Author: Andrew Sullivan

“With My Daddy In The Attic”

Weird, isn’t it, that song-writer Dory Previn would write a song with that title:

In 1968, Farrow had an affair with the conductor and composer Andre Previn. Previn’s wife, the songwriter Dory Previn, discovered the affair when Farrow became pregnant with Andre Previn’s child. Dory divorced Andre, and shortly afterwards Farrow married him. At this time Dory Previn released an album of songs that included “With My Daddy in The Attic,” which appears to be an incest fantasy about a girl and her father having trysts in an attic.

And then there are the lyrics. A reader adds:

Yes, Dylan Farrow’s anguish and pain can be reconciled that the evidence at the time showed that she was being coached and that there was no physical evidence of abuse with her current anguish.  It is simply that children – and adults – can be led to create memories that are not true.  Here is a listing of the daycare hysterias that have swept the country. Here is an academic paper on the issue on the case of Kelly Michaels.

In almost all of those cases, the child was led into making false accusations and what happened is that those accusations became their memory. They still suffer as victims of child abuse, but their stories have long-since been discredited.  They did suffer child abuse, but it was not at the hands of the accused, but at the hands of the accusers.  Yes, I do think that Mia Farrow is the abuser in this case, not Allen.  Her daughter was the victim of her venom.

This version reconciles all known facts.  Yes, a tragedy, but one made worse now by your – and many other – careless accusations against Mr. Allen.

I am a feminist who worked in the anti-rape movement in my 20s and used to think that one should “believe the women” and “believe the children” as a matter of course.  The subsequent history of false accusations starting with the daycare panic, and extending into the adults accusing parents of child abuse through therapist suggestions. You simply don’t seem to be aware of this possibility, which suggests a hole in your education, and without bringing it up as a possibility, you are being irresponsible to Mr. Allen.

I am very much aware of that possibility. The tragedy in this case is that we have to choose between child abuse by one parent and child abuse by the other. The only thing we can really know is that Dylan Farrow is in extreme pain, and that she deserves our respect and tenderness for that reason alone.

Clinton Fatigue?

Drum is worried about it. I’m already exhausted. Masket is unconcerned:

Is there any evidence that voters “get tired” of politicians? I don’t want to get into the whole literature on what governs presidential elections, but the simple answer is no. Candidates tend to Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting In New Yorkdo better if the economy is growing while their party holds the White House (or if the economy is drowning while the other party holds it). Prolonged wars can hurt their party, as can perceived ideological extremism. But overexposure?

The big case here would be Ronald Reagan, who did his first film in 1937, 43 years before getting elected president. (Okay, maybe he wasn’t “in the public eye” until “Knute Rockne All American” in 1940, but still.) But Drum discounts Reagan’s film career, so maybe we shouldn’t start the clock until Reagan begins doing his conservative speeches for General Electric in the late 1950s. That’s still over two decades before becoming president. His record warning about the dangers of Medicare was recorded in 1961. And keep in mind that in 1984, after being in the public eye for nearly half a century, Reagan won one of the biggest Electoral College landslides in history.

But before he got the nomination, he’d never been the Establishment front-runner with a 50 point lead over his nearest rival. The problem for Clinton is that a) she’s not a very compelling public speaker or shrewd campaigner (she was handed the New York Senate seat on a nepotistic platter and got creamed by an upstart in 2008); b) she has close to no record of substantive achievements at any point, as First Lady, Senator and secretary of state; and more critically c) she is perched on an impossibly high pedestal which all but cries out for someone to knock her off it – either in the primaries or the general.

I think she may be the weakest and the strongest candidate for 2016. I don’t think that’s a great combination for a campaign.

(Photo by Getty)

Chart Of The Day

iraq casualties

Anup Kaphle checks in on Iraq:

You can see that violence has spiked considerably since the war’s formal end and the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops.

Last month, 992 people were killed in Iraq, according to numbers recorded by AFP, as the country struggles to contain deadly attacks by Sunni militants. Iraqi ministries of health and defense put the death toll even higher, saying that at least 1,013 people were killed in January, including 795 civilians, 122 soldiers and 96 policemen.

That makes January the deadliest month for Iraq since April 2008, when nearly 1,100 people were killed as the country was still rising from the ashes of a brutal sectarian war.

Can Immigration Destroy The GOP?

Ann Coulter fears so:

For at least a century, there’s never been a period when a majority of immigrants weren’t Democrats. At the current accelerated rate of immigration — 1.1 million new immigrants every year — Republicans will be a fringe party in about a decade.

Michael Brendan Dougherty disputes this logic:

Although Coulter is right that immigrants have gravitated to the Democrats, the descendants of the 19th century great wave voted overwhelmingly for Nixon and Reagan. Many of them have come to view themselves as true conservatives, even if a century earlier America’s true conservatives wanted to ship their great grandparents back to Europe. … The relationship between the composition of the American people and the ideals adopted by the parties that seek to represent portions of them is complex. We cannot predict how the addition of new immigrants will pressure and cleave the Democratic coalition. But, in general, our two political parties have accumulated so much inherited power, including the power to change, that it is difficult to imagine either of them ever being mortally wounded.

When Mental Health Care Is A Luxury

Lauren Kirchner explains that, even when services like counseling or medication are available, former inmates with mental health issues often do not seek them out. When researcher Amy Wilson asked inmates leaving jail about what they would need, 70 percent said “housing,” 59 percent said “money,” and only 23 percent said “mental health treatment”:

Getting on (or getting back on) public assistance was often vital in a successful re-entry, Wilson says. Public assistance registration is a long and onerous process, for anyone: it can include long waits in crowded offices, criminal checks, substance abuse evaluations, and medical appointments. For people suffering from serious mental illness, who have just gotten out of jail, perhaps having lost any forms of government identification that they may have had, this is especially daunting.

So people with mental illness don’t just need help with treatment for their conditions, Wilson found. They need much more practical help, first, in handling the basics. Wilson suggests, for instance, offering temporary cash and food-coupon assistance, right on the day of release, to fill what she calls the “resource gap” between jail and public assistance.

Hop On The Bus, Gus

Bus Travel

Eric Holthaus, who has vowed never to fly again so as to reduce his carbon footprint, took a bus from Wisconsin to Georgia in order to attend a conference. Why he thinks buses are the way to go:

From both a climate and financial standpoint, there’s a clear case to take the bus. From a butt-numbness standard, the bus isn’t quite there yet in the United States. However, the rise of limited-stop intercity operators like Megabus is helping the United States to quickly catch up to the rest of the world in terms of frequency and comfort on long-haul bus rides. In Chile, a spread-out country that has embraced long-distance buses, you can easily and cheaply snag a first-class quality experience with meals, Internet, live TV, and a lay-flat bed in every seat.

Buses are the most climate-friendly mode of transportation per passenger mile next to walking or riding a bike. This makes sense: There’s no need to accelerate hundreds of tons of aluminum to nearly the speed of sound, or to push thousands of tons of steel along 19th-century rail routes. Even a Prius is dragging along lots of extra weight just to move you down the road, especially if you’re solo, as most car trips are.