How on earth did he get on stage? Love this York-Keyes snippet:
“Ambassador, I’m going to ask you one more time. Have you personally been doing campaign events here in Iowa in the last few months?”
“I have had several campaign events here in Iowa, but I will not define those events as you do,” he said.
“In the last few months?”
“I don’t define those events as you do."
Well, he is a Straussian.
Exposing the evil denialists.
Huckabee better hope it doesn’t get off the ground. Chris Mooney explains that POTUS has a $150 billion research budget. But can’t we leave the rest to, you know, scientists? Just quit doctoring their reports, and I’m happy to leave the president out of it.
Her Iowa Achilles stiletto.
The best thing to come out of the NIE is averting a Cheney-style attack that would have created a constitutional crisis and a potential security nightmare. The worst thing is that Iran’s continuing capacity for a nuclear weapon breakout is unaffected. Kissinger isn’t crazy. But here’s another sign of the limits of the West’s traction: Gazprom gets cozier with Tehran. More detail here. Poulos comments here.
‘Tis the season for the shameless pitch:
What is so timely about Sullivan’s book, and why it should be read closely by liberals as well as conservatives, is its embedded firsthand report on the widening ideological cracks in the house
that Rove built — a building that Rove used to boast was permanent and impregnable, and that Sullivan now makes look like a tottering fixer-upper," – Jonathan Raban, New York Review Of Books.
"Andrew Sullivan has been more honest and more open-minded than just about anyone else on the right … This is Sullivan at his wonderful best," – David Brooks, New York Times Book Review.
"Sullivan was one of the very few conservatives who repudiated Bush and the Bush movement when Bush was still popular… The Conservative Soul highlights the true philosophical and psychological roots of the Bush movement – its first principles – and reveals just how rotted those fundamentalist roots are. It does this as well as, if not better than, any other book has done," – Glenn Greenwald, Salon.
"I don’t read a lot of books (any actually) that have the words "conservative" or "liberal" on the cover but "The Conservative Soul" is not a fire-breather or a back-slapper or a bunch of anecdotes strung together to mock the other side. [It’s] a fucking book with a capital fucking B. I think a lot of people in America are going to be better for reading it. I know I am," – Matt Stone, co-creator, South Park.
I’m not convinced it’s that big a deal, but Dick Morris is:
Oprah sends a message to all American women that it is OK not to vote for Hillary and one to African-Americans that they need to vote for Obama. Were Oprah seen primarily as a black leader, her endorsement of a candidate of her own race running against one of her own gender wouldn’t mean that much. If her reputation were one for putting her race constantly ahead of her gender, her endorsement of Obama would seem automatic. But that is not who Oprah is.
She is iconic to women of all races; to them she’s a woman who is black, not a black who is female. So her refusal to endorse a fellow female seeking the presidency is tremendously significant to women voters. She sends a message by her unusual intervention in a political contest in which a woman is running. It reads: A woman, yes. This woman, no.
Here’s a fascinating exploration of the question raised by Mike Huckabee with respect to certain Mormon beliefs. Money quote:
In their book No More Strangers, Emeritus General Authority Hartman Rector, Jr., and his wife Connie, record the following story as told by LDS Church member Naomi Adair Hendrickson:
"This is what they [the Mormon missionaries] told me: God has a physical body shaped like a man’s except that it is a resurrected and perfected body of flesh and bones and spirit-no longer corruptible. He has a head, body, legs, and arms such as ours. He has feelings and emotions-love, compassion, jealousy, anger, and so on-much as we have, though in him they are controlled and exercised to perfection. He once was as we are now, and we may some day become as he is now. He once lived in accordance with eternal laws on a planet such as ours. In due time he obtained the power to beget spirit children—to become a God or Father in heaven. Jesus Christ was the first born of his children in heaven. Probably Lucifer similarly was among those early born spirits. Both are older brothers of ours, Jesus Christ being our eldest brother. We were created in God’s image." (No More Strangers, 3:91)
God also has sex, it seems. I reproduce this solely because it’s interesting. Mormonism really is very different from Christianity in its theology and doctrines. I don’t think it’s inherently stranger. As a Catholic, I am obliged to believe that the mother of Jesus was whooshed physically into the sky rather than dying. (This is a more binding teaching than the bar on sex with my husband, by the way.) Once you start subjecting religious doctrines to secular, empirical standards, not many would survive. But, as long as we have a secular politics, this doesn’t and shouldn’t matter in a presidential election. For me, it doesn’t. But here’s the point: for those who believe no politics is meaningful without religion dictating its meaning and direction, i.e. today’s Republican leadership, it’s a legitimate question.
So quit the whining, Mr Romney, and enjoy the bed you’ve made for yourself.
Two key cross-overs hold the architect in contempt of Congress.
"If you reject Giuliani because he thinks that Judith Nathan is his wife, then why shouldn’t Huckabee reject Romney because he thinks Lucifer is Jesus’ brother? I don’t want bad living or bad theology if I can help it, but I will put up with either if I get good government in the bargain. I will put up with it more willingly if I get great leadership too.
I wish the social cons for Romney well in their Huckabee firefight. They asked for it, if they didn’t foresee it," – Rick Brookhiser, NRO.
