Author: Andrew Sullivan

 

For some reason, I've been much less suicidal this holiday season than usual. But I know that it's a painful time for many. A season when one is supposed to be happy can make sadness all the more acute. And, of course, there are some brutal memories that sometimes come to the fore at this time of year. PZ Myers writes a rather beautiful post here, illustrated by the brilliant cartoonist Mark Tatulli (above), of how the sudden death of his father on December 26, 1993 still haunts him at this time:

One of the lies we always tell ourselves is that the pain will go away with time, that we'll get over it, that time heals all wounds, and it's not true.

Every loss is forever raw, and we can feel it all again with just a thought or a reminder, like a Christmas phone call to the family. The older you get, the more of these moments of grief you accumulate, and they never leave you.

My father was cremated, and there is no location I can batten upon as a focus, no place for flowers. And strangely enough, florist shops always remind me of my father, too; he took me to a little shop when I was a teenager, and helped me pick out flowers for my first date with the lovely young lady who would several years later be my wife…and it was this same florist shop I went to almost 20 years later to pick out flowers for his funeral. So I'm reduced to this, honoring a memory with an evanescent scattering of electrons on a medium my father never knew anything about. But hey, it's no more transient than petals on a grave, now is it?

Hang in, PZ. And everyone else who's hurting right now.

I keep seeing Rasmussen polls cited in the usual Republican outlets. Maybe their selection bias really does represent the people likely to show up in next November’s mid-terms better than other polls. But the discrepancy between their findings and everyone else’s seems to be widening, as the GOP keeps up its campaign to bring down this presidency. Here’s Rasmussen’s Obama approval chart in the last half of 2009:

Now, here’s the same graph, as reported by all the other polling outfits included in Pollster’s poll of polls:

See what I mean?

A reader writes:

I am a family law attorney in NH. I find Bristol's statement about Palin's involvement in the case implausible. For starters, in about 100% of the cases involving custody of a child born to teen parents, the maternal grandparents are heavily involved. The teen mom about always lives at home, is very dependent on her parents for child care, and overall assistance with everything to do with the baby. And not the least, but reviewing the pleadings filed to date, serious money has already been shelled out-in the thousands I am certain. You can be sure that Sarah and Todd wrote those hefty retainer checks, not Bristol..

She seems to be using every weapon to hand to intimidate Levi. But why?

One failed bomb attempt on a plane and one of Cheney's flunkies is already banging the drums to bring back torture. He uses Orwellian language, of course, the kind we became used to under Cheney's criminal regime:

Instead of looking for ways to release these dangerous men, we should be capturing and interrogating more of them for information on planned attacks. But that is something the U.S. no longer does. President Obama has shut down the CIA interrogation program that helped stop a series of planned attacks — and in the year since he took office, not one high-value terrorist has been interrogated by the CIA.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has escalated the targeted killing of high-value terrorists. There may be times when killing a terrorist leader is the best option (for example, his location might be too remote to reach with anything but an unmanned drone). But President Obama has decided capturing senior terrorist leaders alive and interrogating them — with enhanced techniques if necessary —is not worth the trouble.

My italics.

What Thiessen is really saying is not that the US isn't interrogating captured terror suspects – we're told, for example, that our trust-fund fundamentalist from Nigeria is chatting away merrily to interrogators. What he is really saying is that we are not hooding them, freezing them to near death, waterboarding them, hanging them from shackles to create excruciating pain, exploiting phobias, stripping them of clothes, beating them and hounding them with dogs. This is what Thiessen and his comrades yearn to get back to: the tools of torturers. One overwhelming reason to hope that Obama manages to keep terror attacks at bay – by luck or design – is that the neo-fascist wing of the GOP is chomping at the bit to get their hands on the machinery of cruelty once again.

Here’s a graphic video of a peaceful march in Tehran on December 27. Notice how restrained and calm the crowd is. Then watch to the end, as the regime’s thugs attack:

Is John Yoo saying he never met the former president? Money quote:

Were you close to George Bush? 

No, I’ve never met him. I don’t know Cheney either. I have not gone hunting with him, which is probably a good thing for me.

Weren’t you invited to the White House Christmas party during your two years at the Department of Justice?

I don’t think so.

