New ad includes Laura Bush, Colin Powell, and Dick Cheney expressing support for same-sex marriage.

Laura Bush didn't approve of the use of this video clip (which comes from a 2010 interview with Larry King) and she's voiced her objection to it:



Who knows what she secretly thinks, but officially, she's saying you shouldn't have used me without asking. Of course, the group that made the ad — the Respect for Marriage Coalition — has the right to appropriate this clip and use it in their political message. Imagine how hard it would be to make political ads if you couldn't use clips like this. I suspect that secretly she's happy to influence opinion this way — especially as she's able to hold herself at some distance from politics. She clearly likes to seem modest and completely unpushy, as you can see in the longer clip from the Larry King show:



What a terrible shame that the Republican Party didn't accommodate itself to this idea at least 10 years ago. Really, it's a shame they didn't buy in even earlier, 18 years ago, when Andrew Sullivan's "Virtually Normal" came out. At the time, the left-liberals I knew were antagonistic to the institution of marriage and viewed Sullivan's contribution as an unwelcome conservative intrusion on the gay rights movement, which they saw as belonging within a left-wing ideology that transcended traditional institutions. Back in the 90s, I sat through serious, lawyerly presentations aimed at stopping the marriage equality proponents from changing the focus of the movement. There was a wonderful opportunity then for conservatives to embrace the issue, and they missed it.

The Republican Party saw the advantage elsewhere, and now they're stuck with the result.

UPDATE: The Respect for Marriage Coalition withdraws the ad.

"The blog is also now unending: you can scroll down indefinitely if you so wish..."

A nice feature at Andrew Sullivan's newly independent blog. This means that the blog is set to have a  number of posts on the page when you click there, but if you want more, you don't have to click to an "older posts" page (as you do here), it automatically provides new posts as you scroll. This gives a vivid depiction of what a blog really is: a pile of posts one on top of the other. For example, my blog is a stack of 32,381 posts.

Sullivan has also moved his archive, which goes back to January 2001: "I have given a sharp dagger for anyone who wants to make me look foolish – so have at it." I don't think the archive makes him look foolish. I read him all the time back then, when he called himself conservative and tried to define conservatism in new ways. Or is the appearance of foolishness not in what those old opinions were, but in the later deviations? Would you read the sort of person who would go 12 years without contradicting himself?

The Dictionary of Received Ideas — my imagined modern American version of it — has this under "contradiction":

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

That's the reflexive quotation but you can keep scrolling in that poem, Walt Whitman's tall stack of lines:

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through
with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too
late?

I wait on the door-slab....

Jodie Foster's Golden Globes speech isn't nutty or incoherent.

That's my working theory. Maybe you disagree. Transcript here. Highlights:

"So while I’m here being all confessional, I guess I have a sudden urge to say something that I’ve never really been able to air in public.... I am single. Yes I am, I am single...."

That is, she rejects the yep-I'm-gay routine. She's not being all confessional, like these other people.

"... But now I’m told, apparently that every celebrity is expected to honor the details of their private life with a press conference, a fragrance and a prime-time reality show.....

"But seriously, if you had been a public figure from the time that you were a toddler, if you’d had to fight for a life that felt real and honest and normal against all odds, then maybe you too might value privacy above all else. Privacy.  Some day, in the future, people will look back and remember how beautiful it once was."

Well said. That's rather old-fashioned and not what the pop-culture media have been telling us is the right way to be these days.

ADDED: Andrew Sullivan says: "What unadulterated bullshit."

"Unlike so many of the lemmings and partisans of Washington DC, Hagel actually called out the catastrophe of the Iraq War as it happened."

"The neocons cannot forgive him for exposing what they wrought on the nation and the world. For good measure, he has a Purple Heart and has served in combat. Not easy to say about most of the Iraq War armchair warriors and war criminals."

ADDED: That link goes to Andrew Sullivan (discussing Peter Beinart), but if you want your choice of links to uproar over Hagel, there are plenty at Memeorandum.

Andrew Sullivan reaffirms the value of independent blogging.

