Leon Wieseltier has a meandering, conceptually confused, pointless essay in the upcoming issue of TNR sort of criticizing the latest loathsome hit piece from Bill Kristol, sort of defending it, but mostly subjecting readers to a masturbatory public display that goes on for just about 1000 words and feels like ten times that number. As Wieseltier winds things out having proved nothing, argued for nothing, expressed no worthwhile insight, and informed no one of anything, the masochistic reader who makes it all the way to the end is treated to this:

And now for the grossly undialectical bit. The ink on the Times was not yet dry when Andrew Sullivan rushed to the defense of his idol, I mean Obama. When one types all the time, sooner or later everything will be typed, and so Sullivan, in his fury against Kristol, typed this: "A non-Christian manipulator of Christianity is calling a Christian a liar about his faith." Ponder that early adjective. It is Jew baiting. I was not aware that only Christians can judge Christians, or that there are things about which a Jew cannot call a Christian a liar. If Kristol is wrong about Obama, it is not because Kristol is a Jew. So this fills me with a certain paschal wrath. Nice little blog you have there, Obama boy. Pity if frogs or locusts should happen to it. Let my people be!

"Ponder that early adjective," Wieseltier writes, referring to Sullivan's description ofThe Most Preposterously Overrated Cocktail Conversationalist On Earth Kristol as a "non-Christian manipulator of Christianity." If you're not determined to be a willfully obtuse prick, then also ponder the noun it modifies --- "manipulator." What Sullivan is obviously saying is that Kristol's affectation of taking offense to a slight to Christianity is a transparently cynical imposture on the part of a man who in fact regards sincere Christians as an alien species that happens to be useful in serving his electoral ends. Why is it obvious that that's what Sullivan is saying? That question has an overdetermined answer: It's obvious because, agree or disagree with him generally, Sullivan is obviously not a "Jew baiter" of any kind; it's obvious because the context of Sullivan's criticism of Kristol makes it obvious; and most of all, it's obvious because no honest, competent, minimally-educated speaker of the English language could interpret Sullivan any other way.

However, if, like Wieseltier, you'll let nothing stop you from being a willfully obtuse prick --- say, because you think it's okay to smear somebody as an antisemite if that'll help even scores in a twelve-year-old schoolyard feud, and your editor doesn't have the guts to tell you "no" --- you'll hardly let little things like intellectual defensibility or fundamental decency get in the way of a satisfying slander. And if you've gotten that far thinking your case that Sullivan is a bigot could persuade anyone who read the original quote --- or didn't read the original but knows anything about Sullivan, or didn't read the original and doesn't know anything about Sullivan but knows the definitions of English words and idioms and the syntactic rules combining them into sentences --- you're not terribly likely to notice the irony of first accusing a 44-year-old married gay man with degrees from Oxford and Harvard of "Jew baiting" and then calling him a "boy."

Of course Wieseltier didn't intend an anti-gay slur (except in the accidental allusion to Obama girl and the implication it entails that Sullivan's attraction to Obama's candidacy is sexual). All Wieseltier intended was an ugly cheap shot at an old enemy, and was so intent on getting the cheap shot off that he didn't mind its being a witless non-sequitur --- though nothing in the Wieseltier piece follows from anything else, so this particular digression into inanity isn't necessarily suggestive. But never mind any of that. Let's adopt Wieseltier's interpretive standards. By those lights, Wieseltier has leveled a disgraceful swipe at the dignity of gay men and women, and should be held accountable for it.

There is no reasonable interpretive standard under which Wieseltier is guilty of gay-baiting, and even if Wieseltier can't be bothered to extend intepretive charity, you and I are better than Wieseltier and should do so. No matter how forgiving our interpretive standards, however, there is no way of getting Wieseltier off the hook for his suggestion that the smear of Sullivan is the only "grossly undialectical bit" in his essay. No public intellectual is able to pack more elementary philosophical errors --- mistakes for which a sophomore concentrator in a rigorous course would be swiftly reprimanded and never make again --- into fewer column inches than Wieseltier, and his latest conceptual trainwreck doesn't fail to deliver its share of whoppers. I'll mention only one, which is perhaps the most telling. Discussing the motives behind religious belief, Wieseltier writes that "It is because suffering is so hospitable to illusion that philosophers have often made an ideal out of lucidity."

Sorry no, that's simply wrong. The first consciously philosophical embrace of lucidity as an ideal comes from Plato's Republic, in the form of an argument that allowing standards of lucidity to grow lax will leave the politeia vulnerable to political demagogues. Nearer to our own time, when philosophy adopted lucidity as a necessary but insufficient standard for getting to take part in the enterprise at all, it was as part of a turn away from metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics, and towards language and logic, on the grounds that slovenly logic had produced philosophical abortions like, say, most of the corpus of Continental post-Hegelianism at the turn of the twentieth century. For both the Greek logicians and the founders of analytic philosophy --- the schools that accord lucidity a place among the chief philosophical virtues --- lucidity is virtuous because it is necessary for doing good philosophy. Ponderous introspection about notions like "the nature of suffering," on the other hand, tends to be a hallmark of excruciatingly bad philosophy. (Not that it's impossible to do that sort of thing well; but the odds are stacked against it.)

Why is this confusion important? Because it dramatically sharpens the contrast between what Leon Wieseltier thinks he knows, and what Leon Wieseltier actually knows. It takes a staggering ignorance of the philosophical tradition to make Wieseltier's claim, an ignorance that pervades virtually everything he writes about the subject. (Read this if you think that's hyperbole.) Which raises the question, How could someone who knows so little philosophy and is so bad at the philosophy he does know conjure up the arrogance required to make embarrassingly misinformed, sweeping generalizations about it? In researching the origins of Wieseltier's beef with Sullivan (the rumor is that Wieseltier helped engineer Sullivan's ouster from TNR), I think I found the answer in an old Sam Tanenhaus profile of the pompous fraud:

A prestigious Kellett fellowship took Wieseltier to Oxford in the fall of 1974 to study philosophy, but when he got there ''philosophy at Oxford was in transports of logical notation,'' he remembers. ''I had no interest in studying mathematical logic or the logical analysis of language.''

