The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Saturday, December 27, 2008

27 Dec 2008 02:28 pm

Friday, December 26, 2008

26 Dec 2008 01:29 pm

Thursday, December 25, 2008

25 Dec 2008 10:51 am

The View From Your Window

Bellevue, Washington, 1 pm.

25 Dec 2008 09:29 am

Happy Christmas!

Polls are now open for the Christmas Hathos Award. Nominees have been narrowed down slightly. Enjoy.

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

24 Dec 2008 07:35 pm

Merry Christmas And Happy New Year

Taylor Knapp, 6-years-old, tries to place a letter for a welcome home sign for her stepfather U.S. Army Sgt. Joseph Peoples before he returns home from a 15 month deployment to Iraq December 22, 2008 in Fort Stewart, Georgia. Peoples deployed with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, 4th Brigade Combat Team in October of 2007 for his third deployment since the U.S. led invasion in 2003. By Stephen Morton/Getty.

This year, the Dish is going to take off the week between Christmas and New Year. Patrick and I are pretty much wiped out after a year of the craziest, most frenetic, most exciting blogging since the Dish began. This time last year, if you can remember, we were poised on the edge of the primaries, and Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani were slated to be the likeliest choice in the fall. We've been posting every day, including Saturday and Sunday, ever since, at a pace we've never even attempted before - peaking at over 400 posts a week. If you don't take time out, and spend it with those you love, you'll never have the energy and stamina to keep it up in the New Year. So the next week will simply be window views - from your windows, as you celebrate the season.

We have many plans to bring the Dish to new places next year; and I wanted to thank you all for being such an integral part of this conversation. The Dish tripled in size this year, as Patrick helped me expand in new directions. All my colleagues at the Atlantic, from James Bennet to the interns, Teddy, Daniel, Stephen, Vanessa, and Laura, helped make it happen as well, as did the benevolent support of David Bradley and Atlantic Media. If you appreciate what we've done, the best way of expressing it is to buy a subscription to the print magazine - the best monthly in America. I feel particularly aware of the Atlantic's priceless legacy this year, as a magazine founded to end slavery played a part in helping make the case for the first black president in American history. Somewhere, the founders are very happy.

For what it's worth, my two long-form essays of the past year for the Atlantic were "My Big Fat Straight Wedding", a personal reflection on the meaning of the California court decision to grant marriage equality to gay couples, and a meditation on "Why I Blog." Oh, and Goodbye To All That may stand as a kind of wish and prayer for the New Year.

God bless and Happy Christmas.

Andrew

24 Dec 2008 06:19 pm

Enjoy The Clip Show

Only a few days left. Vote here! Winners will be announced on New Years Day.

24 Dec 2008 05:11 pm

Christmas Hathos Nominee

Kathie Lee raps:

24 Dec 2008 04:23 pm

Von Hoffmann Award Nominee

"I'm hoping McCain and Obama manage to defeat these forces of entropy. A McCain-Obama fight could be as tough as it would be civil..." Andrew Sullivan, January 24, 2008.

Vote on the 2008 Von Hoffmann Award here. Glossary here.

24 Dec 2008 04:17 pm

The Hathos

A blog is born.

24 Dec 2008 03:31 pm

Photos Of The Year

The Big Picture rounds up some of the best.

24 Dec 2008 02:54 pm

Spool Art

Devorah Sperber's Last Supper used 20,736 spools of thread. A description of her work:

Devorah Sperber is a New York City based artist who recreates famous works of art using spools of thread. Sperber treats the spools like pixels, recreating the works of Da Vinci, Rembrandt and Van Gogh in detail. However viewers will not see the work until the move up close because most of her work is created upside down. the reason why the spools hang from the wall backwards is so that when reflected in a mirror or metal sphere, they will appear in the correct size and proportion. The reflection also shrinks the images and blends the spools together to create a more accurate representation of the original works.

More images here and here.

24 Dec 2008 02:24 pm

The View From Your Window

Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica, 9 am. And at Christmas in Michigan, I get the feeling.

24 Dec 2008 02:17 pm

The Beardiest U.S. City?

Portland claims the title.

