The Dish

Sinai, Egypt, 8 am.

From the Obama website, some political geography:

"On many issues, Conservatives have more in common with ideological liberals than we do with the business interests that come to Washington looking for a handout. Our goal should be to persuade the Left — to use clear failures we agree on, like ethanol — to demonstrate that Big Business will always come to Washington for handouts until Washington stops giving them altogether. Each new handout is the next ethanol, the next sugar — and once you’ve started giving a handout, it never ends," – David Freddoso, NRO.

A reader writes:

I don’t know what’s causing you to abandon your conservatism of doubt, but there’s no doubt that’s what you’re doing. Take, for instance, this unilluminating piece of credulity:

He obviously does care about working class voters, white and black. Why else would an Ivy League educated lawyer return to Chicago to work as a community organizer for the urban poor?

As an earlier, less starstruck, Andrew might have said, "please." This is a classic case of theoretical under-determination. Why might Obama have returned to work as an organizer in a community that became his earliest constituency? Sure, it could be because he "cares about working class voters, white and black." But it also could be because the precinct in which he worked was optimally suited to elect him, a left-wing black, to political office.

Or because community organizers have the time to write books. Or because he figured an intelligent community organizer could easily make the leap to influential local academic. Or, for that matter, because his wife made him do it.

See, what distinguishes a "conservative of doubt" from a hack is his doubt: his refusal to accept the rosiest picture, his acknowledging that politicians invariably act out ulterior motives, and that the ones who should be vetted most closely are those who seem most lily-white. Is the conservative of doubt realistic? No, he doubts — he is skeptical — but he understands that political errors are most likely to be avoided when the question is not, say, "who is best suited to lead this country?" but, rather, "who is the least worst suited?" This perspective does not preclude him from making optimistic inferences from the evidence; a conservative of doubt can still judge that Obama would be a thoughtful, even-keeled president, or that John McCain is an honorable man, but the onus is on Obama to be extra-thoughtful, and McCain to be extra-scrupulous.

That’s why the foregoing excerpt belies your low ‘c’ conservatism. The evidence from which you infer that Obama cares about the white and black urban poor supports many other hypotheses, all of which attribute to Obama a less virtuous character. The conservative of doubt would provisionally accept any one of these before he endorsed the hypothesis you settled on.

This is a plausible explanation. But my point was made in reference to the assertion, without evidence, that Obama does not care about working class folks. And Clinton did not argue that Obama’s record in this respect was merely careerism. He implied total unconcern. At some point, you cannot surrender to total cynicism about people in public life. But I take the point that I need to remind myself of the need for skepticism toward a candidate I have come to admire. I will merely remind my reader that so far, my support for Obama has been in the context of the Democratic primary.

Professor Daniel Dennett argues it is:

If religion isn’t the greatest threat to rationality and scientific progress, what is? Perhaps alcohol, or television, or addictive video games. But although each of these scourges – mixed blessings, in fact – has the power to overwhelm our best judgment and cloud our critical faculties, religion has a feature of that none of them can boast: it doesn’t just disable, it honours the disability. People are revered for their capacity to live in a dream world, to shield their minds from factual knowledge and make the major decisions of their lives by consulting voices in their heads that they call forth by rituals designed to intoxicate them.

While Lord Winston argues it isn’t:

The problem is that scientists now too frequently believe we have the answers to these questions, and hence the mysteries of life. But, oddly, the more we use science to explore nature, the more we find things we do not understand and cannot explain. In reality, both religion and science are expressions of man’s uncertainty. Perhaps the paradox is that certainty, whether it be in science or religion, is dangerous. The danger of Dennett’s relatively gentle brand of certainty is that it increases polarisation in our society. With inflexible positions on both sides, certainty surely is the biggest threat to rationality, and to science.

Some amazing new photos from Hubble via NASA.

In response to my thoughts on the pope, Michael Dougherty writes:

“This was not an accidental omission,” is a slippery phrase. Does Sullivan mean to imply the pope tacitly approves of U.S. torture? He should use plain language.

“His own priests” is also delightfully non-specific. Is Sullivan saying something about the pontiff’s time as Bishop of Munich (in the 70s), when he would have been in charge of priestly formation in his diocese? If it refers to the recent scandals, when he was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, this is equivalent to pretending the secretary of health and human services should have devised an exit-strategy for Iraq. There are plenty of people to blame in the Church for what is euphemistically called the "abuse-scandal" – Benedict is not one of them.

“In return, the president refused” is even stranger, as if to say that Bush thought, “Hey Benny, thanks for not taking me out to the woodshed over that torture thing. I’ll do you a solid and not accuse you of covering up child-rape.”

One of Mark Shea’s readers remarks on the same post:   

The funniest part is that those who fear theocracy are the same people who are bashing the Pope for not smacking down Bush. If the Pope gets involved in American politics, it’s theocracy. If he doesn’t, he gets blasted for not condemning torture. B16 cannot win. Thankfully he does what he does regardless.

Two responses: anyone who believes that Benedict has no responsibility for the crimes the Church enabled while he was the very apex of ecclesiastical power is in willful denial. Yes, Benedict was the protector and ally of Bernard Law, the man who delayed holding Maciel to account for years, and the careful architect of the strategy to displace blame by holding celibate gay seminarians responsible. He is a man who even now argues that the broader culture is really responsible for the criminal cover-ups in the church he helped run for decades. As for Mark Shea’s reader, torture is not a political intervention. It is a profound, universal moral issue that the whole world knows is at the core of what is rotten in the Bush administration. Benedict punted in speaking truth to power. He is as much a politician in this respect as Bush.

(Photo: Benedict XVI and his inseparable aide, Georg Ganschwein, by Franco Origilia/Getty.)

A reader writes:

Vladimir Nabokov may have had a touch of clairvoyance. His novel Pale Fire’s entire structure is the posthumous publishing of a character’s (believed to be unfinished) poem and the self-appointed editor’s extensive commentary about said poem.  The commentary has little to do with the poem itself, but rather focuses on the editor’s quest to find himself in the lines of a poem that is clearly not about him.  It’s Nabokov, so naturally it’s more complicated then that, but there is a definite sense that Nabokov considers one man’s interpretation of another man’s work to be more about the interpreter then the interpreted. 

Presumably, Dimitri Nabokov, who is also a writer as well as a translator of his father’s work, will provide commentary since The Original of Laura was never finished.  While I’m sure that Dimitri will serve his father’s memory far better then Charles Kinbote served John Shade in Pale Fire, I couldn’t help but think about that novel and think that Dimitri publishing his father’s work is much more about him then it is about Vladimir.

That being said, as a person who just adores Vladimir Nabokov’s work, I would have had a very hard time destroying his words.  I do feel for Dimitri, although I would hope that I would have followed my father’s wishes.

From the WaPo:

… when Bill Clinton was a less impressive version of Barack Obama. Via Drudge, this is a classic NYT piece from 1992:

Eventually, most of the superdelegates are likely to back Mr. Clinton, if only because there is no place else for them to go. But they will do so "with extreme reluctance," one said, and the delay and the grudging spirit makes it harder for Mr. Clinton to move his campaign onto a higher plateau, free of character issues.

It’s a useful reminder that many people saw the moral deficiencies of Bill Clinton long before Ken Starr poisoned the wells. And that young and new candidates will always – and not unreasonably – prompt bouts of buyers’ remorse, skepticism and scrutiny.