Author: Andrew Sullivan

by Dave Weigel

I'm signing off now and heading back into scenes like the one you see above you. It's been a fun week, and I want to thank Andrew for letting me into his habitat again. I also want to thank David Frum for joining me, and Patrick Appel and Chris Bodenner from ascending from the underblogverse to keep everything humming. That included churning out their own posts, keeping me alerted to commentary on what I'd written, and helping me put things online in those frequent moments when Haystack let Unalaska wireless customers down. (I did learn from former mayor Frank Kelty today that there's discussion of running fiberoptic cables over to the island from Kodiak, which would be nice, although it hadn't happened as of 3:06 p.m. local time.)

What did we learn this week? I don't know, but we asked plenty of questions. Will 2012 coverage be as silly as 2008 coverage, and if so, what does that mean for the Snow Empress of the Mama Grizzlies? How is Politico like a liberal blog? When did we elect President Jim Bunning? Isn't it time to stop obsessing over Trig? And isn't it time for Megyn Kelly to close down the minstrel show? Think it all over and I'll see you around.

by Dave Weigel

Charles Krauthammer tells it like it is:

The net effect of 18 months of Obamaism will be to undo much of Reaganism. Both presidencies were highly ideological, grandly ambitious and often underappreciated by their own side. In his early years, Reagan was bitterly attacked from his right. (Typical Washington Post headline: "For Reagan and the New Right, the Honeymoon Is Over" — and that was six months into his presidency!) Obama is attacked from his left for insufficient zeal on gay rights, immigration reform, closing Guantanamo — the list is long. The critics don't understand the big picture. Obama's transformational agenda is a play in two acts.

There's a popular spin among conservatives now that portrays Obama as a new Jimmy Carter. Just as an incompetent Carter made the Reagan revolution possible, Obama will fill the next Congress with Rand Pauls and Marco Rubios and make possible the ascent of the most conservative president ever — possibly one named Sarah. But if we've learned anything in the past two years, it's that even overpowering ideological control of Congress has its limits. A GOP Senate caucus of 40 members, the lowest since the 1970s, stopped card check. How exactly does a Democratic caucus of 52 (in 2011) or 45 (in 2013) members, in the best case scenarios for Republicans, fail to block a repeal of health care reform?

by Chris Bodenner

Palestinian boys taunt Israeli soldiers during a protest in the West Bank town of Nabi saleh, near Ramallah, on July 16, 2010 against the expropriation of Palestinian land to expand the nearby Jewish settlement of Halmish. By Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty Image.

by Dave Weigel

Seth Schiesel has my favorite review of the week, if only for the line "the actor Fred Backus deserves praise for his performance as the deliciously rapacious Pac-Man." It's for "Theater of the Arcade," which is exactly what it sounds like. Let the creators explain:

“We would have these parties in junior high school and all the guys would be playing Street Fighter and most of the girls would be off doing their own thing, but I was pretty good at Street Fighter and definitely beat a lot of the guys,” said Gyda Arber, 30, the festival’s executive producer. Ms. Arber, who also directed “Theater of the Arcade” (written by Jeff Lewonczyk), said that she was halfway through Final Fantasy XIII on the PlayStation 3 and that she and her boyfriend recently played through Sony’s noir thriller Heavy Rain not once but twice as they explored that game’s impressive narrative depth.

There's a fun field of "I weep for my culture" criticism, perfected by Steve Sailer, which asks how much talent has been squandered by smart people turning their talents to video game development instead of, let's assume, the perfection of cold fusion or sequels to "Ulysses." I don't like this criticism because it reminds me of the hours I spent beating Final Fantasies II through VII (American titling) and the relaxation hours I now devote to "Call of Duty" and "Rock Band." (Hello there, David Hajdu.) How do I know this time wouldn't have been spent, in another era, by playing poker or Monopoly? How do we know that the developers of the game would have been successful at some other, less suited arts or sciences? Screw it. Enjoy the games or enjoy being a scold out of touch with the culture.

by Patrick Appel A reader writes:

You write:

“Iran is a proud country with an ancient history; trying to bend it to America’s will through force alone is unlikely to succeed. It sees itself as an equal, as a superpower – or at least a regional superpower – in the making. However far-fetched that may seem to Americans, treating the nation like a donkey, to be controlled with carrots and sticks, is insulting to many Iranians and politically strengthens anti-American forces inside the Iranian government.”

Another way of looking at this statement, at least for those who think that the causes of WWII were not entirely rooted in anachronistic dynamics and issues with no relevance beyond their original applications, is that Iran has a lot in common with Japan of the 1930’s. Ancient and highly advanced (albeit barbaric in many respects) culture? Check. Justification for seeing itself as rightful leader of it’s sphere of influence? Check. Arrogance? Check. Might America have bended Imperial Japan to its will had we taken a less bellicose approach?

Perhaps had we abandoned our support for China, a nation that didn’t do anything for us anyway, we might have gotten along better. But we insisted on taking their side just as Americans still side with (relatively useless) Israel. And after it became obvious Japan had lied about not building gigantic war ships we embargoed them which is an act of war. We haven’t embargoed Iran but that’s the direction we are going.

