Author: Andrew Sullivan

Greenwald asks why "do Americans, seemingly regardless of party affiliation or geographic location, despise the political establishment?" Jonathan Bernstein answers:

The key to public opinion, especially when it's about abstractions divorced from practical day-to-day life, is that it follows opinion leaders. And all opinion leaders in America are against the establishment. In fact, no opinion leaders in America will admit to being part of the establishment! Virtually every president in my memory, from Nixon on with the possible exception of George H. W. Bush, not only ran against Washington to get elected but continued to campaign against Washington from the White House. Look at Obama — he's not the establishment! He's not even the establishment of the Democratic Party; that's the message of keeping his grass-roots insurgent organization, OFA, running. Over on the Republican side, surely no one — not Rush Limbaugh, not Glenn Beck or anyone at Fox News, and certainly not the Republican Party's most recent nominee for vice president — would admit to being part of the dreaded establishment.

Or, in Julian Sanchez's words:

Apparently being part of "the establishment" is like being a hipster: even the paradigm cases have to deny it.

A reader writes:

As I read this to my husband his first reaction was "BULLSHIT!"  Yes, I was the one who was pregnant, and I gained weight, and I gave up alcohol, and I went through labor … so what? What WE got in return was true joy. My husband actually caught my daughters as they were being delivered so he saw them and held them before I did. He cut their cords, which disconnected the physical relationship I had with OUR babies. He changed their first diapers. I don't think I changed a diaper until we got home from the hospital. Since I was unable to breastfeed (a rare inability to produce breast milk), he was the first to feed OUR girls. He gave them their first baths and continued to do so until it was no long appropriate. Just because OUR girls spent 41 weeks in my womb did not make either me or my husband further ahead in the parenting process. Making these babies was a two person process and so is raising them.

Another writes:

I did not feel I was in some way behind in building my relationship with our newborn or that my wife had somehow been carrying the early parenthood load more than I. I was not pregnant, so I did not share those physical-biological experiences.  But my role in her life in those months was not de minimus.  Similarly, my role in her serious illness before (and not related to) her pregnancy, and my role in a subsequent miscarriage.  In all three cases, the core experience was hers since is was in her body.  But in each case I contributed meaningfully to our team approach to dealing with the situation we faced, and looking back, I felt (and feel) no need to "atone" or "catch up."

A Giraffe eats a branch of leaves given by a visitor at the National Zoo in Kuala Lumpur on May 23, 2010. The 47 year-old National Zoo, locally known as Zoo Negara, consists of around 5000 animals from 459 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish, covering 110 acres of land. By Saeed Khan/AFP/Getty Images.

Matt Steinglass unloads:

The spill has so far cost BP $760m dollars. The company's stock has fallen by a quarter. That was inevitable. What was not inevitable is the damage the company has done to its own reputation by continuing to lowball its estimates of the magnitude of the spill.

A reader writes:

Your reader indulges in the timeless rhetorical strategy of saying "plainly false" to mean "I no longer believe this."  The earliest Christian writing are not the Gospels but the letters of Paul, and his assertions of Christ's divinity are as clear as anything you could ever want.  The letter to the Phillipians (c 62 AD), almost a decade before the earliest gospel, has Jesus in the "form" or "nature" of God and emptied himself to be born in human likeness.  And even leaving aside the gospel of John, it's hard to deny that Luke-Acts makes clear statements about Christs's divinity. And the famously excluded Gospel of Thomas has an even less human Jesus.

Fitting together the simultaneous claims of divinity and humanity is the central paradoxical (not contradictory) claim of Christianity, and occupied much of Christian theology for its first four centuries. There were many many ways that Christians tried this, from the Docetic "Jesus only pretended to be human but never really suffered" all the way down to the more Jeffersonian "Jesus was a pretty cool ethics teacher." And many of those options are in Scripture itself, which indeed quite happily shows a number of different perspectives. They — unlike contemporary fundamentalists (and their opposite numbers, the academic biblical deconstructionists) — were quite aware that you could not reduce such complexities to the ideological clarity of "plainly true" or "plainly false".

Xiamen, China, 4.52 pm

Bartlett asks when neoconservatives will wake up and recognize the debt is a national defense issue:

Republicans primarily concerned about national security ought to be in the forefront of efforts to raise revenues to reduce deficits, free up domestic saving for domestic investment, and reduce the importation of foreign saving and the trade deficit. But so far they are not. They remain loyal to the Republican obsession with tax cuts and a refusal to raise taxes in any way for any reason. However, I think my national security-minded friends are soon going to discover that massive defense budget cuts will necessarily be a big part of the price that will be paid for not raising revenues.

A reader writes:

While I think that Rand Paul was smart to take a step back from the national microphones and skip this week's "Meet the Press," I think his decision highlights a larger problem: politicians on the right will not venture beyond the safe confines of Fox News.  MSNBC's Joe Scarborough rhetorically asked this question on his show on Friday: "What the hell was Rand Paul doing on MSNBC?"  That says it all.  As you have chronicled much on your blog about the separation between red and blue states, this is just another nail in the coffin of debate in this country.  When the right and left of this country will not share the same TV shows to discuss or debate the issues facing our country, we all lose.

A journey through the Internet's imagination.