(hat tip: notcot)

24 Dec 2008 01:42 pm

The Antidote To Benedict

A gay Catholic who, unlike the current pontiff, saw Creation in its fullest, complex beauty:

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—
fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Have a happy Christmas whatever the Pope says.

24 Dec 2008 01:17 pm

Operators Are Standing By

November voting, now in convenient December form.

24 Dec 2008 12:33 pm

How To Get The Dreamlife Of Your Dreams Using The Internet

Farhad Manjoo has a guide to blogging. He spoke with Ambers:

...the best way to stick to a blogging schedule is to write quickly, and a good way to write quickly is to write as if you're talking to a friend. Marc Ambinder, the political-news maven at the Atlantic, told me, "I've found that I tend to write the way I speak. Short, staccato sentences, lots of parentheticals. That annoys purists, but it's uniquely my own voice, and I think it helps to build a connection with the reader." Also remember that your readers want you to get to the point. "Be clear, not cryptic," Salmon says. "Blog readers have neither the time nor the inclination to read between the lines; blogs aren't literature."

That's good advice. My own essay on what blogging has done to writing is here.

24 Dec 2008 12:10 pm

What Fundamentalism Requires

The cramped view of the Pope finds an honest expression in the views of many fundamentalists today. The universe is binary - male and female - and each half has a prescribed role. Here's how fundamentalists see the role and freedom of women:

A husband knows that his wife loves him first and foremost by her willingness to give her body to him. This is rarely the case for women. Few women know their husband loves them because he gives her his body (the idea sounds almost funny). This is, therefore, usually a revelation to a woman. Many women think mens natures are similar to theirs, and this is so different from a woman's nature, that few women know this about men unless told about it.

Blue Texan notes Prager's own experience with two divorces. But he has fought like hell to prevent me from getting married.

The description of homosexual orientation as evil, of course, is linked to the view that women's physical subordination to men is intrinsic to nature and must be enforced. You cannot extricate the two concepts. The erasure of homosexuals is deeply, theologically connected to the subjugation of women.

24 Dec 2008 11:30 am

Untaming The Prince

Bryan Finoki interviews Tom Hilde:

...it's not that torture had been non-existent in liberal states until the torture shown in the Abu Ghraib photos. The US torture at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, Baghram, and elsewhere reflects the techniques developed through CIA documents dating to the 1950s. The liberal state, more generally, has always functioned on an opposition between its conception of civilization - grounded in a liberal conception of rationality - and what's beyond civilization.

Continue reading "Untaming The Prince" »

24 Dec 2008 11:03 am

What Benedict Actually Said

You've read the press accounts in which the Pope allegedly spoke of protecting the rainforests from destruction in the same vein as protecting heterosexuals from homosexuality. The actual text, brought to us by Rocco, is more complex, but essentially argues that the forms of male and female as created by God can know of no complexity or variance. The fact of same-sex sexual and emotional orientation - displayed throughout nature and expressed by human beings since the beginning of time - is, in the Pope's view, a divine error. The entire universe must fit into the binary Thomist vision, or we are allegedly divorcing humankind from our own nature. And nature must be divorced from all new knowledge of the human and animal sciences. Well: at least the knowledge we have gained since the Middle Ages.

Read the whole thing. There is little new in it, although that is not a criticism for a Pope. What I found telling is how this Pope, in his summary of the recent history of the Church, simply erases the Second Council from reality - just as he erases homosexual orientation from the arena of open inquiry or meditation. For Catholics, this passage will say a lot (which is why, of course, it never made it into the headlines):

The year just concluding has been rich by way of retrospective glances on important moments in the recent history of the Church, but also rich in events which carry within them pointers to direct our journey towards the future. Fifty years ago Pope Pius XII died, fifty years ago John XXIII was elected Pope, Forty years have passed since the publication of the Encyclical Humanae Vitae, and thirty years since the death of its author, Pope Paul VI.

The encyclical banning all forms of contraception eclipses the entire Second Council for this Pope. We have not yet really absorbed what a reactionary he is.

(Photo: Christophe Simon/Getty.)

