Robert Wright

What gives this story legs is that (1) Lin graduated from Harvard, whose basketball program has never been dubbed "gateway to the NBA," and (2) he is Asian-American.

I gather that this second fact is considered by some not just statistically noteworthy (no Asian-American has played in the NBA in decades, though several Asians have) but inherently ironic. Certainly the fact that Lin was almost completely ignored by both college recruiters and pro scouts could be explained by a belief that people of Asian descent aren't built for hoops.

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But there's a sense in which Asian heritage could equip a person for success in basketball, and it wouldn't surprise me if we start seeing more Asian-Americans in the NBA. What follows, at any rate, is my armchair pop-psychology theory to that effect.

Lin is known not just for scoring but for "assists"--that is, he's good at passing the ball to teammates who are in a position to score. Since helping teammates score is a form of selflessness, it's tempting to invoke stereotypes about collectivist Asian values, but that's not where I'm heading.

Being a good passer in basketball isn't the same as being a good passer in football. Quarterbacks tend to go sequentially through their targets--they look at the primary receiver, and if he's not open they look at the next prospect, and so on. In basketball, the great passers are simultaneously aware of several targets at once; their focus expands toward the edge of their peripheral vision. Indeed, sometimes the success of the pass depends on never looking directly at the person you're passing to, as that would tip off your opponents.

One of the most intriguing cultural contrasts between eastern and western ways of viewing the world was documented in experiments by the psychologist Richard Nisbett, some of them in collaboration with Takahiko Masuda. The upshot was that East Asians tend to view scenes more holistically than westerners.

In one experiment, East Asians and Westerners were shown pictures and then asked to remember what they'd seen. Westerners tended to recall the dominant foreground image. If the picture was of a beaming tourist with a mountain stream in the background, they'd remember the tourist clearly. The stream? Not so much. East Asians were on balance better than westerners at remembering the background.

Related tendencies showed up when people were asked to take pictures of other people. East Asians, compared to westerners, framed the pictures so that the individual was smaller relative to the entire scene.

An assessment of eastern and western art found something similar. East Asian landscape paintings, wrote Nisbett and Masuda, "tend to put the horizon high as it would be seen by a bird flying over the landscape or an artist perched on a high outcropping. Western landscapes put the horizon low, as it would be seen from the ground. Consequently, less of the landscape is seen."

I played basketball in high school. Actually, "played" is misleading. I mostly sat on the bench--though during my freshman year I did, to my credit, have the prescience to play at the high school where the great Shaquille O'Neal later played. Anyway, I remember a kind of perceptual "frame shift" you needed to undergo when, on a fast break, or while driving the lane, you had targets to your left and right and needed to be aware of them simultaneously. It was a kind of broadening of your focus, toward a more wide angle view. You stared straight ahead but your focus wasn't straight ahead; in a sense, there was no focus.

Is it crazy to think that the perceptual tendencies that Nisbett and Masuda documented in East Asians could equip them for this sort of thing?

There's at least one problem with my conjecture. These experiments were done with Asians, not Asian-Americans, and presumably immersing people of Asian heritage in western culture makes them more and more like westerners. Indeed, other researchers showed Rorschach cards to China-born Chinese and American-born Chinese and found that the China-born subjects were more likely to view the patterns as a whole, whereas the American-born focused more on details.

But even if immersion in western culture would erase all vestiges of this Asian heritage, that doesn't mean it would do so immediately. One posited explanation for the differences Nisbett documented has to do with the way Asian parents direct the attention of their infants and young children. Lin's parents were born in Asia (Taiwan), and maybe their child rearing reflected that.

In any event, they seem to have raised a nice young man. Here's a video of Lin being interviewed earlier this year, back when he was with the Golden State Warriors. My favorite part is near the end, starting at 3:20, when he is lured into briefly dancing. It's kind of endearing.

[Update, 9:40 a.m., 2/14: Alert commenters Kawlighty and Joe Smith caught two factual errors that I've fixed. I had originally said that this was Lin's rookie year, when in fact he played some games for the Warriors last year. I had also said there had been one Asian NBA player in recent decades (I was of course thinking of Yao Ming) when in fact there have been several.


Image credit: Reuters

Citing unnamed US officials, NBC reported that Israel has used an Iranian opposition group to carry out those much-publicized assassinations of Iranian scientists. The group in question is the M.E.K. (Mojahedin-e Khalq, or People's Mujahedin of Iran), which since 1997 has been designated a terrorist group by the United States because of its alleged assassinations of US citizens.

The argument for considering Israel a supporter of terrorism comes in two varieties:

1) According to NBC, Israel gives the M.E.K. the funding, training, and weapons to carry out the assassinations--and that would seem to constitute support for a terrorist group.

2) Leaving aside the M.E.K. involvement, there's the argument that the assassinations inherently constitute terrorism. Andrew Sullivan and Kevin Drum had previously suggested that whoever is behind the assassinations is committing terrorism, but this NBC story is the first mainstream media corroboration of the widespread suspicion that Israel is behind them.