Allow me to translate that: Real philosophy is hard, so rather than even try to do it, Wieseltier spent his fellowship sucking up to Isaiah Berlin and quit grad school a few years later, at a time when it was still possible to become a celebrated public intellectual without having expertise in anything. Over the next thirty some-odd years, having turned enough clever phrases and misappropriated enough philosophical concepts to secure a reputation among easily deceived people as a learned man --- thereby validating Plato's warning --- Wieseltier came to believe his own delusional self-flattery.

Which brings us, finally, to the voice in the whirlwind coda to the smear of Sullivan, wherein he enjoins God to bring plagues down on Sullivan's blog. Since the first four paragraphs of the essay have no point, the puerile score-settling of the last paragraph at least serves to lend them a vicarious point. But why leave it at that? Surely Wieseltier could not be expected to pass up the opportunity the calendar provides him to compare himself to Moses --- or, as he would prefer, gives Moses the opportunity to be compared to Leon Wieseltier.

In the run-up to the start of the primary season, my fellow Brit blogger Andrew Sullivan somehow managed to endorse both John McCain and Ron Paul as the least worst alternatives in an uninspiring GOP field (eventually plumping for Paul).  But despite nominally being a conservative, there’s no doubt where Sullivan’s main hopes for the presidency rest; a series of gushing articles in recent weeks (most notably in December’s Atlantic magazine) confirm him as a fully signed-up Obamaniac. On his own blog, Sullivan even describes “what can only be called euphoria from America's allies and friends around the world at the prospect of an Obama presidency”. That strikes me as something of an exaggeration, to put it mildly, but there is no doubt that the eyes of the world are glued to this US election like no other that I can remember.

Of course, it’s not simply, or even mostly, down to Obama (whom my spellchecker obstinately insists on trying to rename ‘Osama’ – expect Fox to use that excuse some time soon). In fact, there are a number of reasons for the heightened interest. First and most obvious, the race is incredibly hard to call. A week or two ago the Dem nomination was Hillary’s to lose; at time of writing this she may be only hours from (effectively) being out. The Republicans, meanwhile, have eschewed the boy-girl matchup in favour of an all-male threeway; a sweaty tangle of shiny teeth, macho postures and barking mad attack ads that most outsiders find at once utterly baffling and totally compelling (Chuck Norris? I mean, what?).

Second, and probably equally obvious now I think about it, a lot of people over here would get excited about a sheep’s bladder on a stick if it was running to replace the current incumbent. Now, I have no time whatsoever for the kneejerk Bush-hatred of the European Left, which blames this administration, directly or indirectly, for everything from Benazir Bhutto’s assassination to David Beckham’s knackered knee; but you don’t have to be a alfalfa-munching Kos reader to see that most of the world will breathe a hearty sigh of relief in 54 weeks’ time. Of course, as most of the runners and riders are relatively unknown beyond your shores, observers of all political stripes can pin their own hopes and hobby-horses onto Bush’s departure; the new guy is going to disappoint a lot of people very quickly. But for the time being, people are – if not exactly “euphoric”, in Sullivan’s phrase – certainly optimistic. 

However, I think there’s something else at work here, too. The typical supercilious European view of the US political system (shared by many in Britain) is that it’s irredeemably broken; a messy combination of special interests, religious nutjobs and insane amounts of money weighing down a drawn-out process that seems to take about three years, and which usually conspires to pick the wrong guy anyway (and it is always a guy - and a Protestant white guy, at that), and then holds him hostage to the lobby groups who got him elected (big oil, the labour unions, the NRA and – of course – the Israel lobby).

Like all caricatures, it only works because there’s more than a hint of truth informing the broad brush strokes. But there’s a growing realisation that behind our sneering view of American-style democracy, something else is at work. There is, at least on the face of it, a healthy optimism about the political process in the US – yes, yes, it may only be skin-deep, and challenged daily by candidates whose interest lies in trading on fear rather than hope, but it still makes a refreshing change from the world-weary scepticism with which we greet every utterance from our own politicians in this country. Part of that is down to the possibility that a year from now we will see the first black President, or first woman. We beat you to the latter, of course, but our politics is still every bit as dominated by average white guys as it once was.

And worse is the stifling uniformity that has descended on the British political system in the post-ideological age. Tony Blair apes Conservative themes and policies, Gordon Brown poses with the hated [by him] Thatcher in Downing Street and steals Tory policies for short-term gain, and for their own part our Conservatives go out of their way to try and appropriate the rhetoric and language of the “progressive” left. To witness the slightly archaic system of caucuses and primaries that seem to be propelling Barack Obama past the slick Clinton machine, or seeing Huckabee giving Mitt Romney a richly deserved kicking in Iowa despite spending a fraction of his rival’s budget, is inevitably to look at our own stagnant political systems - in which we are lectured by increasingly similar-looking social democrats, who look like they should be selling homes but whom we would not dream of inviting into our own - and wonder if we’ve got things so great here.

You cannot, when reading Sullivan,
Help but allow your own head to spin;
From a Tory for war,
To a Ronulan bore,
His bullshit is really not hard to pin: 

But the deeper reason to support Ron Paul is a simple one. The great forgotten principles of the current Republican party are freedom and toleration. Paul's federalism, his deep suspicion of Washington power, his resistance to government spending, debt and inflation, his ability to grasp that not all human problems are soluble, least of all by government: these are principles that made me a conservative in the first place. No one in the current field articulates them as clearly and understands them as deeply as Paul. He is a man of faith who nonetheless sees a clear line between religion and politics. More than all this, he has somehow ignited a new movement of those who love freedom and want to rescue it from the do-gooding bromides of the left and the Christianist meddling of the right. The Paulites' enthusiasm for liberty, their unapologetic defense of core conservative principles, their awareness that in the new millennium, these principles of small government, self-reliance, cultural pluralism, and a humble foreign policy are more necessary than ever - no lover of liberty can stand by and not join them.

Why do I think that if Matt Yglesias hadn't been so good as to post Ron Kampeas' second letter -- which I forwarded to Matt -- Andrew Sullivan would have gone on "miss[ing] this email in my in-tray"?