After years of selling his traffic-pulling work to corporate enterprises — first The Atlantic and then The Daily Beast — announcing that he's going independent again, he acknowledges what really matters about blogging:

When I first stumbled into blogging over 12 years ago, it was for two reasons: curiosity and freedom. I was curious about the potential for writing in this new medium; and for the first time, I felt total freedom as a writer. On my little blog, I was beholden to no one but my readers. I had no editor to please, no advertiser to woo, no publisher to work for, no colleagues to manage....

For the first time in human history, a writer - or group of writers and editors - can instantly reach readers - even hundreds of thousands of readers across the planet - with no intermediary at all.

And they can reach back....

Is he going independent again to reconnect with these essentials? It's really more about the endless, frustrating search for a workable business model. I guess he wasn't getting enough from big media, in relation to what he gave. And yet, what is the alternative? Making even less? The new experiment is to make his blog into a subscription site. No ads. Sullivan reminds readers of the old adage: "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product being sold." He wants us to pay $19.99 a year. I don't know what his traffic is, but if my readers did that, I'd make $700,000 a year. He has many more readers, but also 7 employees to pay. He's not going to get all his existing readers to fork over $20, and putting up a wall will affect his traffic. But what does traffic matter if you're not selling the "product" of readers' eyes to advertisers? It matters in the way stated above, reaffirming the essentials of blogging.

Hence the purest, simplest model for online journalism: you, us, and a meter. Period. No corporate ownership, no advertising demands, no pressure for pageviews ... just a concept designed to make your reading experience as good as possible, and to lead us not into temptation.

But of course, the new temptation is whatever is needed to keep that subscription money flowing in. And no one has ever figured out what that is. And there's an escape for tight-fisted readers: You don't actually have to pay $20. You can pay whatever you want. Sullivan argues that you should want the writers you read to make money. They deserve to be paid for their work, and they work hard. I agree. And I must say that I like the mechanism he's using: TinyPass.

The point of doing this as simply and as purely as possible is precisely to forge a path other smaller blogs and sites can follow. We believe in a bottom-up Internet, which allows a thousand flowers to bloom, rather than a corporate-dominated web where the promise of a free space becomes co-opted by large and powerful institutions and intrusive advertising algorithms. We want to help build a new media environment that is not solely about advertising or profit above everything, but that is dedicated first to content and quality.

Even though I think Sullivan wants to grow his project into big media, I would love to see this model work. I especially like the way it's set up:

Our particular version will be a meter that will be counted every time you hit a "Read on" button to expand or contract a lengthy post. You'll have a limited number of free read-ons a month, before we hit you up for $19.99. Everything else on the Dish will remain free. No link from another blog to us will ever be counted for the meter - so no blogger or writer need ever worry that a link to us will push their readers into a paywall. It won't. Ever. There is no paywall. Just a freemium-based meter. We've tried to maximize what's freely available, while monetizing those parts of the Dish where true Dishheads reside.

That's really well thought out. I have no idea if he'll make enough to sustain a 7-person staff, but I wish him luck.

And I wonder if Althouse should set up a TinyPass business model like that too. What if I cleared out all the advertising and switched to a system like that?

Scenery chewing in the Theater of Outrage over Wayne LaPierre's unremarkable news conference.

Read the transcript of what LaPierre said, if you haven't already, so you know what the purveyors of outrage are characterizing for their readers.

Here's the NYT editorial, which is entitled "The N.R.A. Crawls From Its Hidey Hole."

[W]e were stunned by Mr. LaPierre’s mendacious, delusional, almost deranged rant.

Mr. LaPierre looked wild-eyed at times....

We cannot imagine trying to turn the principals and teachers who care for our children every day into an armed mob....

He proposed a mob? This is a failure (or pretended failure) of imagination. What if those who worked in schools were offered training in weapons and permission to carry in schools if they could qualify — entirely optional? Is that idea obviously mendacious, delusional, and almost deranged? The NYT is hot to exclude it as something any sane person would even begin to contemplate. They'd like an instant crazy image of teachers gone wild.

People like Mr. LaPierre want us to believe that civilians can be trained to use lethal force with cold precision in moments of fear and crisis. That requires a willful ignorance about the facts. 

If "civilians" can't be trained, how can noncivilians be trained? And quite aside from how well people hit targets, isn't the presence of an armed guard a deterrent from beginning an attack, and doesn't pointing a gun at the criminal sometimes end his attack?

