Category: The Dish

McCain campaign advisor Lawrence Eagleburger unloads on the religious right:

On the Christian hard right, I live in Charlottesville now and I can’t tell you I’m surrounded by it," Eagleburger said. "I must tell you we fought it there, fought hard against it. There’s no question that in the Republican Party it is a serious problem…Among the hard-right conservatives in the Republican Party John McCain was, shall we say, less than enthusiastically received…What you see is what you get. You are not going to see him moving to assuage the concerns of these conservatives.

Paul Waldman discusses Code Pink’s absurd approach to ending the war:

…this week, which will see the fifth anniversary of the start of the war, Code Pink plans to "step up the pressure," as its leader Medea Benjamin said. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, "Code Pink has a full roster of activities planned for the week, including: yoga every morning at 8:30; organic potlucks every noon; nightly movies and popcorn; a bike ride around Berkeley on Tuesday; an open-mike musical jam on Wednesday; and a ‘send-off’ to the Marines on Friday, when protesters will bring suitcases and pink berets for traveling." How the Bush administration will be able to resist is anyone’s guess.

Any effective political movement has to engage its participants in a way that makes them feel their contributions are meaningful and redefines their sense of self. But if those contributions aren’t actually meaningful, if they amount to an extended series of circle jerks that accomplish nothing, then the movement will inevitably be confined to a small group of self-deluding members with a lot of time on their hands. There are tens of millions of Americans who want to end the war in Iraq. But how many of them see something like Code Pink protesting a Marine recruiting station and say to themselves, "I want to be a part of that"?

A summary of public opinion five years in.

A mash-up video conflating Obama with the most radical and inflammatory of black radicals and separatists is now being linked by Powerline and Hewitt. No big surprise who is behind it:

Rather the incendiary video — which also includes footage of Malcolm X, the U.S. Olympians who raised their hand in the black power salute and the song "Fight the Power" — is in part the amateur work of Lee Habeeb.

A co-founder and former producer of the Laura Ingraham Show, Habeeb is the director of strategic content at Salem Radio Network, the conservative talk radio powerhouse that airs programs hosted by figures such as Bill Bennett and Hugh Hewitt.

Marianne Williamson on why she won’t back Hillary Clinton.

The truth about Hillary Clinton’s remarkable lack of foreign policy experience. People are confusing familiarity with experience.

Me too. An American Journal of Psychiatry editorial says Internet addiction should be added to the official guidebook of mental disorders:

Like other addicts, users experience cravings, urges, withdrawal and tolerance, requiring more and better equipment and software, or more and more hours online, according to D. Jerald Block, a psychiatrist at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. Dr Block says people can lose all track of time or neglect "basic drives," like eating or sleeping. Relapse rates are high, he writes, and some people may need psychoactive medications or hospitalization.

Mind Hacks dissents:

Rather curiously, the editorial mentions the figure that 86% of people with ‘internet addiction’ have another mental illness. What this suggests is that heavy use of the internet is not the major problem that brings people into treatment.

In fact, ‘internet addiction’, however it is defined, is associated with depression and anxiety but no-one has ever found this to be a causal connection.

Recent research shows that shy or depressed people use the internet excessively to (surprise, surprise) meet people and manage their shyness.

And in fact, as I mentioned in an earlier article, one of the only longitudinal studies on the general population found that internet use is generally associated with positive effects on communication, social involvement, and well-being, although interestingly, those who were already introverts show increased withdrawal.

In other words, the internet is a communication tool and people use it manage their emotional states, like they do with any other technology.

Jeff VanderMeer pays respect:

Arthur C. Clarke’s fiction embodied a fundamental optimism about the future, tempered by a healthy skepticism about the human condition and an ongoing fascination with certain forms of spirituality. Unlikely to indulge in dystopic visions, but rarely sentimental or unrealistic, Clarke was, quite simply, curious about the world.

Ross disagrees with my saying that part of the right’s reaction to Obama’s speech was fueled by fear and opportunistic racism:

The conservative idea of a candidate who’s "transformational" on race is someone who sounds like Bill Cosby and works with Ward Connerly, and that just isn’t what Obama’s doing; hence the Right’s disappointment, which in many cases is curdling into dismissiveness and outright dislike. Instead, Obama’s trying to be a transformational figure on the following two counts: First, as John McWhorter suggests in his response to the speech, he’s trying to free African-American politics from the vice grip of grievance and resentment, breaking away not only from the Sharptons and Jacksons but from the NAACP line of Julian Bond and Kweise Mfume as well, and bringing black Americans out of racialism and radicalism and into the liberal mainstream; at the same time, he’s trying to bring the country, which has heretofore tilted right, into the center-left mainstream as well. (The latter achievement, obviously, depends on the former, which is why the Wright affair is potentially so damaging: It calls into question his promise as a new kind of a black politician, without which his hope to be a new kind of American politician more or less collapses.) […]

As everyone from Rod Dreher to Mickey Kaus to Steve Sailer have noted, [Obama’s] practical concessions to present-day conservatism are vanishingly small. But he isn’t trying to win over the gang at the Corner, or movement conservatives more generally; he’s trying to win over those voters (and writers) who sometimes think that conservatives make a lot of sense, but whose ideological commitments are ultimately malleable. So of course if you’re an ideological conservative you don’t like what you hear from him; he’s talking to everybody else, but not to you.

As does Larison:

Sullivan didn’t need readers to update him that Obama’s speech would be received poorly, would be viewed as condescension and would be ridiculed widely on the right.  This is not because of “fear and racism,” but on the contrary reveals the degree to which what George Will called the “exquisite” sensitivity we have all been conditioned to possess has completely consumed the modern conservative movement to the point where many mainstream conservatives are, if anything, more preciously p.c. than university speech code enforcers.  In an expression of “turnabout is fair play,” rather than denounce these anti-racism witch hunts in principle as ludicrous thought policing, many conservatives have decided that it is fine to play this game so long as a Democratic ox is being gored.

I don’t think I’ve ever believed or written that Obama’s approach to race is like Connerly’s or Steele’s. And I don’t think he’s an ideological conservative, even if he is at times a temperamental and pragmatic one. I think his approach is more effective, because it both integrates their points – he doesn’t hesistate to tell black audiences about responsibility and family and faith – while refusing to leave other parts of the black experience behind. It is a both-and strategy. And that’s what actually makes it new. I admire Connerly and Steele and Rice and even Thomas after a fashion. But they have obviously not brought black America along with them – or much of white America either. And all of them have failed to be elected nationally or even locally.

Obama is therefore a more integrative candidate, a broader bridge. Whether this turns out to be mush or whether it is something real is unknowable right now. But I don’t believe a black candidate who is not merely a token has any other choice. And I haven’t come across a black politician who has managed to do this with quite this level of thoughtfulness, talent and integrity.

(Photo: Tim Sloan/Getty.)