Author: Andrew Sullivan

 The Senate candidate from Kentucky says "not quite":

In my mind, the word “libertarian” has become an emotionally charged, and often misunderstood, word in our current political climate. But, I would argue very strongly that the vast coalition of Americans — including independents, moderates, Republicans, conservatives and “Tea Party” activists — share many libertarian points of view, as do I. I choose to use a different phrase to describe my beliefs — I consider myself a constitutional conservative, which I take to mean a conservative who actually believes in smaller government and more individual freedom.

David Boaz reacts:

[M]ajor-party politicians are nervous about being tagged with a label that seems to imply a rigorous and radical platform covering a wide range of issues. But if you can call yourself a conservative without necessarily endorsing everything that William F. Buckley Jr. and the Heritage Foundation — or Jerry Falwell and Mike Huckabee — believe, then a politician should be able to be a moderate libertarian or a libertarian-leaning candidate.

Matt Welch chimes in.

Jamelle Bouie counters this chart – and Yglesias' contention that "among college graduates, there simply isn’t an economic crisis" – with the chart above. Bouie adds:

A college degree certainly helps black workers, but not by much, at least compared to the national average. What's more, well-off blacks tend to have more social proximity to blacks lower on the income scale, so while white college grads are mostly isolated from the recession's effects, I'm not sure if you can say the same for their black counterparts.

Heather Horn summarizes Adam Weinstein's lengthy challenge to Matt:

[Weinstein] points out some other problems with talking about college graduates as a single group. Aside from issues of race, there are issues of age and class: recent graduates are much more likely than older graduates to be underemployed, while Weinstein doesn't take kindly to Yglesias, a Harvard man, grouping "all of us Florida State, Navy, and Iona College grads in with [him]self, John Boehner, and Ben Bernanke."

Fallows responds to the notion that the Atlantic as a whole is now a de facto party to the neoconservative and Israeli campaign to initiate a global war with Iran here and here. I hope to post a long and impassioned response to Jeffrey's cover-essay making the Israeli case for war next week. But a small word about the meta-issue. The point of this magazine, as I understand it, is airing real and honest debate about the great issues of our time. I think Jeffrey's piece is a classic example of what should be published under such a philosophy, and am proud that this magazine is pioneering the debate we need to have. We do not, moreover, believe in a collective line. We believe in open discourse. And there is no subject as grave as the one Jeffrey has grappled with or that this country will have to confront in the months and years ahead.

And that is why I intend to rebut his arguments and evidence and worldview as powerfully and effectively as I can soon. And why I am not going to rush in prematurely.

A truly unhinged Congressman Gohmert touts his "terror babies" canard to Anderson. There are few better examples of the politics of fear than the ranting of Gohmert. His "argument" is that because the 14th Amendment could possibly prompt Jihadists to give birth to "terror babies" who would grow up as Americans and then commit terror, we should accept it as established fact and reverse a core part of the Constitution to prevent it. You tear up the Constitution to protect us from a threat that exists only in the paranoid mind of the far right. And by the way, Gohmert also says something about Republican amnesia. He says that dismissing this threat as bogus is equivalent to the FBI and CIA dismissing the 9/11 plot as inconceivable before it happened. But we know for a fact that president George W. Bush was told a month in advance of the coming threat. These people remember nothing, know nothing and fear everything:

I have nothing to add to Steve Benen. Money quote:

Also note the lesson Krauthammer believes Pope John Paul II was offering: "This is not your place; it belongs to others." In this case, who are we to believe "others" are? On Sept. 11, 2001, the victims included innocents of every race, ethnicity, and religion. Krauthammer seems to suggest Muslim Americans are the "others" who should stay away. That is as absurd as it is offensive.

It is worse than offensive. It is a conflation of American Muslims with al Qaeda – a conflation Bin Laden has been eager to establish for years. That Krauthammer and so many other conservatives simply assume this conflation is a real eye-opener for me. I thought they made a distinction between foreign Jihadists and American Muslims, were in fact proud of the way in which American Muslims have overwhelmingly rejected both the nihilism of Islamist violence but also the segregation of many Muslims in Europe.

It appears I was mistaken. The war, as they understand it, is one between the Judeo-Christian West and Islam as a whole. They have forgone Bush and Rice for Cheney and Falwell. And religious freedom? One more expendable principle in the pursuit of power through demagoguery.

A reader writes:

Your reader's comments unintentionally capture McWhorter's point exactly. They blame cities, teachers, and anybody else except the culprit. A sample of their silly tropes: Urban schools are "underfunded?" Bull. They actually spend more per pupil than most (check out D.C.'s history on that).  Kids in cities can't graduate because the teaching staff is awful? Garbage. Urban districts certainly have a larger percentage of time servers and patronage hires, but the fact remains that the good ones just get burned out because they can't get any traction against the social problems. "Poor access to contraceptives" is the cause of teen pregnancy? In 2010?

This reads like a primal scream from 21-year-old college student who has never been outside the suburbs but is certain that his Intro To Radical Politics professor just can't be wrong.  The fact is, lack of interest from students and totally non-existent parental involvement are the biggest reasons for the drop-out rate, which everyone acknowledges when race is not the topic.

Another writes:

I have to disagree with your readers who took umbrage to John McWhorter.  I spent five years as a teacher in Compton. (Yeah. That Compton.) I can't tell you how sick I am of people who have never been in a classroom talk about the failures of the “system.” The system works reasonably well in Compton.

Sure, they could use better teachers and more administrators, but the students have all the learning tools they need. In my English classes I gave each student a brand new book each year and let them keep another one at school so they wouldn't have to shlep so much luggage around daily. The classroom were clean, bright and well lit. The back wall was full of nice Macs hooked up to high speed internet. The schools in Scarsdale might be better equipped, but I don't see how.

The schools I worked in were never "underfunded."  I'm as tired of that myth as I am hearing the GOP put “job killing” in front of every mention of taxes. Funding is not even close to the problem in Compton. McWhorter is right. It's a cultural issue.

I'm not talking about single parent families, although that's an issue. (You've also got a lot of kids in group homes – that's worse than the single parent issue.) The real problem is that the “system” doesn't run the schools. Gangs do. I can't tell you the number of bright, upwardly mobile freshman who were determined to break the mold and get out of Compton but were waylaid by gangs. By junior year most of them are gone, afraid of being killed if they return to school, usually for some ridiculous breach of gang etiquette like looking the wrong way at a banger. I can see their faces now, lost in the miasma of the inner city. That's the real tragedy.

Until our justice system spends as much effort on suppressing the gang plague as it does on jailing Lindsey Lohan no amount of educational reform is going to fix anything.