After the NBC story broke, Paul Pillar, a former CIA official who teaches at Georgetown, dusted off the definition of terrorism used by the US government for purposes of keeping statistics: "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents." That, says Pillar, is what these assassinations are.

The counter-arguments have tended not to be big on legalisms. There is the "Look who's talking" argument. "Isn't Iran itself the leading exporter of terrorism in the world?" asks The New York Post. And there's the argument that Iran is an existential threat to Israel and therefore all is fair. "Israel is entirely justified in using whatever means it has to prevent Khameini's government from achieving its genocidal ends," writes Jonathan Tobin in Commentary.

Daniel Larison, writing in The American Conservative, was aghast at Tobin's argument: "In other words, Israeli state sponsorship of a terrorist group is acceptable because it's in a good cause."

This whole issue is in one sense moot. Adding a country to the list of states that sponsor terrorism requires executive branch initiative. And unless I'm misreading the political winds, placing Israel alongside Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism isn't high on President Obama's list of election-year priorities.What's more, strict and consistent enforcement of America's anti-terrorism laws could raise uncomfortable questions about some of America's drone strikes.

Still, there may be some consequential fallout.

There has been a movement afoot to "de-list" the M.E.K.--to remove it from America's list of terrorist groups on the grounds that it has renounced violence and, anyway, hasn't killed an American in a long time. This argument gets made mainly by Americans who support bombing Iran or even engineering regime change--a project the M.E.K. would love to abet. (A few other high-profile Americans have signed on to the de-list-the-M.E.K. cause, but as The Christian Science Monitor reported, they have shown a tendency to get paid tens of thousands of dollars for the speeches in which they express their newfound yet heartfelt sympathy for the M.E.K.)

As Glenn Greenwald wrote in Salon, the NBC report should, if nothing else, "completely gut the effort to remove the M.E.K. from the list of designated terrorist groups; after all, murdering Iran's scientists through the use of bombs and guns is a defining act of a terror group, at least as U.S. law attempts to define the term."

Matthew Duss has suggested that proposals like this serve as framing devices. They're so radical that they expand the "Overton window" to the right, making standard bomb-Iran proposals sound moderate, Duss wrote in Salon.

But Duss, co-host of the Bloggingheads show Foreign Entanglements, apparently believes that everyone deserves their day in court. He gave Fly his. Here is the heart of their exchange: 

You can watch the whole conversation here.

What is mindful eating? The Times piece gives step-by-step instructions. "Chew slowly. Stop talking. Tune in to the texture of the pasta, the flavor of the cheese, the bright color of the sauce in the bowl, the aroma of the rising steam."

And what is the point of the exercise? For one thing, it's a kind of fast-food form of Buddhism. If you don't have time to go off to a monastery and sit in silence for a week, you can still get little tastes, here and there, of what such a retreat might be like.

And when I say little tastes, I mean little tastes. The Times story says of Jan Chozen Bays, a pediatrician and meditation teacher:

Sometimes, even she is too busy to contemplate a chickpea. So there are days when Dr. Bays will take three mindful sips of tea, "and then, O.K., I've got to go do my work," she said. "Anybody can do that. Anywhere."

Even scarfing down a burrito in the car offers an opportunity for insight. "Mindful eating includes mindless eating," she said. " 'I am aware that I am eating and driving.' "

It may sound like I'm about to make fun of the mindful eating movement--and that last quote is certainly a tempting springboard--but instead I'm going to spring to its defense. First, though, I have to disclose something about myself.

Three times over the last nine years I've gone on one-week silent meditation retreats at a Buddhist retreat center. Seven days of no talking, no reading, no phone calls, no email, no news whatsoever from the outside world. Five and a half hours of sitting meditation each day, five and a half hours of walking walking meditation each day. And, more to the point, three meals a day.

But the term "meals" doesn't do justice to these experiences. When I got to my first meditation retreat, I didn't understand why so many people in the dining hall were eating with their eyes closed. Three days later I was just like them--eyes closed, eating in slow motion, totally absorbed in the taste and texture of foods that, a few days earlier, I would have dismissed as offputtingly wholesome and lacking in sex appeal. (None of the food was even made of dead animals!)

Now that I've established my credentials, I just want to make two points:

(1) If you dabble in mindful eating as prescribed in the Times piece, do not be under the mistaken impression that this is anything like the real thing. The level of sensual emergence in food that I reached would not have been possible without getting totally off the grid and using intense meditation to fundamentally alter my frame of mind.

(2) Do not be under the impression that this sensual indulgence is the ultimate point of the exercise. Because meditation can involve a lot of inward focus, it is sometimes belittled as egotistical or solipsistic. But the overall effect is supposed to be roughly the opposite, and that held true for me. The retreats made me way more open to other people and less judgmental of them. I felt a true kinship even with non-human animals (even non-canine non-human animals!). That this was intertwined with a much deeper sense of aesthetic appreciation--of both food and non-food items--certainly made the whole experience gratifying, but it was a paradoxically selfless kind of gratification.

