NYT columnist Frank Bruni muses about why Obama and Romney won't say the word "sacrifice."

Here's the pithiest line:

... why sacrifice in ways that plump federal coffers or reduce federal obligations when Washington can’t be trusted to make anything better or get anything right?

I think Bruni disturbed himself when he coughed up that argument for the other side. He had to distance himself with this introductory phrase:

And cynicism about the intentions of politicians and the effectiveness of government has become an easy out: ...

Oh, so only cynics and intellectually lazy characters go with that question? All right then. I'll ignore it and move on to your other musings about "[your] own trust issues," which could be "lessened considerably" if only some candidate would say that "pain is a precursor to healing; and that it’s time to take our medicine."

No, I won't! It was a great question, and I have my own trust issues that would be lessened considerably if you wouldn't put a sign in front of us saying only lazy/cynical people ask it. I could just as well say that it's the cynical, easy way out to say that it's the cynical, easy way out to ask that question. That is the question!

"And is it really good policy for Santorum to fill young adults with suspicions about higher learning..."

"... which rightly exists to challenge — in a healthy sense — what parents and maybe pastors have poured into them?" asks Frank Bruni.

If their beliefs survive that, then those beliefs can be seen as genuinely earned and are probably all the stronger for it. Santorum’s did. He went not only to college but also to two graduate schools, getting an M.B.A. from one and a law degree from the other.

But to listen to him talk about universities is to get the sense that he doesn’t trust others to emerge from such an obstacle course of unsavory influences as uncorrupted as he did. For safety’s sake, he’ll bless a little ignorance.

He’ll also massage facts. In explaining his Kennedy-induced nausea, he claimed that the former president had said that people of faith had no place in public life. What Kennedy asserted was infinitely more nuanced than that. He said people of all faiths were welcomed, so long as they weren’t slaves to their creeds.

Apparently, Santorum used bulimia against those ideas that the academics attempted to pour into him. Others digest what they've been fed.

Speaking of pukeworthy: "infinitely more nuanced." What is it about nuance that liberals love so much? And infinitely more nuanced? Ironically, that's quite crude. Infinitely? Kennedy had oodles and oodles of nuance. Or is it that Santorum, in Bruni's book, has zero nuance, so anyone with any nuance at all has infinitely more than Santorum?

And I love the way Bruni modifies his idea of challenging family and religious values with the phrase "in a healthy sense." There's no assurance of healthfulness!

And if challenge is so good, college students who were raised in liberal families with liberal or nonexistent religions are being horribly deprived!

Young brains.

1. Does homosexuality reside at the biological brain level? "There is substantial evidence of various connections between genes, brain, hormones and sexual identity... But those do not amount to a simple picture that A leads to B." So gay people aren't born gay? "I honestly have no idea if I was born this way. My memory doesn’t stretch to the crib. But I know that from the moment I felt romantic stirrings, it was Timmy, not Tammy, who could have me walking on air or wallowing in torch songs and tubs of ice cream."

2. Do kids with ADD have a different kind of brain that makes stimulants like Ritalin have a mysterious opposite effect, calming them down? "Putting children on drugs does nothing to change the conditions that derail their development in the first place. Yet those conditions are receiving scant attention. Policy makers are so convinced that children with attention deficits have an organic disease that they have all but called off the search for a comprehensive understanding of the condition."

3. Are teenagers defective at the brain level? "Brain research is often taken to mean that adolescents are really just defective adults—grown-ups with a missing part. Public policy debates about teenagers thus often turn on the question of when, exactly, certain areas of the brain develop, and so at what age children should be allowed to drive or marry or vote—or be held fully responsible for crimes. But the new view of the adolescent brain isn't that the prefrontal lobes just fail to show up; it's that they aren't properly instructed and exercised.... Instead of simply giving adolescents more and more school experiences—those extra hours of after-school classes and homework—we could try to arrange more opportunities for apprenticeship. "

"Thou art waxen fat, thou art grown thick, thou art covered with fatness...."

Anti-fat insults, from the Bible.

No, I didn't go looking for anti-fat insults, though I did have a tab open on the Frank Bruni column delving into the hot topic of whether Chris Christie is too fat to win a presidential election.

Let’s talk about discipline.... Discipline can... be overrated. A vegan-come-lately, President Clinton fought and often lost his struggles with diverse appetites...

[And] President Bush...  seemingly kept his midlife resolve never to touch booze again, worked out religiously, maintained an early bedtime and vacationed like clockwork at his ranch[.] Bush was arguably more disciplined in those arenas than his predecessor and successor combined, but discipline was entwined, as it often is, with an absolute certainty and even inflexibility. And those qualities arguably had consequences far greater than Christie’s evident gluttony might.

As an open tab, that item had a chance at getting blogged, but the fact is, I was just looking up "apple" in the Bible, for my previous post, and got drawn into Deuteronomy 32. If you think we are cruel to fat people today, you should see what God had in mind.