"Let your mother know how much she means to you, in the form of a haiku."

The last item on a questionnaire, which... ... ... I don't care how compliant you've been up to that point, filling out the answers, you need to just say no. Shut up questionnaire!

"Sarah Palin, she won't listen to their bunk. Sarah Palin's coming south to hunt some skunk."

Via Andrew Sullivan, who calls this "a fantastic nugget of hathos." I call it awesome. I do think "hunt some skunk" is an inappropriate metaphor after the Tucson massacre (though this performance predates that).

I got to Sullivan through the commenter 1jpb, who said: "Sully's got some funny stuff up. And, it's very civil (as it is when cons mock the BHO tribute videos)."

Singing to the glory of politicians should always appear ridiculous if not repulsive. Let's remember the classic benchmark of absurdity:



FROM THE COMMENTS: EDH says: "Notice, the 'Sarah Palin Battle Hymn' shares a martial theme if not metaphor with Amy Chua's 'Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.'"

Andrew Sullivan reflects on the "difficult task is summoning the right amount of anger with the right amount of generosity of spirit."

Including the way he has treated Sarah Palin:

Here, there is no conceivable way in which, in my judgment, her presence on the national stage can improve our discourse, help solve our problems or improve public life. But that does not forbid one from noting the great example she has shown in rearing a child with Down Syndrome, whatever his provenance, or noting her effectiveness as a demagogue, or from admiring her father's genuineness or her skill in exploiting new media. I've consistently tried to do this without undercutting my still-raw amazement that an advanced democratic society could even contemplate putting such an unstable and irresponsible person in a position of any real power.

His approach to the new civility, he says, will be "generous anger: a classically Orwellian term." The idea is "to make strong and lively points without demonization."

"[T]he worst pop song designed to reflect a profound moral conscience. I.e. the smuggest, most pretentious pop song in history."

Andrew Sullivan sets up a poll for what he (a bit inaptly) calls the "Shut Up and Sing" award. You can't really shut up and sing. He's just looking for bad lyrics of a particular sort.

I only know 4 of the 10 songs on his list, and they don't really bother me. I mean, it's fun to knock Sting, but other than that, who cares what Madonna was actually saying in "American Life"? And if Stevie Wonder wants to sing with Paul McCartney about racial harmony using a piano keyboard metaphor, that's too sweet to get upset about. As for "Okie From Muskogee," that song has aged fabulously well. I was around in the 1960s when we hippies loved hating Merle Haggard for the things he said in that song, but it's nuts to take it the way we did back then:

"Okie From Muskogee," 1969's apparent political statement, was actually written as an abjectly humorous character portrait. Haggard called the song a "documentation of the uneducated that lived in America at the time."... "I wrote it when I recently got out of the joint. I knew what it was like to lose my freedom, and I was getting really mad at these protesters. They didn't know anything more about the war in Vietnam than I did. I thought how my dad, who was from Oklahoma, would have felt. I felt I knew how those boys fighting in Vietnam felt."

That text is from Wikipedia. "Abjectly humorous character portrait"? Somebody doesn't know the meaning of "abjectly." But I'm inclined to say that Andrew Sullivan is abjectly humorless... at least when it comes to marijuana....

"We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee..."



Smug? Pretentious? Absurd!

You know what deserves to win the award Sullivan defines. It's damned obvious and it's not on the list. Imagine all the peeepull....

Really, this award is no fun if you take shots at lightweights like The Partridge Family and the New Kids on the Block — as Sullivan does. Get the guys who've been taken seriously, like Bob Dylan. ("He that gets hurt will be he who has stalled...") Pick a worthy target or... as they say... shut up.

"Does that not just sound like an NPR report, to do an in-depth report on the word of the year, 'no.'"