Anyway, it's nice that Andrew acknowledges that Dan Sieradski wasn't wrong about his characterization of Paul's communication with the JTA when Dan originally wrote and published his piece. However, a simple retraction wasn't enough. The rest of his post is of a piece with Sullivan's if-I-blog-it-it-must-be-true burbles of late:

The assertion that Ron Paul "doesn't take phone calls from Jews" was designed to be, and remains, a slur. I'd give back the $500. Paul can afford it, at this point. And it would surely help diminish the neocon attacks that Paul is an anti-Semite (a claim that nonetheless remains indisputably true of Pat Robertson).

Paul will surely take calls from Jews when it's to publicize the Jewish support for his campaign. But as Dan has made abundantly clear by now, Paul has no time for interviews when the purpose is to ask about the gothic characters lining his coffers.

As for "neocon attacks that Paul is an anti-Semite," where have these occurred besides in the imagination of Andrew Sullivan? Daniel Sieradski, who once told me he protested the Iraq war "every step of the way," can hardly be described as a neocon. (Frankly, I don't know what to call his peculiar brand of politics.) Nor does his article claim that Ron Paul is an anti-Semite. Here is how Dan ends his piece:

I had intended to write a story about the Congressman, and to provide him with the opportunity to distance himself from his extremist supporters, to clarify his position on Israel, and to state his case to the Jewish community. Yet, after three weeks of repeated telephone calls, two chats with his Deputy Communications Director, and several left voicemail messages, I have yet to receive a callback to schedule an interview.

Which leads me to conclude the following about the Congressman from Texas: Ron Paul will take money from Nazis. But he won’t take telephone calls from Jews.

It's a sign of the intellectual paltriness of the blogosphere that one is forced to descend to such depths of literal-mindedness, but allow me the question: Who can possibly claim to know who Ron Paul will take calls from except Ron Paul himself? And why should Sieradski not raise an eyebrow at Paul's silence when Sieradski provided the congressman with an ample window of opportunity to set the record straight on a minor scandal of his campaign?

Ah, yes. Keeping a check cut by neo-Nazis is all about the categorical imperative. A politician who boasts that he is not beholden to any special interest and then presumes to take money from all of them is acting on high-minded principle. But it's the same high-minded principle of the village whore who promises never to fall in love with any of her clients.

Yesterday, Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency emailed Andrew Sullivan regarding our lead story, "Ron Paul's Jewish Problem." In that article, Dan Sieradski said that the Paul camp would not return the JTA's phone calls in relation to a $500 donation given to it by Don Black, the founder of Stormfront, a white supremacist organization:

This is kind of sensitive for me. My colleague, Daniel Sieradski, posted the "takes money from Nazis, won't take calls from Jews" comment on his personal blog. On the other hand, he describes his exchanges with the Paul campaign in his capacity as a JTA staffer.

The problem with all this, is that the Paul campaign WAS responsive, giving my intern here, Beth Young, an exclusive statement on where Paul stands on Israel for a story we posted yesterday (the day Dan posted his blog item.) (I have no idea why Dan was pursuing his own story when he should have known DC was pursuing a story, but that's a boring internal JTA matter.)

I pointed this out to my boss, asking her the best way to address the anomaly; she suggested (and I think this is wisest), that I simply point out that Dan's blog posting is wrong, Paul does talk to the JTA - and point out Beth's story.

Which is what I'm doing.

After talking to Sieradski, Kampeas forwarded Jewcy his second letter to Sullivan, which Sullivan has yet to post on his blog. Here it is in its entirety, reprinted with Kampeas' permission:

Andrew-
I wanted to clarify that I wrongly faulted Dan Sieradski in this. He posted his original comment a couple of weeks ago on his personal blog, before Paul had replied to our request. Jewcy reposted it Nov. 9, the day after I first reported Ron Paul's statement in a short article unbylined article for JTA. Dan upated his post and alerted bloggers who had picked up the original item as soon as he was aware of Paul's statement. I'm not acquainted with the mechanics of the blogosphere, but just like in journalism (or anything else) I guess it's not hard for one hand to do something without the other being aware.

And thanks for posting - between your alerting me and my seeing it, it was the fourth item on your blog. And I thought wire service writing was fast.

Ron

Andrew Sullivan reprints an e-mail from the JTA’s Washington Bureau Chief, Ron Kampeas, under the heading “Kirchick and Sieradski: Factually Wrong On Ron Paul.” Says Kampeas: 

The problem with all this, is that the Paul campaign WAS responsive, giving my intern here, Beth Young, an exclusive statement on where Paul stands on Israel for a story we posted yesterday (the day Dan posted his blog item.)

But that’s not when Dan posted the story. He initially published it on his personal site November 1, over two weeks before the Paul campaign got in touch with Beth Young. We poached it for Jewcy and put it up it November 9. It’s been on the site ever since.

Yesterday afternoon, feeling that the Paul story deserved more attention, we decided to put it in the lead space (still dated November 9, by the way, because that’s when it was first published.) Not long after it went up, Dan contacted us to say that the JTA had just published a Paul article. We updated the story and posted a link to the JTA piece, but not before Ron Kampeas of the JTA had contacted Sullivan.

Dan, meanwhile, has addressed the issue on his personal site. And Ron Paul’s campaign is still $500 richer thanks to a neo-Nazi.

Jamie has already alluded and linked to the big, sopping valentine Andrew Sullivan delivers to Barack Obama in next month's Atlantic. At the risk of affirming an official Shvitz position on this cover story, let me just say that it's one of the most homiletic and trite pieces of political journalism I've seen in a long time.

One is told, repeatedly, that Obama is the cure for what ails America because he's post-Boomer, multiracial and has an evocative full name that will cause some pleasantly puzzled expressions in Lahore and Jakarta. The man is the message, in other words, and never you mind about his policies, experience or whether or not he'd make the best wartime commander-in-chief.

