Month: May 2012

The Dish is seeking two interns to help with ransacking the web for smart nuggets, helping out with administrative crap, working on larger projects, and guest-blogging when yours truly takes a vacation. The paid internship will be full time, includes benefits and is for a six-month duration. For the first time, the positions are based in New York City, at the iPod-looking super-cool Gehry-designed IAC building.

We are hoping to hire within the next month or so. Start dates are semi-flexible. We're looking for extremely hardworking self-starters, web-obsessives and Dishheads, who already understand what we do here. We also prefer individuals who can challenge me and my assumptions, find stuff online that we might have missed, and shape the Dish with his or her own personal passions. I want to emphasize that the Beast's "balls-to-the-wall" aspiration is just as relevant to the Dish; these are intense jobs for the intensely motivated. They're also a pretty unbeatable opportunity to learn what online journalism can be. And a sense of humor is an asset.

To apply, please e-mail a (max 500-word) cover letter explaining why you are a good fit for the Dish and a resumé to Dish.Intern@newsweekdailybeast.com. The cut off for applications is Monday, May 21.

That's how Jacob Heilbrunn reads the Chen Guangcheng mess:

Can anyone doubt that the blind lawyer and dissident Chen Guangcheng, who apparently says that he feels a "little" lied to by American embassy officials in Beijing, was, more or less, hustled out and dumped into a hospital before he could further disrupt Chinese-American relations, especially with high-level meetings coming up between Hillary Clinton, Timothy Geithner and their Chinese counterparts? 

Walter Russell Mead counters, in-depth:

Jerome Cohen, a well known China legal scholar (and former WRM colleague at the Council on Foreign Relations) gives a version of events that supports State Department claims that Chen left the embassy voluntarily, was not pressured by US officials, and accepted the negotiated agreement with the intention of staying in China.  Cohen, who was involved in the discussions at Chen’s request, is well respected — and not just by those who, like me, have known him and his work for many years. According to Cohen, the deal originally accepted by Chen was modeled on an arrangement made by the famous dissident Ai Weiwei which has allowed Ai to stay in the country and participate, carefully, in political and cultural life.

A rather hirsute form of Aussie street confrontation:

A reader writes:

I cry no tears for Grenell nor do I find his neo-conservative cred something to justify why he shouldn't have been vilified. He has, is, and seems to be for the near future chosen to be part of a party that has, is, and seems to be for the near future the national political party (not a segment, not a fringe, but the party) that's not about to support marriage equality and never legislatively/officially supporting/accepting of LGBT people (they booed a gay soldier on TV for goodness sake).  

So, for me as an African-American, he is like an African-American back during Reconstruction and part of the "in-political crowd" for the Southern Democrats, and "shocked, shocked" that they really want him to come through the back door for their meetings, never marry their daughter, never drink from the same fountain, never ride in the same train car, never ride next to them on a bus, never eat at the same lunch counter, and a bunch of other nevers – like becoming president of the United States.

You have said it yourself a few times over the last several years (the totally on-point "Riding the Tiger" posts), that eventually the Tiger (made of Christianist/Tea Party/et al genes) the GOP's been riding will bite back.  Consider Grenell consumed.

I do. I have held for two decades the belief that we have to do two things: expose Republican homophobia and yet still engage with the Republican party. I have to concede that this has now become almost quixotic. But we still must try. Gay rights should not be the monopoly of one party; that gives that party far too much power. Do you think Obama would have refused to sign an executive order on non-discrimination among federal contractors if he thought the GOP might beat him to it?

There's a fine line between enabling a homophobic party and sticking with it while holding your ground on gay equality. Grenell walked that line about as impeccably as anyone could. And yet even he was hounded out. And so I've come reluctantly to the same conclusion as Obama: the only way to engage the GOP at this point is to fight them. Only when they start losing elections badly will they grapple with the actual reality of the country they seek to govern. Including all its citizens.

You don't have to be a Democrat to want this kind of Republicanism defeated. You just need to see the rank prejudice right in front of our nose.

A revealing quote from an early letter to a girlfriend:

Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.)

And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times.

He gets tragedy, which is why he gets Niebuhr. And this sense of benign fatalism is rare among Americans and American presidents. Maybe that's where he gets his long game from; or his otherwise freakish calm under pressure.

Rick Perlstein reads Peter Beinart:

As for Israel, I don't think of it much. Even in a career as a political writer given to disputation, the sheer viciousness (which you'll see from the hate mail this piece produces: I plan to publish it) faced by those who criticize not merely Israel, but certain specific de rigeur formulations about Israel, turned me off the entire subject. Instead, and I've never admitted this publicly before, the deeply saturated irrationalism surrounding it as I was growing up was what made me fascinated with political irrationalism as such – and helps explain why I ended up a scholar of the American far-right.

That reflexive intimidation, in the end, is what most fascinates me about The Crisis of Zionism.

I'd heard great things from friends about the book — but read almost nothing admiring about it in the public prints. People are cowed at the thought of taking on the shrieking Israel absolutists, the ones who imagine themselves every day saving six million lives and their critics as hastening the slaughter. Apropos: In one stunning story Beinart tells in his book, a group of young Jewish leaders declined to stand together at a Jewish gathering and sing the national anthem, but also declined to join a public resolution opposing settlement growth: "In the organized Jewish world, left-leaning young Jews often rely on establishment Jewish institutions for financial support. And publicly criticism is an excellent way to endanger that support."

That is indeed one of the most powerful lessons of the book – that a single generation, obsessed with permanent victimhood, has relentlessly bullied (and there is no other word for it than bullied) anyone who dared to question their paranoia and premises. Reading The Crisis Of Zionism is to stand up to the bullies and thugs of the AIPAC lobby – and the deranged mindset they represent.

You can buy it here.

AP tries to guess the unemployment future. I think all one can say is that it probably won't go up. Unless Europe goes down.

You’re often paying for status:

[Cowen] advises foodies to avoid spots filled with “beautiful, laughing women.” Why? He’s playing the odds that because the place is popular and trendy, the focus is on “the scene” rather than the food, which is all but guaranteed to be overpriced…

He also thinks America has great cheap food thanks to diverse immigrant communities:

As he sees it, American food was ruined by a series of entirely contingent historical events — Prohibition, the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the rise of TV — which effectively ruined the restaurant industry. Those events were especially damaging, he argues, because immigration was so severely restricted during much of the 20th century. Immigrants were the people who can do the most interesting things with the cheap food on offer in the United States; without them, American food became boring and bland. Now that immigration is on the rise again, America is a food paradise: the extended food supply chain created by American agribusiness means that food is plentiful and cheap, while our vibrant immigrant communities take that cheap food and make it awesome in a million different ways.

Follow Tyler Cowen‘s work at Marginal Revolution, and buy his new book, An Economist Gets Lunch. “Ask Anything” archive here.

"He cannot beat Obama. It's not going to happen," – Michelle Bachmann on Mitt Romney, earlier this year.

She will apparently endorse this losing proposition shortly. Yes, Shep, it's all fucking weird.