"Both you and Sarah Palin are good-looking women. I mean, you’re attractive, young — relatively young — women who other women can identify with," – Bill O'Reilly, to Michele Bachmann.
Berlin’s Giant Puppet Celebration
On the anniversary of the wall falling, a city celebrated. The Boston Globe captured it in a spell-binding slide-show.
A Question
I may have missed something, but what happened to that US soldier captured by the Taliban?
The Undiplomatic Michael Oren, Ctd.
A reader writes:
So it's just that simple? Eye-for-an-eye? As soon as the body count equals that of what the enemy inflicted, the defenders are just supposed to stop defending? Please do tell how us many wars, justified or not, have actually ended in such a fashion at any point in world history. I guess this makes the Afghanistan issue much more simple that you realize. We have, since 9/11, killed far more Afghani's than Americans were killed. By your standards we should have pulled out long ago.
Here is the reality: The response to attacks is not only to retaliate, but to diminish the chances for future attacks. Part of that tactic involves structural
damage.
The other part involves changing the motivations of those who would otherwise be inclined to further aggression. It means a show of force that involves something more that just an E4E. If the other side realizes that 100 of theirs will die for every one of ours they kill, well then that might cause them to re-think that strategy now wouldn't it?
Why do you continue to ignore the fact that if the Palestinians never fired another shot, bombed a school bus, or launched another rocket into Israel, there would be eternal peace through those lands? The Palestinians have only themselves to blame for every one of the deaths in Gaza – including the children.
Another writes:
As we say in Philadelphia, bullshit. Your article omits one point, what should the Jews have done to get those bastards to stop firing rockets at them? Sorry, but as the father of Jews, and as the son of Jews, and as the husband of a Jew, I'll take a live Jew without "integrity" over a dead Jew with "integrity" every fucking day of the week.
Another adds:
As a Jewish American who completely supports Obama's recent efforts towards peace in this region, and who generally always disagrees with the notion that if you don't support the neocon, AIPAC model you are a self-hating Jew, I still have to take issue with this post. I feel it is unfair to write about the number of civilian deaths without mentioning that the Hamas members were taking shelter in hospitals, schools and homes. The goal was to raise the level of casualties in order to incur the sympathies of the critics of Israel.
How Naive Is Reihan On Rove?
My dear friend actually wrote:
Karl Rove never imagined that opposition to same-sex marriage would cement a permanent Republican majority. It was a distraction that I'm sure he found distasteful.
Chris Orr recommends he read Josh Green's deeply researched piece for the Atlantic. Me too. If you can read that and conclude that Rove finds gay-baiting distasteful, then I give up.
The Undiplomatic Michael Oren
I thought ambassadors were supposed to smoothe over rifts, not inflame them. And I thought they were supposed to speak to the broadest number of citizens in the countries to which they have been appointed, not provide inflammatory rants to the already-persuaded. But this 
Over eight years, 28 Israelis were killed by Hamas rockets in what were clearly war crimes, as Goldstone emphatically reports. Four times that many Palestinians were killed by Israelis in one month in 2008. In the subsequent conflict, the ratio of Palestinian deaths to Israeli deaths was close to 100 – 1. With this tally, Oren writes:
If a country can be pummeled by thousands of rockets and still not be justified in protecting its inhabitants, then at issue is not the methods by which that country survives but whether it can survive at all.
Seriously? No; the issue is whether Israel committed war crimes in its self-defense in Gaza and whether that self-defense was disproportionate to the threat it faced. At the time Bret Stephens offered the just war theory behind the Gaza war thus:
For every single rocket that falls randomly on Israeli soil, an Israeli missile will hit a carefully selected target in Gaza. Focusing the minds of Hamas on this type of "proportionality" is just the endgame that Israel needs.
Does that sound like the desperate act of a country on the brink of extinction? Glenn Reynolds explained the actual rationale:
Israel’s just playing by Chicago rules: “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!”
Whatever else that is, it is not a just war. The disproportion was the point: it was designed to teach the Gazans and Hamas a lesson they would never forget. Michael Goldfarb, McCain's former spokesman, echoed Reynolds' statement but embraced the murder of children as well:
The fight against Islamic radicals always seems to come around to whether or not they can, in fact, be deterred, because it's not clear that they are rational, at least not like us. But to wipe out a man's entire family, it's hard to imagine that doesn't give his colleagues at least a moment's pause. Perhaps it will make the leadership of Hamas rethink the wisdom of sparking an open confrontation with Israel under the current conditions. Or maybe not, and the only way to stop Hamas is to eliminate its capacity for violence entirely.
