The Dish

John Hinderaker of Powerline and Dan Riehl  are annoyed that Obama side-stepped a question about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings while on his trip to Japan. Conor Friedersdorf confronts them:

How dismaying that a loud subset of the right so consistently demands that President Obama privilege their childish desire for self-righteous rhetoric above the actual demands of statesmanship. What good would it possibly do to tell the Japanese, “Yes, I think it was right to incinerate your cities”? It wouldn’t do any good. On the other side of the ledger, it would antagonize an allied nation, put its leadership in a difficult spot that might impede its ability to help the United States.

President Obama is also endeavoring to slow nuclear proliferation, so it would hardly due to have headlines in Iranian newspapers pointing out that even as he demands that other nations give up nuclear weapons, he is saying that their only actual use in history was justified.

Asked whether the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified, President Obama correctly calculated that answering either yes or no would harm American interests, so he gave neither answer, the wisest course available to him, even if it didn’t satisfy the jingoistic vanity of certain critics.

Fallows explains:

Thirty years from now, the most important aspect of Barack Obama's interaction with China will be whether the two countries, together, can do anything about environmental and climate issues. If they can, in 2039 we'll look back on this as something like the Silent Spring/Clean Air Act moment in American history, which began a change toward broad environmental improvement. If they can't….

He's "Ricky Hollywood" now? Well that's a new one. If you thought the Sarah-Levi show was winding down any time soon, we're told the Oprah interview will dispel any such doubts:

 "I don't think a national television show is the place to discuss some of things he'd been doing and saying… By the way, I don't know if we call him Levi — I hear he goes by the name Ricky Hollywood now, so, if that's the case, we don't want to mess up this gig he's got going…. Kind of this aspiring, aspiring porn — the things that he's doing. It's kind of heartbreaking."

Them's fighting words. C'mon, Levi: fight back. Tell us what you know. All of it.

By the way, it's pointless to resist. I'll be live-blogging Oprah at 4 pm. Come back then.

Max Blumenthal explores the record of Lynn Vincent, Palin's ghost-writer:

Vincent’s association with Robert Stacy McCain … offers the clearest window into her far-right politics. Indeed, the only political book that Vincent has written in the first-person was done in collaboration with McCain. Published in 2005, Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime and Corruption in the Democratic Party was a compendium of misdeeds of and accusations against Democratic Party activists and leaders whipped up into an indictment of the party as irredeemably corrupt. Yet many of the authors’ charges proved false.

Vincent and McCain, for example, stated the Democrats were “perilously close” to committing treason for their opposition to the war on Iraq and insisted that Saddam Hussein had an active WMD program in the days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. They also claimed, based on alleged information supposedly culled by Congressman Richard Nixon on the House Un-American Affairs Committee, that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had been a “puppet” of Joseph Stalin. And finally they predicted that the Democrats would “surely lose” the 2006 congressional midterms if they made Republican corruption a centerpiece of their campaign. Vincent and McCain might have come to regret this if the book had made any noticeable impact. Instead, Donkey Cons was generally ignored by both the targets of the authors’ invective and conservatives, too.

Andrew Sprung builds off Jonah Lehrer's thoughts on the biology of smell:

I think that we describe sights more precisely than smells and tastes not because smell and taste are more emotionally laden but because they're less precise senses than sight. (Maybe because of some processing in that trip to the thalamus that smells don't make?) You can say of a tree's appearance that it's thirty feet tall, has a spear-shaped leaf crown, reddish bark in fishlike scales, and needle foliage; all you can say about the experience of eating a grapefruit is that it tastes like a more sour orange and smells fragrant and pungent. All language is ultimately relative, comparative — but our range of comparison is much richer with visual data.

Commenting upon some recent criticism of the US health care system by the Dutch health minister, Scott Sumner explodes the right-left divide:

Yes, some conservatives oppose any form of universal health care.  But at this point would any conservatives/pragmatic libertarians prefer the US health care system we will have 5 years from now over the Dutch, Swiss, or especially Singaporean universal health care plans?  And our “universal” plan will still have 20 million uninsured.  So for how much longer can progressives claim that universal coverage is the issue separating the left and right?

Phuket, Thailand, 8.52 am

Yglesias pivots off the debate over KSM's trial to make a larger point about the "war" on terrorism:

In political terms, the right likes the war idea because it involves taking terrorism more “seriously.” But in doing so, you partake of way too much of the terrorists’ narrative about themselves. It’s their conceit, after all, that blowing up a bomb in a train station and killing a few hundred random commuters is an act of war. And war is a socially sanctioned form of activity, generally held to be a legally and morally acceptable framework in which to kill people. What we want to say, however, is that this sporadic commuter-killing isn’t a kind of war, it’s an act of murder. To be sure, not an ordinary murder—a mass murder—but nonetheless murder.

Tyler Cowen defends the two-party system:

Political competition is better than autocracy, but its benefits are not well understood by a comparison with economic competition.

A reader writes:

Don’t do it Mr. Sullivan. Don’t legitimize Sarah Palin and her ridiculousness. She is a joke. You know that. Any reasonable intelligent person knows that. You are a reasonable, thinking, intelligent person, but more than that, aside from maybe Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, you are one of the few sources of calm, reasonable political discourse out there. I don’t always agree with you, but I always understand where you are coming from. But if you challange this woman, you give her credibility, which she doesn’t deserve. Then your site  becomes “The Huffington Post” or “The Drudge Report” or “Dailykos.”
 
Yes, she is a liar. That is not news. Let her hang herself with her book. Let her hang herself with her lies. Don’t stoop to her level. Don’t do it sir. It is beneath you.

Another writes:

Tone down the Palin butchery.

I am behind you 1,000%. I think you were instrumental in exposing that farce for what it was to the national thinking community- right and left. Congrats, and thanks. Seriously. Well done.

But now that she’s a joke, looking to make some money and host a talk show or whatever the hell she’s up to, I only think you elevate her to rock-star right winger status by dedicating so much time to tearing her down. How much lower can she go? She’s worthless as a candidate and the intelligent right is pointing that out (love me some david brooks!) Shes a white trash soap opera, a Kate and Jon Plus Octomom, who happened to run for president. I hate to see her sharing your blog’s stage with actual important people, at least to the extent you seem to be gearing up for.

I’d lay back a bit and let her self-destruction take its course. That said, if she does actually plan on entering public service again… pounce.