24 Dec 2008 10:08 am

Freedom, Power, And Toleration

Noah Millman responds to Jacobs:

Religion (as opposed to conscience) is a corporate rather than an individual matter – Milton may have belonged to a sect of one, but most of us who are in any meaningful sense religious are members of corporate bodies extending through time and space. And corporate bodies to exist at all must define their boundaries: this is who we are, this is what we believe, this is how we behave. And this requires an implicitly if not explicitly excluded “not that.” This being the case, if freedom of religion means, most fundamentally, the freedom to be a heretic, it equally means the freedom to declare that the other guy is a heretic. In a very real sense, a social environment that is hostile to religious intolerance must necessarily be hostile to religious freedom.

And yet it always comes back to the impossibility of humankind ever being able to know the Godhead with sufficient certainty to use power to restrain the heretic. Again: the true believer will, in my view, seek freedom for God rather than power against heresy. To repeat Montaigne:

"Some impose upon the world beliefs they do not hold; others, more in number, impose beliefs upon themselves, not being able to penetrate into what it really is to believe."

And others believe.

24 Dec 2008 09:09 am

My YouTube Of The Year

Whenever I find myself being quizzed about the new media and what it all means - and it happens all the time these days - I find myself thinking back to Max and Gabe. No one ever captured the spirit and essence the way they did:

24 Dec 2008 07:52 am

Is God Nice?

Alan Jacobs considers Philip Jenkins' call for interreligious dialogue:

What always fascinates me about these arguments is that, in their focus on how proponents of different religions can get along, they invariably forget to raise the issue that for most religious believers is the central one: truth. If “intolerance” of other religions means denying that they are equally valid means of accessing the divine, that’s only a bad thing if all religions are equally valid means of accessing the divine — but that is just the point at issue. The constant and never-questioned assumption of people like Jenkins is that, if there is a God, that God will be tolerant and open-minded and accepting of a great variety of ways of trying to get to Him or Her or It. But as far as I can tell, the only reason for believing in so all-embracing a God is that we’d prefer to. Looking around at the world — the natural world as well as the human world — I do see some reasons (none of them definitive, of course) for believing in a God, but I don't see much warrant for believing in a God who is nice.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

23 Dec 2008 11:48 pm

Cheney Keeps Speaking

And the lies keep coming:

The efficacy of torture is not a close question anywhere outside of Fox television anymore. Darius Rejali has definitively studied the question and showed that torture does not elicit truthful confessions. In his book How To Break a Terrorist, former interrogator Matthew Alexander agrees that abusive interrogation techniques don't work and endanger Americans. FBI Director Robert Mueller recently told Vanity Fair's David Rose that he doesn't "believe it to be the case" that enhanced interrogation stopped any attacks on America. And the stunning bipartisan report issued earlier this month by the Senate armed services committee confirms that lawyers in every branch of the military consistently warned top Bush officials that torture wasn't effective. The handful of people—including Dick Cheney—who are still blathering about how well torture works do so in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

Then this astonishing denial of fact:

Some of his finest overstatements of this past week include the assertion that those prisoners still left at Guantanamo Bay represent "the hard-core." Oh good grief. Even the CIA stopped believing that hooey six years ago.

Anyone who believes that Gitmo actually isolated "the worst of the worst" and that those who remain are a) all guilty or b) the "hard-core" would not be allowed to pass a basic news quiz. Yet this man was de facto president for eight years.

The hardcore torture advocates like Cheney were always alone among those who had any actual idea of how the world works. What Cheney lacked in a grip on reality he sadly made up with such bravura certainty and bureaucratic shamelessness that an entire administration went along for eight long years.

Prosecute him.

23 Dec 2008 05:24 pm

Faces Of The Day

Choristers from the Salisbury Cathedral Choir light candles as they leave the vestry to practice ahead of the midnight service that will be held in the Cathedral marking Christmas Eve on December 23, 2008 in Salisbury, England. It will be the 750th year that Christmas has been celebrated in the cathedral after it was dedicated in 1258. It is thought that the foundation of the choir stretches back even further with evidence of the foundation of a song school in Salisbury as early as the 11th century. By Matt Cardy/Getty.