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy. The war on Islamist terror, after all, is two-pronged: a function of both hard power and soft power. We have seen the potential of hard power in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. We have also seen its inherent weaknesses in Iraq, and its profound limitations in winning a long war against radical Islam. The next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard power to isolate the enemy, to fight where necessary, but also to create an ideological template that works to the West’s advantage over the long haul. There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

Now consider this hypothetical. Long before sacred terror afflicted these shores or most Americans had even heard the name Osama Bin Laden, a civil war was raging in the Islamic world that pitted the theologically pure against the reformist, the moderate and the apostate. We've seen how Abu Musab-al Zarqawi treated his co-religionists, who weren't up to snuff and were thus "polytheists" worse than Jews and Christians. In Darfur, a genocide that has been blessed and encouraged by Bin Laden, is currently underway to eliminate black Muslims whom their Arab Muslim killers refer to as "niggers." If we're to judge a candidate for high office on the basis of his gene pool, I can't think of a better rallying point for Al Qaeda than a "brown-skinned man whose father was an African" and "attended a majority-Muslim school," then came to America and discovered Jesus Christ. If you thought hope was powerful, wait until you see the audacity of dashed expectations.

Obama's heritage neither qualifies nor disqualifies him as president any more than Hillary's protean head of hair does her. And, as if to underscore the nonsense of his previous observation, Sullivan goes on to laud Obama for taking up his non-Muslim faith:

The best speech Obama has ever given was not his famous 2004 convention address, but a June 2007 speech in Connecticut. In it, he described his religious conversion:

One Sunday, I put on one of the few clean jackets I had, and went over to Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street on the South Side of Chicago. And I heard Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright deliver a sermon called “The Audacity of Hope.” And during the course of that sermon, he introduced me to someone named Jesus Christ. I learned that my sins could be redeemed. I learned that those things I was too weak to accomplish myself, he would accomplish with me if I placed my trust in him. And in time, I came to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world and in my own life.

It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity one day and affirm my Christian faith. It came about as a choice and not an epiphany. I didn’t fall out in church, as folks sometimes do. The questions I had didn’t magically disappear. The skeptical bent of my mind didn’t suddenly vanish. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt I heard God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to his will, and dedicated myself to discovering his truth and carrying out his works.

That would be the same Rev. Wright who traveled to Libya in 1984 with Louis Farrakhan to gladhand Muammar Qaddafi, and who spoke of 9/11 with the same roosting chickens rhetoric that has now become cliche on the radical fringes. Obama's spiritual awakening comes in a distant second to his political opportunism, since he has an odd way of rewarding his favorite apostle and phrasemaker. He disinvited Wright from delivering a public invocation last February, on the exact date he announced his White House run. According to one of the Obama's spokesmen, "Senator Obama is proud of his pastor and his church, but because of the type of attention it was receiving on blogs and conservative talk shows, he decided to avoid having statements and beliefs being used out of context and forcing the entire church to defend itself." Well, why shouldn't a church led by a man of questionable motive and political affiliations not have to defend itself when it is openly credited with imbuing the divine spark in a possible leader of the free world? If Wright had such a impact that Obama took up religion because of him, isn't he deserving of something more than this calculated and weasely distancing? In short, how is Obama's religiosity any different, or any less meretricious, than that of the other candidates?

I don't doubt that Obama is the freshest national politician the U.S. has seen in a quite a while. I admire him a lot and -- glib Skype conversations with my co-editor aside -- I still haven't made up my mind not to vote for him. But what benefits him and the country least are the kinds of shallow and sanctimonious hosannas that depict him as a saintly figure. Sullivan is good enough to confess that he's suffering from a kind of electoral affirmative action impulse that esteems black religiosity for being just that. Fine. But when it comes time for the 101st Airborne to touch down on Waziristan, or garrisons to be shuffled in Iraq so as to maintain the hard-won security that's been established there, I suspect we'll need tougher metrics for assessing leadership than smiling white condescension.

Sullivan thinks the Stewart/Colbert moment will ebb:

This moment will pass, of course. One gets a sense that it may be peaking already. For satire to work well, it has to let off the collective steam of a nation. It needs a po-faced, Cheney-style establishment to mock. As the religion-drenched era of Republican hegemony wanes a little, the satirists begin to become part of the establishment themselves. Colbert’s presidential run may be a step too far. Perhaps, in retrospect, these last, ragged months of the Bush administration will come to seem the high-water mark of the Colbert-Stewart tide. But it’s been a joy while it’s lasted.

Al Franken's mock presidential run was a publishing stunt too far, if you recall, which you probably don't. 

As Jamie already mentioned, the verboten subject in talking about Burma is China -- namely, its responsibility to rein in the very junta it arms to the teeth. (90% of Burmese military weapons come from Beijing).

Jim Fallows, Steven Clemons and Matt Yglesias all agree that the United States is hobbled by its failed interventionism, and thus has no ability -- much less any moral credibility -- to coax the next superpower into doing anything it doesn't want to do. As such, couldn't we quit the saber-rattling over human rights violations in Rangoon already? (If you're Yglesias, any expression of outrage over the bludgeoning of monks, the on-camera assassination of a foreign journalist, and the categorical shut-down of an entire country's Internet access is coterminous with hawkish rhetoric, in which the new prey is -- China.)

If I had to nominate the paragraph that best encapsulates this new vogue of realist thinking by wide swaths of the American left, it would be this one by Clemons:

But that does not mean that China will simply be America's puppet and will solve all of the problems we see in Burma, Darfur, and other parts of the globe because we have pressured it into doing so. China is a shrewd calculator of its interests. So too the United States used to be.

Judge of Nations, spare us yet. Lest we forget, lest we forget! I never thought I'd see the day that a foreign policy wonk waxed nostalgic about America's losing streak in the Great Game. "So too the United States used to be." Yes, in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Iraq, Indonesia, the Philippines, etc.

You'll find no mention in Clemons' post, by the way, of China's bald-faced facilitation of the genocide in Darfur out of the "shrewd calculation" of its oil interests. It's only that he "very much hope[s] that China does use influence that it can bring to bear on Sudan and the Burmese junta." This is like asking a rapist to lead a Take Back the Night rally before he stopped, you know, raping women.

It's not that the United States demands that China swoop down like an avenging angel to end the enslavement of democratic activists, or beat back the mass murder and displacement of hundreds of thousands of black African Muslims. It would be enough if China only stopped arming the enslavers and funding the mass murderers.

What feckless puppeteers we are to ask for that.