Moving on from the NYT, here's Andrew Sullivan absorbing LaPierre into an all-out assault on the GOP titled "Enough!":

Between the humiliating and chaotic collapse of Speaker Boehner's already ludicrously extreme Plan B and Wayne La Pierre's deranged proposal to put government agents in schools with guns, the Republican slide into total epistemic closure and political marginalization has now become a free-fall. This party, not to mince words, is unfit for government.

If that kind of hysteria — sounding deranged in the condemnation of derangement — is what counts as unminced words these days, I'd like to put in an order for minced words. I'd like to aim a precise scoff at the phrase "government agents in schools." Agents! Sounds very scary, but the truth is, teachers are government agents.

Anyway, Sullivan's style of hysterical talk wins The Game of Internet, where the score is kept in traffic statistics. And Sullivan himself is boasting that his "Enough!" post "has just blown up on Facebook." Kablooey! He's so sensitive about those terrible guns, but his metaphor of choice is explosion.

"Conservative Pundits: Accepting Same-Sex Marriage Is Common Sense."

Trend watch.

Of course, same-sex marriage started out as a conservative idea, and lefties resisted. That was back in the day when marriage was patriarchy and oppression.

Here's a prediction: Once gay marriage becomes the norm, the left can get back to critiquing marriage. That topic got backburnered.

ADDED: Recommendation: Conservatives should get on the side of same-sex marriage now, make it part of what is traditional, and embrace the "marriage" ideal generally (and for all) going forward. The left will go off in another direction, and good old marriage will be yours once again.

AND: If you don't remember when lefties called it right-wing to support gay marriage and gays in the military, read "Richard Goldstein’s Heresy Hunt," and article from 2001, referring to a Village Voice writer who despised that notorious right-winger, Andrew Sullivan::

... Goldstein decried the so-called "gay right" because he says that they bring the issues of gay marriage and gays in the military to the forefront, making them more prominent, while they should be arguing for an end to workplace, housing and public accommodation discrimination. "They believe in civil equality, not equal opportunity," he said....

... Goldstein said we should revile the gay right because they are "a masculinist group of gay writers." They are men and women who worship and aspire to traditional masculinity and "cannot see beyond their privilege." He then equated masculinism with marriage-and-military advocates: "In times of war, masculinist values come to the forefront and feminist values recede.... If these people prevail.... the masculinist version of homosexuality will come to dominate the movement. ... It is the most dangerous thing we face today, I believe."

And watch "The Great Gay Debate" from 2002, with Andrew Sullivan, attacked from the left, at his fiery best. Conservatives missed a great opportunity a decade ago.

"Does Mitt Romney’s Mormonism make him too scary or weird to be elected to president of the United States?"

Asks Glenn Beck, a Mormon, speaking to Evangelical Christians, reported in the NYT.

During his special program, Mr. Beck took questions from mostly evangelical Christian listeners, colorfully debunking misperceptions about Mormonism. The “magic underwear” was compared to a skullcap, and Mr. Beck insisted that polygamy was seen as a “perversion” in the modern church.

“It’s not weird to be a Mormon,” he assured his listeners at the end of the program, “and it’s not weird to be president if you’re Mormon.”

It's fascinating — isn't it? — how little anti-Mormon material has been spread about in this election. The only notable person who seems to be going there is Andrew Sullivan:

Andrew Sullivan recently posted YouTube footage of LDS temple ceremonies in an effort to turn Romney’s Mormonism into an argument against his candidacy.

The video posted by Sullivan was shot surreptitiously inside LDS temples by a former Mormon who wanted to use the publicity connected with the Romney campaign to embarrass the LDS community. (The video creator enhanced the footage with his own monologue — wearing a gorilla mask — and spooky "Carmina Burana" soundtrack.)...

I think most Americans have a deep sensibility respecting religion and don't care to look into details about any given sect that could be exploited to make outsiders see it as bizarre. Sullivan, like Joe Biden, is a Catholic. You could make an equivalent YouTube video holding Catholics up to derision and contempt. That's generally not how we behave in America. I wonder who is more susceptible to this anti-Mormon material: the middle Americans who are aggregated under the "Evangelical Christians" label, who listen to Glenn Beck, or the affluent, educated coastal Americans who read Andrew Sullivan and the New York Times? Whichever, the notable fact is that there has been very little effort to stimulate anti-Mormon sentiment, and that's an excellent thing about America.

