Category: The Dish

Scottsdale, Arizona, 8.15 am.

A classic from Spencer Ackerman. "Twinkletoes" is especially fifth grade.

Bill Clinton disinters the Tuzla story. And gets it wrong.

It could be worse.

A reader writes:

I think of Eternity in terms of one day at a time. Would I rather not die today?  Yes, I think I would rather not.  Carry that into the future, and you’ve got Eternity.

There’s no point in trying to comprehend what Eternity would be like, because we couldn’t comprehend it even if we were living it. The human brain has only so many cells in which to store so many memories. Long before a thousand years pass by, and assuming we had the technology to do so, you’d have to perform a ‘spring cleaning’ on your brain and decide which memories to keep and which to discard so that you could have room to store new memories.

In effect, thanks to the memory storage limitation of the human brain, we are immune to Eternity. Therein, of course, lies good and evil.

If we had the technology to reverse the aging process, the big deal wouldn’t be about the existential crisis of facing Eternity, it would be about the sociological crisis of one generation never making way for the next. Imagine New Kids on the Block plotting a comeback every decade for the next thousand years, and you’ll see what I mean.

Shudder accomplished.

Unthinking hostility to gay people is far more entrenched among Republicans than Democrats, alas. But prejudice and fear are human things – and liberals aren’t immune. Some deploy homophobia when it suits them. Take Joe Wilson on the right-wing attacks against him:

"He’s had three wives, he’s a womanizer, he’s done drugs. But then they realized they couldn’t use those because I’ve never actually denied them. I mean, I’m the first to admit that, unlike Ken Mehlman and David Dreier, I really like women."

Jamie Kirchick explores this territory here. The truth is: there are tolerant Republicans who nonetheless acquiesce in their party’s institutional hostility to gay people, and intolerant Democrats who never get called on their shit.

How to become an empire without ever fully realizing it. (Hat tip: Matt.)

A blog dedicated to photoshop mishaps. South Park already did this to Britney.

Ezra on all the presidential candidates entertaining the idea of an Olympic boycott:

…this Olympics idea is the worst of both worlds. It’s a high profile snub that will piss off the Chinese without actually exerting any real pressure on them. Why bother?

Amen.

From the newly released May issue, Jonathan Rauch’s take on McCain and conservatism:

…some of what [McCain’s] detractors view as inconsistencies display a distinctly Burkean logic. McCain opposes gay marriage but also voted against a federal constitutional amendment to ban it. Inconsistent? Not if you think that marriage is best handled by the states, which have handled it since Colonial times, or that there is nothing conservative about preemptively amending the Constitution to end-run the Supreme Court, a stratagem future liberals could have all kinds of fun with.

McCain voted against Bush’s big tax cuts, but now says he supports extending them rather than risking damage to the economy. Flip-flop?

Not if you believe, as Burkeans often do, that sudden and large policy changes deserve skepticism, but that when a policy becomes well established and woven into everyday life, as the tax cuts have, continuity should get the benefit of the doubt.

In the face of resistance from Bush and his own party, McCain fought heroically for a law restraining harsh treatment of terror-war detainees, yet more recently he voted against legislation imposing on the Central Intelligence Agency the same stringent ban on coercive interrogation that the U.S. Army observes. Hypocrisy? Not if you believe that brutal interrogation methods should be illegal, but that holding the CIA to the military’s white-glove constraints, even in emergencies, goes too far the other way.