Says Rush Limbaugh, about this NPR segment, which I tried to listen to. Man, NPR is slow. Unless you're driving in traffic trying to create the illusion that you are going quickly, I don't see how you can listen to that. But there's a transcript at the link, and you can read it so much faster than the 5 minutes it takes for Geoffrey Nunberg to perform the text on the audio. When he finally gets to the point that the word of the year is "no," he says:

That word usually gets a bad rap in public life; it's never a compliment to call somebody a naysayer. So Democrats obviously meant to put Republicans on the defensive when they began to call them "the party of no" for opposing the stimulus bill in early 2009. As The New York Times' Ben Zimmer pointed out, that phrase has often been used by the party in power to label the opposition as obstructionist. Ronald Reagan branded Democrats as the "party of no" in 1988, Bill Clinton did the same thing to Republicans in 1994, and Tom Delay turned the phrase back on Democrats in 2005.

Here's the part Rush played:

What was different this time is that after some early defensiveness, a lot of Republicans embraced the label and even ratcheted it up a notch. "We're not just the party of no," Rush Limbaugh said, "We're the party of hell, no!" — and Republican leaders quickly adopted the line. That extra word shifted the meaning of the phrase — it no longer suggested just opposition to particular bills and programs but unapologetic and resolute defiance.

That stance clearly resonated with a lot of voters.

Rush stopped his playing of the clip there, but it continued like this:

"No" has a great power to bring people together, precisely because it doesn't have to be pinned down. A child has a much harder time mastering "yes," which is always the response to a specific prospect — "Do you need to go potty?" Whereas the child's first "no" comes earlier, as a pure eruption of willful refusal. And the word retains that capacity, even as we learn to intone it to convey despair, anger, defiance, fear, astonishment, disappointment or resignation.

And that's how NPR sees you voters: You're children. You're resisting potty training. Your Tea Potty Party is mindless emotionalism. You're — as Andrew Sullivan would put it — intellectually inert brats.

That's what makes these choruses of negativity so hard to read, whether they're coming from unhappy voters or tired preschoolers in full shutdown. Everybody is sounding the same plaintive note, but it isn't as if there's any single juice flavor that will make them all happy again.

Hard to read?! Is conservatism a foreign language to Nunberg and the NPR slow-listeners stuck in traffic? Juice flavor? It would be a punch line for me to call that a punch line — juice ≈ punch — but why is that a punch line? Maybe Nunberg plied his intellectually inert brats with juice — I'll get grape, because grape is a little more favorite — but what does that mean about what he (and NPR) think government is supposed to do? It's supposed to give us yummy things to make us feel good (and compliant). No wonder he can't read these choruses of negativity.

So who did the conservative bloggers decide were the most annoying left-wing and the most annoying right-wing bloggers?

From The 8th Annual Right Wing News Conservative Blog Awards:

Most Annoying Left-Of-Center Blogger

3) Matt Yglesias (6)
3) Kos/Daily Kos (6)
2) Charles Johnson (10)
1) Andrew Sullivan (11)

Most Annoying Right-Of-Center Blogger

4) Allah (4)
2) Dan Riehl (5)
2) Debbie Schlussel (5)
1) David Frum (8)

More awards at the link, of course. I'm just a particular fan of the concept of annoyingness.

Andrew Sullivan: "I have to say the more I see of Chuck Heath, [Sarah Palin's] dad, the more he seems like the real thing."

"The revelation of the episode was his little shed full of astonishing artefacts of wildlife, small and large, that he joyfully shared with the kids. He stole the entire show, captivating the children like an iconic granddad from the wild, and he is obviously an educated, smart, curious man. How on earth did he produce an intellectually inert brat like his daughter?"

Sullivan was watching a TV show about Alaska. He should come to Madison. We eat intellectually inert brats for lunch.

What Sarah Palin is doing to her children.

The ratings are up for "Sarah Palin's Alaska." Oh, that's so sad for the people who exulted last week when the ratings were down. I skipped last week myself, but I watched this week's show. It was pretty cool seeing the Palins hauling in fish nets, slicing salmon into strips, tying the strips with string, and hanging them up in a smokehouse, with Todd's Eskimo grandmother demonstrating how to set up the fire to get the smoke just right.