Just for the record, I only ever opened my yap about Scooter Libby because I found Andrew Sullivan's original take to be both ludicrous and hysterical. Now comes his clarification, responding to what my friend Jamie Kirchik wrote at TNR's The Plank (full disclosure: Jamie linked to my post "The Scooter Chronicles"):

I do not believe, as Jamie Kirchick asserts, that the commutation of Libby's sentence for perjury is a sign of creeping authoritarianism. I've said it's constitutional, but indefensible. My concern with authoritarianism is related to the Bush administration's claims that it has the right to detain any American or non-American anywhere in the world, detain them indefinitely without charges and torture them, if deemed necessary to national security; it is related to the use of signing statements that exempt the president from enforcing the laws; to wire-tapping Americans with no court oversight; and to the suspension of habeas corpus. I know Jamie seems utterly unconcerned by any of these things - and for good reason. We now know that neocons need not fear the justice system. They have a president who will exempt his ideological supporters from the rule of law.

Leaving aside for a minute how fast Jamie would find himself out of prison stripes by the grace of neoconservative infallibility, Andrew's elaboration hardly meshes with what he originally wrote in response to the commutation news, which was this:

"It is hard to think of an action more contemptuous of the rule of law - except for so many decisions made by this lawless president, acting as a monarch. De facto pardoning or commuting of a sentence was once a royal prerogative that even kings reserved for those they didn't know, convicted clearly unjustly, whose sentence had often largely been served. And yet Bush uses it in office for a friend, hours after the failure of his appeal, to protect his own political and legal liability for jeopardizing intelligence and compromising national security."

"Contemptuous of the rule of law," followed by a comparison to absolute monarchy... And we're to believe this was not uttered as a warning sign of "creeping authoritarianism" in Washington?

One of the more absurd gotchas in the aftermath of this affair has been to point out that a Republican Justice Department indicted, tried, and sentenced Libby, so clearly he must have done something really bad to command such categorical evidence against interest. Yet if a Republican president chooses to contradict his own judicial appointees or co-partisan prosecutors, how is this a sign, in itself, of ideological venality? Moreover, why are there so many registered Democrats lobbying on Libby's behalf, and for no other reason than they believe his prosecution was unlawful from the start?

Not that it should matter or that I should have to clear my throat with this, but I am with Andrew up to the hilt in opposing the Bush administration's policy of torture and domestic espionage and suspension of habeas corpus. But I remember when the kind of Burkean conservatism his Bloggy Lordship otherwise extols meant intellectual honesty and a careful use of language, not this silly promiscuity with semantics, evidently undone with the work of a keystroke.

I really haven't followed the case and its stultifying minutiae carefully, so I won't comment on the defendant's innocence or guilt. However, some statements are self-evidently silly and histrionic, and Andrew Sullivan has made the issuance of them his signature blog form:

It is hard to think of an action more contemptuous of the rule of law - except for so many decisions made by this lawless president, acting as a monarch. De facto pardoning or commuting of a sentence was once a royal prerogative that even kings reserved for those they didn't know, convicted clearly unjustly, whose sentence had often largely been served.  And yet Bush uses it in office for a friend, hours after the failure of his appeal, to protect his own political and legal liability for jeopardizing intelligence and compromising national security.

The phrase bandied around the Daily Dish for last twelve hours has been "rule of law." In what sense has this president violated such an adamantine concept with respect to Scooter Libby, exercising, as is his full constitutional right, the ability to pardon or grant clemency to convicted criminals? 

Timothy Noah -- surely another a beetle-browed agent of Dick Cheney's master plan -- fills in some of the abuse-of-power blanks that the Saint Sebastian of the Right evidently felt were too niggling to fill in himself:

Judge Reggie Walton went overboard in sentencing Libby to 30 months. This was about twice as long as the prison term recommended by the court's probation office, and if Libby hadn't been a high-ranking government official, there's a decent chance he would have gotten off with probation, a stiff fine, and likely disbarment. Walton gave Libby 30 months and a $250,000 fine, then further twisted the knife by denying Libby's routine request to delay the sentence while his lawyers appealed it. (Libby was duly assigned the federal prison register number 28301-016, but Libby's lawyers managed to move quickly enough to keep Libby out of the slammer until his appeal was denied on July 2, the same day Bush commuted his sentence.) The voluminous pleas for leniency from Libby's A-list friends seem to have annoyed Walton, who erred on the side of severity not in spite of Libby's high position in government but because of it. Walton wanted to make an example of him.

The term for Walton in conservative circles would be "activist judge." But far be it from the author of The Conservative Soul to know one when he sees it.

I wrote back in February that the surge was a viable strategy for securing Iraq because it had little to do with added troops but much to do with the attendant application of them as counterinsurgents. David Petraeus literally wrote the book on counterinsurgency, and while there is of course still carnage and misery in and around Baghdad, there have also been noticeable and marked improvements. Anbar Province, once the reptile pit of Al Qaeda, is virtually pacified now:

In Anbar, meanwhile, violence has dropped dramatically in recent months because of the cooperation of local tribes -- a trend that could allow for a smaller U.S. presence there in the future, Odierno said. "We have less attacks in Anbar than in any other region," he said.

In Baghdad, sectarian killings have fallen dramatically since January, while suicide bombings using vehicles have increased. Overall, attack patterns varied in different parts of Baghdad. For example, in Mansour to the west, extrajudicial killings fell in February only to increase again by April, while other attacks remained on average the same. In the Rasafa district of central Baghdad, weekly attacks went from 88 in January to 25 in February but are now at about 60.

If Kevin Drum sounds guardedly optimistic, it's not because the surge will -- or was ever intended to -- eliminate all violence in Iraq, but because it's still the only chance we have to keep the country from falling apart. Credit goes to a Democratic Congress, which, by its toothless but persistent demand for a timetable for military withdrawal, has all but ensured that the administration knows it has one last chance to get it right:

The fact remains that five battalions is the best we can do, Petraeus is probably the best general available for this job, and congressional threats really are providing incentives to Iraqi leaders to resolve their differences. This is why I suspect that September might really be September. Given the current conditions — the best ones it's reasonable to hope for at this point — if there isn't serious political progress in the next few months there are a fair number of nondelusional Republicans who are finally going to decide that they aren't willing to flush their careers down the toilet just to show solidarity with a lame duck president.