23 Dec 2008 04:56 pm

"Weirdoes And Creeps"

Hitchens tackles the Warren dust up:

...if the speaker says that heaven is a real place but that you will not get there if you are Jewish, or that Mormonism is a cult and a false religion but that other churches and faiths are the genuine article, then you know that the bigot has spoken. That's all in a day's work for the wonderful world of the American evangelical community, and one wishes them all the best of luck in their energetic fundraising and their happy-clappy Sunday "Churchianity" mega-feel-good fiestas. However, do we want these weirdos and creeps officiating in any capacity at the inauguration of the next president of the United States?

Heather Mac Donald differs. You all know what I think by now: it's time for some eggnog.

(Actually, I find eggnog disgusting. Have you tried the new honey Jagermeister?)

23 Dec 2008 03:46 pm

Bears In Games

A video podcast blog - about big hairy, bearded guys playing and featured in video games. Niche marketing. But what a niche.

23 Dec 2008 02:50 pm

I, Nanny

The robot babysitters are coming:

Models now on the market range from the Hello Kitty robot — "perfect ... for whoever does not have a lot time to stay with child," proclaims a vendor — to NEC's PaPeRo, which tells jokes, gives quizzes and uses radio-frequency identification chips to track kids. In another generation, these sophisticated machines will likely seem quaint.

"The question is, if robots could take care of your children, would you let them?" said [Clifford Nass, director of Stanford's Communications Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab].

Continue reading "I, Nanny" »

23 Dec 2008 02:31 pm

The View From Your Window

St. Andrews, Scotland, 8 am.

23 Dec 2008 02:24 pm

Keeping Government At Bay

Megan believes the government shouldn't and can't successfully refinance people's mortgages:

Whether or not it should, there are certainly situations where the government can prop up prices artificially. But the housing market is too big, and too dislocated, for that to work at this point. The supply curve and the demand curve will find each other--and given the overhang of new construction, I'd guess that in the near future, they'll meet at a point even lower than we're seeing now.

Josh Marshall doesn't want a bailout of real estate developers either.

23 Dec 2008 01:51 pm

The Year Of The eBook?

Gregory Cowles reflects:

Whatever else it’s remembered for in the publishing industry, 2008 may be remembered as the year that e-books finally caught on. Kindles are a regular sight on my train these days, and seem likely to become as ubiquitous as iPods: due to unexpected demand (or shrewd marketing?) Amazon sold out well before the holidays and established a Kindle waiting list, elevating the device to the vaunted commercial realm of Birkin bags and Tickle-Me-Elmos. Meanwhile, executives at one publishing house recently told me they now read all of their manuscript submissions on Sony Readers, not paper, and they may eliminate bound galleys in favor of electronic review copies.

(Hat tip: Jacobs)

23 Dec 2008 01:44 pm

The Conservative Sole

The soon-to-be-former-president stimulates the Turkish economy:

The shoe hurled at President George W. Bush has sent sales soaring at the Turkish maker as orders pour in from Iraq, the U.S. and Iran.

The brown, thick-soled “Model 271” may soon be renamed “The Bush Shoe” or “Bye-Bye Bush,” Ramazan Baydan, who owns the Istanbul-based producer Baydan Ayakkabicilik San. & Tic., said in a telephone interview today.

“We’ve been selling these shoes for years but, thanks to Bush, orders are flying in like crazy,” he said. “We’ve even hired an agency to look at television advertising.”

(Hat tip: Tyler)

23 Dec 2008 01:21 pm

The Year Of Obama III

It's important to remember, it seems to me, that this wasn't the year about Obama. Something else was going on, and the candidate himself identified it as early as June 2007:

The truth is, one man cannot make a movement. No single law can erase the prejudice in the heart of a child who hangs a noose on a tree. Or in the callousness of a prosecutor who bypasses justice in the pursuit of vengeance. No one leader, no matter how shrewd, or experienced, or inspirational, can prevent teenagers from killing other teenagers in the streets of our cities, or free our neighborhoods from the grip of homelessness, or make real the promise of opportunity and equality for every citizen.