"How are your passions...?"/"I am bloody elated."

Chris Matthews/Andrew Sullivan.

"Can I give it to my monkey?"

This is the essence of what Andrew Sullivan presents under the heading "Hathos Alert."

"Has any candidate lost 18 points among women voters in one night ever?"

"And we are told that when Obama left the stage that night, he was feeling good. That's terrifying. On every single issue, Obama has instantly plummeted into near-oblivion...."

Andrew Sullivan melts down.

Look: I'm trying to rally some morale, but I've never seen a candidate this late in the game, so far ahead, just throw in the towel in the way Obama did last week...

I'm trying to see a silver lining. But when a president self-immolates on live TV, and his opponent shines with lies and smiles, and a record number of people watch, it's hard to see how a president and his party recover. I'm not giving up....

Sorry, but it's hard not to see this as a lot of posing. A set up for the big announcement that Obama is back. If Obama is any good at all in the next debate or the one after that, we'll be told the man is a miracle.

Did Obama have a strategy to make the debate feel wonky and dull?

He may have figured that if he were energized and feisty, there would be moments that might change the path of the election, and he's been on track for victory. Early on, it seemed that both men were cranking out their policy ideas, and if Obama had that strategy, he might have gotten complacent, thinking no one's really watching or nothing really matters anymore.

Later, perhaps, he got scared that Romney, with seemingly endless energy, was getting the better of him, embodying optimism. It's almost... Reaganesque! People are supposed to love me, that's the given of this race. What if they love him?!

Obama didn't have a way to change his own demeanor, to veer away from the game plan, mid-debate, and as he relied more and more on studied dullness, hints of his own disappointment in himself showed through. He tried, it seemed, to stave off those feelings by flashing his famously beautiful smile — which, we could then see, does not emanate from a place of joy or pleasure.

I'm reading Andrew Sullivan's his live-blog. His last entry is widely quoted:

But this was a disaster for the president for the key people he needs to reach, and his effete, wonkish lectures may have jolted a lot of independents into giving Romney a second look.

That corresponds to the theory that Obama had a strategy that turned out to be bad. And scroll down to 10:29:

How is Obama's closing statement so fucking sad, confused and lame? He choked. He lost. He may even have lost the election tonight.

The closing statement is a part Obama would have planned in advance. There's no reason for that to come off badly. Even if he'd been tired before and disappointed in himself and surprised at Romney's strength, the event was almost over. Summon up a final burst of energy and deliver that little speech you've got memorized. That is the thing you're best at — other than that smile — delivering a sermon. Nail that last little bit and maybe that's what people will remember. End big. Why wasn't he ready to do at least that?

Speculating, I'm able to come up with only 2 ideas: 1. He has some burdensome real emotions behind that smile, and 2. He actually doesn't want to win.

Andrew Sullivan denies that there was any anti-Semitic meaning...

... when he wrote:

The usual would-be policeman of Washington's discourse on all things to do with Israel, Jeffrey Goldberg, takes a break from the Jewish holidays to consign yet another member of the thinking classes to the ranks of "something much darker."

... which Goldberg called a "low blow" 8 days ago. Today, Sullivan is all "apologies if I was misunderstood." And he denies membership in "the thought-police" while maintaining the presumption that Goldberg belongs:

... I will occasionally note homophobia - but usually of the obvious, fanatical, religious kind, not parsing metaphors of fellow columnists for "dog-whistles" and "code". And I have a long record of exactly the same for anti-Semitism....

...I have long, relentlessly lambasted the main gay rights lobby, HRC, while Goldblog is always anti-anti-AIPAC, just as he is always anti-anti-settlements.

... Let me just say that when Goldblog treats John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, Kenneth Waltz, Phil Weiss, or Daniel Larison in the same way I treat my opponents on the issue of marriage rights, I will agree that he is not a member of the thought-police....