My problem, though, with saying that "September" is going to be the fulcrum moment for Iraq is that it plainly is not, at least according to Petraeus's own estimate for judging the success of a sustained counterinsurgency. It might take well over a year before the long-term threats of sectarian fighting -- and now, with Mutqada al-Sadr jockeying to remain the head of the Mahdi Army, sectarian in-fighting -- are reduced to within livable circumstances.

RELATED: The Surge Can Work [Jewcy]

Word has it that Matt Yglesias will join the The Atlantic's expanding blogger outreach program. I've begun to notice an aesthetic common to this august monthly's recent Beltway hires: Ross Douthat, Andrew Sullivan, now Yglesias. Is there some kind of algae in the Potomac that makes Washington pundits sprout facial vegetation?

In a nutshell, here's what you should know: A tech blogger called Kathy Sierra started receiving death threats and having her visage Photoshopped in all sorts of crude but inventive ways. She subsequently pulled out of a speaking engagement (or maybe it was a few) for fear that her cat-callers and possibly lethal enemies might turn up. This led to a widespread moratorium on blogging in some quarters, the goal being to go mute in solidarity with Sierra. Now there's a whole debate brewing about the absence of civility in internet discourse and what, if anything, should be done about it. Should sites regulate language and hall-monitor user comment threads? Or is part of the charm of this anarchic, binary universe that anything goes, and you can get away with saying what you'd never, ever say if you had a pair of eyes to look into, or, you know, a fist to avoid meeting.

Andrew Sullivan read the following pathetic quote from some fuckwit (sorry: moderately delusional person) called Tim O'Reilly and rightly took him to task for endorsing censorship:

"That is one of the mistakes a lot of people make — believing that uncensored speech is the most free, when in fact, managed civil dialogue is actually the freer speech. Free speech is enhanced by civility," - Tim O'Reilly, a person the blog-clueless NYT deems to be relevant to the blogosphere.

Sorry, Tim, but "managed civil dialogue" may be better in your enlightened eyes than, er, free speech, but it sure isn't freer. You can choose or not choose to have comments sections; you can already monitor such sections, if you so choose. But the blogosphere is about freedom - not codes of conduct on sites for free exchange of views. Now go back under the rock whence some clueless reporter from the NYT discovered you.

Whoo-doggy, the backlash Sully has endured.

As someone who takes his Bloggy Lordship to task on an almost weekly basis (more in sorrow than in anger, rest assured), I feel obliged to give credit where it's due. Andrew is right. Free speech is universal, or it is nothing at all.

RELATED: The Sierra Club: Izzy and Michael Debate [The Daily Shvitz]

Quid pro quo, suggests Andrew:

Iran’s state-controlled media reported that an Iranian diplomat would now have access to the five Iranians arrested in Irbil — captives whose whereabouts bears close scrutiny in the weeks ahead. And an Iranian official, Jalal Sharafi, also detained in Iraq two months ago, was returned to Tehran last Tuesday. Hmm. In The Washington Post last Friday the very well connected neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer bragged that “American action is what got this unstuck”. Last week, Vice-President Dick Cheney told ABC News radio that he “did not know” if any deal was made. That is, to say the least, an interesting nonresponse to the question.

As unfortunate as such a set of circumstances may be -- we're now trading spies for soldiers, assuming these reports are true -- one takeaway is positive. Can there be any doubt that the Anglo-American "special relationship" has solidified into a permanent one?

Anti-Americanism is choking in the UK, far worse than it is in France, and yet, somehow, we still manage to sacrifice for our English cousins in ways that would be unthinkable for anyone else. I smiled reading the above paragraph in Sullivan's Times piece. Not because it means that once again and Yankee Doodle Dee, we're plucking Blighty out of the soup, but because news like this must drive Geoffrey Wheatcroft and Simon Jenkins crazy. A disastrous war that should never have been fought actually strengthens U.S.-British ties the more disastrous it gets.

There's every indication that should either David Cameron or Gordon Brown be elected the next prime minister, the nexus between Washington and London would remain unbroken. George Washington's famous admonition against "entangling alliances" was right, save for one the ally he never thought we'd have.

Here's how it goes: You read a news article that reveals information about a new military policy in Iraq that not only might have been useful to you yesterday but was in fact widely available months before. You grow apopletic about what you perceive as further lies and deceptions peddled by the administration. You question your epistemology, your newfound antiwar bona fides, everything. Then, just when you feel like someone who's beaten up a policeman only to find another policeman running right at you, you go and post something so silly as this:

I've been conned again by the Bush administration. One reason I was skeptical of the surge was its very low troop levels. I couldn't see how a mere 17,500 new troops would change the dynamic in any meaningful way. And it hasn't. Yes, we've seen some calm in Baghdad, as Shiite militias lie low, but we've also seen stepped up Sunni violence in Baghdad's periphery. Now, in response to "whack-a-mole," it appears that Petraeus wants another full brigade. When you add that to the extra 4,600 announced March 10, the surge is now just shy of 30,000 more troops. Rich Lowry claims vindication. Huh? The only vindication is that Lowry believed that Bush was lying back in January, and Lowry, it appears, was right. Why did Bush "low-ball," i.e. deceive us about the numbers? My best bet is that he thought if he actually told people we'd be sending 30,000 more troops (and maybe more), Americans would balk. I would have been more impressed, of course, and more inclined to support it. But this is beside the point. The point is: why is it beyond this president to tell the truth to the American people in wartime?

That's Andrew Sullivan, writing today. He didn't support the surge three months ago, and has reluctantly admitted that it seems to be doing some good in and around Baghdad. Frankly, I'm not surprised at his shocked, shocked reaction to discoving the soldier count actually exceeds the bruited figure of 21,500.

The surge -- or "Plus Up," as it's also known -- was based on this report, which was available for download on this website, weeks before the president delivered this speech about sending more troops to Iraq. In that report, the following is stated in clear English:

There are three battalions in an Army brigade combat team or BCT, which, together with all of its supporting elements, numbers around 5,000 soldiers. [Italics added].