I was touched by Sarah's interaction with Trig and with another boy with Down Syndrome (a member of her extended family). It made me cry and it made me think about this post by Andrew Sullivan criticizing Sarah Palin for combining motherhood and a career in national politics:

Anyone one who genuinely cared about the privacy of her kids would have either said no [to the vice presidential nomination] or been extremely careful to release the information as soberly as possible....

[S]he parades a special needs infant in front of the press, dangles him half-naked in front of book tour crowds, uses him constantly as a rhetorical campaign prop, and cites him at almost every speech to appeal to pro-life voters....

What Palin has done with her young children is unprecedented. Think of how Obama strictly protects his daughters, and how George W. Bush did the same. 

Think of how the press — including you — regards those daughters as off-limits but goes after Palin's daughters.

What Palin has done is use her children, having failed to actually rear them. She is still doing it on her reality show. That she has gone so far as to use and thereby abuse a child with Down Syndrome whose interests are clearly in seclusion, careful nurturing and care, and constant parental attention, tells you a huge amount. 

Seclusion? Is that right, tucking those kids away from the rest of the society? Why not be out and proud?

"[I]t is absurd for any government to prevent people from growing a naturally-occurring plant that requires no processing to provide humans with pleasure."

"It's pretty basic, actually. This is a core freedom for human beings and requires an insane apparatus of state control and police power to prevent it from occurring. All you have to do is burn a plant and inhale the smoke. If humans are not free to do this in the natural world in which they were born, what on earth are they free to do?"

Andrew Sullivan, pushing back Josh Marshall, who writes:

... I just don't know if I think marijuana should be legalized at all. Maybe it's that I'm getting into my 40s. And maybe I'm a hypocrite.... But [my Dad] had this very contradictory and hard to rationalize position which was that he was fine with people smoking pot but keeping it at least nominally illegal kept public usage in some check. Again, how to rationalize that in traditional civic terms? Not really sure. But frankly, I think I kind of agree.

So, for Marshall, it all comes down to who's skittish or formal about law? This is a pleasure that is open to everyone except those who adhere to the law. Everyone else can go ahead, but — perhaps as a sop to the rule-followers — they'll have to feel uneasy about it.

U.S. District Court Judge Virginia Phillips has enjoined the enforcement of Don't Ask Don't Tell.

It violates free speech and due process, she wrote, rejecting the arguments made by the Department of Justice lawyers who fought against the change... change that President Obama promised a year ago that he would deliver. Here, watch him — it's chilling to witness now:



"It's important to be honest among friends," he says at 0:24 and then literally puts his tongue in his cheek. He was lying and he knew it. Lying about being honest.

But what damnable luck for the Democrats to have this thrown at them 2 weeks before the election! It's such a bad issue for Obama. He hasn't done what he promised, and he's fought against constitutional rights that he ought to be actively pursuing, whether he'd made promises or not. He's going to have to rest on the argument that he was always all about Congress making the change. But why hasn't his Congress gone his way? And do Democrats in Congress want this issue forefronted now? They've only made everyone unhappy — people who want DADT repealed and people who don't. And then there's the additional issue of "activist" judges.... (Phillips was appointed by President Clinton, who, of course, signed the original Don't Ask Don't Tell statute.)

ADDED: Andrew Sullivan:

So once again, we will have the political prospect of the Obama administration simultaneously legally defending the Defense of Marriage Act and Don't Ask, Don't Tell in court, while politically saying they oppose both...

Yes, the GOP is the main party to blame. But no, this does not excuse the extra-cautious, gays-are-radioactive mindset of the Obama administration...

The GOP is convenient, and the Obama and the Democrats have taken advantage of that. I think they are deeply responsible for the failure here. Obama's administration is actively fighting against gay rights.

UPDATE: The Obama administration, continuing its active fight against gay rights, will appeal the decision in the case about the Defense of Marriage Act.

I "toast or roast" Andrew Sullivan.

At Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Daily Dish.