By the way, Goldberg calls himself "Goldblog," so that's not a dog-whistle (or telling typo).

"This interview was conducted by two African-Americans, a man and a woman. It was a subtle touch. And a profound one."

That's Andrew Sullivan telling us about "One small thing I only really noticed until tonight" [sic].

Oh, good lord. What the hell is subtle and profound about it? Is there something special about "a man and a woman"? (That would be ironic, since the interview was all about saying "a man and a woman" is not special.) Is it about 2 black people? Oh, my! What an amazing occasion — 2 black people are talking!

Can we ever settle down and be normal about the fact there are people of different sexes, different races, and different sexual orientations? I wish Andrew Sullivan would be a little more reflective — to the point of experiencing embarrassment — about the sentimental twinges he feels witnessing black people accomplishing something.

Women "in a room... tend to be a little more reasonable" than men.

Brown professor Wendy Schiller, spouts blatant nonsense, but obviously believes herself to be reasonable. Then Andrew Sullivan lambastes Hillary Clinton. It's all good fun. Check it out.

"Snowe's Gift To Obama."

An Andrew Sullivan blog post title.

2 Instapundit posts show some sharp, clear things that Romney can't say... but I like picturing Romney saying.

1. Here, Instapundit deals with Romney's supposedly unfortunate remark that he's "not concerned about the very poor":

Frankly, I think he’s got a point. People whose livelihood comes from the government — whether the very poor, or the government employees — are doing fine. It’s people who depend on the actual economy who are hurting.

2. This one links to something I said to Andrew Sullivan who'd taken shot at Romney/Mormons. Instapundit then prints email from Will Collier that says:

Disclaimer: I’ve got no particular use for Romney or anybody else still running this year. That said, whenever a yahoo like Sullivan pulls the “fake friendly” Mormon card over the next year, the response ought to be this speech from the end of the (in)famous South Park “All About Mormons” episode…

Look, maybe us Mormons do believe in crazy stories that make absolutely no sense, and maybe Joseph Smith did make it all up, but I have a great life. and a great family, and I have the Book of Mormon to thank for that. The truth is, I don’t care if Joseph Smith made it all up, because what the church teaches now is loving your family, being nice and helping people. And even though people in this town might think that’s stupid, I still choose to believe in it. All I ever did was try to be your friend, Stan, but you’re so high and mighty you couldn’t look past my religion and just be my friend back. You’ve got a lot of growing up to do, buddy. Suck my balls.

Andrew Sullivan purports to know about "the Mormon mask."

"It's the kind of public presentation that a Mormon with real church authority deploys when dealing with less elevated believers, talking to them, and advising them. The cheery aw-shucks fake niceness in person is a function in part, some believe, of the role he has long played in the church: always a leader."

ADDED: Actually, he doesn't purport to know. He's just passing along some bullshit he heard.

I have no way to know whether this is true or not. But I'd love to hear from Mormon readers if this analysis of Mitt strikes them in any way as accurate.

When is it okay to spread stuff like this around? Isn't this prejudice and bigotry? Is it a special thing reserved for Mormons? For your political enemies? Test yourself out, Andrew. Imagine some friend of yours told you something like that about some other religious group. Test it with every religious group can think of, referring to political candidates that you like and dislike. Hold yourself to a neutral standard. Are you satisfied with what you've put out there?

Andrew Sullivan misunderstands why I did not read his "Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?" article.

He writes:

I wondered when I wrote this what the reaction would tell me. Just browsing at a few of the right-wing blogs, I see that they have attacked it without actually, you know, reading it. Althouse is a classic example:

I don't even want to read it. It just seems like red meat for Obama fans. And what a cliché! Republicans are stupid.

Half the article is devoted to liberals and Democrats! But it would be too much for her to actually read it.

If you look at my blog post, it's a reaction to the Newsweek cover, beginning with some analysis of the photograph of Obama and continuing to the question that Newsweek framed for the purpose of getting people to buy the magazine. Inside was Sullivan's article, which I did not have time to read. Not that Sullivan could know this, but we had to drive halfway across the country today. Another way of putting that is: I have a life. I can't read everything. Generally, I scan the web in the morning and find some things that feel bloggable to me. Today, it was the Newsweek cover photo and headline, and that's what I wrote about. Writing about the headline, I had the reaction that it doesn't work on me. It doesn't make me want to read. It's insulting! That is a journalistic failure by Newsweek.

