Author: Andrew Sullivan

Larison's contribution to the NYC mosque "debate":

Anti-jihadists keep making the same errors over and over. Instead of exploiting differences between jihadists and non-jihadists, among different kinds of Islamists, and between different groups of jihadists, anti-jihadists have been perfectly content to roll all of them into a single “Islamofascist” menace. That artificially inflates the strength of actual jihadist enemies by lending credibility to their propaganda, and as a result it makes jihadist causes more appealing. In this case, anti-jihadists are compounding their error by confusing the equivalent of Muslim ecumenists with hard-line Islamists. That is exactly what Gingrich does when he claims that the project is a “a test of the timidity, passivity and historic ignorance of American elites” in the face of demands from aggressive Islamists. It’s not just that anti-jihadists are conflating any and all Muslims together here, but they are vilifying as aggressors some of the least aggressive Muslims around.

Lynch makes a version of the same argument. Ackerman a few months ago profiled Faisal Abdul Rauf, the imam at the center of Palin's crusade.

Softwar from Moustache on Vimeo.

Thomas Mahnken defends our intelligence agencies:

Although beginning the story with 9/11 makes a certain amount of sense, in doing so Priest and Arkin miss an important dimension of the story. During the 1990s the size of the U.S. intelligence community declined significantly because both the Clinton administration and leaders in Congress believed that we were headed for a more peaceful world.  Indeed, the Clinton administration made trimming the size of the intelligence community a priority through its Reinventing Government initiative. Many intelligence analysts took offers of early retirement and became contractors — contractors that the U.S. government hired back after 9/11. A good deal of the post-9/11 intelligence buildup thus involved trying to buy back capacity and capability that had been eliminated during the 1990s.

Er, yes, but something significant happened in the late 80s and early 90s that explains why the US envisioned "a more peaceful world." Tim Shorrock, author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, was unimpressed by the series for different reasons:

We have a series that's long on numbers, short on analysis, unwieldy as hell, and offering technology as a panacea for understanding — kind of like the intelligence community itself. If you want the real story, read my book.

Looking more generally at defense spending, the video above "attempts to represent the US military budget of $549 billion dollars as a heap of 88,548 Abram M1 tanks."

Drum notices a pattern:

A reader writes:

One point that keeps getting raised by people who believe Sarah is Trig's mother is that she's not responding because she enjoys using it as another reason to paint herself as a victim.  I think that's possible, but I have serious doubts, mainly because, as far as I can tell, Palin doesn't manifest any particular eagerness to talk about the Trig theory. 

I checked out Going Rogue from the library yesterday and was surprised to find that she only devotes one paragraph – a brief one – to the Trig theory, and quickly dismisses it as too ridiculous to respond to.  Compare that to her reaction to that joke from David Letterman, which she seized upon with unseemly eagerness to spark a public fight that she was obviously trying to convert into positive publicity.  Or the media firestorm she fueled with Rahm's "retarded" remark.  Or the Family Guy nonsense.

When Sarah Palin perceives herself as being unfairly attacked, she has a history of eagerness to jump into the fray.  But as far as I can remember from her public comments on the Trig controversy, she actually has not seized upon it as an example of how unfairly she's treated – she's just dismissed it as a topic beneath contempt, and then moved on as quickly as possible to something else.

Kinsley revives it:

What debate there has been about the estate tax has concentrated on where the line should be drawn between the merely prosperous and the actually rich. The feeling seems to be that only the actual rich should be subject to the estate tax. I think this misunderstands what the estate tax should be about. It is not intended to punish people for having a lot of money. It is intended to raise the money we need to run the government, and to do so as fairly as possible. In 2008, very near its low ebb, it raised $25 billion. To the extent it sends a message, the message should be that we’re all in this together, to the best of our ability, and some of us are more able than others.

Alexander Hart goes to bat for the tax. I think a meritocracy should reward work not inheritance.

E.D. Kain thinks through the Shirley Sherrod affair:

I’m tired of both sides lobbing these race-grenades. The Tea Party ‘movement’ – whatever that means – is not racist anymore than the NAACP is racist. There are racists in the very fragmented conservative grassroots movement cobbled together under the title ‘Tea Party’ just as there are racists in every other big organization. I don’t like it when cynical political entertainers like Glenn Beck play on this theme. I find it exceptionally disingenuous to say that the Tea Parties aren’t racist but progressivism writ large is. The whole race conversation has imploded in the past two years, and perhaps that’s to be expected. Did we expect anything less with the ascendance of our first black president?

A reader writes:

You are so quick to pick up any stick to beat Israel with that you may not realize that the concept of rape by deception has found its way into U.S. law, and other Western countries as well. I have a job that does not allow me to spend more that the 30 seconds it took me to find these articles: the first talks about a 2008 proposed Massachusetts statute that would criminalize obtaining consent to sex through by deception, and makes reference to the fact that "rape by deception" is illegal in California and Tennessee; the second article discusses the two cases that served as the impetus for the proposed statue; a third covers a case in the UK.  I'm sure there are many more.

Whether we should criminalize the lying of men to seduce women is open to debate, and no doubt you have already concluded that an Israeli court would never have convicted a Jewish man who claimed to be Muslim to seduce Muslim women.  But even if that were true (and other than your reflexive antipathy for the Jewish state, there is no reason to think it is; Israeli courts do in fact convict Jews of crimes against Arabs), there are stories every day about unequal application of criminal law in the U.S. based on race.  For instance, blacks who kill whites are much more likely to be sentenced to death than whites who kill blacks. That makes the U.S. system deeply flawed but still Western.  As is Israel, with all its flaws.

I am truly sick of being accused of "reflexive antipathy" to the Jewish state. It's a lie. I desperately want Israel to survive as a Jewish state (just Google my record, will you, for decades) but believe it has gone deeply astray in the last decade, and the occupation is killing its soul and future. As for my reader's other points, I am unaware of any law in the West that treats racial or religious deception as the equivalent of rape that requires incarceration. I am unaware of any prosecution of Israeli Jews for rape posing as Arabs in order to get laid (if someone has such evidence, please let me know). As for the other Western cases cited, they are about doctors using their practice to sexually abuse women, a man somehow passing himself off as his own brother to have sex with his brother's girlfriend, and another bizarre story about a man posing as a doctor, citing intercourse as a form of treatment for vaginal infection!

This is not the same as suddenly realizing your lover is, say, a Mormon and thereby accusing him of rape-by-deception, or, say, a light-skinned black man being convicted of rape because he told his partner he was white. This is racial and religious bigotry, a form of Jim Crow-style racism, upheld by the Israeli courts. I notice my reader does not defend it. Who could? And I was careful in my post to assert that Israel is indeed far more Western than its neighbors. Just weirdly different at times – in this case, repulsively so.

Howard Gleckman demonstrates the failure of starve the beast theory, i.e. that the "best way to cut government spending is to cut revenues":

Delinking spending from taxes made all those new programs appear free, thus encouraging more of them. Bill Niskanen, president of the libertarian Cato Institute and former economic adviser to President Reagan, figured this out years ago. Bill concluded that if 20 percent of spending is financed by deficits, people will perceive that government programs cost only 80 percent of their real price. And, not surprisingly, they will be more popular at the perceived discount than at their full cost.