Author: Andrew Sullivan

Today on the Dish, we assessed why the Koran burning was only suspended. Obama responded; Republicans laid claim to 9/11; and in general burning things appealed to lizard brains. Christianism threatened Christianity; Islamism threatened Islam and Terry Jones was as crazy in Germany as he is in the U.S. The war machine chugged along, throwing beacons of freedom under its wheels of torture, while a humane interrogation technique already exists.

We talked tax cuts; Schwarzenegger couldn't see Russia from Palin's house; and being compared to Bristol Palin lowered Meghan McCain's self-esteem. The Tea Party might be good for gays; considering the Obama administration is now battling Republicans to prevent gay servicemembers from serving openly. Mayor Fenty losing in DC could be bad for education reform; climate change skeptics could throw our whole understanding of the world into chaos; and Americans wanted something for nothing.

We wondered about the corrupt Karzai clan; there was more political impasse in Iraq, and China very kindly paid for the war in Iraq. VFYW here; smug alert here; View From Your Recession here; FOTD here; and MHB here. "Black" was not "what white people do not do" and men were lied to about their waistlines.

Wickford, Rhode Island, 6 pm

Thursday on the Dish, the rule of law took an unimaginable hit on torture and national security. On the Florida jerk front, the burning was cancelled. We paid a visit to the other Terry Joneses, we found out who is funding the Cordoba culture war, and Sarah Palin won the Yglesias Award. A divided government may be a better government; but probably not when led by the Tea Partiers. GOP heretic hunting continued; our intelligence community was shooting itself in the foot; and a burning Boulder was being saved by social media. Bad HIV reporting continued as did the harsh realities of covering Palin. 

In international news the Chinese loved their cars; North Korea was about to get an even crazier successor; and we may need more modesty in Afghanistan, while the world could use a happy planet index. 

In response to the recession, Beth Boyle Machlan played the lottery; college educated young women outearned young men; and the final shoe on real wages was about to drop. We harnessed the power of the personal brand; and readers responded to the emergency room debate and the peak oil problem. VFYW here; creepy ad watch here; MHB here; and FOTD here. 

Remembering those lost to AIDS didn't get any easier, but Iowa's gay marriages were prospering with their own version of the suburban American dream. One day, the New York Times will stop being printed, date TBD, and this guy won the award for the worst stump speech ever.

Wednesday on the Dish, Feisal Rauf urged peace; and Leon Wieseltier closed the books on the Mosque with the most beautiful response yet. We parsed Petraeus's comments on Koran–burning; and honoring 9/11 got pretty pricey with Palin and Beck.

The Iraq war via Wikipedia was bound; Castro had lunch with Goldberg; and Pakistan's problems weren't going anywhere. Andrew promised a response on the Iran-Israel article soon; Greece might default on its debts; and we argued over isolationism.

Boulder was burning, America faced fiscal collapse; and the housing hangover was just beginning, but peak oil didn't scare Reihan. Andrew warmed to redistribution rather than soaking the rich and Manzi outlined the hard work ahead on education and immigration. We assessed the GOP's anti-debt rhetoric and the budget behind Obama's proposal; and Conor kept at the Heritage Foundation over Addington. American novelists were in decline according to Time; Santorum had a Google problem; and emergency rooms didn't always fit our schedule.

Karl Smith wrote a pessimist's manifesto; the Chesterton fetish was called into question; and "jumping the shark" may mark the "end of the beginning rather than the beginning of the end." Humanity thrived while the earth died; erotic capital still ruled the beauty premium; and magic mushrooms could help the terminally ill. We watched Tom Hardy work out; and we wanted the sex ads back on Craigslist. Quote for the day here; VFYW here; MHB here; FOTD here; and email of the day here.

Joaquin Phoenix was a mountain-top-water-drop and this woman sacrificed sex for the occasional sherry.

By Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty Images.

Tuesday on the Dish, Andrew returned. He asked the big questions about humility and humiliation in religion and politics and extended a hand to Ross to embrace the equality of their respective marriages.

Obama stepped up his game; we remembered the 1990s; and we read the tea leaves of today's political polls. We looked at which party might get to claim the business tax cuts and whether Obama's transportation proposal was any good. Marty Peretz weighed in on the Mosque; Chait volleyed with Conor on what makes a good opinion journalist; and the era of free lunch ended but the GOP didn't want to make a different sandwich.

The algorithm for war didn't get any easier; Afghanistan went on the back-burner; and we assessed Obama's foreign policy legacy. The history of Margaret Thatcher doesn't fit into soundbites; burning Korans could endanger troops;and Stephen Hawking thought philosophy was dead.

Gateway drugs were still a hoax; a college education made cops less violent; and anarchy might break out if corporate speak didn't exist. MHB here; FOTD here; VFYW here; and the winner for the slightly easier labor day VFYW contest #14 here. We closed the accounting book on hip religious music with some final inductees; Craigslist censored their adult services; and we took a trip to red state liquor stores. And the shark may not have been jumped, after all.

–Z.P.

Leonard Pitts Jr, writing earlier this week:

There is in the act of burning something primitive and tribalistic, something that appeals to the lizard brain which has no ability or desire to reason, no comprehension of ideals and abstract concepts, that knows only that it lives in fear of a world it cannot understand and will do anything to send the fear away.

The process of becoming a truly human being is the process of conquering that lizard brain. Unfortunately, some people never do.

