Author: Andrew Sullivan

So much for an apology. He claims the farmer's wife who backed Sherrod could have been a plant:

Good grief. He's bonkers.

A reader writes:

You are a twit sometimes, Andrew. Obama is handling the Sherrod thing exactly as he handles everything like this. Get the public totally involved and see if there's enough outrage out there to change anything. Education by fire . . . . Perhaps we'll get another discourse on race relations. This is a democracy; it's working. Stop whining.

Take it away, TNC. Reinstate Sherrod.

A disgusting ad celebrated by Conservatives4Palin:

"The audacity of jihad." Real subtle. But you see here the neo-fascist, civilization-war rhetoric that Palin will deploy more and more crudely as she moves toward the White House.

Dan Rather made some attempt to get his facts straight. Breitbart made none, in smearing and slandering a black woman. Frum:

When people talk of the "closing of the conservative mind" this is what they mean: not that conservatives are more narrow-minded than other people — everybody can be narrow minded — but that conservatives have a unique capacity to ignore unwelcome fact.
 
When Dan Rather succumbed to the forged Bush war record hoax in 2004, CBS forced him into retirement. Breitbart is the conservative Dan Rather, but there will be no discredit, no resignation for him.

David is particularly acute on how the rightwing blogosphere, realizing they had been snookered, simply shifted their stance to blaming Obama and Vilsack. That was the spin on Morning Joe this morning as well. God, I hate cable news.

Palin doubles down on her Ground Zero campaign. A reader writes:

I first heard about the mosque project a month or two ago, and the thing that struck me the most about it was the overwhelming support it had from the local community board in Lower Manhattan. 

I don't know how familiar you are with how zoning works in New York and the role that community boards play in that process, but let me tell you, to have a community board agree 29-1 on ANY land use issue is quite an accomplishment. Furthermore, why is land use in New York City the business of anyone else but the citizens of New York?  If so, I would really like to know Sarah Palin's opinion of the Atlantic Yards (or Hudson Yards or the expansion of Columbia University) project, an issue that is 1,000,000x more controversial than this project.  That's all this is: a land use issue. 

Following her logic (no small feat, I might add), do I now have the right to protest the construction of a new office building in Anchorage because it may house the offices of Big Oil and insult the people who suffered from the BP oil spill?  Or can I have a say the next time some city in the "heartland" decides to build more sprawl at the expense of more livable communities with mixed-use development, walkable streets, and public transportation?  I think I should, because it really "stabs me in the heart" when places do that.

This is a local issue, plain and simple.  The people of New York – the ones actually attacked on 9/11 and who had to live through the aftermath – are the only ones who are affected by this.  It is no one else's business.  Sarah Palin and the "heartland" do not have permanent veto power over what gets built in Lower Manhattan.  If they want a say over what happens there, my advice would be to move to New York. They might even learn something about the values of living in a multi-ethnic, multicultural community.  Short of that, please STFU.

Polling shows that 52% of New Yorkers are opposed to the mosque. Joe Klein isn't one of them:

If there ever was a place to demonstrate this country's core value of religious tolerance, it is at the site of the World Trade Center.

As regular readers know, I am an intensely proud New Yorker–from the outer boroughs, even–and Palin's intolerance runs counter to my all-American value system. I am a such a staunch supporter of diversity that I find that cliched word insufficient: multiversity is more like it. There is nothing more satisfying for a true New Yorker than to discover a great new restaurant–Afro-Lebanese fusion, perhaps–run by a gay Muslim-Adventist couple. I mean, hummus grits! Why not?

Mayor Bloomberg is backing the board (and an aide who got in a Twitter spat with Palin). Another reader writes:

Yes, 9/11 affected all of us, in the sense that it was an attack on all of our country, and our hearts go out to the victims and heroes of that day. While I do think 9/11 was a national trauma, I also agree with Morgan Freeman when he said "If you were not in New York on Sept. 11, what you saw was an event on CNN". Just because al Qaeda meant to symbolically attack the whole country doesn't give the whole country a say into what goes on in the surrounding area of ground zero.

How often do Sarah Palin, or any of these other talking heads (or me, for that matter) find ourselves strolling around the lower Manhattan area? So what do I care if in one of those buildings is a mosque and Islamic cultural center? The zoning approval for such a center should be subject to the same approval process as anything similar in New York City, and those are subject to the relevant laws and ultimately the voters of New York City and the state. The rest of us should just butt out.

Alaska native Shannyn Moore agrees:

9/11 for NYC was a day many Alaskans couldn’t fathom. I’d never been there. My father didn’t know about the terrorist attack for weeks because he was on the Koyukuk River hunting moose. Another hunter was informed after a military escort surrounded his small aircraft on his return to town. Last year I visited New York City and wept when I realized how terrifying it must have been. I had no context until I stood in the canyons of buildings.

She also points to a list of Muslim-Americans killed on September 11. 

"I think she should get her job back. I think she's owed apologies from pretty much everyone, including my good friend Andrew Breitbart. I generally think Andrew is on the side of the angels and a great champion of the cause. He says he received the video in its edited form and I believe him. But the relevant question is, Would he have done the same thing over again if he had seen the full video from the outset? I'd like to think he wouldn't have. Because to knowingly turn this woman into a racist in order to fight fire with fire with the NAACP is unacceptable," – Jonah Goldberg, NRO.

