Patrick Ruffini has a bash. Money quote:
Because Romney’s strength is pretty much all out there right now, the risk of failure is greater. If there is any team in politics that can pull it off, Romney’s can. But the risk is enormous. If he loses New Hampshire, it’s over.
The closeness of the race leaves no margin for error for any of the candidates, and that includes Giuliani and Thompson. The only difference is that Romney starts out with insanely high expectations in these early contests.
A reader writes:
I’ve enjoyed the "View From Your Window" photos since you started posting them. I feel yesterday’s pic from Mainz is the best so far: the straight street in shadows, devoid of people or cars; the perfect row of DPW barriers; the light coming from windows somewhere on the left reflecting on the street and the long building on the right–Edward Hopper would have had a field day painting this scene.
I say this as an art novice/ignoramus who happened to catch the Hopper exhibit at the MFA the last day it was in Boston. Having never been to an honest-to-God exhibition before, I was overwhelmed. It’s truly a once-in-a-lifetime event to stand a few feet or even inches from a comprehensive collection of a master’s life work. Now when I look through a window down the street I take a moment to ask myself, "what would this look like if Hopper painted it?" The shot from Mainz triggered just such a reaction in me, to the point where I spent five minutes staring at it. (A great way to take a break, by the way.)
You can spend many more minutes virtually traveling the globe through the windows of Dish-readers across the planet here.
The NYT reverses one of the dumbest moves in the history of online journalism. This is not the benefit of hindsight. It was obvious at the time that this kind of gambit would never work for online opinion, and anyone with a pulse and a modem could see that, including many of the columnists themselves. In some ways, it was less a business decision, it seems to me, than a sheer assertion, by slightly desperate men, that somehow Times opiners merited a fee in a way no one else did – least of all those – shudder – bloggers. Two years ago, they could still assert that with a straight face, even if the rest of us were snickering. No longer. The NYT has some great columnists and some unreadable ones. But they are not a class apart. They are merely part of a much larger and better conversation than any Sulzberger could ever own. Welcome to the blogosphere, guys. It’s free.
(Photo: MoDo by Amy Sussman/Getty.)
The contest is in full swing. Check out the clips and the quotes and vote here. Meanwhile, as part of the Dish’s Hollywood week, here’s an archived Atlantic classic by Raymond Chandler on the Oscars in 1948. His sights were set high:
"Not only is the motion picture an art, but it is the one entirely new art that has been evolved on this planet for hundreds of years. It is the only art at which we of this generation have any possible chance to greatly excel."
I’ll be running some classic movie reviews and essays all week on the Dish. Stay tuned.
A reader sends in a different kind of YouTube than that exposing embarrassment with cruelty. It is an embarrassment, but it’s rescued by a moment of kindness. A painfully young girl forgets the national anthem as she sings before the NBA Play-Offs. But a coach and a crowd pick her up, and bring the anthem to life. Gave me goose-bumps actually.
Edward Luttwak dissected Petraeus’ doctrine at length earlier this year in Harper’s. Like almost everything Luttwak writes, it’s a bracingly candid and original argument – and well worth reading at this moment of non-decision. Money quote:
The essentially political advantage of the insurgents in commanding at least the silence of the local population cannot be overcome by technical means no matter how advanced. Nor can the better operational methods and tactics advocated in FM 3-24 DRAFT be of much help. So few of the insurgents ever engage in direct combat, so much of the insurgency takes covert forms, ranging from the infiltration of the government to bombings, sabotage, and assassinations, that the tactical defeats inflicted on the insurgents — including the killing of their top leaders and heroes—have no perceptible impact on the volume of the violence, and of its political consequences.
Nothing will work in Iraq until there is a political settlement. And there won’t be any time in the foreseeable future. The rest is futile.
A dissent:
There’s a big difference between saying that a particular statement has no place in the American political debate and saying that those who made the statement have no place in America.
Reading National Review’s editorial, one looks in vain for any statement of principle about why hundreds of thousands of Americans should be denied the right to vote in the District of Columbia. There are plenty of reasons why Republicans and conservatives might not like it; and some legitimate Constitutional questions. But am I the only person who finds it incongruous that a magazine that wants to spend tens of billions of dollars and thousands of young lives to bring democracy to Iraq is so viscerally opposed to the principle at home?
