Author: Andrew Sullivan

A reader writes:

It's really not difficult to see what's going on here.  Custody battles are nasty.  They can drag on for years and cost thousands.  Levi is probably no angel.  It's obviously not difficult to make a few bad choices in Wasilla.  Throw in the Playgirl spread and 'partying' in Hollywood or wherever…it's red meat for the high priced team of lawyers I'm sure Palin hired for Bristol.

Short version: shut your mouth, we own you and your dirt on us … or you will never see your son again.  It's just how a highly contentious custody battle works.

It's totally unfair to say Levi caved and expect him to dish his dirt given this proverbial gun to his head.

And Tripp is the second innocent child that Palin has used as a weapon.

Funny how they are not squeamish about using the term "genocide" accurately – even in a fiercely contested context. A reader asks a potent question of the NYT's editors:

Hypothetically, is there any action the Bush administration could have authorized against a detainee that you would have called "torture," despite their objection to the word?

Recall the no one disputes that several individuals were tortured to death by the US under Bush and Cheney? Would Bill Keller use the word "torture" to describe that? Not if the far right objected.

From a political science symposium:

Many journalists and politicians believe that during the Bush administration, a majority of Americans supported torture if they were assured that it would prevent a terrorist attack….But this view was a misperception…we show here that a majority of Americans were opposed to torture throughout the Bush presidency…even when respondents were asked about an imminent terrorist attack, even when enhanced interrogation techniques were not called torture, and even when Americans were assured that torture would work to get crucial information. Opposition to torture remained stable and consistent during the entire Bush presidency. Even soldiers serving in Iraq opposed the use of torture in these conditions…a public majority in favor of torture did not appear until, interestingly, six months into the Obama administration.

The conclusion:

The people who had the most accurate perception of public attitudes turned out to be the people nobody believed or supported throughout the Bush administration—the 29% who were most opposed to torture.

This strikes me as a classic example of how much of the political class simply assumes the worst of the American people and acts in morbid fear of the far right, when fear is utterly unjustified. The contemporary right’s politics of total war – in which there is no accountability for the past, relentless focus on slogans, and extreme positioning – has intimidated non-authoritarians.

The right response to bullies is always courage – and argument. And yet the Democrats and decent Republicans too often reflexively adopt the defensive, cowardly crouch. It’s wrong and it empowers the bullies.

(Hat tip: Sides)

Governor Linda Lingle of Hawaii vetoes a civil unions bill because it would create separate-but-equal status for gay citizens. Lingle supports separate and unequal. Which is one better than the GOP platforms in Montana and Texas, which want gays back in jail.

 

From Mercede Johnston's blog:

The message was from my mother saying that Levi, who has not spoken to us since he rekindled his relationship with Bristol (although we had attempted repeatedly to call or text him), left a message saying that if I did not take my blog down by Wednesday that I would never get to see him, or Tripp, again.

I could not believe it! I thought to myself if he was really willing to make such a threat that he would at least have the decency to call me and talk about it first. I mentioned on my blog repeatedly that my intention was not to hurt or attack the Palins, but to speak out and tell the public my side of the story. As well as how badly my life, and the lives of our family members, had been impacted by our association with the Palins.

It had my mind spinning. How could my brother threaten me like this?

That's a very good question. So is the question of how Palin finally put the screws on Levi. In Palinland, no one knows what's really going on. But I wonder if this is a somewhat panicked response to the recent blip upwards in web interest in the Trig question. With all these family members able to speak to the public and McGinniss digging deeper, Todd and Sarah may have felt the need to crack down and use Levi's access to Tripp and Bristol as their latest weapon. Mercede has this to say about Levi's latest statement, which reads like a man who has a metaphorical gun to his head:

As for this new People magazine article where my brother “Apologizes to the Palins” I am extremely disappointed in him. Not only is he being controlled like a puppet, but saying that all of his comments and stories were lies is absurd!