Now, quite possibly Newsweek sold the article short, and I was fair enough to Sullivan not to presume to know what he said. But he has melded his web presence — once fiercely independent and alive — to the rotting corpse that is Newsweek, and he bears some responsibility for his predicament. Judging from his blog post, I think he wants his article to be taken as a sane, sober, balanced assessment of Obama's presidency, but he has opted to wrap himself in Newsweek — how much money is that worth to him? — and doing that, he loses many of the readers he purports to mean to speak to and persuade.

But how sober and balanced is he really? I can't help noticing that in talking about me, he wasn't fair. He called me "right-wing," and yet I'm a political moderate, liberal on the social issues, and I voted for Obama.

So there I was, en route from Texas to Wisconsin, pulling in the 3G on my iPad, and I could see that I had an engraved invitation from Andrew Sullivan to read his article. I read it out loud, as Meade drove. (Meade is my husband, and — speaking of personal insults to me from Andrew Sullivan — Sullivan insulted us for deciding to marry!)

The cover really does misrepresent the article. The internal headline is: "How Obama's Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics." Note the difference between calling the critics "dumb" and saying Obama will "outsmart" his critics. Sullivan does a good job of marshaling the evidence that Obama has done a pretty good job — not that it's impossible to quibble. (Sullivan claims that Obama has "not had a single significant scandal to his name." What about Fast & Furious?!) But his central theme is that Obama has an 8-year rather than a 4-year plan, so we need to reelect him to "recapitalize him to entrench what he has done already and make it irreversible."

I know that last quote will make many of my readers think: That's exactly why we need to oust him! The changes he's made need to be reversed, and if we don't act now, it will be too late. 

But maybe if you take the time to read the article, you'll agree that some of what Obama has done is admirable. It's still a separate question whether we should want 4 more years of him rather than the alternative. It might be better for the country to have Mitt Romney step in and give the Republican Party a chance to take ownership of the economy and national defense. Four years ago I saw the benefit of the Democratic Party having its turn in power after the Bush years left so many people feeling frustrated and excluded.

In short, Sullivan's article is elaborate and well articulated, but it doesn't answer all the questions, and it certainly doesn't answer the insulting and off-putting question "Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?" I don't expect Sullivan to address the larger journalistic question in which his career is embedded, but it's obvious that Newsweek fully intended to drag in some readers with that red-meat title, and in doing that, it knowingly repelled others like me. I'm not the slightest bit apologetic for passing over an article that didn't appeal to me. I can't read the entire internet. Like every other reader, I have to make choices about what I'm going to read, and that's a choice that must necessarily be made without reading the article.

If I choose not to read the article, must I also choose not to blog about it? Of course not. I'm careful not to say anything I can't fairly say. I don't assert that I know what's in an article I haven't read, but criticizing media, I often have very good reason to write about why I'm not reading something. I analyze covers as covers and headlines as headlines. I think that's entirely appropriate.

Newsweek's "Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?" cover story and photo.

First, the photo. Why that photo? Some people think he looks awful — old, squinty, puffy — but I think it's an effort to evoke the old "HOPE" poster. Actually, it looks more like "hope" than the original Shepard Fairey image, which looks a little hunched-up and blank by comparison. The new image shows Obama, burdened and beleaguered, having sacrificed his youth for us, peering into the future... and yes, there is still hope.

Second, the article, by Andrew Sullivan. Based on the cover headline — "Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?" — I don't even want to read it. It just seems like red meat for Obama fans. And what a cliché! Republicans are stupid. That's what they always say. It's not just red meat, it's the same old red meat they always serve. You know, you have to be kind of dumb to be so easily pulled in by the assurance that you're with the smart people and those other people are stupid.

For the article under that headline to be any good, it would need to offer criticisms of Obama that are ostensibly smarter than the what the supposedly dumb critics are putting forth. A mere defense of Obama — you've got to be dumb not to appreciate him — would be so insipid.

UPDATE: I respond to Sullivan's complaining about my failure to read his article.