Only a country can do those things. Only this country can do those things. That's why if you give me the chance to serve this nation, the most important thing I will do as your President is to ask you to serve this country, too. The most important thing I'll do is to call on you every day to take a risk, and do your part to carry this movement forward. Against deep odds and great cynicism I will ask you to believe that we can right the wrong we see in America. I say this particularly to the young people who are listening today. ...

I know that you believe it's possible too.

(Photo: from an Obama rally in Iowa, a long, long time ago now, by Scott Olson/Getty.)

23 Dec 2008 12:58 pm

The Year Of Obama II

One returns to a speech that will, I suspect, be remembered long after the Obama presidency is over. Here's a trip down 2008 lane from the Dish, grappling with the Wright speech. It brings up themes reignited by the Warren selection:

Much of Wright's worldview I find repugnant. But some of it I also find inspiring. And in trying to understand it in its totality, I do try to think about the racial context and history of America. And so there is a difference, pace Jonah, between a white charlatan like Robertson who chooses to demonize minorities in the name of Jesus and a pastor like Wright who vents rage against a majority that has, in the not-so-distant past, given African-Americans every reason to be angry. And there is a difference between a white politician (like Bush) who seeks to enjoy the support of a Robertson without ever challenging his ugly dimensions and a black politician who, while remaining in a congregation like Wright's, nonetheless has written and spoken as movingly as anyone in my lifetime about the need for racial reconciliation and understanding.

Maybe this is a bridge too far. But in thinking about Obama for this past year, and reading the subtle critique of, say, Shelby Steele, as well as the palpable racial discomfort of some white conservatives, I have to say that it is precisely the wide span of Obama's bridge that makes me admire him. He has refused to disown Wright, while also refusing to endorse all of his message. You can call that opportunistic or expedient or cynical. You can also call it intelligent and brave and principled.

Refusing to disown Wright must now be seen in the context of refusing to disown Warren. Continued here. The full text of Obama's speech here.

23 Dec 2008 12:22 pm

Christmas Hathos Nominee

Mitzi Gaynor, where hathos and camp collide:

23 Dec 2008 12:06 pm

Dump Yglesias?

Ta-Nehisi:

...why the eff does Yglesias still get an award named after him? He jumped ship! Dump his ass!!

The award was named after him long before he ever worked at the Atlantic. Frum is edging out Peggy Noonan at the moment.

23 Dec 2008 11:38 am

Full Of Sound And Beauty, Signifying Nothing

This column on why Sarah Palin is the "conservative of the year" is by Ann Coulter. It is an entire poem dedicated to someone regarded as the savior of conservatism in which not a single actual policy response to a single contemporary problem is discussed.

In Palin and Coulter, you have the two sides of contemporary conservatism: identity politics and malice. That's why they lost. They had nothing substantive to say.

23 Dec 2008 11:29 am

It's Nearly Lunchtime: Procrastinate!

The top mental health breaks of the year have been clinically tested to be among the best ways to put off your pre-Christmas email or wrapping duties. Babies, hedgehogs, shark-surfing: think of it as a year-end clip show without any ads.

23 Dec 2008 11:09 am

He'll Use The Lincoln Bible

It will be the first time it has been used since its original use in 1861. From Lincoln's hand to the first black president's. The arc of history is long ...

23 Dec 2008 11:05 am

'Tis The Season

The leading Mental Health Break is the following:

A reader emails to note another celebrated moment of canine love:

In 1924, Hachikō, an akito dog, was brought to Tokyo by his owner, Hidesaburō Ueno, a professor in the agriculture department at the University of Tokyo. During his owner's life Hachikō saw him off from the front door and greeted him at the end of the day at the nearby Shibuya Station.

The pair continued their daily routine until May 1925, when Professor Ueno didn't return on the usual train one evening. The professor had suffered a stroke at the university that day. He died and never returned to the train station where his friend was waiting. Hachikō was given away after his master's death, but he routinely escaped, showing up again and again at his old home. After time, Hachikō apparently realized that Professor Ueno no longer lived at the house. So he went to look for his master at the train station where he had accompanied him so many times before. Each day, Hachikō waited for Professor Ueno to return. And each day he didn't see his friend among the commuters at the station.

