The Dish

Kevin Drum wants to know when Obama willl give up on bipartisanship:

Obama clearly seems dedicated to a program of compromise and bipartisan comity, and he wants to keep at it long enough to give it a real chance of working.  But how long is long enough?  I never really believed Republicans were ever likely to respond to olive branches in the first place — they need a few more years in the wilderness before they're willing to really take stock of the corner they've painted themselves into — so I'm not a good judge of this.  But it's been nearly a year now and Republicans, if anything, are more intransigent than they were on inauguration day. How much longer does Obama give them? Another year? Two? At what point does he finally give up and decide that he's just being played for a patsy?

He keeps going because the party that loses the middle is the party that looks the most intransigent and ideological. I hope he keeps up the kind of discipline he has so far.

A reader submits Merle Haggard's "If We Make It Through December." Lyrics after the jump:

If we make it through December
Everythings gonna be all right I know
It's the coldest time of winter
And I shivver when I see the fallin snow

If we make it through December
I got plans of bein in a warmer town come summer time
Maybe even California
If we make it through December we'll be fine

I got laid off down at the factory
And there timings not the greatest in the world
Heaven knows I been workin' hard
I wanted Christmas to be right for daddy's girl
Now I don't mean to hate December
It's meant to be the happy time of year
And why my little girl don't understand
Why daddy can't afford no Christmas here

If we make it through December
Everythings gonna be alright I know
It's the coldest time of winter
And I shivver when I see the fallin' snow

If we make it through December
I got plans of bein' in a warmer town come summer time
Maybe even California

If we make it through December we'll be fine

A reader writes:

I live very near Laredo and it is no more appropriate to talk about book stores in Laredo without mentioning Nuevo Laredo than it would be to talk about Brooklyn and fail to mention Queens. They are right on top of each other and most Laredoans routinely cross the border for groceries, tools and, yes, books. Nuevo Laredo, like much of Mexico, is awash in oodles of little book stores with titles primarily in Spanish, but English too. Book store life – with readings, discussion groups, good coffee and bad guitar playing – are very alive and well in Nuevo Laredo and enjoyed by the Laredo crowd as well.

"Pope Benedict’s action this week seeks to destroy the evidence, which is the point. If he were to have his declaration hoisted as a sign, it would say: “The Holocaust was the work of a few Nazis, period.” In fact, that has been a theme of his controversial papal statements on the subject. In Cologne, in 2005, he told an audience of German Jews that Nazi anti-Semitism “was born of neo-paganism,” as if it were unrelated to the long history of Christian anti-Judaism, embodied in the “Christ-killer” slander, and preached from nearly every Christian pulpit nearly every Good Friday for more than a thousand years. Speaking at Auschwitz in 2006, Benedict blamed the Holocaust “on a ring of criminals,” an exoneration of the larger German nation that is almost unheard of among the impressively self-critical Germans of Benedict’s generation. At the death camp, he went on to make the astonishing claim that by eliminating Jews, the Nazis were “ultimately” attacking the church. He complained of God’s silence, but not of the previous pope’s," – Jim Carroll, whose Practicing Catholic was one of my favorite books of the year.

Another performance by the soon-to-be knight:

A reader writes:

Three years ago my partner and I visited India.  The sites that impressed me even more than the Taj Mahal were the man-made Ajanta and Ellora Caves.  For centuries, Buddhist monks and others, using primitive tools, spent their entire lives carving these caves knowing they would never live to see them finished.  Back home I was working on a lawsuit where corporate directors had committed fraud, doing all they could to inflate the next quarter's earnings reports.  All that mattered was the next financial statement. 

For all I know these caves could have been built with child slave labor but our tour guide explained to us that they were built by monks, men who felt connected to what had gone before them, who worked on it themselves, and would pass the work on when they died.  For centuries.  I like to think they saw themselves spiritually connected to the passage of time and they dedicated their lives to that trust.   

I think of Obama that way.  Great change comes at glacial speed.  George Washington didn't become a king but he still owned black slaves.  So did Jefferson yet that didn't stop him from expanding democracy with the Louisiana Purchase.  Lincoln waited two years to free the slaves and did so only in the South, exempting the border states still fighting for the Union.  Even the New Deal, arguably the most significant change in our government since the revolution, didn't include healthcare, didn't desegregate the schools, etc.  Only a George Bush thinks that the one-man "decider" gets to change things at once, at his whim.  What a fool.  Obama understands what the Bush's of the world and even Bill Clinton fail to grasp.  A leader is only as great as her or his contributions to the flow of historical progress. 

 

No way will Obama accomplish all that he wants. But when his time ends, the right person following him will be able to build on his accomplishments, just like the monks at Ellora and Ajanta left majestic but incomplete structures for those that followed them.  Contrast that to Bush, whose predecessor has had to devote much of his time to fixing the mess he left.

 

Josh Shahryar profiles Grand Ayatollah Yousef Sanei, the most prominent of the remaining opposition clerics:

Sane’i is the perfect man to replace Montazeri. He represents the same brand of moderate Islam that Montazeri espoused. This includes his stance that women have equal rights with men and can be judges and sources of jurisprudence. He has denounced suicide bombings, considers nuclear weapons as being against the soul of Islam and forbidden and perhaps shockingly, even believes that followers of other religions if they are sincere would go to heaven. These are the qualities that endeared him to the late Montazeri and this is the reason why today, thousands of people from around Iran announced their willingness to defend him against the government.

And he'll need it; Sanei's offices were attacked by Basiji militiamen yesterday.

The LA Times reports:

Large-scale protests spread in central Iranian cities [including Esfahan and Najafabad] Wednesday, offering the starkest evidence yet that the opposition movement that emerged from the disputed June presidential election has expanded beyond its base of mostly young, educated Tehran residents to at least some segments of the country’s pious heartland. […] The central region is considered by some as the conservative power base of the hard-liners in power.

Iranian authorities are clearly alarmed by the spread of the protests.

Mojtaba Zolnour, a mid-ranking cleric serving as supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s representative to the elite and powerful Revolutionary Guard, acknowledged widespread unrest around the country. “There were many [acts of] sedition after the Islamic Revolution,” he said, according to the website of the right-wing newspaper Resala. “But none of them spread the seeds of doubt and hesitation among various social layers as much as the recent one.”

Scott Lucas provides a similar analysis. Video above was shot in Najafabad yesterday.

Today on the Dish, Andrew presented his first-year evaluation of Obama. Readers responded here and here. John Cole reviewed the president's record of promises while Steve Lombardo and Andrew analyzed his approval rating.

Sully also tackled Robbie George over natural law and responded to a reader's dissent on Gore. Sprung fisked Jane Hamsher on healthcare and worried about the future. Megan called out Harry Reid. Beck set off the red hathos alert while others on the paranoid right continued to retreat to the fifties. And their fearless leader tweeted some more on death panels.

The Dish revisited Jim Manzi's important piece in National Affairs and ran more commentary on gays in comics. More depressing Christmas songs from Roy Orbison and Dr. Elmo. Another VFYR update here. Ten more MHBs of the year here. And a spectacular viral skit here.

— C.B.

(Today's Wrap brought to you from the Chicago O'Hare Airport. Ugh.)