Author: Andrew Sullivan

A reader writes:

Kain makes the mistake of thinking that any moral belief deeply held, no matter how extreme, can't be criticized for being too extreme. It's a moral belief, after all!

But imagine a militant animal rights activist who claimed, "The meat industry is indisputably the worst Holocaust in history." If we buy into Kain's argument, there's nothing ridiculous here. If you believe in your heart of hearts that an animal is a sentient being worthy of equal moral weight to a human being, and yet the law of the land dictates that said being is not in possession of even the most basic right – the right to life – then really how different is the meat industry from the Holocaust?

The only difference that I can see is that it's those damn hippies who would make one argument, while respectable and upstanding members of the community would make the other.

The photo is from a PETA "die-in".  Another writes:

Two can play that game: If you believe in your heart of hearts that a woman is nevertheless a person – a live, autonomous human being – and yet the law of the land dictates that said live, autonomous being is not in possession of even the most basic right – the right to control what happens to her body – then how different is this from slavery? It's all about control; does the government get to decide what I do with my body, or do I?

Another:

In the US, murder of a slave was still murder. They had a right to life. The enforcement may have been lax (or nonexistent), but it was illegal. So I say the Malkin award stands. Abortion = Slavery is a ridiculous analogy. Abortion foes have legitimate morals to raise, why raise specious ones?

Always a one-way street:

When it comes to the Simon Wiesenthal Center's building the Museum of Tolerance on the oldest and largest Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem, the ADL has no problem backing the legal rights of the Wiesenthal Center and turning a deaf ear to the sensitivities of the Palestinian Muslims.

Beinart unloads on another double-standard:

When Arizona passes a law that encourages police to harass Latinos, the ADL expresses outrage. But when Israel builds 170 kilometers of roads in the West Bank for the convenience of Jewish settlers, from which Palestinians are wholly or partially banned, the ADL takes out advertisements declaring, “The Problem Isn’t Settlements.”

Steven Walt writes that Obama is likely to be zero for four on big foreign policy goals going into 2012, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Israel:

Obama didn't get us into Iraq, and he's doing the right thing to get us out more-or-less on the schedule that the Bush adminstration negotiated back in 2008. But it's now clear that the much-vaunted "surge" was a strategic failure, and Iraq could easily spin back out of control once U.S. forces are gone. Even in the best case, Iraq can only be judged a defeat for the United States: we will have spent trillions of dollars and lost thousands of lives in order to bring to power an unstable government that is sympathetic to Iran and unlikely to be particularly friendly to the United States. Americans don't like losing, however, and Obama is going to get blamed for this outcome even though it was entirely his predecessor's fault…

Obama's fundamental error was to run try to run a very conventional foreign policy — one that turned out to be not very different from the second Bush term — in a situation that called for far more creative thinking and a willingness to try new approaches and stick with them even if it alienated some domestic constituencies.

I think it's far too early to judge. If you view Iraq and Afghanistan as FUBAR, then finding some face-saver to get out of both places will be some achievement. Iran's isolation is as about as acute as at any time in recent history. On Israel, Obama was simply crushed by the pro-Israel lobby, and is now reduced to acting as Netanyahu's puppet. Marc Lynch differs on Iraq:

Obama is on track to deliver on his campaign promise to withdraw from Iraq — something which voters might begin to notice next month when they discover that he has also met his promise to get down to 50,000 troops.  He's already almost there, without anyone really paying attention, and he has admirably resisted all pressure and temptation to relax the timeline in the face of the political paralysis of Iraq's political class.  What's more, Iraqi security forces and state institutions have proven quite robust during the extended political crisis, and the general security trends are not nearly as dire as the headlines would suggest.   Iraq should be a major positive for 2012 if Obama makes the case, as I'm sure he will:  he kept his promise on his signature policy initiative and it has worked out pretty well.  

And the GOP alternative is…. staying longer?  I don't see that as a political winner. 

Julian Sanchez wants the Government Accountability Office to oversee the intelligence community. The Obama administration threatens to veto.

Ross Douthat is disappointed in right-wing muckraking:

From the day I started this adventure ten years ago this summer, the Daily Dish has evolved. It evolved from a late night opinion dump, posted at 2 am to an ongoing blogathon, day in day out. It went from white print on navy background to what we have today. It once had no photos and no videos. Now we have window views and mental health breaks every day. From an independent site, we retained total editorial freedom first at Time and now at the Atlantic. And at the Atlantic, I was able to hire interns to add extra eyes and ears as the web exploded in size and scope and variety. Interns in turn helped increase reader-generated content so that we have the stream of collective consciousness of today's latest iteration of the Dish – in which I operate as a kind of composer/disk-jockey for the music that we play.

I'm more than psyched therefore to announce the latest evolution: in addition to Chris and Patrick, two other former interns are returning to add more beef and depth and color to the Dish. Zoe Pollock – coming from the NewsHour – will both be helping me organize this contraption that grew up around me, as well as under-blogging. Conor Friedersdorf, no stranger to Dish readers, will be under-blogging with his usual range of interests and keen eye, but also focusing on both the degeneracy of the conservative movement, and the green shoots we are beginning to see of a saner, more imaginative, more traditionally conservative policy revival.

We've added a new masthead to acknowledge these changes. They'll also, with any luck, relieve some of the pressure on yours truly to keep this ideas and news machine humming day in day out, while getting some time for more expansive reading, thinking and rest. Thanks to the Atlantic for finding the funds for these reinforcements. We hope the range and diversity and depth of the work we do will keep improving.

Bernstein yawns at a story about where various reporters sit at White House press conferences.

More gasoline on the Islamist tinder-box.

Andy McCarthy argues that sharia is the biggest foreign policy threat faced by the United States. But, in a move that his namesake would have loved, the threat no longer just comes from al Qaeda, but from Islamists under the bed:

Some Islamists employ mass-murder attacks while others prefer a gradual march through our institutions — our legal, political, academic, and financial systems, as well as our broader culture; the goal of both, though, is the same. The stealth Islamists occasionally feign outrage at the terrorists, but their quarrel is over methodology and pace. Both camps covet the same outcome.

So we’re slam-back in the 1950s, with American Muslims in general as the new reds. What to do about it? Uh-oh:

Will that entail an ambitious project to democratize Islamic countries — notwithstanding that sharia dictates waging jihad against Westerners who try? Gingrich’s embrace of President Bush’s second inaugural address suggests that he may think so. How we go about it and whether we use our military to spearhead a “forward march of freedom” are matters the former speaker did not flesh out.

So the basic plan is 50 years or more of nation-building via the military, as conceived by George W. Bush. What could go wrong?

It's in the Christian Science Monitor.