The president pledged 5 BCTs to Baghdad and 1 Marine Regiment Combat Team, or RCT, to Anbar province. (An RCT, together with all of its support elements, is comprised of slightly fewer peronnel than 1 BCT.) By my math, this means -- and always did mean -- that more than 25,000 soldiers would be deployed as part of the surge. Not of all of these soldiers are combat troops, however.

The figure 21,500 referred to fighting men and women. Support elements in BCTs and RCTs refer to military intelligence specialists, signals officers, MPs and personnel who are not out on patrol and therefore not directly in the line of fire.

Did the president lie? No. He was talking about combat troops in his speech. For more on what has been the case all along, see Fred Kagan's essay, "The Numbers Game," and my piece "The Surge Can Work."

The theory that the total number of soldiers being shipped to Iraq was willfully hidden from the public because the public might have, you know, opposed the surge, requires only seeing it spelled out like that to determine how absurd it is.

Of course, Andrew might have done a little reading before pronouncing on White House Deceptions That Weren't. Who was it in the administration that once said reality is whatever you want it to be?

It's very hopeful for someone who trafficks in rational skepticism to make the following forecast:

It seems profoundly unimaginative-and, frankly, dangerous-to think that we cannot possibly overcome the religious divisions in our world. What is the alternative? Do you really think that the 23rd century will dawn, with unimaginably powerful technology having spread to every corner of the earth, and our thinking will still be governed by sectarian religious certainties? Muslims eager for jihad? Rapture-ready Christians holding political power?

Sam wrote earlier in this installment of his ongoing "blogalogue" with Andrew Sullivan that, sitting on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee he had what under different circumstances might be termed an "awakening." For Sam, it was nothing more than a momentary flash of Freud's "oceanic feeling," which drives all varieties of religious experience. (That Sam's quasi-feeling took place near the water gives this concept added semantic value, one would think.)

Does any of us really believe that faith will be eradicated even in some technocratic Star Trek future? Sam's case elsewhere hinges on the current abundance of scientific evidence for disproving religious myth, and yet, as he alarmingly reports, the vast majority of Americans still believe in angels. This contradiction hints at an inextinguishable human compulsion to believe in God, and I doubt that two more centuries will be enough time to allow us to evolve to the more self-assured plane where the earthly is precious and, indeed, good enough.

What mind-body problem?: Evolutionary psychologist Steven PinkerSullivan made a vague allusion to the mystery of mathematics, but Godel's achievement was anything but mysterious. It was a thorough debunking of positivism, the early 20th century philosophical movement that took empiricism to a radical and wholly absurd level by stipulating that nothing that isn't tangible exists. His incompleteness theorem was a confirmation of a priori truth -- the kind of Nature Spinoza spoke of -- not of religion. And even though Godel's elegant proof specialized in paradox and sinuous self-referentiality, it was perfectly traceable according to the known laws of logic. By definition, a theorem is only as good as the next genius who comes along to demonstrate how bogus it really is. Would that religion said, "this may all be nonsense, wait until we learn more."

So Sullivan is still grasping at straws to place his faith in the same august company as neo-Platonic philosophy. When Einstein spoke of the great "out-yonder," he meant a cosmological order that had yet to be sussed out. There are no laws of heaven except those we invent to make peaceable our time on earth, which is of course our only time, anywhere.

Lucky us, my esteemed co-blogger. Just as I was thinking about how consciousness could be unmoored from matter, I happened upon Steven Pinker's illuminating essay in Time magazine addressing that very subject. He defines the so-called "Hard Problem" of cognitive science like this:

The Hard Problem... is why it feels like something to have a conscious process going on in one's head--why there is first-person, subjective experience. Not only does a green thing look different from a red thing, remind us of other green things and inspire us to say, "That's green" (the Easy Problem), but it also actually looks green: it produces an experience of sheer greenness that isn't reducible to anything else. As Louis Armstrong said in response to a request to define jazz, "When you got to ask what it is, you never get to know."

The Hard Problem is explaining how subjective experience arises from neural computation. The problem is hard because no one knows what a solution might look like or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place. And not surprisingly, everyone agrees that the hard problem (if it is a problem) remains a mystery.

Although neither problem has been solved, neuroscientists agree on many features of both of them, and the feature they find least controversial is the one that many people outside the field find the most shocking. Francis Crick called it "the astonishing hypothesis"--the idea that our thoughts, sensations, joys and aches consist entirely of physiological activity in the tissues of the brain. Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain.

Harris is in the extreme minority, then, by denying the "meat chauvinism" that drives most of his field. Maybe as a post-doc he'll locate the totality of cognitive experience in gray matter.

Though just because Sam expresses doubt about the mind-body problem doesn't mean Andrew's any closer to justifying religion as one way of reconciling it (by adding a soul into the mix) that's as good as any other.

P.S. Last August I had a fun little email dialogue with Rebecca Goldstein about her Spinoza book. It should be up at Jewcy in the coming weeks.

G.K. ChestertonNow his literacy is being threatened by his piety:

I believe science is one, important, valuable and respectable mode of thinking about the whole. But there are truth questions it has not answered and cannot answer. What I found insightful about your book was your openness to this possibility. You repeat that openness in your recent posting:

"While I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the brain (as I am finishing my doctorate in neuroscience), I do not think that the utter reducibility of consciousness to matter has been established. It may be that the very concepts of mind and matter are fundamentally misleading us."

So you allow for a space where the logic of science and of materialism does not lead us toward truth, but may even mislead us about it, and lead us away from it. This is a big concession, and it undermines the certainty of your entire case. Such an argument must rest on a notion of ultimate truth that is deeper than science, beyond science. It must rest on a notion that allows for the rational legitimacy of my faith.

It's extremely clear from Sam's phrasing that he means the reducibility of consciousness to matter has not been established because we may be following a cold forensic trail. The alternative is not religion or metaphysics but a different scientific approach to understanding cognition.