Now it is a completely fair point that many other nations are in no position to criticize, including the US. Israel has to survive on a tiny strip of land which is surrounded by enemies. The Jews have achieved there such a miraculous, inventive, dynamic state it puts most other countries to shame. And its moral standards and its internal airing of debate have no peer in its own region. In some respects, the US has recently had lower standards.
The US, by invading Iraq and failing to provide any security for the civilians trapped in the chaos the US tolerated, ("stuff happens"), by torturing hundreds of prisoners, innocent and guilty, and by unleashing entities like Blackwater on civilian populations is in no position to judge. 3,000 Americans died on 9/11. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died in the Iraq occupation in sectarian violence that an invading army has a fundamental moral responsibility to restrain. To have invaded a country with no thought for the security of its civilians is one reason I came to see the execution of the Iraq war as morally intolerable. Israel, moreover, has seen its Supreme Court outlaw the torture methods championed by the US under Bush and Cheney. The US, in stark contrast, refuses to investigate its seven-year policy of torture and abuse of individuals, some of whom it knew to be innocent.
But that doesn't make either war just. As Matt points out, even if you believe the Israeli attack on Gaza was justified, that doesn't exclude the possibility of war crimes in its execution. Is this so hard to understand? Jews of all people – the victims of war crimes of unimaginable evil – should know this. And exchange anger and paranoia for the integrity they once had.
Now I’ve Vented
A constructive proposal for the president as he addresses HRC this weekend. Help us in Maine and Washington state. Marriage equality is being attacked in Maine with classic techniques of fear, especially around children. In Washington, the Christianist right is fighting to reverse equal domestic partnerships, revealing that the m-word is not their real concern; their true fear is that gay people might cease to be pariahs.
Since the president has made it clear he will offer us nothing but words – and only in contexts where straight people are largely absent – he could urge the voters of Maine and Washington to stand up for equality. My old comrade in the marriage fight, Evan Wolfson, has offered his thoughts on how Obama's speech could help. I hope Obama or his speech-writers listen.
Merton, Belief And Unbelief
A reader writes:
I've dipped in and out of the various discussions you've had on religion and belief but haven't participated because it seems to me the the believers and the nonbelievers can go only so far in finding common ground before a final failure in understanding and agreement. In the end, one either believes or not, and there is no rational path, virtually by definition, toward faith. "I believe" and "I know" are incompatible ways of seeing. The gap between reason and faith is unbridgeable.
Merton's statement seems a model of rationality and moderation, of reasonableness, but it won't hold.
The implication is that doubt is merely a way station, however difficult, toward believing, not an insuperable impediment. What he is saying is that doubt is inconvenient, even painful at times, but it can be overcome and faith established in the end. Faith will never, or almost never, be turned aside by doubt, only delayed. What the statement elides is that doubt, if genuine, must be seen as just as likely to demolish faith as sustain it. If not, then doubt is always a poor second to faith. Faith is able to overcome doubt in a way that Merton's formulation suggests doubt can never overcome faith. The ultimate power of faith is not a conclusion but an underlying assumption of what Merton is saying.
The View From Your Window
Clifden, Ireland, 6.23 pm
In Defense Of Breitbart
Matt Welch joins the fray and takes some pot shots at the Atlantic. His larger point:
[P]artisan media criticism is not "rapidly replacing journalism," it's supplementing journalism, forcing journalism to be sharper, and frequently committing acts of journalism in its own right, despite not being motivated by the same allegedly pristine Mission guiding postwar American newspaper types. That fact is not difficult for most consumers to grasp, but it's proven maddeningly elusive for keepers of the old flame. Here's the scoop: Media critics are more motivated by politics than journalistic purity, and in their extra motivation they can and will occasionally steal the old guard's lunch. They–and more importantly, their work–should be held to the same standard that people apply to alt-journalism from all sources, not just those whose politics seem yucky.
I don't disagree. I haven't attacked BigGovernment; in fact the Dish gave it mad props for its ACORN scoop. I like Andrew Breitbart and championed Drudge when it was really unpopular. More power to them. I've said the same thing over the years about Reynolds and Malkin and did all I could to promote Instapundit in the early days. I think my record in holding the MSM to account is pretty strong. And I do think their liberal bias and institutional cowardice has hurt them. The Dish tries to take strong positions, but also air dissent and opposing views. I do not pretend to be neutral but I do try to be fair and accountable. That's very difficult, but we should all aim for it. I don't blame people for failing; I do blame them for not trying.
The Dish 