I'm one of a bunch of bloggers invited to "toast or roast" Sullivan's blog. As he explained yesterday, today is his blog's 10th anniversary. He reflects on the occasion:

I'm a Catholic, so let me start with the things I am sorry for and even, in some cases, ashamed of. When you blog in real time, day by day, hour by hour, emotions can get the better of you. The blogosphere is awash in examples of invective, abuse, cruelty, accusations of bad faith, or just bluster - in part because blogging is so much more like speaking than writing and also because it addresses people in the abstract, not face to face. I am not innocent in this, and wish I could take back a few barbs, especially in the early days, when we were all discovering what this medium could do....

His greatest failure, he says "was giving in to my legitimate but far-too-powerful emotions after 9/11 and cheer-leading for a war in Iraq that remains one of the most disgraceful, disastrous and murderous episodes in the history of American foreign policy." He reaffirms that he is a conservative:

I remain deeply skeptical of government's ability to solve most human problems, but have never denied its necessity or importance in tackling the profound questions of the common good no other institution can replace. I'm a Whiggish Tory, not a pure libertarian....

I remain very proud of a few things: of my early recognition of the anti-conservative nature of the Bush administration in almost every respect - fiscal, constitutional, social...

And he reaffirms the value of unseriousness:

From '80s music video contests to our now constant Mental Health Breaks; from mischief and blasphemy and black humor, from Road Runner videos to ghetto mashups, the Dish has always had an anarchic streak, what Bodenner calls "Dishness". The sardonic awards; the reader threads that became riveting - the "cannabis closet" which will soon be a book; the wonder of that simple idea - The View From Your Window - that then became a weekly puzzle; the dialogue with Sam Harris on faith and reason; the countless faces of the day that can convey things no words ever can; the Poseur Alerts; the randomness of bear culture, beard disasters, straight anal sex, South Park out-takes, Hathos Red Alerts, baby panda sneezes ... we've created an institution here that remains alive because we really don't know what the fuck we are going to do next. And yes, I used the word "fuck". Because I fucking well can, if I want to.

Ah, yes. There are so many blogs that are no fun at all. 

"Obama's speech to Gen44 tonight knocked my socks off.... If you've forgotten why many of you worked your ass off for this guy..."

Socks off... ass off...

You can discuss the substance of Andrew Sullivan's new celebration of the amazing oratory of Barack Obama, but I see this as an occasion to reprint what I consider to be the single most useful item of advice in George Orwell's essential essay "Politics and the English Language": "Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print." Background:

Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying.

I, the reader, am interested... and totally distracted by an assless man running around barefoot.

"I think all the time I've felt that life is a wager, and that I was probably getting more out of leading a bohemian existence, as a writer, than I would have if I didn't."

"Writing is what's important to me and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me, sure."

At this point, it's best not to have regrets.

(The whole show is here.)

AND: Andrew Sullivan says:

Hitch is dying as he lives, with integrity and passion. And since we all die in the end, alone, it is an impertinence even to enter this zone of another's last things. But for me, the human being, for good and ill, is more than reason. Reason must govern us, but it cannot explain us.



We live alone in a universe so vaster than we are and with an expiration date that defies our own attempts to understand it. We are wired to fear death and suffering, and in the spiritual transcendence of death and suffering we exercise our greatest humanity. The moments I have felt closest to God have been when I have been stripped of every security, the moments when I have felt no human love, known no safe home, witnessed unspeakable cruelty - and was rescued by nothing but His ineffable, boundless and yet intimate caritas.

This is not an argument, I know. It can easily be dismissed as wish fulfilment. All I can say is: this is not how I experienced these moments. They were real. In suffering I have felt and known God reach into my life and grab me by the scruff of my neck and shake me with the brusque affection of a father's compassion.

I know Christopher feels none of this, has never felt any of this, which puzzles but does not vex me. Friendship, in the end, is about the lack of any desire to change another person.

It is about loving him as he is. And in that love there is the only human redemption and, in my view, the true intimation of the divine.

