Author: Andrew Sullivan

My ferociously anti-Tory friend, Johann Hari, lobs another rhetorical grenade at the Etonian facade of the New Tories. Johann thinks Thatcherism is about to make a come-back:

The council here told people that if they took away services like this, there would be volunteers; if the state withered away, people would start to provide the services for each other. But nobody opened their home to Jane, or volunteered to feed Debbie, or started a new youth club on their own time and with their own money. The state retreated and the service collapsed. It's a rebranding trick. The Conservatives know that shutting down public services sounds cruel, while calling for volunteerism sounds kind – but the effect is exactly the same. It's as if Marie Antoinette called in Max Clifford, and he told her to stop saying "Let them eat cake" and start saying: "Let them form a workers' co-operative to distribute cake on a voluntary basis."

Meanwhile, Britain's debt piles higher – because 13 years of Labour's reckless spending has neither solved the country's social problems nor stabilized the country's economy.

You know things are bad when even sports in America gets politicized – in a good way, of course.

A euphemism is born.

Grover has a conniption:

"This remark is the equivalent of using the 'n' word. It shows contempt for middle America, expressed knowingly, contemptuously, on purpose, and with a smirk. It is indefensible to use this word. The president knows what it means, and his people know what it means. The public thought we reached a new low of incivility during the Clinton administration. Well, the Obama administration has just outdone them," ATR president Grover Norquist tells Inside the Beltway.

Over to you, TNC! I think the long, awful history of white guys getting lynched for dipping their pendulous scrota in places where they are consensually welcome needs … reparations, anyone?

Newsweek is for sale.

The bearded nomad strains to stay within his contractual obligation (TOTALLY NSFW subtitles – so if you're squeamish about silent naughty words on your work monitor do NOT click play). But this is fucking sweet:

This is what now consists of sanity on the right:

"He is a citizen of the United States, so I say we uphold the laws and the Constitution on citizens. If you are a citizen, you obey the law and follow the Constitution. [Shahzad] has all the rights under the Constitution. We don't shred the Constitution when it is popular. We do the right thing," – Glenn Beck, on "Fox and Friends."

The appalling behavior of John McCain and Joe Lieberman this past week underlines what a bullet this country missed by electing Barack Obama president. This, remember, was McCain's original dream-ticket – before a forty hour Google search unleashed brain-dead boobage across the land. Look at their instincts: find a citizen terror suspect and tear up the constitution to … do what exactly? McCain won't say. Or: strip the guy of citizenship immediately and then get to work on him.

Megan has a simple question:

Can someone explain to me–hopefully using graphs, and small words–why Joe Lieberman is willing to share the precious blessing of American citizenship with Charles Manson, Gary Ridgeway, and David Berkowitz, but wants citizenship stripped from a guy who strapped some firecrackers to a bag of non-explosive fertilizer?

Now recall that McCain and Lieberman were celebrated in Washington for their alleged maturity, wisdom, and elder statesmen experience. They are in fact adolescent hysterics, whose terrorized Manichean view of the world sees nothing but an existential struggle and the imperative to win it. We would have been electing Cheney to a third term. And we barely knew it.

Slate inquires with video. Sigh. I'm not that old but I can remember a time when there was nothing but suspicious activity in Times Square. And that's why it was such a glorious, hideous, amazing place – and not the Disney shopping mall it is today.

I am told that Colbert is going to give me a whole lot of shit for my late-tsar (Just For Men enhanced) beard this Thursday night. So take this as a preliminary shot across the bow.

a bear film from kris anka on Vimeo.

Hard to beat Goldblog's assessment:

There are more than five million Muslims in America; a tiny handful of them have committed, or have tried to commit, terror attacks in recent years. Many more Muslims serve faithfully in the United States military than serve jihadist ideology. Still, ignoring the infiltration by jihadist ideologues of certain marginal circles in Muslim America serves no purpose, either, except to advance the argument that the Tea Party is worse than al Qaeda, which, I fear, is what some on the left actually believe. Blaming Islam, or the mass of law-abiding American Muslims, for the acts of men like Faisal Shahzad will only lead to segregation, prejudice, and radicalization; ignoring the problem entirely will lead to more terror attacks.

I am relieved by the incompetence of the attempt and the flawed but still successful work of law enforcement to get him. The potential for real intelligence is also enormous – since the bomb did not go off and the suspect is captured and is not being tortured. 

For me, the case offers several mysteries: why haven't there been far more of these attempts these past few years? How half-assed are these Taliban training camps? Does this act suggest that the aggressive war in Pakistan and Afghanistan might actually increase terrorism at home and in the region – or does it imply we should keep up the military pressure in Afghanistan?

I suspect at this point that so many of these things are inter-locking and figuring out what caused what is close to pointless. This is what war does. In the end, it sustains itself.