The transforming effect that a silent meditation retreat can have doesn't magically last forever, though you can hang on to an appreciable part of it if you practice daily meditation and mindfulness in a disciplined fashion after the retreat is over (which is way easier said than done). So I'm not the wonderful human being I so briefly was at the end of my first meditation retreat. But I think I'm better than I was before I went on it (leaving aside the question of how high that's setting the bar).

Anyway: Yes, by all means, read the Times piece and experiment with mindful eating. But don't think that, amid the hubbub of your daily life, you're going to get more than a taste of what mindful eating can be like. And don't think that even full-fledged, mind-blowing mindful eating is more than a taste of what Buddhism can be about.

[Postscript: Judging by early commenter reaction, I've written this in a way that makes it seem like I'm denigrating everyday mindful eating, or looking down on people who haven't been on meditation retreats. I plead innocent! Here's my alibi.]

Earlier this week I criticized Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice for their high-volume indignation over Russian and Chinese vetoes of a UN resolution that would have called on Syria's president to step down. And I still think Clinton and Rice were hypocritical, given America's long tradition of overlooking the atrocities of dictators who are as close to America as Bashar al-Assad is to Russia.

Still, it looks like the public shaming of Russia may have done some good. Russian leaders are sounding pretty defensive, and Russia's foreign minister says he'll work to start negotiations between the Syrian government and the opposition. His prospects can't be great, but I've got to think Russia has a better chance of influencing Assad than that UN resolution did.

I wonder if national leaders are more sensitive to international shaming now than they were back before electronics made the world seem small. Or maybe it's just that the things they're ashamed of are harder to cover up; the images coming out of Homs must make it harder for Russia to walk away. (In 1938 Chamberlain famously described turmoil in Czechoslovakia as "a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing." Today you couldn't say that about Papua New Guinea.)

Meanwhile, I haven't found anyone with a compelling idea about what to do. Everyone seems to agree that this would be a much messier intervention than Libya (where, the New York Times reminded us yesterday, things remain a bit messy even now.) And everyone seems to agree that things will be very messy in the absence of an intervention.

Part of the problem is that, as usual, America's standard dictator narrative doesn't apply. That narrative envisions a single "autocrat," with a small coterie of thugs and lots of military hardware, oppressing the rest of the population. But it looks like Assad may be able to hold the allegiance of ethnic groups constituting a third of the country (Allawites, Christians, Kurds)--plus the military hardware.

There is at least some cause for hope in two New Republic pieces--one pro-intervention and one not--that go beyond indignant denunciations of Assad and of Russia and actually look at things from their point of view.

The pro-intervention piece notes that if Russia is to join in authorizing an intervention it will have to be guaranteed post-war use of its cherished warm-water naval base in Syria. (I would add that the same pre-requisite holds if Russia is to truly support more peaceful regime change.) The anti-intervention piece notes that if diplomacy is to work, key members of the Assad regime will have to be guaranteed safe exile after this is over.

Looking at things from the point of view of bad guys is always unpopular--certainly in America, home of the good guys--but it's just about always valuable.

Coda: I had actually raised the last point--about guaranteeing Assad safe haven--in a recent Bloggingheads dialogue with Matthew Lee of Inner City Press, who is the world's most dogged United Nations correspondent. When I asked him if it was possible to grant immunity from prosecution to a dictator who has committed atrocities, he pointed out that, actually, we just did that with another dictator who is probably at the Ritz Carlton in New York at this very moment:

I take this with a small grain of salt. A number of terrorism prosecutions have been borderline entrapment cases -- terrorist "plots" that took shape with the active involvement of undercover agents. So changes in these numbers could conceivably reflect changes in the zealousness of law enforcement. And in any event we're not out of the woods; a sufficiently big attack could spook Americans into the sort of hypervigilance (prolific mosque surveillance, ethnic profiling) that alienates young Muslims and so makes them more susceptible to the call of radicalism.

Still, these numbers seem encouraging, and there is reason to hope for continued progress. Some of the most high-profile cases -- the Fort Hood shooting, the botched Times Square bombing -- were, by the perpetrators' own accounts, inspired in part by either the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, or drone strikes in Pakistan. With the withdrawal from Iraq complete, and withdrawal from Afghanistan now accelerated, maybe this kind of fuel for homegrown terrorism will decline for some time to come.

And surely, having made this progress, we wouldn't threaten it by doing something as stupid as supporting or even participating in the bombing of a Muslim country, would we?

It's kind of amazing, when you think about it: This whole "debate" over bombing Iran has included essentially no discussion of whether America's involvement in another war might revive the threat of homegrown terrorism, which was demonstrably exacerbated by past wars with Muslim countries. I'm getting that Twilight-Zoney feeling I got before the invasion of Iraq, when it slowly became apparent that the drive to war was impervious to reason.

Of course, there's a downside to a 7-millimeter-thick phone: It will have less battery life than a thicker phone could have had. And it will be harder to hold onto than a thicker phone, so you'll be more likely to drop it and watch in horror as it plunges to its death. But in between the time it leaves your hand and the time it hits the concrete, it will look really attractive. Same goes for when you're on the road and the battery is dead: It's an awesome kind of dead.

