The Dish

Frum sounds naive here:

Having urged the president to honor his commitment to the Afghan war, we Republicans must honor our commitment to support him as he fights it. Given the public unenthusiasm for the conflict, there will be political temptations to “go rogue” on the president, if not now, then in the summer of 2010. That will be our test, for us to pass as the president has passed his.

I know many Republicans and conservatives will say: “Hey – the Democrats did not give President Bush support when he most needed it.” Correct. They didn’t. And the country suffered for it. The right way to react to that dereliction of duty is not by emulating it, but by repudiating it. “For it before I was against it” has deservedly become an epithet for shameful wavering. Let’s not inflict it upon ourselves.

A reader writes:

"The Morning After" is simple, non-hysterical, spot-on analysis. I especially agree that Obama is after bin Laden. No other single action would pay such huge dividends. In this, Obama proves himself again to be, not just the politician as chess master, but the politician as martial artist, always seeking for the fulcrum, the pivot point where four ounces of effort will yield a thousand pounds of result.

It is a very high level skill, far higher and more effective than the brute force men like Cheney, Bush, or Rumsfeld rely on, and it's difficult to attain, because it depends on three subsidiary skills that lesser men simply never recognize, much less master: listening, understanding and neutralizing. Obama is a master of all three — just think back on his campaign. 

It's only after he's listened to, understood, and then neutralized his opponent that he — or fate — delivers the coup de grace. What appears to some to be hesitation or lack of engagement on his part early on in any effort is really just preparation: listening, understanding, neutralizing.

And since, as you say, he plays the long game, there is really no way to judge his effectiveness at this point — although, if one applies the same skills of listening and understanding oneself, as you've done in this post — and as opposed to the shouting and reacting one sees elsewhere — one quickly suspects he has maximized whatever potential the situation holds, and only waits for his opponent to walk into his trap and "defeat himself", as they say. In this he is the opposite of Bush and Cheney, who walked into bin Laden's trap — and defeated themselves.

Greenwald praises one aspect of Obama's speech:

Obama did not even mention — let alone hype — the issue of women's rights in Afghanistan.  There were no grandiose claims that the justness of the war derives from our desire to defeat evil, tyrannical extremists and replace them with more humane and democratic leaders.  To the contrary, he was commendably blunt that our true goal is not to improve the lives of Afghan citizens but rather:  "Our overarching goal remains the same:  to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda." 

There were no promises to guarantee freedom and human rights to the Afghan people.  To the contrary, he explicitly rejected a mission of broad nation-building "because it sets goals that are beyond what can be achieved at a reasonable cost and what we need to achieve to secure our interests"; he said he "refuse[d] to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, or our interests"; and even vowed to incorporate the convertible factions of the Taliban into the government. 

New York's state senate continues the recent backlash against recent expansion of marriage equality. The vote against marriage equality was more lopsided than many had hoped for. Not a single Republican voted for the bill, despite intense lobbying. The vote in the Assembly was 88 – 51 in favor of civil equality.

In direct violation of Catholic doctrine, a leading cardinal has insisted that being gay is a choice and that those who choose to be gay are thereby excluded from God's kingdom. Benedict's church is slowly reversing the reforms of the 1970s that saw gay persons as made in the image of God and inherently not sinful, as long as they remained celibate and lived alone their entire lives. It began with Benedict's own policy of insisting that even celibate gays cannot become priests because they are mentally or psychologically "disordered." The creation of a class of sub-human humans – the early medieval Catholic approach to Jews and sodomites – is making a comeback.

One also notes that the new Ugandan bill that would begin to treat gays as sub-human threats to be identified, informed on, jailed and executed has met no resistance from Pope Benedict XVI. Since the largest religious group in Uganda is Catholic, one has to take Benedict's silence in the face of this proposed Nazi-style law against homosexuals to be consent. The Ugandan Anglican church – closely allied with American Christianists – has this position:

The Anglican Church of Uganda on Nov. 6 issued a press release saying that it is studying the bill and does not yet have an official position on the proposed legislation. However, the release restated the Ugandan church's position that "homosexual behavior is immoral and should not be promoted, supported, or condoned in any way as an 'alternative lifestyle.'"

