Author: Andrew Sullivan

Larison seconds Noah Millman. And further rebuts Frum:

What does need to happen is to re-balance the relationship with Israel so that the political, diplomatic and financial costs of the alliance are matched by what the U.S. receives from it (which isn’t very much these days). At present, even the smallest moves in that direction are considered unspeakable betrayals. That is one reason why proponents of re-balancing the U.S.-Israel relationship are not interested in arguing for ending the alliance outright. It is difficult enough to argue for conditional reductions in economic aid that calling for a complete break would be rejected out of hand.

That is what makes Frum’s detour about Charles Freeman at the end of the same post especially ridiculous. Freeman outlined some of the costs that the alliance imposes on the U.S., and he may have understated the case, but he then made very modest recommendations for what the U.S. government should do to pressure Israel to halt settlements. My guess is that the “pathetically disproportionate” recommendations reflect Freeman’s understanding of what is politically possible here in the U.S. As it is, Freeman’s proposal to reduce economic aid to Israel to compel a halt to settlement activity is more than anyone in the administration or J Street is willing to advocate publicly. Had Freeman made a more radical proposal, Frum would not be congratulating him on his consistency or his boldness, but would instead be declaring him a lunatic.

Judge for yourself Freeman's latest. Some of it is spot-on; some, to my mind, just wrong. Israel has no friends apart from the US? Please.

This program is still in development, but it looks incredible:

An Introduction to Firefox's Tab Candy from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Roger Cohen wonders why the killing of American citizen Furkan Dogan by Israeli paratroopers has received so little attention and follow-up:

I have little doubt that if the American killed on those ships had been Hedy Epstein, a St. Louis-based Holocaust survivor, or Edward Peck, a former U.S. ambassador to Mauritania, we would have heard a lot more. We would have read the kind of tick-tock reconstructions that the deaths of Americans abroad in violent and disputed circumstances tend to provoke. (Epstein had planned to be aboard the flotilla and Peck was.)

I also have little doubt that if the incident had been different — say a 19-year-old American student called Michael Sandler killed by a Palestinian gunman in the West Bank when caught in a cross-fire between Palestinians and Israelis — we would have been deluged in stories about him.

But a chill descends when you have the combination of Israeli commandos doing the firing, an American with a foreign-sounding Muslim name, and the frenzied pre-emptive arguments of Israel and those among its U.S. supporters who will brook no criticism of the Jewish state.

I've noticed a very similar pattern with respect to US soldiers in Taliban captivity. I suspect it is because the US government now has no moral standing to complain about prisoner abuse and torture. And so we walk quickly on …

In Dave Weigel's post discussing the Trig controversy, he wrote:

Among the people who told me that Alaskans were well aware of Palin's pregnancy were Shannyn Moore, an award-winning and left-leaning political radio host who has been roundly attacked by Palin fans.

Moore actually said that everyone in Alaska knew that Bristol – not Sarah – Palin was pregnant. He muddled the two up.

Massa Martana, Italy, 12 pm

Douthat sketched out the conservative case against cap-and-trade yesterday. Leonhardt takes issue with one of Ross's parallels:

[Douthat's case is that] just as ingenuity came to the rescue in the past, allowing people to use resources more efficiently than they ever had before, it could do so again — providing us with ways to emit far less carbon for every dollar of gross domestic product. And I — like many others, I imagine — would be thrilled if that were what the future held. But I think there are two big reasons to doubt that we’re on another Ehrlich-Simon path when it comes to global warming.

The first is basic economics. When the problem is resource scarcity, companies and individuals have a powerful incentive to become more efficient. It keeps their costs down. Mr. Simon understood this, and it’s the fundamental reason he won the bet.

But global warming is different. The fact that carbon emissions are warming the planet doesn’t make it more expensive to produce those emissions. So companies do not have an ever-increasing incentive to emit less — the way they would if the problem were, say, a lack of oil. Global warming doesn’t solve itself the way that resource scarcity does.

The second reason is the data: it's far more robust on global warming than on predictions of future resource scarcity. My view is that a small but steadily increasing carbon tax is a modest way to help accelerate energy innovation and guard against the possibility of quite drastic shifts in temperature caused by climate feedback loops. I also find a pure human cost-benefit analysis lacking when it comes to something like the health of the planet. But then that's my Catholic side coming through, I guess. We have a moral duty for proper stewardship, in my view, not relentless exploitation until disaster strikes. And I fail to see why such prudence is now regarded as un-conservative.

A reader writes:

I'm a big believer in expanding class-based affirmative action.  But I think one important step that should also be taken is the ending of legacy admissions at private schools, colleges, and universities. 