On Saturday, some of those people will gather round a bonfire to watch pages blacken and curl and turn to smoke. You listen to the hatred spewing from respectable leaders in prominent places, you think of how normal that has become, and one thing suddenly seems starkly clear:

We're burning a whole lot more than books.

(Photo: Pakistani lawyers carry a burning US flag during a protest in Multan on September 9, 2010 to denounce the plans to burn the Koran by a US church. By Mohammed Malik/AFP/Getty.)

A reader writes:

I think you are being a little more than disingenuous when you claim that the Obama administration is to the right of some conservatives with respect to DADT and marriage equality.  Like a law or not, it is the duty and constitutional obligations of the executive branch to defend every law.  While I disagree with DADT and believe DOMA to be unconstitutional, I still want the executive branch to litigate to uphold the legality of these laws.  Once you set a precedent that an administration should not defend laws with which it disagrees, it will start to work against you.  What would happen if a Republican administration decided not to defend challenges to EPA regulations or not to defend challenges to the constitutionality of health care reform?  (Whether to appeal is a different matter.)  You can fault the Obama administration of many things, but not for doing its constitutional duty.

Dave Roberts goes after global warming skeptics:

Consider what the Limbaugh/Morano crowd is saying about climate: not only that that the world's scientists and scientific institutions are systematically wrong, but that they are purposefully perpetrating a deception. Virtually all the world's governments, scientific academies, and media are either in on it or duped by it. The only ones who have pierced the veil and seen the truth are American movement conservatives, the ones who found death panels in the healthcare bill.

It's a species of theater, repeated so often people have become inured, but if you take it seriously it's an extraordinary charge. For one thing, if it's true that the world's scientists are capable of deception and collusion on this scale, a lot more than climate change is in doubt. These same institutions have told us what we know about health and disease, species and ecosystems, energy and biochemistry. If they are corrupt, we have to consider whether any of the knowledge they've generated is trustworthy. We could be operating our medical facilities, economies, and technologies on faulty theories. We might not know anything! Here we are hip-deep in postmodernism and it came from the right, not the left academics they hate.

"The whole tenor of this news conference illustrates Obama’s central and continuing dilemma. He wants to be post-partisan, or to appear to be post-partisan, but is forced by events to sound partisan. Constant tension," – Ed Luce, on Gideon Rachman's blog, via Clive.

A reader writes:

Surely I'm not the first person to compare that speech to this classic Dwight Shrute moment.

A reader writes:

I may be Pollyanna here, but I wonder if Obama is again playing the long game.  There is a legitimate national security argument for not investigating Cheney's war crimes while we have troops in combat in the Middle East.  If Pastor Jones can inflame Muslim public opinion and endanger our soldiers, think what a detailed probe of Cheney's torture regime might do — not to mention the political blowback.  And there's the terrible problem of our intelligence operatives who were ordered to do unspeakable things, and whom to hold accountable for that.  If Obama intends to end combat for all U.S. troops by the end of his first term, and I believe he does, I think we might then see prosecutions for murder, the crime for which the statute of limitations will not run out.  And I think that possibility will get much stronger if Obama is elected to a second term.  He is pragmatic, yes. And while we're at war, he's caught between a rock and a very hard place.   But I don't think he's a moral coward.

Another writes:

I don't think that Bush created this new direction out of whole cloth, though, and that Obama has chosen to endorse it and preserve its existence. I think you are wrong to give these two Presidents all of the blame for what's going on.

The shadowy, secret, national security infrastructure has been with us since the end of the Second World War. Getting rid of it, or even just trying to reign it in a little, is a very hard and complicated problem.

A lot of the nuts and bolts business of running the empire is flowing through these secret parts of the system. You can't just flip a switch and turn if off. It's the problem of closing Gitmo multiplied by 100,000.

Bush and Cheney didn't so much create the system as they made it impossible for the rest of us to pretend it didn't exist. They were so aggressive, and so contemptuous about maintaining even the illusion of decency and lawfulness that they forced us to think about what was really going on. Obama can't put that back in the bottle. Morally, things like torture represent the core problems that must be solved. But on a practical level, the problem is secrecy. Secrecy makes the national security apparatus invulnerable — if we can't talk about it, can't criticize it, can't suggest changes, how can we do anything at all?

The secrecy argument, of course, is what the latest case is about. Secrecy not to protect genuine and important aspects of national security, but secrecy to immunize criminals in government. On this topic in general, I have been engrossed by Andrew Bacevich's new book, "Washington Rules." I hope to have something to say about it soon.

A reader writes:

Really? Please realize that "retard" is a slur, which has somehow morphed into common usage much the same way "fag" was used years ago. Yet the pain it causes is real, to those who are intellectually disabled, as well as to their friends and families.

Another writes:

"Celebutard" is not really a neologism; it's been in popular use for at least three years (judging by its entry in the Urban Dictionary), and is actually a conflation of "celebrity", "debutante", and "retard" (or "leotard" if you follow Dan Savage's campaign), originally and most aptly applied to Paris Hilton.

A reader writes:

You wrote:

Is this how wounded the American giant is? Is this how incapable it is of reforming itself?

Well, you know…

"When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic." – Ben Franklin

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been about 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage." – Alexander Fraser Tyler.

I mean, that's essentially what's going on, here.  The *American people* do not want to hear that they have to pay for the services that they receive from government.  They want something for nothing.  All of these politicians wouldn't be following this path if it was going to get them thrown out of office.

The problem is not with the politicians; it's with the people who are voting for them.