Author: Andrew Sullivan

Many readers have taken me to task for allegedly allowing my personal feelings and gratitude toward Marty Peretz overwhelm the Dish's usual impatience with rank expressions of bigotry. We posted two examples of such dissents here. I try valiantly not to allow this to happen – and I confess to a deep conflict here. For a more dispassionate – and, on reflection, definitive – treatment of the issue, check out Jim Fallows' post here. It's one of the more elegantly concise arguments against such crude generalizations as "Muslim life is cheap" as one could read. And it helps connect this newly ascendant truism to the bigotries of the past in a way that is truly helpful. I'd like to reassure Jim that "hate the sin, love the sinner" is indeed my sentiment.

Former TNR acting editor, Bob Wright, also elaborates, as he did in his brilliant book, The Evolution of God, (my review here) how the Scriptures of Jews, Christians and Muslims all contain ugly as well as life-saving passages, and how missing their complexity does justice to none of them. The violence done in the name of Jesus over the centuries is certainly comparable to the violence done by Muslims.

None of this affects any individual judgment of an individual's motives. But then we have this from the Daily Beast:

"Reached by phone, Peretz offered the following response to [critical] comments before hanging up: 'The notion that after teaching 45 years at Harvard and people giving money in my honor that I have to defend myself – please.' "

In a word: unacceptable. Sorry, Marty, you do have to defend yourself. Addressing the serious and reasoned critiques of Fallows and Wright would be a start.

If history is any guide, that is …

Thus spake Cardinal Walter Kasper – the Vatican's "leading expert on relations with the Church of England". He was apparently referring to the country's multicultural and multi-racial evolution. The statement comes as Pope Benedict XVI arrives in the UK. Kasper has now disappeared from the papal entourage for "health reasons."

He was however onto something about the increasingly hostile attitudes in Britain to the public expression of religious faith. But really. How clueless is this Pope's p.r.?

One thing that still staggers me about the Dems (which is why I still feel so much contempt for that party). Why do they expect people to support something when they never make the case for it? You can listen very hard and not hear anyone defending the biggest shift in social legislation in a decade. Are they not proud of it? Or just, as usual, paralyzed by fear and political incompetence?

The pioneer of "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" has been forced into the equivalent of a witness protection program, on the advice of the FBI.

Adam Ozimek revisits a never-ending debate:

If someone making $250,000 doesn’t feel rich in Manhattan then they can just move to Queens and feel rich. In fact in most cities there are neighborhoods with really expensive homes less than a mile from neighborhoods with really cheap homes. It would be nonsense for someone living in a $2,000 a month condo they can barely afford and shopping at the expensive local grocery store to say they aren’t rich because their costs are high relative to their $70,000 a year income. They’re simply consuming an expensive neighborhood as an amenity to their home. Note this can be true at the county level as well.

Rauch looks at the structure of the tea parties:

In American politics, radical decentralization has never been tried on so large a scale. Tea party activists believe that their hivelike, “organized but not organized” (as one calls it) structure is their signal innovation and secret weapon, the key to outlasting and outmaneuvering traditional political organizations and interest groups. They intend to rewrite the rule book for political organizing, turning decades of established practice upside down. If they succeed, or even half succeed, the tea party’s most important legacy may be organizational, not political.

(Hat tip: Reihan)

Josh Barro is wary of combining tax reform with fiscal measures to fix the deficit:

I think tax reform becomes even harder to sell if you combine it with a fiscal adjustment on either side of the ledger: you have to simultaneously sell people the idea that they will pay strange new taxes and that they will pay more and/or get less. I think there is a good reason that the 1985 Social Security reforms (which started a rise in retirement ages and raised the payroll tax) and the 1986 Tax Reform Act (an essentially revenue-neutral reform that cut rates and expanded the tax base) were handled separately.

But that required some kind of bipartisan cooperation. We have a president who could pull this off. But a GOP?

A reader writes:

The Tea Partiers were created by Republicans.

They devolved.

They rebelled.

They look and feel like Republicans.

There are many copies.

And they have a plan. (Maybe)