In what way does this concession leave the door open to the possibility that a) a man born over 2,000 years ago was miraculously placed inside the womb of a virgin, b) he was the son of an invisible man in the sky whose nature and will is, conveniently to those who respect logic and verifiable fact, unfathomable to human minds, c) said son died for humanity's sins and was resurrected three days later, d) the founding text of his biography is true on these points but may not be true on other ones, depending upon how much they make us wince in the 21st century?

Also, I fail to see how it's permissible to trust someone whose definition of "truth" is so promiscuous:

Take, for example, the question of historical truth. You rely in your books on a lot of historical facts to buttress your empirical case. But these facts are not true - and could never be proven true - by the scientific method that is your benchmark. There are no control groups in history. There are no experiments. But there is a form of truth. Discovering that historical truth is the vocation of a historian - and it is a different truth than science, and reached by a different methodology and logic.

Spoken by a man compared after 9/11 to George Orwell. Orwell, you may remember, famously remarked that there were certain things that happened in war-ravaged Spain that happened none the less because The Daily Telegraph failed to report them.

Enough ink has been spilled -- some of it on this blog -- about the deadly fusion between the postmodern Left and the medieval forces of Islamic reaction. Perhaps now would be an excellent time to point out that conservatives who routinely blast moral and historical relativism succumb to exactly these vices when it suits their own interests -- particularly when those interests are religious. "Don't judge me, this is my truth. You're intolerant if you call my beliefs ludicrous or hold them to the exacting empirical standards that you (and I) hold everything else." How is this different from sickly syllogisms about not stopping the practice of sati in India because it conforms to local Hindu customs, or condoning female circumcision in Africa for the same reason?

G.K. Chesterton, beloved geyser of aphorisms for the faithful right, said that a man who ceases to believe in God doesn't believe in nothing, he believes in anything. You'll hear this trotted out at feverish moments in the current culture war between atheists and theists as a last sally of condescension, as if moral superiority and wisdom were rooted in superstition. Yet as the breadth and scope of human knowledge expands, it's another Chesterton insight that one finds applying to the adherents of an antique dogma, who are becoming increasingly desperate and defensive: when a man thinks any stick will do, he reaches for a boomerang.

Andrew Sullivan | The Daily Dish

Sam Harris purees Sullivan's metaphysical slush:

Now let me briefly address your primary charge of "intolerance." The sentences that you appear to have found most troubling are these:

Anyone who thinks he knows for sure that Jesus was born of virgin or that the Qur'an is the perfect word of the Creator of the universe is lying. Either he is lying to himself, or to everyone else. In neither case should such false certainties be celebrated.

What if I told you that I am certain that I have an even number of cells in my body? What are the chances that I am in a position to have actually counted my cells (there are on the order of 100 trillion) and counted them correctly? Would it be unfair (or worse, "intolerant") of you to dismiss my assertion as either a product of self-deception or outright dishonesty? Note that this claim has a 50% chance of being true (unlike claims about virgin births and resurrections), and yet it is patently ridiculous. Some claims to knowledge-even about facts that have a high order of probability--immediately brand their claimants as intellectually dishonest. Please forgive me for saying that it is extraordinarily obvious that neither you, nor the pope, nor any other Christian is in a position to know that Jesus was actually born of a virgin or that he will one day return to earth wielding magic powers.

Apart from the concession that he needs faith in order to cope with the harsh reality of life -- which would of course give away the game of religion's smoke-and-mirrors deception -- there's really no way for Sullivan to respond without seeming a perfect fool.

Evelyn Waugh was an empurpled nasty, but he could be quite funny about his adherence to Catholicism when he wanted to. Recall his most autobiographical fiction The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, particularly the lines:

The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom. There was a phrase in the 'thirties: "It is later than you think," which was designed to cause uneasiness. It was never later than Mr. Pinfold thought. At intervals during the day and night he would look at his watch and learn always with disappoint how little of his life was past, how much there was still ahead of him. He wished no one ill, but he looked at the world sub specie aeternitatis and he found it flat as a map; except when, rather often, personal annoyance intruded.

That's how I like my believers. "Fuck off, you should see me without the Christ-love." Infinitely more palatable than the easy-listening ecclesiastics of the St. Sebastian of the right.

This one's almost too easy. If you've ever run the sink over a Quaker rice cake, you'll get an idea of the kind of mulchification that happens to Andrew Sullivan's intellectual integrity when he starts writing like this:

My sense of the fallibility of human reason and the ineffability of God's will leads me not to dismiss these "extremists" as fools or idiots, but to wonder what they have known that I may not know, even as I worry about their potential for evil as well as good (a potential we all have, including you and me).

And does he likewise wonder with such equanimity what elusive truth is known by those water-boarders at Guantanamo Bay? Surely they must believe their wager with the possibility of another attack on American soil is at least as urgent as the more famous one advanced by Blaise Pascal? Or can Andrew summon a stronger term than "fool" or "idiot" to describe the "extremist" state torturers he nobly denounces in between those fatuous photographs of leaves turning and beach-scapes awaiting Jesus' footprints?

Taste the full flavor of warmed-over Catholic belief. God's will has, for some undisclosed reason, addled so many of his "flock" that they can advocate the preaching of fairy tales in science class, picket the funerals of homosexuals, sign off on genocide (when it's of the right people), talk as if those who aren't their co-religionists are morally inferior and damned to hell -- and the worst this gets out of Sullivan is a head-scratching bewilderment. The Lord sure does work in mysterious ways. Don't judge: Leibniz thought so, and he invented the calculus!

Thanks, but I prefer Spinoza. And the grand achievements of true believers had everything to do with human ingenuity and the triumph of reason and nothing at all to do with the ontology of God. (Does any of us think, say, Martin Luther King would have been more comfortable with segregation and bigotry had the Rev. honorific not shared equal place with the Dr.?)

You may say that faith helps motivate people to do extraordinary things, but the divine spark is fungible with, and quite indistinguishable from, the neurological kind. It could be the love of a good woman, an early role model whose influence becomes a lifelong inner daimon, or anything else that forces us to struggle for the improvement of the species (and there's a word you won't find in either Testament). To exalt religion as prime mover of anything but convenient self-deception is to be remarkably... parochial.

The deep and many failures of George Bush's certainty have truly humbled the primus inter pares of journo-bloggers. Sullivan's more in touch in with his