The Dish

TNC takes it on:

It's shame that's created our absurd McWeightLoss culture where Octomom takes to the cover of celebrity magazines to show off her new bikini body, and retired athletes claim to have found the secret to losing five pounds a week. It's symptomatic of who are, of our abiding belief in short-cuts, and our technological ability to elide truth. The truth is that weight loss–like almost anything really worth doing–is long, hard and very lonely. It requires you to live in a way that many of your friends and family almost certainly do not.

Dreher is less forgiving.

A few activists are holding on – good for GOProud – but the outlook is grim. Why? Look at what even GOProud supports: civil marriage equality, military service, and no federal constitutional amendment barring marriage equality. There are virtually no openly gay Republicans supporting Republican policy on gay rights. This is not true of any other minority.

This has changed for the worse over the last two decades, in direct opposition to what has happened in every other Western country, especially the British Tories. Here’s my attempt to explain why the old conservative politics of homosexuality has fallen apart:

Pivoting off an NYT magazine article on "femivorism" about stay-at-home moms raising chickens, Elizabeth Nolan Brown asks:

[W]hy does everything women do – and I was going to say outside the realm of paid work, but really, it’s everything: working, not-working, part-time work, hobbies, etc. – have to be considered as a reaction to or against “feminism?” Why can’t we accept that there have, are and always will be myriad ways for arranging domestic, social and professional life, and the periodic, cyclical “discovery” of them by magazine or style section reporters says close to nothing about the state of gender relations, the nature of egalitarianism, feminism or the rejection thereof?

Rasmussen-free.

This is what they endure day to day:

There are no beds, no showers, no toilets and no electricity. Chickens and ducks roam the bare dirt yard amid scraps of trash and rotting animal dung. Fleas, flies and filth are the grunts’ constant companions. “It’s definitely rough living,” said Capt. Josh Winfrey, 30, of Tulsa, Okla., the commander of Company L, 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment.

The Marines of Company L have been living in the compound since late February. Unless they’re ordered to move into another sector, it will probably remain their home until they redeploy to Camp Lejeune, N.C., in August.

In the meantime, there’s little prospect for significant improvement anytime soon.

Kevin Sullivan scratches his head:

I challenge the increasingly marginal number of pundits, pols and bloggers who are blaming this incident on the Obama administration to explain to me exactly where and how Obama has changed U.S. policy on Israel in any material or substantive fashion. Joe Biden went over to Israel to make nice and say in no uncertain terms that "there is no space between the United States and Israel when it comes to Israel's security" against the Islamic Republic of Iran…for some reason which clearly escapes me, there is a faction – albeit a tiny one – pinning blame for the fallout on the Obama administration. Worse yet, this same faction for the most part believes that this event is somehow consistent with a record of disinterest or hostility toward a nation that hasn't had any aid guarantees seriously challenged since 2005, while President Bush was still in office.

Simply mind boggling.

“Some Palestinians are saying that we should send police and soldiers to guard Netanyahu and Lieberman because they are so good for our cause,” – a "Palestinian leader"'s joke in the NYT today.

Jonathan Bernstein rebuts William Saletan's latest column:

Yes, the Constitution does create a system of representative democracy, not direct democracy.  But how are those representatives supposed to decide?   The Constitution is silent about that.  We can suppose (and here I'm following Hanna Pitkin) that Saletan is correct at one extreme; if Members simply take a poll about everything and do whatever the poll tells them, then they're not really "representing" them.  But, Pitkin argues, the other extreme — in which the elected official does whatever she wants, regardless of what the people say they want — isn't really "representation" either.  For her, representation is a way of making present someone (the constituents) who aren't actually present.  And so they have to be with the politician, in some sense, but not completely overwhelming him.

Bernstein's second criticism:

Saletan and others would have politicians do what's right.  What I'm saying is that politicians have no way of knowing what's right. They aren't trained for it. They aren't selected for it.  And that's true whether one thinks of it in terms of policy that works, or in terms of what's ethically correct.  If you want the former, get rid of democracy and hire some technocratic experts; if you want the latter, go find yourself a philosopher-king, I suppose.

The entire job of a politician is to discern what he or she thinks is right at any particular moment on any particular question. And of course they have a way of knowing what's right: it's called judgment and practical wisdom. For Jonathan to say that this is somehow not part of their role seems to miss a core part of human conduct and nature. He adds:

Now, in my view, a Democratic Member of Congress who is trying to get re-elected will want the health care bill to pass, because that's going to help her win re-election.

I remain with Burke.

Mead's advice:

President Obama needs to do two things now in this dispute.  He must stand tall, and he must settle quick. 

He cannot afford a humiliating climb down in the face of Israeli pressure, but it is unlikely that either Congress or Jacksonian America will back him in a long and divisive struggle.  Israel on the other hand cannot welcome a bitter controversy that will polarize American public opinion and damage Israel’s image, perhaps irreparably, among the liberal constituencies who were once its strongest source of support.

But whatever happens in the Washington policy wars, one thing should be clear.  This is not a battle between ‘the Jews’ and the rest of the United States over our policy in the Middle East.  It is a battle between opposing conceptions of America’s interests in the Middle East, and  gentiles and Jews can be found on both sides.

Jacksonian America will not support a president boldly defending the interests of the US? Mead gets the paradox here. I'd prefer to put it as Christianist America, primed to see Israel as a sacred territory where an in-gathering will precede the Apocalypse; and a Jacksonian empathy for any fellow nation waging scorched earth warfare against common perceived enemies.

The terrifying prospect is that Israel's religious fanatics join forces with America's religious fanatics to destroy any hope of peace in the Middle East or of America's regaining the role of an honest broker between the parties. Actually, of course, that has already happened.

But resisting the logic of this cycle of religious violence is one reason Obama was elected. Preventing the escalation will not be easy. But one humiliation over the settlements was bad enough for US power. Two humiliations would be devastating to America's position in the Middle East. Alas, the Republican right believe in Israel's right to do anything anywhere almost as strongly as they believe in pre-emptive war, unlimited presidential power, the fusion of religion and politics, and torture at home. 

But at least the phony war is now over. On so many fronts, something else is taking shape.