But here's the kicker:

A psychiatrist might say you are in denial. 

I deny that I am in denial.

When is the OPR report going to be released, Mr Holder? When?

They have made the iPhone a joke if you actually want to make a call:

Let’s try to do this reasonably and with particularity: Every call I made yesterday on my iPhone dropped. A number of them were to my 84-year-old mother who has a hard time understanding why telephones no longer work. I have a hard time understanding this, too.

Is it mere success, as AT&T seems to suggest?

The iPhone is just too popular, straining its network. The fault, in other words, lies with consumer demand and great design, and not with AT&T and its resources and infrastructure. But how come for the last two years I go dead in the East Thirties, on 57th Street and Sixth, on 72nd and Madison, on Bleeker and Lafayette, on the Williamsburg Bridge, and about a hundred other specific locations I’m too irate to remember now?

Overload would be random (of course, iPhone calls drop randomly, too), but a plainly crummy system is one that can’t cover some of the most well-trafficked thoroughfares and intersections in the world.

As Netanyahu engages in yet another "go fuck-yourself" to the president of the United States, and continues his ethnic social engineering in East Jerusalem, an op-ed in Ha'aretz gives an insight into the forces he is coping with at home. Americans can be a little naive when it comes to many Israelis' view of the West Bank and the religious and tribal fundamentalism that courses through their discourse. But this op-ed in the liberal Ha'aretz highlights the kind of looking glass world many extreme Israelis and their Washington allies inhabit:

Once upon a time there was a black woman; her name was Rosa Parks. There were racially discriminating laws in the United States, but she continued to sit on the bus even when she was told to vacate her seat for a white person. She was arrested, which set off a process whose end saw the abolishment of racial segregation on American buses. How is it possible that one little black woman, a dressmaker by profession, could change history simply because she remained sitting? Her protest was stronger than any demonstration, op-ed piece or Knesset vote. She opted for the natural choice; that is why she was triumphant.

People get married and have children. The children need space. The children grow up and get married. The children need a house. That is known as life. No one has ever managed to stop it. But every time another evil person arises who plans to destroy us, he does not succeed. And he does not succeed in destroying life itself. 

Yes, the settler is analogizing the seizure of other people's land, slow expulsion of much of the population, erection of massive walls to contain and police them … as the equivalent of the fight against Jim Crow. But she's not done yet:

The freeze is an edict that the public cannot tolerate.

It is not democratic, nor is it humane. It hits hard at the pockets of law-abiding citizens and embitters their lives. But at its foundation, either intentionally or by accident, is pure and basic apartheid – it is forbidden for Jews to live in certain places. It is forbidden to build. It is forbidden to develop. And it doesn't matter what the reasons are…

Despite the fury and the insult, let's not turn to violence. There is a simple, natural solution that is full of life – continuing to build. That will perhaps embarrass the prime minister in front of U.S. President Barack Obama, but that's precisely the point. A person with a manual cement mixer in Samaria can change history. Sometimes the man in the field can be a lot stronger than the great leaders. Just like Rosa Parks. 

What I notice in this op-ed is no reference at all to the Palestinians and their claims and their rights. To these settlers, Arabs are non-persons; they do not exist in their narrative so they are utterly invisible. There is no one to compromise with – just land promised by divine diktat, against which there is no appeal. Any Israeli government beholden to these people will be incapable of making peace on its own. Increasingly, it seems to me, NATO or US troops will have to intervene on the border to enforce a separation and an end to these settlements for good and all.

(Photo: Right wing Israelis demonstrate in the city centre on December 9, 2009 in Jerusalem, Israel. The protests were held in response to last month's decision by the Israeli government to halt construction of new houses in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. A 10 month moratorium on new building permits for Jewish settlers was welcomed internationally but has been rejected by both Palestinians and Jewish settlers. By Uriel Sinai/Getty Images.)

… gets a divorce. To be fair, his long-running coordinated attempt to deny others the right to any civil marriage at all was only a means to an end – using fear to win elections. It wasn't about marriage as such, or gays as such. Rove isn't a homophobe in private by all accounts; he just knows how to exploit the fears of those who are.

[Update: Greenwald, forced into exile because his own partner cannot reside in the US, takes a tougher line on Rove's marriage cynicism here.]