I've waited until now to unload this rant about the gadget thinness fettish because I wanted to let a decent interval pass after the death of the man I blame for it: Steve Jobs.

Remember when Jobs first unveiled the Macbook Air? I do, because I had long been a fan of the small, lightweight computers that had until then been available only on the Windows platform. Jobs brought the machine onstage in a manila envelope, because the thing he wanted to wow the audience with was its thinness.

I thought: Who cares how thin it is? Thickness isn't the dimension that really matters when you have to fit a computer into a tiny backpack or use it in a coach seat on an airplane. And, anyway, more important than any spatial dimension is weight. Sure, to the extent that thinner means lighter, thinness is good, but if you make thinness an end in itself, you start compromising functionality.

Witness the new generation of Windows "ultrabooks"--machines designed to compete with the Macbook Air. Read the parts of the ultrabook reviews that focus on the keyboards. Chances are the reviewer will say either that the keyboard is bad or that, happily, the keyboard isn't quite as bad as the average ultrabook keyboard. The main reason is that the keys don't have far enough to travel--even though adding a millimeter of travel space would have added almost nothing to the machine's weight.

Jobs hewed true to his thinness fetish with the iPhone. (That's one reason iPhone batteries aren't replaceable.) And the iPhone set the aesthetic standard for a whole generation of smartphones. It's a testament to the charisma and marketing genius of Jobs that he could start a global fashion wave that millions of people have cheerfully succumbed to even as it makes their lives more problematic.

The good news is that the tide may be turning. Motorola just unveiled the Droid Razr Maxx--a new iteration of the Droid Razr that is thicker than the original. The reason is that the original, while claiming the title "thinnest 4G phone on the market," also claimed the title "phone with bad battery life."

Last week Brad Molen of Engadget reviewed the Razr Maxx. One of his main complaints was that the Maxx would make people who had just bought the original Droid Razr feel cheated. "How many owners," Molen asked, "would much rather have a device that's still very reasonably svelte and offers astronomically superb battery life?" That's the kind of question that could start a fashion revolution.

This seems like a bit much. It's not as if this resolution would have stopped the bloodshed. It would have called on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down--something he would have promptly not done. And it's not as if the Russians and Chinese weren't willing to play ball at all. Russia offered amendments that would have turned an ineffectual resolution into a more conspicuously ineffectual resolution, and they were rejected.

And Russia's resistance, anyway, isn't shocking. The Assad regime is an ally of Russia that buys arms from it, and Russia has a naval base in Syria.

Imagine if the U.S. had a naval base in some Arab country and popular unrest threatened the regime, which then set out to suppress the unrest. Oh, wait--you don't have to imagine that; it actually happened last year, in Bahrain. And the US wasted no time in deserting the people in favor of the regime, even as some of those people were being killed or tortured.

Granted, the Syrian regime's brutality far exceeds that of the Bahranian regime, which managed to nip its revolution in the bud. But America has more than once averted its eyes as friendly dictators killed thousands of innocents. For a nation whose support of popular revolts comes and goes depending on which authoritarian regimes we find useful, we're pretty intolerant of this sort of fickleness in other nations.

I would have liked to see this resolution pass. (And I'd love to see Assad actually step down.) And I can see why the administration would like to be seen as making some progress on Syria. That might slow the advance of people who are arguing for military intervention (which would be way, way messier and less predictable than it was in Libya, and would take place in a much more explosive part of the world).

And indeed, as if on cue, the usual suspects responded to the failure of this resolution by arguing that America should arm the Syrian rebels--a development that would no doubt be followed by calls for America to provide air support and, if necessary, boots on the ground.

Then again, those suspects were saying the same thing before the resolution failed, and they would not, in any event, be long appeased by essentially symbolic actions at the UN. As we saw in Iraq, even when the UN does something much more than symbolic--like get a country to admit weapons inspectors who are in the process of discovering that it has no nuclear weapons program--American hawks have a way of persisting and prevailing.

If the failure of this resolution has made it even easier for the hawks, that's bad. But for Clinton and Rice to carry their moral indignation to such high levels is to evince exactly the sort of forgetful American self-righteousness that is one of the hawks' most valuable and enduring resources.

I can help! I'm not a regular-season fan either, so I've devised a simple four-point formula to help me choose my allegiance. 

1) All other things being equal, root for the underdog.

2) All other things being equal, root against a team that has a known cheater as its coach.

3) All other things being equal, root against a team whose quarterback has political aspirations and lent valuable symbolic support to a president who a year earlier had launched a disastrous war that would damage America's national security for years to come.

4) All other things being equal, root against a team whose quarterback has so little imagination that he marries a supermodel and builds a supermansion.

Some years there is tension among these four criteria. But not this year! Go Giants.

On post-dialogue reflection, I fear that a viable third-party peace candidate is unlikely. The natural constituency would consist mainly of (a) Republicans who are very fiscally conservative, including libertarians; and (b) Democrats who are in the left wing of their party not just on foreign policy but, typically, on domestic policy. It's hard to imagine a domestic policy platform that both groups could stand on. Anyway, back to Horgan's book: It's a brisk, uplifting read. Here's an excerpt that just appeared on The Atlantic.

