Today on the Dish, Andrew marveled at American puritanism about sex, and picked apart what it means to live, both online and off, while we all seek out our authentic selves. Feds broke up nice marriages, and Andrew examined what it could mean for children to never consider closeting themselves and exited the holding pen of gay pride parades.
Andrew praised Huntsman's moderate conservatism, but Nate Silver thought it doomed him. Andrew dismissed Pawlenty's insane tax cuts, McArdle chalked it up to the inflated candidate ego, while the rest of the GOP geared up to out-tea-party him. Bachmann started a brawl with Palin, Palin's team fought back, and Andrew dismantled Palin's answers to "gotcha questions." Andrew drew comparisons about Palin's post-pregnancy look, the real Palinization was backwards enough, headlines battled over polling, and business cred doesn't help a GOP candidate for the most part.
Syria's impending civil war differed from Libya's, we wondered if the Gay Girl In Damascus could be a hoax, the Syrian regime forced young men to become snipers, and Peter Van Buren made the case for shrinking the embassy in Iraq. We debated pain vs depression as to when people request assisted suicides, and readers recommended and spoke highly of hospice care. Incarceration doesn't stop drug addiction, we stressed the importance of keeping DNA evidence for exonerations, and a man hid a cellphone SIM card in his mouth to save his recording of the cops. We experienced walking on a minefield in the first person, snake oil medicines used to fool us pretty easily, and the social cost of smoking totals about $40 a pack. The French deconstructed the Smurfs, and X-men remained a good metaphor for the gay rights movement.
Yglesias award here, cool ad watch here, quotes for the day here, here and here, chart of the day here, VFYW here, MHB here, and FOTD here.
–Z.P.
The Dish 