Author: Andrew Sullivan

A reader writes:

While that South Park clip is great, you guys might appreciate this clip from Mr. Show, with Bob Odenkirk and David Cross. It's one of those uncanny examples of life imitating art.

A reader writes:

"Will Palin retract her lie?  Does the Pope crap on the tortured souls of hundreds of raped deaf children?"

Okay, Andrew.  That deserves the Moore Award.  (Thanks to Bill Donohue, such criticism of the Pope seems to be best qualified as "left wing".  But I'm just as happy to nominate you for the Malkin if you prefer).  The comment about the pope and the sexual abuse victims certainly falls under the criteria of shrill, hyperbolic, divisive, bitter, and intemperate.  Moreover, it is gratuitous snark that's beneath what the Dish stands for: honest, sincere, and thoughtful reflection on the world. 

Also, I'm confused.  The answer to the former question is presumably no; the answer to the former, you seem to indicate elsewhere, is yes. 

It was a South Park reference.

As this single-serving site suggests, the two groups have more in common than the far right would want to admit.

And they say it's not a culture …

Humans lead the pack:

So why don’t monkeys and apes masturbate even nearly as much as humans? It’s a rarity even among low status male nonhuman primates that frustratingly lack sexual access to females–in fact, the few observed incidents seem to be with dominant males. And why haven’t more researchers noticed such an obvious difference with potentially enormous significance for understanding the evolution of human sexuality? After all, it’s been nearly 60 years since Alfred Kinsey first reported that 92 percent of Americans were involved in masturbation leading to orgasm.

The answer for this cross-species difference, I’m convinced, lies in our uniquely evolved mental representational abilities—we alone have the power to conjure up at will erotic, orgasm-inducing scenes in our theater-like heads … internal, salacious fantasies completely disconnected from our immediate external realities.

If Aquinas were working today, masturbation would not violate "natural law" for homo sapiens; it would exemplify it. I can't remember discovering any act quite so spontaneous and quite so wonderful as masturbation. If that impulse wasn't part of my nature, what was? In my teens, it was a marvel that God had given me such an amazing source of pleasure, fantasy and excitement. And portable!

I also remember, being the good Catholic boy that I was, pondering whether it was obviously evil to the reflective conscience. The question seemed – and seems – ludicrous, etching within me my first dissent from orthodoxy, on the basis of the doctrine being self-evidently stupid. (The second was trying to believe that the Virgin Mary was physically whisked upward into the upper atmosphere – and that under papal infallibility! Strike two.)

This much we know: every priest masturbates. Because they are human beings, and the sperm has to go somewhere.

Unrepentant.

With Petraeus now running the Afghan "surge", we are back to square one: an impossible and contradictory war that requires permanent occupation to work and twelve months to succeed. Ambers, reporting the view from the White House, says it was a question of three strikes and he was out. It wasn't the insubordination; it was the indiscipline:

If there is any pattern here, it is not one of insubordination but of an acute deafness to institutional politics, a condition exacerbated by McChrystal's insular inner circle, which was used to seeing their boss being treated with complete deference. HE was the guy who went from Colonel to a four star general in six years. He was the guy who revolutionized terrorist hunting. HE was the guy who was not tainted by two taintable offenses: ignoring abuse at Camp Nama and for knowingly participating in the cover-up of Pat Tillman's death. The Pope was invincible. The Pope felt invincible. As the Secret Service agent who's sitting next to me on the Acela would tell you, a lack of discipline is the vice that pays tribute to invincibility. 

In some ways, though, Petraeus is the natural choice if you are a counter-insurgency true-believer. I'm not.

A John Derbyshire classic:

"At some level, I’ll agree, this is not our business. North of five million people have been slaughtered in the Congo this past twelve years, and nobody much (no, not me—how about you?) has lost a wink of sleep over it … [But] the Congo is nothing to me. Israel is something to me. It’s an outpost of my civilization, organized on principles I agree with, inhabited by people I could live at ease with. They defend themselves, their borders, their interests, with the kind of vigor and thick-skinned determination I’d like to see my nation display. (If only!) I admire them and wish them well.

There’s an affinity. In some tenuous sense, they are me, and I am them. The Gazans? I’ll care about them right after I start caring about the Congo."

My italics. Derb is on record saying he would never live among many African-Americans. So his racism is consistent.

After the Palin fiasco, it's good to see journalists demanding answers:

And pointing out that a candidate won't grant interviews:

Keep it up, guys. Don't give in.

… silence.