When I say "major," I mean major. It isn't a plan just to defuse the crisis, but to craft a grand bargain that would begin to draw Iran into the community of nations. Along with intrusive inspections that would prevent Iran from enriching uranium to weapons-grade levels, there would be full recognition of Iran by America, systematic cooperation between the two nations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so on.

I hope anyone tempted to dismiss an approach this ambitious will first pause to appreciate the basic reality that motivates Pickering and Luers to think in such big terms. Here is their key paragraph:

For Iran's leadership, the notion that the United States is bent on overthrowing its rulers is rooted in historical experience: the United States did overthrow Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, supported the Shah afterward, supported Saddam Hussein's war against Iran in the 1980s, and now backs increasing efforts to weaken and isolate Iran.

It's true: There is a genuine fear in some Iranian circles that America has hostile intentions that are independent of any threat Iran may pose to America or Israel. And if you were a Middle Eastern regime that believed the U.S. was bent on deposing you, wouldn't you want nuclear weapons? Especially if you'd seen what happened to the last two Middle Eastern leaders who abandoned a nuclear weapons program--Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi?

No expert I know of believes that bombing Iran would permanently halt an Iranian drive for nuclear weapons. Most experts believe bombing would remove any doubt in the minds of Iranian leaders that they should pursue nuclear weapons headlong. Certainly bombing would intensify what Pickering and Luers identify as one of the motivators of any Iranian ambition to build nuclear weapons.

It may be to President Obama's credit that this week, posed with a question about American drone strikes, he answered it rather than ducking it--even though the strikes are technically covert operations. It is not to his credit that his answer seems to have been misleading.

As part of a foray into social media, the president was chatting with some regular Americans on a Google Plus "hangout" when he encountered a question about drones from a guy named Evan in Brooklyn. "For the most part," Obama assured Evan, "they have been very precise, precision strikes against al Qaeda and their affiliates." He added later that the drone strikes are "part and parcel of our overall authority when it comes to battling al Qaeda. It is not something that's being used beyond that." And he reminded us that "there are still active plots against the United States."

Coverage in the mainstream media tended not to question any of this, but Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations questioned it. Noting that Obama had focused his discussion on drone strikes in Pakistan, Zenko wrote: "We know from reporting by Pakistani journalists that the vast majority of suspected militants targeted are not members of al-Qaeda, nor are they involved in plots against the U.S. homeland. Many of the targets are actually anonymous, low-level militants who provide operational support to the Taliban insurgency in southern Afghanistan."

You can understand why Obama would want to play up the al Qaeda angle and stress that there are still "plots against the United States." Terrorist threats to the homeland tend to shut down critical thinking--and if, as Zenko says, the drone strikes aren't mainly about al Qaeda, much less about al Qaeda's threats to America, then critical thinking could raise doubts about them.

After all, the inevitable drone-induced civilian casualties tend to make life easier for recruiters for al Qaeda and other anti-American terrorist groups. It's one thing if, in thus expanding the ranks of terrorists in the long run, we're at least doing major damage to al Qaeda in the short run; it still may be, on balance, bad anti-terrorism strategy, but at least you'd have to do the math, comparing short-term benefits to long-term costs, before being sure of that. But if--as seems to be the case--most of the drone strikes are protecting American soldiers in Afghanistan from attacks by the Taliban, then there may be no big upside in terms of homeland security.

True, the security of American soldiers may be served, and that's of course a good thing in itself. But many of those soldiers are there because Obama ill-advisedly upped the ante in Afghanistan, rather than start withdrawing as soon as he took office. And, worse still, he seems to have committed to this escalation as part of a political calculation during the presidential campaign.

At one point in his Google Plus conversation, Obama did a masterful job of describing the function of the drone strikes in a way that did allude to their battlefield function, but still appealed to "war on terror" psychology. The people targeted by the drones, he said, "are on a list of active terrorists who are trying to go in and harm Americans, hit American facilities, American bases, and so on." When you're at war, is it really "terrorism" for the enemy to kill your soldiers? If so, why isn't it terrorism for your soldiers to kill the enemy (especially when you sometimes, as with drone strikes, kill civilians)? But of course, the virtue of the word "terrorism" is that it makes us think of al Qaeda, whether or not al Qaeda is in fact involved.

If drone strikes are indeed increasing America's vulnerability to terrorism in the long run--and if in the short term they're a price paid for Obama's 2008 political calculation--then it's no wonder the president is using these sorts of verbal smokescreens.

[Postscript: It was a big week in drone news. Here's Glenn Greenwald's coverage of a story about the state department's use of surveillance drones in Iraq and, possibly, elsewhere. And here's Obama's Google Plus chat. The drone questions start at 26:25.]

[Update, 2/2/12 8 a.m.: Relevantly, the New York Times reports that a new NATO report finds that "the Taliban have gradually distanced themselves from Al Qaeda."]

Last night CNN commentator David Gergen said of Newt Gingrich, "It's like he's in a different reality."

