The Dish

Unless you pay for them. It's hard out there for an Alaskan.

Andrew Sprung notices an interesting pair of parallel quotes:

“That’s exactly why we thought a timetable was so important,” Mr. Obama said. “Because in the absence of a time frame, if the view in Afghanistan is this is an open-ended commitment or an indefinite commitment, then I think we have very little leverage” over the Afghan leader. (Barack Obama, 12/09)

“Demands in the U.S. Congress for a timeline to withdraw American troops from Iraq are constructive because they exert pressure on Iraq’s leaders to forge compromises….the strong feelings expressed in the Congress about the timetable probably has had a positive impact . . . in terms of communicating to the Iraqis that this is not an open-ended commitment.” (Bob Gates, 4/07)

Of course, the Iraqis still have not agreed on a national election even as a very hard deadline for US withdrawal approaches.

A visual demonstration of what’s really been going on. The final verse is what the president is now proposing:

James Joyner hasn't given up on the GOP yet:

Are the inmates running the asylum in the Republican Party?   I don’t think we’re there yet, although there are days when I have my doubts.  But right now I’m willing to chalk it up to a combination of a political climate that’s been hyper-polarized for years, making the out party seem insane.  (Recall Jane’s Law: “The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane.”)  Add to that dire economic times and a 24/7/365 Twitter environment where crazy thoughts can get amplified and seem more prevalent than they are, and you have a recipe for this sort of thing.

My sense is that things will swing back in the other direction fairly soon because that’s what has always happened in the past.  But, while I don’t think it’ll happen, it’s not entirely inconceivable that Sarah Palin will be the 2012 Republican nominee.  In which case, I’ll look for other options.  Until then, the only thing I can do is point out the crazies and argue for a saner path.

The pattern with these things, I'm afraid, is that they don't swing back soon. They swing back in the end – but only after the delusions of the ideologues have been destroyed the only way they truly can be, by repeated drubbings at the polls. Yes, what happened to the Labour party in the 1980s and the Tory party after 1997 are my most vivid examples of this – it took both parties more than a decade and several leaders before they became capable of governing again. Or think of the Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s.

My fear is that the combination of an insane party, a very populist and potentially economically disastrous few years, and deepening polarization could lead to a very alarming outcome. Resentment is a powerful force; and Palin is nuts enough to ride it.

I'll just leave it to TNC. "I was born of a whore and bred to be an assassin" is a pretty good hook-up line.

Douthat wonders if the sexually puritanical and authoritarian nature of Irish Catholicism fostered sex abuse in the Church:

[Y]ou can see how it could all go bad — how a culture so intense clerical, so politically high-handed, and so embarrassed (beyond the requirements of Christian doctrine) by human sexuality could magnify the horror of priestly pedophilia, and expand the pool of victims, by producing bishops inclined to strong-arm the problem out of public sight instead of dealing with it as Christian leaders should.

(In The Faithful Departed, his account of the scandal, Philip Lawler claims that while less than five percent of priests were involved in actual abuse, over two-thirds of bishops were involved in covering it up.) I suspect it isn’t a coincidence that the worst of the priest-abuse scandals have been concentrated in Ireland and America — and indeed, in Boston, the most Irish of American cities — rather than, say, in Italy or Poland or Latin America or Asia. There will always be priests who become predators; the question is how the Church as an institution deals with it. It hasn’t been handled all that well anywhere, I’m afraid. But the particular qualities of Irish Catholicism — qualities which were once a source of immense vitality — seem to have led to a particularly horrifying outcome.

Ezra Klein gives the data another look:

[A]s the CBO explains on page five, part of the increase in the type of insurance being purchased is the result of "people’s decisions to purchase more extensive coverage in response to the structure of subsidies." In other words, the change is driven by the subsidies, not offset by them…Premiums for the same policy in the individual market fall by 14 to 20 percent. But people in the individual market, who are largely low-income, will now have the opportunity to purchase better policies that cover more expenses and provide more security.

DiA makes the same basic point.

Ambers, along with a gaggle of other reporters, had lunch with the president yesterday. One quote:

The strategy that I'm pursuing is designed to say let's see if we can change the conditions on the ground in a time certain period. There are risks associated with that, but in the absence of that push, we are in a situation that doesn't change, and there are big costs associated to troop presence, to casualties, to a slowly deteriorating situation over a course of years that are at least comparable and probably worse than us going ahead and making this big push now.

Today on the Dish we focused on the president's big speech at West Point. Andrew live-blogged the address and recorded his early thoughts here and here. We also rounded up a blogger reax and noted the Dem response. Reader reactions here, here, and here.

In pre-speech discussion, we revisited the president's strategic outlook, Goldblog recalled candidate Obama's assertiveness on Afghanistan, Jean MacKenzie reminded us of Karzai's hold on the US, Steve Coll downplayed the importance of a central government, Steinglass weighed the costs of occupation, and Ackerman called out the WSJ for skewed reporting. Andrew tore into Cheney's trash-talking of the president and knocked Politico for delivering it unchecked. Ambinder also scrutinized the paper, and Fallows praised Bush for what Cheney isn't – "honorable."

In other coverage, Andrew reiterated his conservative take on conservation, Dreher uncomfortably supported gay adoption, TNC sympathized with Huckabee, and a soldier dissented with Andrew over the surge. Sully also recognized World AIDS Day and took a long look at the defection of one of the most prominent bloggers on the right.  A reader responded to the latter.  And more reaction to the minarets here and here.

Finally, this window is particularly fantastic.

— C.B.