Ross Douthat

There's a lot to agree with in Peter Beinart's piece about Obama's quest to "end" the culture wars - particularly his point that as far as style and symbolism goes, a black liberal may be better-positioned than a white liberal to build the kind of bridges between the secular left and the religious middle that an enduring Democratic majority requires. (In a somewhat similar vein, I suspect the GOP's quest to build a bridge between the religious right and the… More »

"Enhanced interrogation" yielded crucial intelligence that saved lives, says former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen. No, says the Post's Dan Froomkin, it didn't. Yes, says Thiessen, it did.Obviously, this debate will never be completely resolved. But neither will it disappear: If it does go away temporarily, you can bet that it will come roaring back eventually, in this administration or in one to come. And I, for one, wouldn't mind getting a lot more information… More »

If you're looking for a more nuanced and detailed take on the Vatican's decision to lift the excommunication of four Society of Saint Pius X bishops than, say, the New York Times provides, I recommend Amy Welborn's roundup and analysis. This bit, especially, distills what I'm assuming is the essence of the reasoning behind Benedict's decision:The Pope is not stupid. He knows the ins and outs of the SSPX better than any of us and is deeply familiar with the various… More »

In response to this post, and the suggestion that even hardened atheists should occasionally feel faint tremors of "maybe God does exist" doubt, several scoffing readers have directed me to Bertrand Russell's famous teapot analogy, which supposedly settles once and for all the question of whether nonbelievers should give any credence to the possibility that God exists:If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the… More »

Drawing Che Guevera into the earlier conversation about Irish terrorists, Arab terrorists and counterfactuals, Larison writes:Lincoln, Wilson and FDR-each of them was responsible for far more deaths and far more destruction than Che Guevara or any of a number of Arab nationalist figures ever was, but two important things separate them in the eyes of the general public: they did not personally kill anyone, and the causes for which their armies killed and destroyed… More »

From Todd VanDerWerff's meditations on the season premiere:I suspect when all is said and done that the history of Lost will cleave it pretty neatly into two different shows.... The great divide falls between the first half of the show's third season and the last half of that season (which roughly matches up with when executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse convinced ABC to let them set a hard end date for the series). Before season three's 13th episode… More »

Via Isaac Chotiner, I see that David Carr has a novel theory of the Oscar nominations:... what's particularly clear this season is that the Academy will reward excellence, no matter if it comes from a big studio or a small independent.... This year's Top 5 were studio and indie, big and little, broad and very specific. The string that pulls them together is not where the films came from in terms of backing, but where they come from artistically. Each of the films… More »

We disagree about the merits of Revolutionary Road, but for a similarly damning (and more comprehensive) take on this year's nominees, I recommend Chris Orr's burst of spleen. More »

Allow me to quote myself, from the latest issue of National Review: ... the [Christmas] rush is worse for critics than for viewers, since at least half the movies "released" in November and December won't trickle out to non-Manhattan multiplexes until January. (Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, which national publications had to review around its official December 12 release date, probably reached a theater near you some thirty-odd days later.) But I suspect that even… More »

Speaking of week-old blog posts, here's a provocative argument from Edward Glaeser - one that foreshadows, I suspect, some interesting intra-conservative debates to come. More »

This has been making the rounds already, but it's hard to come up with a better way to mark the occasion: More »

In my recent bloggingheads session with Yglesias, I talked a lot about the perils awaiting the progressive mediasphere in an age of liberal dominance - perils with which the conservative mediasphere became, alas, intimately familiar with in the age of Bush. And I meant to link to this post from Ezra Klein, written in the wake of Obama's big dinners with pundits of the right and left, as an example of what I had in mind:... the important thing Obama could do for the… More »

As Daniel Larison notes, the one place where Obama explicitly invoked "false choices" in yesterday's speech was his Bush-rebuking reference to "the choice between our safety and our ideals." This comes a week after Evan Thomas and Stuart Taylor attracted a great deal of attention (much of it unfavorable) for a Newsweek cover story arguing that Obama may end up following in Dick Cheney's footsteps on at least some hot-button national security issues - and a week, as… More »

The speech, I thought, was a sometimes-dissonant, sometimes-successful attempt to marry expansiveness and sobriety. The language of realism was woven throughout - "our collective failure to make hard choices ... the time has come to set aside childish things ...the challenges we face ... will not be met easily or in a short span of time" - and there was, as Maggie Gallagher put it, an "old-school Protestant" element to much of Obama's rhetoric, from the calls to… More »

Lift every voice and sing. Till earth and heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of Liberty; Let our rejoicing rise. High as the listening skies, Let it resound loud as the rolling sea. Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us, Facing the rising sun of our new day begun. Let us march on till victory is won. Stony the road we trod, Bitter the chastening rod, Felt in the days when hope… More »

I'll watching the Inauguration of Barack Obama tomorrow the way a good American should: At home, over some sort of brunch, in front of a flat-screen TV. But as a good Washingtonian, I figured I should attend at least one of the weekend's events, so I hiked down to the Lincoln Memorial concert on Sunday, and spent a few hours shivering in the cold just beyond the World War II memorial (that was as close as we could get), watching as various Obama propaganda films… More »

Razib rounds up the responses to his case against the term "Judeo-Christian." I should note that mine was not intended to be a full-throated defense by any stretch: Any utility the term has is either relatively narrow or extremely broad, and nine times out of ten I'm in favor of emphasizing the distinctions between religious communions, rather than inventing phony, ahistorical ecumenisms. I'm less certain, though, why Razib quite is so hostile to the term. In this… More »

Bob Woodward offers ten lessons to be drawn from the Bush Administration; none, as you might expect, are terribly flattering to our soon-to-be ex-President. Watching Bush's farewell address last night, what struck me above all was how long it's been since he felt like the President. Bush never had the gift of persuasion, the ability to give a State of the Union address or a press conference that left his enemies disarmed, but there was a time when he at least… More »

The Christian Science Monitor, on those anti-theist bus ads:Much of the campaign's initial buzz centered on the assertion that God "probably" doesn't exist. Does this suggest a hedging of bets - a move past atheist dogma? Only partly. Some organizers wanted a flat "there is no God" statement. Dawkins favored an "almost certainly no God" wording. But Ms. Sherine says that British advertising officials advised that a phrase less absolute and… More »

In the wake of the barrage from Larison, Massie and McArdle on the subject of the U.S. relationship to the IRA, I will concede that in spite of its official anti-terror posture, Washington treated the Irish Republican cause in ways that one cannot imagine the U.S. government treating the cause of Hamas. (And concede, as well, the limits of my knowledge of the ins-and-outs of the Northern Irish peace process.) But I think there's an oversimplication in Larison's… More »