Some might say this insight dawned on Gergen more than a quarter of a century after the evidence for it became insurmountable. But, in Gergen's defense, he wasn't making an overall appraisal of Newt's mental health; he was talking about the concession speech Gingrich had just delivered.

And, indeed, the speech made few clear references to the universe you and I live in. Gingrich, having just seen his chances of winning the Republican nomination drop to less than one percent, set about describing the things he would do the day he took the oath of office.

Worse still, as he ticked these things off, he showed signs of more fine-grained disorientation. He said he would "instruct the State Department that day to open the embassy in Jerusalem and recognize Israel." I get the part about moving the embassy to Jerusalem. But: Recognize Israel? I was under the impression that we'd already recognized Israel. Maybe he meant Palestine? No, I guess we can rule out that hypothesis.

This could get fun, folks. We're on a magical mystery tour, and Newt is our tourguide.

But, pessimist that I am, I fear that the journey is close to its end. I'm betting Newt will pull the plug before Super Tuesday, and maybe even within ten days. My logic:

1) Casino-magnate sugar daddy Sheldon Adelson will presumably cut off Newt's $5-million-per-week allowance. Surely Adelson's friends will explain to him that at this point each dollar for Newt just increases the chances that Obama will defeat Romney. Conceivably Gingrich could counter that by promising to run a 100-percent positive campaign. But I'm guessing the Adelson spigot is now off.

2) Once the money runs out, campaigning can become un-fun. Last night Newt, in yet another megalomaniacal reference to historical figures that are nearly as momentous as himself, closed his speech by pledging "my life, my fortune, my sacred honor." (It's the pledge made by the signatories of the Declaration of Independence to each other.) But is he serious about the "fortune" part? I can't see him persisting beyond the point where campaign expenses start cutting into Callista's hairspray budget.

3) Newt is addicted to public adoration. The flip side is that, when the crowds start dwindling, he'll feel withdrawal. And there's a reason they call it "withdrawal."

I'm not a political sage, but I assume the experts are right when they say that February voting is unlikely to bring any good news for Gingrich. So as of a week from now, he'll have lost several caucuses and a non-binding primary. And the view ahead will look like this: He has to wait three more weeks for two more primaries that he's going to lose (Arizona and Michigan)--after which, with a week still left until Super Tuesday, he'll have zero momentum.  

Newt's crazy, but he's not that crazy. Is he?

Are members of the "elite liberal media," as Newt Gingrich would put it, secretly rooting for him? That's the claim of New York Magazine's John Heilemann. And, says Heilemann, this covert sympathy for Newt "may turn out to be a crucial asset--especially if, as seems likely, he falls short in the Florida primary and is forced into survival mode."

It isn't that many journalists actually want Newt to be president, says Heilemann. Some just want the horse race to continue, since they are, after all, in the horse race covering business. For others, there's something fascinating about the spectacle of Newt, and their lives would be poorer without it.

I have to admit that I fall into the latter camp. The horror I feel when I imagine Newt assuming a position of responsibility can give way to melancholia if I contemplate the prospect of life without the feisty, aging smurf. Here are some things I'll miss should anyone ever succeed in driving a stake through Gingrich's heart:

1) The bizarre hyperbole. In his famous dressing down of John King, Newt said that the media's focus on his previous wife's testimony about his character was "as close to despicable as anything I can imagine." Anything you can imagine? Come on, Newt, think harder. Jeffrey Dahmer? The Jonestown Massacre? Stop me when I get to something closer to despicable than John King.

2) The vision thing. The first President Bush was derided for lacking "the vision thing." With Newt that's not a problem. My favorite part of his visionary mode is the part where he... just... keeps... going. Take the space colony thing. It's not crazy, if you're trying to win the Florida primary, to say that you'll increase spending for NASA. I don't even think it's necessarily ill-advised to set as your eventual goal a continuously inhabited base on the moon. And I suppose, if you want, you could call this base a "colony". But at that point you're at the outer limits of the vision an aspiring president should evince. Newt boldly goes where no aspiring president has gone before. He has pledged that as president he would support something that he (who else?) dreamed up as a congressman: "the northwest ordinance for space," which says that, once you have 13,000 Americans on the moon, the moon can apply for statehood.

The problem isn't the conundrums this would raise. (With one senator per 6,500 moon residents, would lunar interests be overrepresented in Congress? Or might this effect be partly offset by the difficulty senators would have flying home to take the pulse of their constituents on three-day weekends?) The problem, rather, is that this sounds like a crazy person talking!

What's not to like?

3) The instinct for the jugular. Newt's ruthlessness might bother me if he were running against a Democratic presidential candidate. But that doesn't seem to be in the cards. So I can just watch with bemusement as he besmirches Mitt Romney's good name. Some people have criticized Sheldon Adelson, the sugardaddy Casino magnate who bankrolled Newt's South Carolina and Florida media campaigns. (Oops! I mean, "who donated to a SuperPac not affiliated with Newt Gingrich.") But my hat's off to any Republican who will spend several million dollars trying to drive up the unfavorables of the inevitable Republican nominee--and in a swing state, no less!

