Author: Andrew Sullivan

"As I look out at the political landscape now, I find plenty of slogans on the Republican side, but not very many ideas. And indeed, if you raise specific ideas and solutions, as I tried to do on health care with Ron Wyden, you are attacked with the same vigor as we've seen in American politics all the way back to the arguments over slavery and polygamy. You are attacked as being a wimp, insufficiently pure, and unreliable … The pendulum will swing. And we will take control of the House — I think that's going to happen — and frankly, with the death of Robert C. Byrd there's a chance we will take control of the Senate as well. At which point, it's 'thank you for the slogans' and 'thank you for the election.' But in the immortal words of Robert Redford in the movie, The Candidate, 'What do we do now?'" – Utah senator Bob Bennett.

Sounds like Frum, doesn't he? So is Bob Bennett now a liberal?

This blog, along with others, compiled some anecdotes and research to show how the New York Times had always called "waterboarding" torture – until the Bush-Cheney administration came along. Instead of challenging this government lie, the NYT simply echoed it, with Bill Keller taking instructions from John Yoo on a key, legally salient etymology. Now, we have the first truly comprehensive study of how Bill Keller, and the editors of most newspapers, along with NPR, simply rolled over and became mouthpieces for war criminals, rather than telling the unvarnished truth to their readers and listeners in plain English:

Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27).

By contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.

In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in 91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only 11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator.

So the NYT went from calling waterboarding torture 81.5 percent of the time to calling it such 1.4 percent of the time. Had the technique changed? No. Only the government implementing torture and committing war crimes changed. If the US does it, it's not torture.

The editors who insisted on these changes remain liars and cowards and a disgrace to journalism and a free society. They should quit for this kind of open deception and craven cowardice in putting power before truth. They remind you that if you really want to understand what is going on in the world, the New York Times will only publish what the government deems is fit to print – even in its choice of words. 

(Photo: Waterboard displayed at Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Prisoners' legs were shackled to the bar on the right, their wrists were restrained to the brackets on the left, and water was poured over their face, using blue watering can, to drown them.)

He puts it much better than I can in a March column I missed:

I don’t think of myself as having gone squishy. I think of myself as having grown sober. And my conservative critics? On them, I think the most apt verdict was delivered by Niccolo Macchiavelli, 500 years ago: “This is the tragedy of man. Circumstances change, and he does not.”

Read the whole thing. He has not changed his core principles or beliefs and they remain, as mine do, well within the boundaries of what we might call the conservative disposition. But his critical move is to believe that political ideology should react to changing circumstances, not become ossified and abstract. And so the catastrophic market failure of the 2008 requires rethinking the rules for the market; the mounting evidence of the relationship between carbon use and climate change needs to be tackled, not ignored or simply dismissed; and the Burkean evolution of a society not obviously careening off the rails is something to be respected and engaged, not attacked and ignored. This is also a brilliant summation of where the right went wrong on social issues:

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, we’d been fighting to protect the common-sense instincts of ordinary people from elite interference. Now, in the Terri Schiavo euthanasia case, with stem cell research, on gay rights issues, it was we who had become the interfering elite, against a society that was reaching its own new equilibrium.

I have had many differences with David but I agree with him that conservatism in the end must be about governing the world as it is – not venting against a world that will not change. I don't think David has fully absorbed the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, but we can agree to disagree. But that he is now banished from the "conservative" tribe says far, far more about the degeneracy of the right than the alleged fickleness of the dissenters.

(Photo: Frazer Harrison/Getty.)

Montel Williams – in a courageous burst of sanity.

She’ll charm her way to the nomination at this rate.

Drum is feeling it. Sprung not-so-much:

Could it be that Obama's moving the country left about as fast and far as it can bear?  Maybe it's selection bias on my part, a comforting personal myth, but I recur repeatedly — hopefully (ad nauseam?)– to Frederick Douglass' 1876 assessment of Lincoln: Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.

Are they all bunk? Moulitsas himself believes so.

The first hurricane of the season is disrupting clean-up efforts, but it could be a net gain:

[National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spokesman Chris Vaccaro] said the winds and higher seas may help “weather” the oil, breaking it up into smaller droplets that are more easily consumed by microbes. While some weathering occurs in all conditions, he said, a major storm “helps by stirring up the water and literally pounding away at it.” … The rainfall may flush marshes and other sensitive coastal areas, Mr. Vaccaro said.

When Andrew Breitbart offers $100,000 for a private email list-serv archive, essentially all bets are off. Every blogger or writer who has ever offered an opinion is now on warning: your opponents will not just argue against you, they will do all they can to ransack your private life, cull your email in-tray, and use whatever material they have to unleash the moronic hounds of today's right-wing base.

Yes, the Economist was right. This is not about transparency, or hypocrisy. It's about power. And when you are Andrew Breitbart, power is all that matters. There is not a whit of thoughtfulness about this, not an iota of pretense that it might actually advance the conversation about how to deal with, say, a world still perilously close to a second Great Depression, a government that is bankrupt, two wars that have been or are being lost, an energy crisis that is also threatening our planet's ecosystem, and a media increasingly incapable of holding the powerful accountable.

Meanwhile, the GOP leaders, having done all they can to destroy a presidency by obstructing everything and anything he might do or have done to address the crippling problems bequeathed him by his predecessor, are now also waging a scorched earth battle to prevent the working poor from having any real access to affordable health insurance. 

This is what the right now is: no solutions, just anger, paranoia, insecurity and partisan hatred.