Will Breitbart apologize? Can he apologize? Is there a record of him ever apologizing for anything? Jonah also seems to me to be dead-on with this point:

I think this episode demonstrates that this White House is a much more tightly wound outfit than it lets on in public. The rapid-response firing suggests a level of fear over Glenn Beck and Fox that speaks volumes.

Yes, some of us backed Obama because he didn't, like Clinton, reek of fear in the face of every rightwing attack. How wrong we were.

Mel Gibson is not a reactionary Catholic like, say, Robbie George or Rick Santorum. He is a supporter of a tiny faction in the church that wants to return totally to pre-Vatican II norms, to restore the notion – mercifully consigned to history by the Second Council – of the Jewish people somehow bearing collective responsibility for the execution of Jesus of Nazareth, of autocratic nineteenth century papal control, and on and on. And in this, he has many supporters, many located at a site called traditio.com, pointed out to the Dish by a reader. Even they can't quite manage to wrap their heads around their idol being a woman beater and proud adulterer. But it's their view of Robyn Gibson, Mel's former wife, that is most striking. Here she is blamed for the divorce a year ago:

Robyn is expected to get around half a billion U.S. dollars in community property, much of it from royalties on Mel's 2004 blockbuster, The Passion of the Christ. With so much money hanging in the balance, Robyn has hired a "celebrity" lawyer, "disco queen" Laura Wasser, who has broken up the marriages of the likes of Angelina Jolie, Britney Spears, and Stevie Wonder.

Only the Gibsons know what is really going on. As in all such cases, there is guilt on both sides. Mel did not initiate the divorce and is not responsible for his wife's action.

And now?

The "saint," if you will, in this story, is Mel's devoted wife of 30 years. Mel always said that she was his best friend and would chastise him when he fell off the wagon. This woman, whom our sources at the traditional Catholic church that Mel built in Agoura Hills, California, describe as a classy lady, has now come out to support her husband in a sworn declaration to a California court that he never hit her or the children during their marriage. It seems to have been Robyn's declaration that swayed the court in a July 15, 2010, decree to confirm Mel's right to visitation and time with his illegitimate daughter by the mistress.

Money-grubbing whore or maternal saint? Yes, those are the two models offered by what Kathryn Jean Lopez calls "feminism."

Despite the obvious fact that Journolist clearly created a tone of group-think and collective response to right-wing shenanigans – replicating exactly what's so wrong with conservative discourse in Washington – Jon Chait defends it. Yes, it once tried to organize a petition, he notes, but only 41 signed it. Yes, it often conveyed arguments about how to shape the discourse – but these were rebutted by some on the list. Then this:

Now, you could say that Hayes' post was an attempt at message coordination if you define the term very loosely. Here was a writer saying that a story did not merit attention. Since he emailed a lot of other writers, his attempt to persuade them that the Wright story didn't merit attention could be seen as an attempt to get liberals to stop writing about Wright. But of course, this would also be true of anybody who suggested that a particular topic merited more or less attention. It's the same as if you ventured such an opinion at a party, or in a published article.

This is ludicrous.

It is obviously different to propose message coordination on a private list-serv for liberal journalists than in a free-standing article in a magazine or newspaper, available to anyone, right, left and center. The whole point of Journo-list was collective discussion on the liberal left. I'm sure there were disagreements; but the point of it was to foster common ground and when that atmosphere encourages proposals for calling Republicans racists purely as a strategy, and when there are emails calling to ignore the Wright issue to a group of liberal bloggers and writers as a political strategy, it's obviously an unhealthy, cliquish and corrupting aspect of today's polarized media climate. I'm not the only one to have made this argument:

The most important of these is an e-mail list called Townhouse. It includes "many bloggers and other representatives of the netroots as well as a large number of partisan journalists and grassroots groups," Moulitsas has written, and its purpose is to "have a unified message in the face of a unified conservative noise machine." The party-line sensibility that pervades the netroots is not some artificial, Stalinist imposition… In replicating the form and structure of the conservative movement, inevitably the netroots have replicated its intellectual style as well.

So Chait agrees with me on Townhouse and disagrees on Journo-list. Maybe Journo-list had more debate, but that several members clearly saw it as a Townhouse replica, organized petitions, suggested common media strategy, and so on … seems to me to blur the difference. And Townhouse was unabashedly for activists and partisans; Journo-list was for allegedly fair reporters as well as opinion writers.

Look: there's a place for list-servs to share ideas, air arguments, vent, etc. I'm sure Journo-list contained a lot of this as well. I have long belonged to a small list-serv for right-of-center gays that informs me all the time of facts and events and legal issues. And it is an attempt to create a space where the intimidation of the gay left can be resisted. But it is not a massive network of journalists talking about how to manipulate their work to promote a party line. That's cliquishness that puts fellow journalists on a higher plane than the readers we are all supposed to serve; and Chait was a part of it, however much he wants to spin it now.

"This has ripped away the veil and shown us all that is wrong with politics today. An ideologue injects poison into the internet, other people rush to judgment on camera, and an administration gets stampeded and commits this travesty of justice. The NAACP has at least had the courage to come back and say 'we were wrong' and apologize. Now the administration needs to to the same thing. The president — tonight — ought to order the Agriculture Department to reopen this case, give this woman a fair hearing, and — if the facts are as they seem — reinstate her with an apology. Indeed, I think she deserves a whole lot more than an apology. I think she deserves honor for her attempts to bring people together," – David Gergen, last night on CNN.