Godspeed, Newt Gingrich.

Before the Iraq War, a number of Iraqi-Americans expressed support for invasion. But there is no groundswell of support among Iranian-Americans for bombing Iran even though they by and large oppose the Iranian regime. I asked Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council and author of the new book A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy with Iran, why that is.

Newt Gingrich's recent proposal to colonize the moon is nothing new. Gingrich has been generating visionary extraterrestrial ideas at least since 1984, when he published a book called Window of Opportunity: A Blueprint for the Future.

And what a blueprint it was! Here are just two of the space-related ideas Newt trotted out in that book:

1) Nocturnal Illumination. Gingrich wrote: "A mirror system in space could provide the light equivalent of many full moons so that there would be no need for nighttime lighting of the highways." The implications of this technology for law enforcement did not escape Newt's attention: "Ambient light covering entire areas could reduce the current danger of criminals lurking in darkness."

2) Helping the Handicapped. Gingrich saw and emphasized "the possible benefits of weightlessness to people currently restricted to wheelchairs." This may sound farfetched, but Gingrich had done his homework; he reported that when he shared the idea with paraplegics they "begin asking questions in an enthusiastic tone."

I gleaned these two examples from a column for The New Republic that I wrote back in 1995, when Mickey Kaus and I were writing TNR's TRB column on alternate weeks (and when TNR was a weekly). I'm reprinting the column, below, for two reasons: (1) I actually kind of like it; (2) it shows how long Newt has been giving conservatives good reason to doubt his bonafides.

The context for the column is that Gingrich had just gotten a lot of publicity for landing a $4.5 million book contract.

TRB FROM WASHINGTON: The $4 million mind

By Robert Wright

The New Republic, p. 6, Jan. 23, 1995

We stand at a crossroads between two diverse futures. O.K., I admit it: the previous sentence isn't original to me. I was looking for an opening line with some oomph, and I lifted this one from the work of one of the most powerful writers of our time: Newt Gingrich. It is the first sentence in his book on America's future.

No, I don't mean the book that a major New York publishing house is willing to spend millions publishing and promoting; that book isn't written yet. I mean Window of Opportunity, published in 1984 by "Tom Doherty Associates"-- and promoted via a $105,000 publicity budget donated by oil interests, textile interests, real estate interests and so on. But that's another story. This week let's use Window of Opportunity as the rare opportunity it is--a chance to glimpse a $4.5 million literary talent in action.

To begin with, there is Gingrich's justly celebrated use of imagery. Consider his description of how "welfare state" liberals wrecked the space program. When he writes that "the vision of a malaise-dominated decaying Western culture smothered the dream of a permanently manned station," we feel as if we can see the malaise-dominated decay; and we watch, transfixed, as it (or, strictly speaking, the vision of it) slowly smothers a space station (or, technically, the dream of one). Of course, more than Gingrich's literary flair, it is his penetrating vision of the future that has made him such a sought-after writer. He reports, for example, that the modern economy calls for less and less physical labor, and then builds swiftly from this insight to the prediction that Americans "will increasingly ... release the day's tension by lifting weights, swimming or through contact sports." Newtradamus has spoken.

As Gingrich stresses repeatedly, the path to an "optimistic future" (one of the two diverse futures between which lies the crossroads at which we stand) passes through outer space. If the government had followed through on the 1969 moon landing, he says, then by 1984 we would have had two space stations and a colony on the moon. You might ask: What eventual benefits could justify such massive spending? Gingrich is ready for this question. "A mirror system in space could provide the light equivalent of many full moons so that there would be no need for nighttime lighting of the highways." Indeed, "ambient light covering entire areas could reduce the current danger of criminals lurking in darkness." Also, don't forget "the possible benefits of weightlessness to people currently restricted to wheelchairs." Lending credence to this scenario, Gingrich reports that, if you describe it to paraplegics, they "begin asking questions in an enthusiastic tone."

The principle underlying this last idea--dubbed "compassionate high-tech" by its discoverer, Gingrich--admits to endless application. Since his book came out, there have been breakthroughs in the field of superconductivity. Should we launch a big federal research program? I say yes, and I think Gingrich will agree once he hears my logic. Superconductivity research involves very low temperatures. So on the roof of each laboratory we could build an ice-skating rink for underclass children who would be flown in to an adjoining heliport. "But what if it rains?" Luddite McGoverniks will ask. Each rink would be covered with a geodesic dome, built by local prison inmates who would thus gain valuable job skills.

There is a serious point here somewhere. Gingrich calls himself a " conservative futurist," yet when he gets futuristic he jettisons the conservative aversion to government involvement. Conservatives are supposed to ask, for example, "Mightn't the market work better here than government spending?" But when the government spending is on technology, the only question Gingrich asks is, "Do I think this is cool?" The answer almost invariably is yes. For example, he thinks "home-based information systems using either the telephone or cable" are cool. Thus "we need dozens of government-encouraged and subsidized efforts" to build such systems, so that we'll find out which kind is best.