The fact that the children of America's elite are given an opportunity to get an Ivy League education, and the prestige that goes with it, even though they may be less qualified than other applicants is one of the major flaws in any claim that the U.S. is, or ever has been, a true meritocracy.  The child of a Harvard graduate should be treated no differently than the child of a high school dropout when Harvard makes its admission decisions, if merit truly is the basis for those decisions.

I don't think there's necessarily an easy way to simply ban legacy admissions.  But we could condition the receipt of federal funding on an agreement that a parent's status as a graduate of a school will not be a factor given any consideration in the admissions process.

Another writes:

While I generally agree with Beinart's sentiments, the way he frames them does more to reinscribe distinctions between red and blue Americans than challenge them.

The only reason I can discern that Harvard is brought up in these discussions so frequently is that people seem to believe that students who are unable to get into Harvard are disadvantaged in some way, as if going to Oklahoma State University or Texas A&M is the booby prize for not lucking out in the affirmative action lottery. In spite of what the makeup of the current Supreme Court suggests, it's not necessary to attend an Ivy League institution to have a great education.

More ability to speak across the red-blue divide would be a wonderful thing, and three cheers if Harvard decides to be more equitable in their admissions. But why don't we see Beinart calling upon the scions of Ivy League elite to enroll at schools outside of the Northeast? Or does the promotion of dialogue only go one way?

The reason behind this seems to be that very few people outside of what are not so endearingly termed the flyover states actually believe you can get a decent education in any of them. Instead of combating this prejudice, Beinart reinforces it, suggesting that the best way to promote dialogue is for red-staters to gain access to blue state power networks. How much more effective would it be if the people in power stopped rewarding only those people who come from familiar networks?

Another:

During my sophomore year of college (2006), I was involved with a group that promoted issue-driven dialogue and we were able to get representatives of the campus organs of the two parties to organize an event discussing affirmative action. Our Republicans completely blindsided the crowd by arguing for a class-based version. Even as a liberal, I found their arguments compelling. It may not have popular support right now, but I could certainly see a younger generation of conservatives promoting these sorts of alternatives.

Dan Ariely has a tentative answer:

One of the more appealing aspects of neoconservatism in the wake of 9/11 was its belief – utopian in retrospect, idealist at the time – that the only way past the pathologies of Jihadism was some kind of model Arab democracy that could pave the way for others to follow, thereby draining the Arab desert of the autocracy that breeds terror. We know what happened in Iraq – about as catastrophic a failure as one can imagine. The face-saving patch-up is still unraveling before our eyes, as al Qaeda (which did not exist in Iraq before the invasion) still shows an ability to kill and maim and murder and intimidate fellow Sunnis at will. The end-result of an invasion that led to the deaths of countless thousands and removed no WMD threat may well be far greater influence for Iran in the region and a lawless Sunni desert where al Qaeda retains a foothold. Meanwhile, the latest neocon fantasy is an alliance with Sunni Arab dictators in order to launch a war against Shiite Iran's nuclear facilities, thereby both inserting the US into one of the oldest theologico-political disputes in human history and deepening the alienation of Muslims on the street toward the little and big Satans of their imagination. I cannot think of a greater boon to Islamism than an atatck on Iran, or a more powerful way to cut the Green Movement off at the knees.

But the concept of a model Arab democracy is still latent within the cynical circles of the pro-Israel wing of neoconservatism. So let me pose a question: where is there a fledgling Arab state whose leaders are now focusing on the humdrum details of housing and economic development and better policing? Where is the state that could be used to show the benefits of cooperation with the West – as opposed to the brutality of Hamas?

It's sitting right there on the map just to the East of Israel proper. Its leaders want more autonomy, its population is showing signs of economic vitality, Europe, Russia and China would be eager to join the US in aiding and helping the nascent state, and it would help resolve one of the core issues fueling Jihadism worldwide: the Israeli occupation and colonization of the West Bank.

And yet it is a visceral stance of the neocons that the radical Israeli settlements, which prevent any such state from emerging, must remain. Or rather that no pressure should be brought to bear on Israel to freeze or curtail let alone reverse them. The result is a walking away from an obvious experiment that brings the positive and liberal aspect of neoconservatism to the fore. And I ask you: what else that is actually doable would transform the region more than this?

In the end, I fear, the neocons' paranoia about Israel's security – which apparently required the deaths of so many civilians in Gaza and demands the daily humiliation of so many Muslims in the occupied territories – renders any such game-changer moot. My view is that a neoconservatism that wasn't rooted and founded in the ideology of Greater Israel would leap at this chance. And support for a real, democratic, Muslim Palestinian state on the West Bank is the acid test of neoconservatism's broader principles.

So far: fail. But maybe some will see the folly of their current stance and move tioward a more constructive engagement. Is neoconservatism just about Israel? Or is it about Israel, America, democracy and a future where Jihadism is defused in the war of ideas as well as defeated in the heat of a long and arduous battle?