The Dish

Buried in the Atlantic’s archives is this interview with Garry Wills, author of Why I Am Catholic:

It’s our concrete experience of the local church that’s especially meaningful to us. There’s an interesting contrast between born Catholics and converts. Converts are often much more rule-directed. Catholicism isn’t something that they breathed in from their childhood, so they think that if you don’t toe the line on abstract doctrine you can’t be part of the Church. But to a born Catholic, Catholicism means their parish, their priest, their fellow worshippers. It’s all very concrete. Papal directives usually seem kind of abstract and unimportant compared to that lived experience. […]

Catholics are living the faith of their shared commitment to the mystical body. Bringing the hierarchy into line with that is just a secondary step. And it’s bound to occur. I’m unhappy with the hierarchy, which is not the Church. It’s part of the Church—an important part, but it’s not the Church. People say the Church is out of touch. Well, it’s not out of touch! The Church is the people of God. It’s the hierarchy that’s out of touch with the people of God, and they’ve got to get back in touch. But that’s their problem.

Judah Grunstein:

The United States is now the thread that binds Iraq, and it is clear that a serious unraveling of the situation would occur were this thread suddenly to be pulled away.

In other words, instead of making it easier for us to leave Iraq, the Surge has made it more difficult. And if that doesn’t qualify a military tactic as a failure, I don’t know what does.

I’m not sure that the surge wasn’t in retrospect a deliberate attempt to make it all but impossible for the US to leave Iraq any time soon. And less out of a genuine security worry, than in order to save face for Bush and Cheney. But the whole gambit – and the underlying mission creep – leads to an obvious paradox of history:

As the glue that holds Iraq’s disparate parts together, the U.S. is now playing the role that Saddam Hussein formerly played in Iraq, and we’re playing it for the same reason that we were willing to tolerate Hussein for as long as we did: to contain Iran’s regional influence. What’s more, it’s a role that has once again led us to ally ourselves with some unsavory and unpredictable characters, all of whom have their own agendas that don’t always correspond to ours. And short of the improbable appearance of an Iraqi strongman in the the structural, functional (and moral) image of Saddam Hussein, it’s a role that only we can play.

Norwich, New York, 8.30 am.

Ross explains what he thinks is the risk of Obama:

[Obama] has the potential to do for the Democratic Party what Reagan did for the GOP in ’80 – to win a lopsided victory in which a slew of previously-wavering independents and politically-unformed twentysomethings end up branding themselves as Democrats for a generation. That’s the good news; the bad news is that if he doesn’t win a lopsided victory among independents and young voters – if the bloom comes off the rose or the glass jaw starts to crack – he has the potential to hemorrhage votes in key constituencies: among downscale voters; among seniors (where I suspect the "wouldn’t vote for an African-American" constituency is concentrated); among hawkish and extremely pro-Israel Dems; and even among white women. Which is to say, he could win in a walk, or lose thanks to heavy defections from groups that would have trended Democratic had Hillary been the nominee.

My own view, for what it’s worth, is that the more Obama campaigns, the more he seems to dispel these reservoirs of doubt. And I think the over-arching argument for an Obama presidency swamps these micro-issues. This is not a Mark Penn election.

There’s only one portrait extant – but computers do the rest.

The next generation of straight teens are playing … "gay chicken":

A game where two people of the same sex (and preferably straight) put their faces closer and closer until one of them chickens out. If none of them do, then they get closer until they kiss.

A Facebook food fight.

The Emmys evolve.

"It occurs to me, as I ponder the work of Hewlett and Packard, that what strikes me as extraordinary is child’s play for Hewlett and Packard, who have answers to scientific problems I shall never know enough to frame. Raising the inevitable question: what is it that strikes Hewlett and Packard as extraordinary?

David Hume is famous for, among other things, remarking, in the manner (if not the tone) of Oscar Wilde, that he would sooner believe that human testimony had erred than that the laws of nature had been suspended. It occurs to me on reflection that the operative word, even allowing for the meiotic tradition of the English, is sooner.

There is a choice.

Mine is that the order of the universe, the arching of the human spirit, the enduring mysteries of love and the unique serenity of faith, are the result of Central Planning, which took seven days, not seven seconds, to make a world exciting enough to doubt Him. That is the flirtatious side of God, to reach for a terrestrial metaphor. We should laugh at its presumption, as, after trying it out several times, I can laugh at the black nihilistic teases of Hewlett and Packard. I am programmed to love God and to seek, however vainly, to obey him, and to trust that the course he laid out for me in the grandest voyage, through time and space, and uncertainty, to infinity and transfiguration, and resolution, is as certainly charted as the toyland course that will lead me from Miami to the Rock of Gibraltar. I shall follow the star of Bethlehem, waywardly; and if I fail to reach it,  I shall be guilty of every delinquency save that I ever doubted it was there," – William F Buckley Jr, Harpers, April 1975.

Larison:

Rhetoric that speaks of an “existential threat” is simply not credible, and anyone who deploys such an over-the-top argument will rapidly lose credibility with everyone outside an intense core of true believers.  There is a security threat from jihadists, but even that is not “existential.”  “America’s existence” is not at stake in Iraq, and it is rather amazing that people continue to repeat such things at this late date.