And AllAfrica.com reported Oct. 29 that the church's provincial secretary told the Monitor newspaper in Kampala, Uganda, that jailing homosexuals was preferable to executing them. "If you kill the people, to whom will the message go? We need to have imprisonment for life if the person is still alive," said the Rev. Canon Aaron Mwesigye, according to the website.

The origin of this law came from American Christianists as much as Ugandans:

Both opponents and supporters agree that the impetus for the bill came in March during a seminar in Kampala to 'expose the truth behind homosexuality and the homosexual agenda'.

The main speakers were three US evangelists: Scott Lively, Don Schmierer and Caleb Lee Brundidge….

The seminar was organised by Stephen Langa, a Ugandan electrician turned pastor who runs the Family Life Network in Kampala and has been spreading the message that gays are targeting schoolchildren for 'conversion'. 'They give money to children to recruit schoolmates – once you have two children, the whole school is gone,' he said in an interview. Asked if there had been any court case to prove this was happening, he replied: 'No, that's why this law is needed.'

(Scott Lively is the author of a book claiming that Nazism itself was a homosexual plot. But he insists that he believes the Ugandan law is too punitive and opposes it, which gives him more moral authority than Rick Warren.)

In the West, core constitutional protections prevent the rounding up, jailing and execution of a tiny minority simply for being public or for mere touching of one another. In a country like Uganda, no such protections exist. And so you see what many Christianists really believe: the terrorization of a minority that offends religious authority and majority prejudice.

"You're assuming there's some morally superior aspect to health care than there is to a house [on the beach]," – Rush Limbaugh to William Shatner.

Douthat is glib:

Broadly speaking, it struck me as one of Obama’s least effective speeches. I can’t imagine any anti-war liberal being convinced to favor escalation by his arguments. I can’t imagine any pro-escalation conservative feeling confident that Obama is really committed to the effort he’s embarking on. And above all, I can’t imagine any up-in-the-air, uncertain American being reassured that we have a military strategy capable of delivering a successful outcome — because Obama barely seemed to talk about military strategy at all.

Gerald F. Seib spins this Peter Wehner post as supportive of Obama because Wehner, like much of the right, agrees with the underlying policy. A sample from one of the more forgiving reviews of Obama’s speech:

[O]ne cannot help but get the sense that Obama is dealing with Afghanistan only with great reluctance, that he views it as an unwelcome distraction from his domestic agenda. He does not seem to view this war in the context of any great cause, whether it is the liberation of captive peoples or prevailing against men of almost unimaginable cruelty and malevolence. The president came across last night as clinical and detached, somewhat distant and weary. He seemed to be reporting to the nation rather than trying to rally it. You do not sense that this is a man whose heart has been touched by fire.

NRO has run an editorial in favor of withdrawing from Afghanistan by John R. Miller. He defends the Iraq war at the same time:

We did not start the conflict in Afghanistan. The Taliban and al-Qaeda did. We punished them. We overthrew their government. These were reasonable, attainable, low-risk objectives. Setting up a Taliban-free government in Afghanistan — let alone the peaceful and democratic one that may be necessary to achieve this objective — will be costly, unlikely, and focused on a country in no way strategic to us. And, just as important, a substantially increased effort — including the half-hearted, almost-no-chance-of-success Obama initiative — will just make it more dishonorable to withdraw later and lead to greater loss of credibility when we do so.

Only Kristol seems chipper:

Obama is now saying: We’re surging and fighting for the next 18 months; see you in July 2011. That’s about as good as we were going to get.

A reader writes:

Quoting you:

The way our politics of fear is now constructed, there is no limit to the costs involved in nation-building in every conceivable failed state that could be a safe harbor for Jihadists. We cannot have the adult conversation about how much terrorist damage the US should tolerate compared with the costs of trying to control this phenomenon at its source. We are not mature enough as a country to have that conversation. And Obama has decided it isn't worth confronting that question now.

So the war with Eastasia continues…  We've always been at war with Eastasia…

Davide Cantoni finds no relationship between Protestantism and economic growth.