Author: Andrew Sullivan

Jane Mayer effectively dismantles the massive lacunae of fact and logic in Marc Thiessen's book defending torture as the only thing that prevented a Qaeda homeland terror attack since 2001. Of course, there had been no such mainstream Qaeda attack from 1993 to 2001 either, with no recourse to torture and with intelligence enough to warn president Bush directly and bluntly that an attack was imminent:

In February, 2001, the C.I.A.’s director, George Tenet, called Al Qaeda “the most immediate and serious threat” to the country. Richard Clarke, then the country’s counterterrorism chief, tried without success to get Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national- security adviser, to hold a Cabinet-level meeting on Al Qaeda. Thomas Pickard, then the F.B.I.’s acting director, has testified that Attorney General John Ashcroft told him that he wanted to hear no more about Al Qaeda. On August 6, 2001, Bush did nothing in response to a briefing entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” As Tenet later put it, “The system was blinking red.”

Horton's comments here. Thiessen makes the usual – totally untrue – statements: that the methods seen at Abu Ghraib had nothing to do with the actions authorized by Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld (the Senate Committee begs to differ; that only one victim was subject to "inhumane" treatment – a fact denied by both the Red Cross, by countless witnesses, by photographs that were somehow not destroyed by the government, and by Bush's own prosecutor at Gitmo. The 2004 CIA report on the torture program described it as a failure, not a success; that's why it was largely ended in the last years of Bush. So was Bush endangering the nation as well?

Read the whole thing. Thiessen's book sounds like rationalization of the irrational, like the work of a criminal unable to confess or even recognize his crime, of a political hack who cannot endure a self-image as someone who really did betray the core values of his own country and the entire West – out of fear, panic, and ignorance. Well, he may need his own alternate reality to sleep at night.

But this subject is too serious not to see in the light of reality.

Jonathan Bernstein notes one of Obama's strongest qualities: his patience.

But he won. And the process indelibly branded Republicans as extremist, vulgar, shrill, nihilist, and in some well-known FNC cases, quite perfectly barmy. Frum surveys the wreckage.

Well, he lost a war, an election and now a huge-stakes legislative victory which he had promised to stop. But what I suspect really got to him was the empirically correct claim that Rove does nothing on principle and everything on politics. By ripping that mask off in public, by refusing to take Rove seriously as anything but a cynical, political propagandist, Plouffe finally found the confidence to hit him where it hurt. More, please:

After countless of institutionally-aided and -protected child-rape, the Pope sees no reason to hold anyone in a cassock, you know, accountable or responsible. Lisa Miller sounds baffled by the pope's letter to Irish Catholics. She shouldn't have been. This is like Bush conceding error. The enormity of the error is so great, confessing it would compel the man to step down.

[T]hough the Pope did concede that the church has demonstrated “a misplaced concern for the reputation of the church and the avoidance of scandal” and said he “openly expressed the shame and remorse that we all feel,” he also continued to blame the scandal on others. No one—not bishops, priests, nuns, parents, even the faithful—themselves, escape having to bear the responsibility of this terrible burden. “I urge you,” he wrote to Catholic parents, “to play your part in ensuring the best possible care of children.” Not all parents are above reproach, of course, but this seems to me to be entirely missing the point.

One is reminded of this classic from The Onion. But Dreher gives the pope more credit:

There are plenty of very strong words in it, and a level of detail and directness that is incomparably better than the vague euphemisms Benedict's predecessor used to talk about the scandal, when he bothered to talk about it at all. Remember too that on more than a few occasions, Benedict has met with victims of pederast priests; John Paul II, for all his personal sanctity, never did. I do wish Benedict would go further, and hold select bishops more directly to account for their sins and failings, including aiding and abetting serious crimes.

John Allen addresses the bishop question:

While Benedict's letter to Ireland is striking in both tone and substance, critics will likely also point to what it does not contain. For example, there is no call for bishops who reassigned abuser-priests to resign. Although the pope calls bishops to renew their "accountability before God," he offers no new mechanisms or policies to enforce that accountability.

Seth Masket:

[W]hile I don't think tonight will have an extraordinary effect on elections in the near or distant future, I do think this will have a profound impact on public policy.  Even if this bill seems watered-down to you, realize that from this point forward, the federal government is responsible for making sure people have health insurance.  The question is no longer whether government should do it; it's whether it's doing it well enough.  I heard somewhere that the two major votes tonight were symbolic ordered that way — first they passed health reform, then they passed reconciliation to improve it.

The length of Obama's coattails.

It's the way he did it that matters:

This is what we’ve learned this year: Obama does not mind defeats if they are procedural or about others saving face. He’s happy to admit error; to give his opponents a chance to lunge at his jugular; to let opponents enjoy a day in the sun; to shave off any small stuff as long as the big stuff remains. He seems oddly impervious to personal insult: he doesn’t mind being affronted by the Chinese or humiliated by Netanyahu as long as it’s a matter of symbolism. On substance, he wants what he wants; and, on the big stuff, he has given up on nothing yet.

A reader writes:

I ran Bart Stupak's first re-election campaign in 1994, though I have only seen him once or twice since as my path led me out of politics and into corporate law. He's a protege of Rep. John Dingell, who has championed health care reform for half a century, a supporter of the labor movement, and a compassionate man.  He's both a good Democrat and a good Catholic.  He's a former state trooper and small town lawyer with a firm set of principles by which he lives his life. I suspect he's become more religious as age and life's tragedies have battered him and his family, but he could not be blind to the struggles of his friends and constituents in his rural, relatively poor Northern Michigan district.

There's nothing surprising about Bart's coming around to vote "yes."  He's a shrewd man — a lawyer — and I suspect the Executive Order solution was in the works for weeks, if not months.  And the timing was, quite simply, exquisite.

Bart's objections were maddening, but principled.  He conducted himself with dignity and firmness, never with vitriol.  His solution is imperfect, but reasonable.  I disagree with him on many issues, including abortion (how a liberal gay man found himself in Menominee, Michigan working for a pro-life, pro-gun candidate is a long story…), but Bart is, at heart, a decent man.  I was proud of him today.

And. The. Damn. Bill. Is. Passed.

Another writes:

A lot of people wanted Obama to "throw Stupak under the bus," but he didn't.  Obama won over Stupak.  He's a fucking genius.

Another:

Other than the sheer weight of this historic health-care moment, something even more significant may have transpired.  The Democratic party now is no longer the pro-abortion/pro-choice party, but the pro-life party as well.  Stupak will share the hero of the decade title with Obama for a while, and he's going to push into the public sphere the notion that pro-life matters for Democrats.

(Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) announces that he and other anti-abortion Democrats struck a deal with the White House and that President Barack Obama will sign an executive order guaranteeing no federal funding for abortion during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol March 21, 2010 in Washington, DC. Stupak said that with the support of the anti-abortion Democrats the health care reform legislation will pass the House of Representatives today. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)