"Any delusions that Journo-List was not, in part, a collusory venture..."

"... to shape the media narrative in ways to benefit Obama, above and beyond ferreting out the truth about any and all candidates, must now be abandoned. Ezra Klein has already been caught in a bald-faced lie about his discretion in picking members; and the notion that this was simply a water-cooler collection of journalistic thoughts is also belied by the emails now published by the Daily Caller."

Sullivan seethes.

This is your liberal media, ladies and gentlemen: totally partisan, interested in the truth only if it advances their agenda, and devoid of any balls whatsoever.

Devoid of any balls. Sullivan, by contrast, had the balls to question Sarah Palin's uterus.

Andrew Sullivan: Journolist was corrupt collusion.

"[T]his collusion is corruption.... [T]his was an attempt to corral press coverage and skew it to a particular outcome.... I'm glad Journo-list is over. It should never have been begun.... [S]ocialized groupthink is not the answer to what's wrong with the media. It's what's already wrong with the media."

"So is the question of how Palin finally put the screws on Levi."

Andrew Sullivan reacts to Levi Johnston's apology:

In Palinland, no one knows what's really going on. But I wonder if this is a somewhat panicked response to the recent blip upwards in web interest in the Trig question. 

No link on that assertion of blip. I know he's interested in "the Trig question," but really... it's trending upwards?

With all these family members able to speak to the public and McGinniss digging deeper, Todd and Sarah may have felt the need to crack down and use Levi's access to Tripp and Bristol as their latest weapon. [Levi's sister] Mercede has this to say about Levi's latest statement, which reads like a man who has a metaphorical gun to his head....

Sullivan links to Mercede's blog and quotes it at length. If that's too much crazy psychodrama for you, let's watch Levi Johnston with Kathy Griffin on "My Life on the D List":

"We have a temperamental WASP in the White House."

Writes Andrew Sullivan.

IN THE COMMENTS: I wrote:

At first I thought Sullivan's sentence was missing a word, that he was referring to the past and meant to write "We have had..." So, we used to have a "temperamental WASP" in the WH, but now we don't and people need to understand that somehow. Then I decided what he meant was "temperamental" not in the sense of moody and unpredictable, but as the adjectival form of "temperament." So, Obama has the temperament of a WASP. I guess you're allowed to have a big old stereotype about white people. And he's applying that stereotype to Obama.

John Stodder wrote:

For the record, I think Karl Rove was the first guy to compare Obama to the WASP stereotype of the sarcastic guy at the country club, leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette and making comments about everyone else at the party. I always thought that was the oddest perception, but it's turned out to be very apt.

Correct! ("He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.")

"In Kagan, it seems to me we have reached a new level of utter blankness."

Says Andrew Sullivan:

Her entire career has been about never taking a stand on anything of any substance - free coffee for students! - while networking in a way to neutralize any conceivable opposition. And she is walking back from her earlier demands for more clarity and transparency in Senate confirmation hearings. Josh notes that liberals are worried about an Obama Souter.

Souter was the old level of utter blankness.

I just don't believe that Obama is that prone to risk.

That should mean that Obama secretly knows what she's about and is hiding it from us. But that wouldn't make Kagan an "Obama Souter." Souter was appointed by a President — George H.W. Bush — who thought he was getting something quite different. Here's a New York Times article from the time of the Souter nomination (before his ascension to the Supreme Court):

John H. Sununu, the White House chief of staff, said today that he had assured President Bush that David H. Souter would uphold conservative values on the Supreme Court.... 

''I was looking for someone who would be a strict constructionist, consistent with basic conservative attitudes, and that's what I got,'' the chief of staff said in an interview. ''I was able to tell the President that I was sure he would do the same thing when he encountered Federal questions....

The chief of staff's comments were designed to advance the overall White House strategy of seeking to convince conservatives that Judge Souter was their kind of man, who could be trusted to vote ''right'' on the big issues, without getting him involved in fierce debates about abortion or flag burning or other contentious specifics.