Actually, since he wrote this, various media and telecom companies have proved willing, without special subsidy, to build expensive, suburb-size systems, installing living-room machines for videotext, multimedia, etc. So far the results can be summarized as follows: this is an excellent way to waste money. The whole notion of choosing a particular "type" of system is losing out to the realization that, if we provide capacious wires and a few industry-wide standards, the market will answer the hardware and software questions that Gingrich would have thrown our tax dollars at.

Witness the "Minitel" example. In the early 1980s the French government decided what kind of on-line text-retrieval machines French homes would have. This did spur the creation of data services--home banking, and so on. But today these antique machines are so glacially slow that the physical infrastructure is stifling the development of new data-intensive on-line services, the kind featuring multimedia effects or even simple graphics. The United States now has gobs more computers and computer networks per capita than France, and its big networks, such as America Online, are invading French turf. Back in 1984 Gingrich said Minitel "may make France the leading information-processing society in the world by the end of the century." Better hurry. Gingrich also thinks health care technology is cool. Serious students of this subject worry that insurance insulates patients from the cost of technology, thus yielding lots of high-cost, low-benefit use and in turn steering too much of society's resources to the further development of such machinery. But Gingrich wants more. In 1984 he wanted more cat-scan machines, and he wanted the government to provide a $100 million incentive for the development of user-friendly dialysis machines--even though "there are already companies and researchers interested in this problem."

The point here isn't that Gingrich will now waste tons on technology. The current political climate will restrain this tendency. The point is that--in case you hadn't noticed--there is little careful thought underpinning his enthusiasms, nothing solid beneath his unshakable self-assurance and his intense disdain for disagreement. (Did you know that the civil rights protests of the 1960s were a seminal contributor to America's "epidemic of technological abhorrence"?) The man who would orchestrate a paradigm shift in American governance shows no inclination to clearly address this basic question: Is government help required to reach a given social goal? And, lacking such clarity, he is at least as likely to say no when the answer is yes as to say yes when the answer is no. We stand at a crossroads between two diverse futures, and--wouldn't you know it!--our compass is busted. I feel increasingly malaise-dominated.

Actually, the Iranians aren't a nation whose leaders have set themselves that "strategic goal." They are a nation with a crackpot president who (a) isn't the country's supreme leader and doesn't have the power to order an attack on Israel; (b) did say "the occupying regime must be wiped off the map" (or "vanish from the page of time"--the translation is disputed); but (c) later said he was referring to eliminating the Zionist form of government, not the people living under it; and (d) said the way to achieve this was to give Palestinians the vote--and that if they opted for a two-state solution rather than a single non-Zionist state, that would be fine, too; (e) also said that Iran would never initiate military hostilities with Israel.

In sum, whatever you think about President Ahmadinejad (and I think he's pretty horrible), or about what he said or about the sincerity of his subsequent qualifications of what he said, for Barak to say Iran's "strategic goal" is Israel's annihilation is a bit misleading.

But let's leave aside the facts of the case. Could Barak really think that, even if Iranian leaders had said they would launch a first strike, they'd actually do such a thing? To believe that, you would have to believe that the Iranian regime is literally suicidal, since Israel's nuclear retaliatory capacity is very robust (not to mention the fact that the event wouldn't exactly go unnoticed by America). Does Barak really believe the Iranian leadership is crazy?

Here's something he said in 2010 that didn't make it into the Times Magazine piece: "I don't think the Iranians, even if they got the bomb, (would) drop it in the neighborhood. They fully understand what might follow. They are radical but not totally crazy. They have a quite sophisticated decision-making process, and they understand reality."

It's enough to make you think that maybe as Barak "gazed out at the lights of Tel Aviv" he was thinking to himself, "Hmmm, this guy says he's writing a story for a major American media outlet. Maybe if I sound sufficiently terrified, he'll report that Israel is determined to launch a military strike before too long, thus scaring America into either ratcheting up sanctions to even higher levels or going ahead and bombing Iran."

Of course, maybe Barak didn't think that. But if he did, then Ronen Bergman has made him a very happy man. The piece's final paragraph begins, "After speaking with many senior Israeli leaders and chiefs of the military and the intelligence, I have come to believe that Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012. Perhaps in the small and ever-diminishing window that is left, the United States will choose to intervene after all..."

Barak isn't as alarmist as some. He concedes in the Times Magazine piece that "Iran has other reasons for developing nuclear bombs, apart from its desire to destroy Israel." For example: "An Iranian bomb would ensure the survival of the current regime, which otherwise would not make it to its 40^th anniversary in light of the admiration that the young generation in Iran has displayed for the West." Got that? Two of the reasons the Iranian regime wants the bomb are (1) to launch an attack that would be literally suicidal; and (2) to ensure its survival. (No wonder Israelis think the Iranians are crazy!)

Notwithstanding my doubts about Barak's agenda, Bergman's piece is well worth reading--richer and more nuanced than my selective summary might suggest. Meanwhile, if you want another view of what Israeli government officials are thinking, Trita Parsi, who just published a book called A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy with Iran, has this appraisal: