Author: Andrew Sullivan

Tyler Cowen worries:

At some sufficiently high debt-GDP ratio, it becomes a foreign policy issue and a big one.  Postwar UK had a high debt to GDP ratio, and to this day it is a fine place, but that debt meant the end of England as a world power, for better or worse.  The U.S. for instance used financial issues to push England around and they basically had to give up on their overseas commitments.  A very high debt ratio here would mean the end of the U.S. as a global world power, again even if GDP does OK.  A global power needs the option of spending a lot more, quickly, without asking for anyone's permission.  Your mileage on a U.S. retreat from the global policeman role will vary, but it's the elephant in the room which hardly anyone is talking about.

Well, the Dish has been talking about it for a while. It's one other legacy of the Bush-Cheney years: by both bankrupting the country and grinding the US military into the barren dust of Iraq and Afghanistan, those two fools did more to weaken America internationally than any administration in modern times. So much of power lies in the imagination of others. Before Iraq, the US military had immense soft power. After Iraq, where the whole world saw a military incapable of curtailing an insurgency for four years, morally tainted by torture and abuse of prisoners, and now leaving a fractured, fragile tinder box more friendly to Iran than ever before, the deterrent effect has been lost. After Afghanistan, the world has seen the greatest military all but defeated by a bunch of goons and thugs and corrupt election-stealers. A super-power should guard its reputation carefully. Bush recklessly threw that reputation away.

It would not be the first time the desire to project power revealed its limits. Neoconservatism began with a Project For The Next American century. It's achievement is a new century with a newly empowered Iran, Pakistan (the two Islamist states with WMDs) and China. And still they write and act as if nothing – nothing – in their worldview needs changing.

A reader writes:

Your reader's excellent email describing the dialogue between Palin and her doctor reminded, oddly, of that recent video that went viral about the stupidly insistent person that wanted an iPhone 4.  I imagine Palin's dialogue with her doctor sounding more like that video:

Palin:  My water broke, and I'm having contractions.  I want to give this speech, then fly to the hospital in Wasilla.
Doctor:  You should stay in Texas and go to the hospital.  Due to your age, your pregnancy is considered high-risk and you could have complications during delivery.
Palin:  I don't care.
Doctor:  Your baby has been diagnosed with Down's Syndrome and could have other problems, and it's very important that you be in a facility that handles high-risk deliveries when he is born.
Palin:  I don't care.
Doctor:  If your water broke, your baby is at risk of infection until he is delivered.
Palin:  I don't care.
Doctor:  Since this is your fifth pregnancy, labor could progress very quickly and you could have the baby at any time.
Palin: I don't care.
Doctor: If you went into labor on the flight, you could disrupt all the other passengers by forcing an emergency landing.
Palin: I don't care.
Doctor:  Okay, if you don't care about any of that, tell me, what the fuck is so great about the hospital in Wasilla?
Palin:  It's in Alaska where there are mooses and bears.

And where no one will ask any questions.

A reader writes:

Did Newt really claim that the Cordoba House mosque would "overlook" the World Trade Center site? Rubbish. It is three blocks away and has no line of sight.

And 3,000 Americans? 3,000 human beings, mostly but by no means entirely American, as anyone in reality-based discourse knows. Another writes:

I live two blocks from Ground Zero in a six-building apartment complex with an active tenant association. As best I can tell, Cordoba House is a non-issue among local residents. I haven't heard a word from anybody on the subject – not in the elevators, not in the lobby, not at the neighborhood bars or restaurants. Nada.

Here are the facts. The proposed Cordoba House is not a mosque. It's to be a community center modeled after the YMCA and the Jewish Community Center, with most of its 13 floors devoted to classrooms, fitness and recreation – open to the entire downtown community, not just Muslims. There is to be a "prayer space" that can hold up to 2,000 people. I'll aver that "prayer space" could just be a PC term for "mosque," though I confess no knowledge of what procedures must take place to consecrate a facility as an official mosque. The group's leader, Imam Abdul Rauf, has held services in a small mosque in the neighborhood since 1983. It isn't as though the group materialized out of nowhere or has no history in the neighborhood.

Another

I think Gingrich has a point. 

I re-read my home copy of the Constitution this morning and came across the first amendment which reads "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." But based on Gingrichian logic, I figured this cannot be true because Saudi Arabia doesn't allow for full freedom of religion, so therefore there is no way the United States can. 

So I looked closer and closer at the Constitution until I noticed something: there was more text there, hidden with invisible ink.  So I whipped up a batch of my homemade ink revealer (just like Nick Cage), applied it to the Constitution, and voila! there it was: a missing footnote that was hidden for centuries!  It reads: "This amendment is only valid when Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations recognize freedom of religion inside their own borders."

Another:

Maybe Newt would also like us to adopt Saudi Arabia's penalties for adultery.

Not likely. But now he's a theocon Catholic, who knows? What interests me is how Newt was obviously doing this to make sure Palin doesn't get an edge with the war of civilizations crowd. She's setting the agenda for Gingrich now, as well – and their primary battle (in which she will eat him alive) is beginning. And can we have no more encomiums to how smart Gingrich is? He's an ill-educated ideologue who treats ideas and arguments as weapons in political wars. That's all.

(Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty.)

Dana McCourt makes a distinction:

Apparent consent can be invalid is if the person has been deceived.  If a prankster serves you a delicious brownie telling you that it’s made of chocolate, and neglects to tell you about the secret ingredient, it’s fair to say that you didn’t consent to getting high.

In this case, the woman argues that she was deceived, and if she was, her consent would be meaningless.  Lack of consent means rape.

So, I’m still not convinced.  I think that the difference lies in whether we read the deception as warranting the assertion, “Yes, I consented, but I wouldn’t have if I’d known the truth” or “No, I really didn’t consent, because I was deceived in such a way that I couldn’t consent.”   I think that there are two categories, and that this case falls in the former category, and that to hold that this is an instance of rape, it has to be in the latter category.

Dan Savage is less restrained:

When we have consensual sex with strangers—when we go home (or to "a nearby building") with someone we've only just met—we're not just taking a chance on a person we know very little about. We're taking a chance on our own judgment. With no way to verify the story of the hot stranger—he could be lying about anything—we're taking a chance on our own bullshit detectors. And no one's bullshit detectors are 100% accurate. So someone who can't bear the thought of accidentally fucking the shit out of an Arab or a Republican or a married man or a guy who makes less than $250,000 a year has no business fucking complete strangers.

But it's the visceral emotional core of this that is so offensive. It's about racism, religion and the risk of miscegenation. It's about the deep disgust of some Israeli Jews toward Arabs, upheld by the courts. It's a variant of the racial sexual panics of the Jim Crow South.

A reader writes:

I don't see how you can be disgusted with Breitbart for what he did on one hand, while at the same time calling out people on the Journo-List because of some selectively edited emails posted on the Daily Caller. (Tucker Carlson has told Greg Sargent he won't publish the full emails.) You're not making sense here. I know you say this is about liberal group think, but you don't know what was discussed on the list. You're drawing conclusions based on nothing but some selectively edited emails published by someone whose agenda at the very least to boost traffic to his site.

I am not defending the Daily Caller, but you need little context to understand an email headlined "The Line On Palin" or Kilgore's call to arms. Tucker addresses the concern:

We reserve the right to change our minds about this in the future, but for now there’s an easy solution to this question: Anyone on Journolist who claims we quoted him “out of context” can reveal the context himself. Every member of Journolist received new threads from the group every day, most of which are likely still sitting in Gmail accounts all over Washington and New York. So feel free to try to prove your allegations, or else stop making them.

In response, Ezra Klein publishes the emails from Tucker asking to join Journo-list two months ago:

At every turn, he's known about evidence that substantially complicates his picture of an international media conspiracy.

He knows I tried to let him in, odd behavior for someone with so much to hide and so much to lose. He knows I let one of his reporters remain a member. He knows I banned — and enforced the ban — on the sort of coordinated letter that served as example one of the list's conspiracy. He knows — and never, to my knowledge, corrected — that his reporter misrepresented the dates of Dave Weigel's posts to make it look like things he wrote at the Washington Independent were written at the Washington Post. And that's not even to mention the more prosaic deceptions of his selective choice of threads, truncated quotations, and misleading headlines.

Ezra also emails the Dish to counter a point in this post:

I'm not sure where you've gotten this idea. ["It was just a water-cooler list-serv that just happened to be open only to liberals whom Ezra Klein liked."]  I didn't know most of the people on the list, and there were plenty of people I didn't like. I set two rules for members: Center to left, and not working for the government, I didn't exercise discretion beyond that because I didn't want to be in the position of selectively choosing people.

Kate Gosselin, Sarah Palin will allegedly go camping together. What's next: a Martini summit with Danielle? But this I had to love:

Sarah Palin has even reportedly said that she will “teach Kate how to avoid bears” during the visit.

Joel Wing explains the diplomatic withdrawal:

The U.S. currently has a series of branch embassy offices throughout Iraq that would be closed down by 2014. The State Department is also due to take over the police training program in Iraq from the military, and that too will come to end in 3-5 years. The 16 Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) would also be consolidated into three offices and two consulates, before being phased out as well. After five years then, the U.S. diplomatic presence in Iraq would consist of the American embassy in Baghdad, an office in charge of military sales, and a consulate in southern Iraq and one in the north based upon the PRTs.

Still: no government; al Qaeda able to score a major attack deep in the Green Zone; and the Awakening movement is being left out to dry. But repeat after me: the surge worked. If you say it often enough, as every Washingtonian does, you may even come to believe it.

A big boom in construction and services has taken experts by surprise. Unlike the US, almost all the growth came from the private sector. The buoyancy makes the looming austerity less troubling, it seems to me.

A new video on Social Security inequality by Shawn Nee:

Thank You For Your Call from Shawn Nee / discarted on Vimeo.

Noah Millman says it well:

Some of “them” are “us.” There are American Muslims. There is an – there are various – American Islam(s). That’s just a fact. There are certainly Muslims (mostly non-American) who deny that fact – who want to argue that Muslims in America can have no true loyalty to America, but must be loyal to some imaginary global Islamic communal interest. And there are certainly non-Muslims who would deny that fact in similar terms. But a fact it is. The problem with this Republican line is not so much that it discourages moderate Islam – though obviously the message “no Muslims wanted” is a terrible one – but that it quite blatantly writes American Muslims out of the American people.