In being unusually candid about the details in the selection process, Mr. Sununu was carrying out his role as Mr. Bush's primary liaison to the right wing of the Republican Party and to the ideological groups that support Mr. Bush but are nervous about the commitment to their issues.

Back to Sullivan:

I predict that if confirmed, [Elena Kagan is] much more likely to surprise on the left than on the right...

That would be Souterific.

Andrew Sullivan on Elena Kagan's "emotional orientation" — emotional orientation?

Apparently, there's a new euphemism. I hadn't seen this one before, and I haven't heard the argument for why it's a good one. Is it something like the way we started saying "gender" instead of "sex"? Maybe "sex" is something that people are supposed to keep quiet, and that makes it hard to insist that talking publicly about someone's sexual orientation is appropriate and important. But there are problems with the term "emotional orientation." It suggests that all of your emotions are centered around your sexual preference. Perhaps the term is intended to convey an argument that if you are gay and not open about it, your public persona is shallow and false.

Anyway, Sullivan says:

There are three possibilities, it seems to me, behind the kerfuffle over Elena Kagan's emotional orientation. The first is that her orientation is heterosexual and she is merely a dedicated career person who never had time for a date. The second is that she is lesbian, and she remains in a glass closet, and the Obamaites, revealing their usual tone-deafness on gay issues, never asked and blundered into this. The third is that she is a highly cautious political lesbian who has drawn a line around her real life in order to prevent her orientation being used against her - especially by the Christianist right.

He suspects it's the third and that Obama knows it and is going along with the cautious approach to forestall criticism from the right. Sullivan thinks that Obama doesn't mind "provok[ing] an outing from his 'left'" because then "senators [could] rally around the closet their generation cherishes and defend a person from 'charges' that invade her 'privacy.'"

Note the use of quotes— "left," "charges," "privacy." If it's not sexual orientation but emotional orientation, the revelation is not really an invasion of privacy? "Left" is in quotes, I think, because Sullivan is in the category of persons who are being provoked yet he still styles himself as a conservative.

If the left/"left" outs Kagan...

The president can say, appealing to the middle, that he respects privacy and has reluctantly allowed Kagan to come out under despicable pressure from people like me. 

Allowed Kagan to come out... Obama hasn't been keeping her in.

Then he dares the Christianist right to vote against her merely because she is a discreet lesbian. And so his jujitsu becomes a triumph for gay rights, and his nominee, who I suspect is far more left-liberal than anyone now believes, helps shape the court for a generation.

I'm not sure what he means to conclude here. The post is titled "The Kagan Rope-A-Dope?" and ends, after the part quoted just above with "Where's that rope again?" If you perceive that someone is playing Rope-A-Dope with you, you should choose not to take a shot at them when they are in that position. (The image is of a boxer leaning against the ropes looking easy to hit but in fact tricking his opponent to wear himself out taking harmless shots.) So why what does "Where's that rope again?" mean?

Is Sullivan saying he sees why he shouldn't try to out Kagan, because he doesn't want her — he thinks she's a big lefty! — on the Court? Or is he saying he should try to out her, because it would be "a triumph for gay rights"? If it's the latter, then he doesn't understand the term Rope-A-Dope and he's not even trying to maintain his conservative credentials.

He's looking for the rope — Where's that rope again? — but what is he planning to do with it? Maybe he intends to be the one playing Rope-A-Dope, and he's inviting people to take energy-expending shots at him. I'm not sure how that would work.

"Is Obama actually going to use a Supreme Court nominee to advance the cause of the closet...?"

Asks Andrew Sullivan.

[T]his is preposterous — a function of liberal cowardice and conservative discomfort.... [Obama has] told us that one of his criteria for a Supreme Court Justice is knowing what it feels like to be on the wrong side of legal discrimination. Well: does he view Kagan's possible life-experience as a gay woman relevant to this? Did Obama even ask about it? Are we ever going to know one way or the other? Does she have a spouse? Is this spouse going to be forced into the background in a way no heterosexual spouse ever would be?