Month: March 2012

Is expected to grow over the next few months:

Rich Lowry joins the anti-Gingrich chorus:

Santorum has outclassed Gingrich. The former Pennsylvania Senator is famously undisciplined, but compared with Gingrich, he’s a robot. He can be prickly, but compared with Gingrich, he’s Little Miss Sunshine. He has won nine contests, more than four times as many as Gingrich has. Gingrich absurdly talks as if the competition to be the anti-Romney won’t be decided until Utah on June 26 or the third ballot of a contested convention. If he believes what he says about Romney’s weakness in the fall, he owes it to his party and his country to defer to Santorum now.

It appears that the day before Peter Beinart launched his excellent new blog, someone published another blog under the domain zionsquare.com devoted to making hard-right arguments on Israel. Liel Leibovitz lambastes the site's anonymous proprietors:

It is tempting to ignore this pitiful little bleep on the Web. At the moment, zionsquare.com, unlike Beinart’s elegant site, contains little save blurry graphics and those Danny Ayalon videos you’ve watched a hundred times on YouTube. And I would ignore it, if it weren’t for its cowardly use of what is quickly becoming a bona fide tactic for right-wing hysterics. Like the Columbia student who claimed she was steered away from a pro-Palestinian class—her findings were investigated and promptly dismissed — the perpetrators behind zionsquare.com hope that tactical anonymity might only increase their appeal.

Which gives me a chance to link to another stirring piece on Peter's new group-blog: Aryeh Cohen on how his experiences in Israel made him a post-Zionist. Money quote:

I have been back in the US for almost 25 years now, and have returned to Israel infrequently. On one of my trips, as my cab driver was pulling out of the Jerusalem Plaza Hotel where I was staying, I noticed the banner on the World Zionist Organization building, which was across the street. It read: “Zionism will win.” This statement flummoxed me. To my understanding, the goal of the Zionist enterprise was to establish a homeland for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. This goal was accomplished in 1948. What did it mean to win now? How much more “winning” was there?

There's a whole West Bank to annex permanently. With American aid, and help. Remember: this is no longer the Israel lobby. It's the Greater Israel lobby.

A bit of bigotry that didn't have to be captured by a liberal documentarian:

Jack Moore captions:

When Kansas State's point guard Angel Rodriguez went to the line, a chant of "Where's your green card?" rang out through the crowd. (It can be heard at 2 and 17 seconds in the video.) Reporters on the scene identified it as having come from Southern Mississippi's band. Thankfully it was short lived.

More context here. The in-tray is quickly filling with further dissents to my take on the Real Time video and we will air the best ones shortly.

That's what Frum suggests would happen if Santorum racks up enough delegates. Scott Galupo counters:

I realize that Vice President Joe Biden said that then-Sen. Barack Obama lacked experience (and that he said this during both the primary and, amazingly, the general-election campaign). But it seems to me that there's a substantial difference between Biden characterizing Obama as brilliant but green, and Santorum bluntly proclaiming Romney "disqualified" due to  ideological heresy. The former arguably comes from a place of fundamental sympathy, while the latter is hostile and unappeasable.

Paul Waldman sees the choice as part of a broader VP problem for Romney:

The extended race doesn't make [the base] happier about him as time goes on, it just makes them more resigned to his nomination. Which makes it important for Mitt, in his first major decision as the party's nominee, to make a pick that gets conservatives excited about the fall campaign and assures them that they'll have a representative in his White House. But the extended primary race has had a simultaneous effect on independent voters: the more they've seen Mitt pander to the Republican base, the more they'll need reassurance that he's not some kind of contraception-banning, foreigner-bombing, rich-folks-tax-cutting extremist. It would seem impossible for Mitt to offer simultaneous reassurance to both groups.

He just wears red Prada slippers, is inseparable from a GQ stud personal assistant, insists on ermine in his hats and has now commissioned a papal eau de cologne! Maybe it's just because I've read a new biography of Saint Francis that these prissy extravagances take me aback. But can you imagine Jesus in Prada?

Ann Finkbeiner explains why each sibling tends to mark off territory, which psychologists call "sibling deidentification":

The idea is that siblings need to avoid competition.  Sibling competition is nothing to take lightly.  Sibling colonies of bacteria secrete antibiotics that kill each other off.  The first African black eaglet out to hatch of its egg pecks the second one to death.  A quarter of spotted hyena pups are killed by their siblings.  The siblings are competing for their parents’ resources and attention, of which the parents have only a certain amount.  So the siblings are operating in a closed system, one pie only.

But Cain and Abel aside, we humans can’t go killing off our siblings, so we agree to go our separate ways, we deidentify, we stake out separate niches.  … Heather’s brother is good at finances, so she can’t be. And here’s the charm of it: a closed system might be lethal for competitors but it’s golden for cooperators. 

(Photo via Awkward Family Photos)

A Dish reader found himself the focus of the same halo-effect as seen from that airplane window:

But he does not claim to be the Messiah.

A columnist in his Israel far-right paper laments Romney's inability to take advantage of his split opposition.

It looks as if Adelson backed Newt to help Romney. But he's more scared of a Santorum nomination. Not because Santorum wouldn't bomb Iran and back permanent Greater Israel, but because he would lose to Obama. Maybe Adelson should give money to Romney now, then. But even with a 5 -1 spending advantage and a split opposition in Alabama and Mississippi, Romney came third. Why risk more money on a losing venture? Well, that's how Adelson made his casino fortune, isn't it?