The Dish

Larison pooh-poohs (and rightly, I’d say) any future collaboration between a president Clinton and someone like Bob Kagan:

Clinton is as reliably hawkish as major Democratic politicians come, and I assume she wouldn’t be opposed to working with neoconservatives in the future on certain issues. That said, Clinton wouldn’t need to include neoconservatives in her hypothetical future administration, and they wouldn’t want to join. Her own party already has more than enough interventionists of its own, as her career and the careers of many of her allies and supporters attest. After all, why would she stir up controversy by bringing in neoconservatives when she can get very similar policy results and much better press by bringing on, say, Anne-Marie Slaughter and other liberal hawks? Supposing that a Paul nomination caused neoconservatives to endorse Clinton, that would be their ideologically-driven act of protest and not something that Clinton would feel any need to reward. Democratic partisans would spin such endorsements as “bipartisan” validation of Clinton’s foreign policy views, and they would find the display of Republican factionalism very entertaining at least until the election was over.

(Photo from Getty)

“Before God and his people I express my sorrow for the sins and grave crimes of clerical sexual abuse committed against you. And I humbly ask forgiveness. I beg your forgiveness, too, for the sins of omission on the part of Church leaders who did not respond adequately to reports of abuse made by family members, as well as by abuse victims themselves. This led to even greater suffering on the part of those who were abused and it endangered other minors who were at risk,” – Pope Francis.

Julie Decker identifies as an “aromantic asexual woman, meaning I’m not sexually or romantically attracted to anyone.” It’s not an easy thing to explain:

“Sexual attraction is not something that is said verbally. It’s a vibe—something you communicate to me unconsciously. Sex is an instinct, not a choice.”

The above horrifying quote was uttered by a fellow I met when I was nineteen years old. There I was in college, uninterested in the sexual experimentation and freedom the away-at-university experience often brings, fairly inexperienced in my “career” as an outspoken asexual woman. Back in high school, I’d never developed any sexual or romantic attraction to anyone, but despite that I did date a couple of people. Peer pressure and consistent “you don’t know until you try it!” messages made me think I needed to investigate before I was sure I didn’t care for it, but what I was really looking for was a magic switch to shut everyone up. I wanted to fill the quota; I wanted to experiment “enough” to make everyone else agree that I’d given it a fair try and could legitimately be believed now.

That never happened. It turns out that for asexual people, there is no threshold we can cross that’s “enough”; if we are not converted by sex, then surely we did it wrong, or with the wrong gender, or with the wrong person, or ruined the experience by expecting to hate it. We find ourselves trying to prove a negative—a scientific impossibility—and ultimately either cave to expectations or live in defiance of them, secure in the hard-won knowledge that we are qualified to describe our experience and we deserve our boundaries respected.

Previous Dish on asexuality here.

Jonathan Bernstein claims that “Obama has done no more or less than what any Democratic president in his circumstances would have done.” Chait takes exception:

It’s surely true that any Democratic president would have pursued health-care reform in 2009. But as the health-care bill dragged on, while it, Obama, and Democrats in Congress grew increasingly unpopular, many Democrats would have pulled the plug and tried to get out with a small, incremental bill. In late August of 2009, Jonathan Cohn later said in his deeply reported reconstruction of the bill’s passage that both Joe Biden and Rahm Emanuel wanted to pull the plug on comprehensive reform, but Obama overruled the. … Now, the logic of passage was always clear to those who paid close attention to the legislative dynamics, but not everybody did. If [after Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts] Obama had given up on health care, most analysts in Washington — and even many Democrats — would have deemed it a sensible, or even perfectly obvious, decision.

On most issues, Obama simply used his power the way any member of his party would have. On climate and health care, he bucked significant pockets of intra-party disagreement — not about policy goals themselves, which the whole Party shared, but of the prudence of accepting political risk to achieve them. And these two episodes where Obama’s own intervention proved decisive happen to be the two largest pieces of his domestic legacy.

I simply cannot imagine, for that matter, a Clinton backing marriage quality and military service with the same intensifying momentum as Obama, or a more liberal Democrat defending the NSA as strongly as Obama has. In some of these areas, perhaps, Obama is less an out-of-the-box Democrat than merely a Democrat of a certain generation. Which makes the looming ascendancy of someone well into her sixties seem such a strange leap forward into the past.

It breaks with recent history:

[W]hy did the president’s unpopularity drag down Laura Bush’s and Hillary Clinton’s numbers but not Michelle Obama’s? In-depth polling about perceptions of her by The Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation suggests that broad segments of the public hold positive views of Michelle’s personal qualities that transcend partisanship, gender and race. Supermajorities of men and women, blacks and whites, Republicans and Democrats alike see Michelle as intelligent, a good role model for women and a good mother.

And even though Republicans, white men and conservatives have held only mixed views of her overall, her strong positive image has prevented a sharp downturn in attitudes among groups that have become super critics of the president.