Well, perhaps had FDR charted a wiser less bellicose course would have steered us clear of at least the Pacific part of WWII but who really imagines so? Given the nature of man and culture what you are really saying is that war is inevitable. The only question is how horrible will it be?

by Patrick Appel

Manzi tallies points in his recent climate change to-and-fro with Bradford Plumer et al. I missed Mike Konczal's contribution until just now. He notes that Nordhaus tried to calculate non-GDP consequences of global warming by comparing how much the population enjoys skiing (which warming will decrease) and camping (which warming will increase):

There’s something kind of oddly endearing to framing the future of how much carbon we are willing to put in the air and how much warming we are willing to experience as a population based on camping versus skiing time surveys from 1981. For this cost-benefit analysis to work, we need to quantify everything, and the moment we step outside the world of the welfare of international industrial production to the world of our bodies and our lives the methods break down.

by Chris Bodenner

Christopher Orr reviews Christopher Nolan's latest:

[I]n this end, it may be Inception's greatest strength, its precision engineering, that also proves its signal weakness. Nolan has always been a nimble, meticulous director, but his best work has exceeded such technical virtues. His first major film, Memento, may have taken the form of a gimmick movie, but it transcended its own structural ingenuity to become one of the most unique and resonant tragedies of the past 25 years. His last movie, The Dark Knight, was also his messiest, with flaws that included a collapsing final act. Yet it, too, perhaps in part thanks to that messiness, found unexpected grandeur and gravity in its subject.

For all its elegant construction, Inception is a film in which nothing feels comparably at stake. (In this it resembles Nolan's The Prestige, another admirably heady tale of perception and reality that never quite found a hearty emotional grip.)

by Dave Weigel

Ta-Nahesi Coates pushes back on my "NAACP tea party resolution backfires" theory:

To the extent that the NAACP has, as Dave says, "failed," it is because the arbiters of facts have ceded ground, and reporters and writers dutifully, and uncritically, dispense the notion that an organization which helped birth modern America has "a long history of…racism." But it also fails because there is very little pushback on this notion from "sensible" liberal writers. (I don't include Dave among them, mind you.) Instead we're getting calls for the president to condemn the NAACP, essentially, for being the NAACP. 

Dave concedes that the NAACP has a case, but concludes that they're wrong for making it. But they're only wrong for making it because the broader society, evidently, believes that objecting to a call for literacy tests is, in fact, just as racist as a call for literacy tests. This inversion, this crime against sound logic, is at the heart of American white supremacy, and at the heart of a country that has nurtured white supremacy all these sad glorious years.

You know, I don't disagree with this. Coates and I are writing from different places. I don't think the way that the NAACP's resolution was covered was good at all. I don't think any racial issues are covered well, least of all "debates" like this where the press creates a point-counterpoint between Ben Jealous on one end and Mark Williams on the other. It was with that assumption that I said this would "backfire."

In the long run, will it backfire? I don't know. Conservatives who disagree with the NAACP have no tolerance whatsoever for being called racists or supporters of racism. Past NAACP attempts to shift the debate by using tough rhetoric — I am thinking of Julian Bond calling some conservatives the "American Taliban" — are remembered today not as things that shifted the debate, but things that torqued off conservatives and justified their suspicions about the NAACP. This doesn't seem fair to them. How is it fair that bringing up the 2000 election's result reveals them as bitter conspiracy theorists, while Tim Pawlenty intimating that Sen. Al Franken may have been elected by felons is just proof that he's a smart pol looking at 2012? It's not fair. I guess I'm more a defeatist than Coates is.

by Patrick Appel

Noah Millman wonders whether economics should remain the primary focus of Libertarian politics:

I would argue that, over the past thirty years, there has been a vast increase in appreciation of the importance of free markets across the political spectrum. Yes, government spending has spiked way up in the past two years as a consequence of the financial crisis and the recession (TARP, ARRA) – but discretionary non-defense spending is still much lower as a percentage of GDP than it was in 1980. The health care reform passed in this congress reflected a move to the “left” by the country – but it reflected a move to the “right” by the “left” inasmuch as it reflected conservative criticisms of past left-wing health care overhaul plans such as President Clinton’s failed first-term effort.

Socialist parties in Europe preside over efforts to overhaul their welfare states to make them more efficient and responsive. Private sector unionization in the United States continues to drop, down to 7.2 percent in 2009. While very recently there’s been a revival of enthusiasm for regulation (particularly of the financial sector), the overall trend has been of more and more widespread acceptance of basic insights from economics that are part of a libertarian’s stock in trade.

So, yes, libertarians should find a friendlier home in the GOP if their priority is pushing the traditional GOP agenda of low taxes and weaker regulation of the economy. But should this be their priority?

by Dave Weigel

It's just a happy coincidence, I guess, that he publishes this as I get ready to polish off a week of blog posts.

[T]here are no real deadlines anymore, because stories are constantly being updated for the Web. All stories are due now, and most of the constipated people are gone, replaced by multiplatform idea triage specialists. In this hectic environment, mistakes are more likely to be made, meaning that a story might identify Uzbekistan as "a subspecies of goat."

Fortunately, this new system enjoys the services of tens of thousands of fact-checking "citizen journalists" who write "comments." They will read the Uzbekistan story and instantly alert everyone that BARACK OBAMA IS A LIEING PIECE OF CRAP.

I basically like "comments," though they can seem a little jarring: spit-flecked rants that are appended to a product that at least tries for a measure of objectivity and dignity. It's as though when you order a sirloin steak, it comes with a side of maggots.

Buy his new anthology when it comes out in September.