I know for a fact that all of his comments were true. I lived through all this and I remember clear as day all of the times that Levi would come home and tell me about Sarah complaining, or fights going on between the family, .etc.

I know he wasn’t making all that up, why would he have back then? I am very disappointed that he is allowing them to control him in such a manner.

A message to all those under Palin's thumb in Alaska. Don't be intimidated. The only thing to do with bullies like Todd Palin is to face them down. Or in Mercede's words:

I wish Levi could be the man I know he is and have a mind of his own and finally stand his ground, but I guess he is blinded by love. I just wish he would take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

Box Turtle Bulletin now says it was a hoax:

Here is what we do know: a young man was brutally murdered, that he was mutilated and his head was cut off and dumped into a latrine. That much is true. But we have now confirmed that the young man had no connections with Integrity Uganda.

Were Weigel's emails leaked or hacked? Dave emails to clarify:

Just so you know, I am not disputing anything about JList with anyone in my interview with David Carr. He quoted me accurately, but what I was saying was that people shouldn't immediately turn this into some bloodless "media, what to make of it?" story. Someone, probably someone on the list, spent a lot of time digging into old off-the-record emails and unleashed a bunch of them to hurt my career. I called this "hacking," because that was the word that came to mind for someone digging around online, but I am not saying "a hacker" went after me. I don't know who did; I assume it was a member of the List, but who knows?

For some reason, I missed this NYT blog-post about the paper's decision to abandon the word "torture" to describe, er, torture. Bill Keller's response is an appalling piece of weaseling:

“I think this Kennedy School study — by focusing on whether we have embraced the politically correct term of art in our news stories — is somewhat misleading and tendentious.”

In an e-mail message on Thursday, Mr. Keller said defenders of the practice of waterboarding, “including senior officials of the Bush administration,” insisted that it did not constitute torture.

“When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves,” Mr. Keller wrote. “Thus we describe the practice vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and human rights advocates as a form of torture. Nobody reading the Times’s coverage could be ignorant of the extent of the practice (much of that from information we broke) or mistake it for something benign (we usually use the word ‘brutal.’)”

But words matter, and the only reason there is any dispute about whether waterboarding is torture is because "senior officials of the Bush administration” were trying to avoid prosecution for war crimes. It is the role of a newspaper not to mimic the propaganda of the powerful, or act as their legal defenders, but to use plain English accurately. The NYT always did this before 2002, so it has been caught red-handed caving into political pressure. The Washington Post is just as bad (and they have actually published brazen defenses of torture and hired a man as a columnist deeply implicated in the war crimes of the last administration):

“After the use of the term ‘torture’ became contentious, we decided that we wouldn’t use it in our voice to describe waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques authorized by the Bush administration."

There you have the Cheneyism – "harsh interrogation techniques." The truth is: the NYT and WaPo did not avoid controversy; they plainly endorsed the Bush administration's lies. They put their own voice behind that of war criminals.

Howard Gleckman scores the unemployment benefits fight:

It is true…that those receiving benefits are somewhat less likely to accept a job offer than those whose aid has run out. However, most researchers find this effect is small, especially when jobs are very hard to get, as they are now. With work so scarce, few will turn down a job offer for the temporary pleasures of $300-a-week.

The funding argument is even harder to swallow.

I’d be more sympathetic with these new converts to fiscal responsibility if they were as enthusiastic about paying for extending $32 billion worth of special interest tax breaks as they are about funding the unemployment extension. If I understand correctly, these lawmakers insist that Congress fund every dime of added jobless aid, which nearly all analysts agree will help boost the economy. But they feel no need to pay for continuing these special interest tax breaks, which will not. They fret about unemployed workers who allegedly game the system to get jobless benefits but seem undisturbed by those businesses and individuals who do the same to maximize their tax subsidies. Politics is indeed a funny business.

Covering similar ground, Dylan Matthews researches the economic impact of unemployment benefits.

More and more vindication piles up with respect to the criminal attitude of Henry Kissinger.