The permanent fixture at the train station that was Hachikō attracted the attention of other commuters. Many of the people who frequented the Shibuya train station had seen Hachikō and Professor Ueno together each day. Realizing that Hachikō waited in vigil for his dead master, their hearts were touched. They brought Hachikō treats and food to nourish him during his wait.

This continued for 10 years, with Hachikō appearing only in the evening time, precisely when the train was due at the station.

Yes, I know he wasn't a beagle, but by Year 7, he was doing it for the treats, you fools!

23 Dec 2008 07:33 am

Benedict and Warren

John Aravosis has noted that the Saddleback website posting that “someone unwilling to repent for their homosexual lifestyle would not be accepted as a member at Saddleback” has been removed. I have to say that this did not strike me as in any way notable, especially since the note also insisted that gays were always welcome to attend services. And one wonders how that makes Warren different from any Catholic bishop let alone the Pope. My own church teaches that I am barred from full communion because of my civil marriage to another man, although it does not bar me from attending mass.

And Benedict has gone out of his way to issue what can only be called calculated affronts to the dignity of homosexual persons. Yesterday's statement that humankind needs "saving" from homosexuality, the way the rainforests need saving from being raped and pillaged is his latest provocation. His first-in-history attempt to ban even celibate gay seminarians is easily the most draconian and hateful anti-gay policy of any church, stigmatizing them even if they agree to obey every stricture the church places on them. His own complicity in covering up the abuse of children and evil protection of Father Maciel make his attacks on the dignity of homosexuals all the more repulsive.

And yet those of us born into this Communion and in love with the Jesus of the Gospels have to find a way to live in this place with our fellow Catholics in charity. At least Warren appears open to dialogue, rather than recoiling in fear and loathing. In that he is somewhat more Christian than this Pope.

Monday, December 22, 2008

22 Dec 2008 08:41 pm

Polls Are Still Open

The number of votes for this year's awards is already the largest in the history of the Dish. We've had over half a million pageviews today and thousands upon thousands of votes in the different categories. It was, I suspect, the sheer quality of the bile - especially against Obama - that enlivened the competition this year. The Awards are a reminder of just how nasty, fearful and unhinged the resistance to Obama became at times.

Maybe that's why the Dish's Mental Health Breaks proved to be so popular as well this year. And for the first time, you can vote for your favorite. (My own personal favorite is now in a comfortable lead.) Plus: Hewitt! Wonderful Hewitt! Voting is still open: so click the links and you can vote for the 2008 Malkin Award, Moore Award, Von Hoffmann Award, Yglesias Award, and Poseur Alert. Don't forget the new Hewitt Award and the Mental Health Break Of The Year. Award glossary here.

22 Dec 2008 07:18 pm

The Choice Is Ours Now

The journey that Melissa Etheridge has taken is my own:

Brothers and sisters the choice is ours now. We have the world's attention. We have the capability to create change, awesome change in this world, but before we change minds we must change hearts. Sure, there are plenty of hateful people who will always hold on to their bigotry like a child to a blanket. But there are also good people out there, Christian and otherwise that are beginning to listen. They don't hate us, they fear change. Maybe in our anger, as we consider marches and boycotts, perhaps we can consider stretching out our hands. Maybe instead of marching on his church, we can show up en mass and volunteer for one of the many organizations affiliated with his church that work for HIV/AIDS causes all around the world.

Maybe if they get to know us, they wont fear us.

I know, call me a dreamer, but I feel a new era is upon us.

We are the ones we've been waiting for. And what we did this past year needs to be a beginning, not an end.

22 Dec 2008 05:02 pm

22 Dec 2008 03:52 pm

The Truth About Tom Cruise

In a nutshell:

I can't name another American icon who has been so popular, and for so long, and yet so hard to like, and for so long.

And he's already used up the autism and Good Nazi Oscar options.

22 Dec 2008 03:25 pm

2nd

A description of a photo project by Sandy Nicholson:

2nd: The Face Of Defeat is a collection of photos by Sandy Nicholson of those who came in second place or, if you prefer, lost first. Either way, it makes for a complex set of portraits featuring the upset, the stoic, the bloody, and the shocked accompanied by their own words, all captured moments after their loss.

See more images here.