Yglesias Award Nominee

"Look, I don’t agree with the guy on anything politically, but he seems like a genuine, nice guy and in this instance I think it was appropriate to bring up the mistakes he made in his past, not to show he’s “human” like some candidates are trying to do when they speak of past errors, but rather to show that it was the wrong road for him to be going down, and that kids shouldn’t make those same mistakes.

And it’s not as if Obama is bringing this up at every campaign stop along the way.  And now that he’s slowly climbing in the polls, politically it’s probably the worst time for him to start talking about this issue.  However, given the question he was asked and the setting, I don’t see anything wrong with it.

And quite frankly Mitt Romney is living in a fantasy world if he really thinks that ‘it opens the doorway to other kids thinking, ‘well I can do that too and become President of the United States,’" – Bull Dog Pundit, from the famously ankle-biting zone.

Face Of The Day

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Palestinian women shout slogans during a rally organized by Hamas movement against next week’s Middle East peace conference in Annapolis, November 23, 2007 at Khan Younis refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip. The United States has announced it will host a Middle East peace conference on November 27 in Annapolis, Maryland in order to hopefully launch formal negotiations to create a Palestinian state. Along with Israel and the Palestinians, the US has invited a key Arab states including Syria and Saudi Arabia. By Abid Katib/Getty Images.

Between Fear and Loathing

Lying awake the other early morning, I found the twin images of Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton coming into my mind. Maybe it was the Ambien, but inevitably the choice between those two haunts the fevered brow in the dead of night. I realized that beyond the policy arguments, my psyche sees the decision between the two of them as the choice, baldly put, between fear and loathing. I loathe Clinton; I fear Giuliani. Which emotion surges most? Clinton could still pull it out as my least favorite, but right now, my fear of Giuliani is outweighing my loathing of Clinton. David Brooks reminds me today how that didn’t use to be the case. I always admired Giuliani, marveled at what he did with New York City, liked his social liberalism, admired his way with bureaucracies, enjoyed his knockabout style. Any pol who’s happy to put a dress on for a bit of fun is fine by me.

But that was before 9/11, and before the Bush-Cheney presidency. All the things I admired about Giuliani as mayor loom as liabilities as president. The security state is understandably more pervasive and powerful than before. But the newly empowered executive branch – with powers to seize anyone anywhere without charges and torture them if necessary – makes a man with the instincts and temperament of Giuliani a real danger in the White House. Oddly, then, it is 9/11 that has made Giuliani intolerable to me. His obsessive loyalty to aides, his reflexive defense of the security and police forces, his discomfort with any argument smacking of civil liberties, his mean streak, his desire to extend his own term of office as New York City mayor, his authoritarian, meddling instincts, and his frequent, hotheaded outbursts: all this make giving him the Cheney-style presidency a huge risk. Maybe not immediately – but in the wake of another terror attack, I don’t think anyone can feel comfortable with what he might do to the Constitution and American liberty. Maybe this worry of mine will lead to charges of "shrill hysteria" from those already declaring that it’s World War IV, but it’s my gut sense of the kind of man Giuliani is and the kind of world he would confront as president. We can’t risk him under those circumstances. So it’s back to dealing with a candidate who, however loathesome, is not quite as dangerous.

The Hathos Of K-Lo

A reader writes:

I enjoy reading The Corner because, like most Americans, I prefer my warmongering from real men like Rich Lowry and Jonah Goldberg.

What I don’t enjoy, however, is reading the adolescent cheerleading of Kathryn Jean Lopez. And by that I mean I do enjoy it, because it’s the closest thing to humor you can get on a site like The Corner.

But I’m still trying to figure out what her purpose is over there. Perhaps you can explain it to me, because virtually all of her posts can be boiled down into these three categories:

1. Look what I read today! (Link.) Perhaps you’d like to read it, too! (No added comment, because she’s got nothing to say.)

2. Look what Mitt Romney said today. (Link.) Isn’t he awesome? (This makes up roughly 85% of her work.)

3. Look who died today. (Link.) R.I.P., please pray for his/her soul, our hearts go out to the family of blah, blah. (This one works for anyone from obscure television stars to conservative journalists that no one has ever heard of to former Reagan administration officials who hated communism more than you ever did. … that no one has ever heard of.)

PS – Stem cells are people, too.

Am I missing something?

Not much. She’s not related to any senior conservative macher, unlike so many others in the conservative establishment, so that doesn’t explain it. But she does most of the work, I think. I hope this isn’t taken as a recommendation that she cease blogging. There’s a hathetic quality to her teenage blurts that remains compelling.

The ENDA Debate

Rob Anderson squares off against Kate Sheppard. Her bottom line:

Most of the discrimination directed at the LGBT community is based not on actual knowledge that someone’s sexual orientation is something other than heterosexual, or seeing direct evidence thereof, but on the suspicion that one might be. That suspicion comes from assumptions about how men and women should speak, interact with others, groom themselves, or dress—all of which falls solidly in the gender identity and expression realm. If gender identity is excluded from ENDA, the protections for gays, lesbians, and bisexuals aren’t actually guaranteed, as a detailed examination of the legislation conducted by Lambda Legal concluded.

America The Mild

Stephen Fry discovers something:

I was warned many, many years ago by the great Jonathan Lynn, co-creator of Yes Minister and director of the comic masterpiece My Cousin Vinnie, that Americans are not raised in a tradition of debate and that the adversarial ferocity common around a dinner table in Britain is more or less unheard of in America. When Jonathan first went to live in LA he couldn’t understand the terrible silences that would fall when he trashed an statement he disagreed with and said something like “yes, but that’s just arrant nonsense, isn’t it? It doesn’t make sense. It’s self-contradictory.” To a Briton pointing out that something is nonsense, rubbish, tosh or logically impossible in its own terms is not an attack on the person saying it – it’s often no more than a salvo in what one hopes might become an enjoyable intellectual tussle.

Jonathan soon found that most Americans responded with offence, hurt or anger to this order of cut and thrust. Yes, one hesitates ever to make generalizations, but let’s be honest the cultures are different, if they weren’t how much poorer the world would be and Americans really don’t seem to be very good at or very used to the idea of a good no-holds barred verbal scrap. I’m not talking about inter-family ‘discussions’ here, I don’t doubt that within American families and amongst close friends, all kinds of liveliness and hoo-hah is possible, I’m talking about what for good or ill one might as well call dinner-party conversation. Disagreement and energetic debate appears to leave a loud smell in the air.

I think that’s why I enjoy blogging so much. It has Anglicized American debate somewhat. But my jousting still evokes hurt or anger or personal woundedness. Nothing personal is intended, even when I rip into another blogger, or, ahem, a presidential candidate.