Ross Douthat

I admit that there's something a bit dissonant about quoting Christopher Hitchens on Christmas, but I've been meaning to say something about a peculiar passage in his anti-Yuletide burst of spleen, and tonight seems like a proper time to do it:... Suppose we put the question like this: Imagine that conclusive archaeological and textual evidence emerged to prove that the whole story of the birth, life, and death of Jesus of Nazareth was either a delusion or a… More »

Defending Caroline Kennedy, Michael Kinsley claims that it "is precisely the fear that she would be a formidable candidate, likely to be elected again and again, that is driving Republicans to gin up a phony issue and bully New York Gov. David [Paterson] out of appointing her." As Ramesh notes, the claim that only Republicans object to the idea of making Kennedy a Senator is specious - but even more peculiar is the notion, floated by many of Kennedy's supporters,… More »

As a follow-up to the previous post, I should note that when I saw Doubt on stage, with Cherry Jones in the lead, I thought it was much more complicted, subtle and serious than A.O. Scott gives it credit for - that it felt like more of a successful argument-generator than a "hermetically sealed melodrama of received thinking, feverishly advancing a set of themes that are the very opposite of provocative." But I haven't seen the film adaptation, and some of the… More »

From A.O. Scott's Year in Film roundup: "Doubt," "The Reader," "Frost/Nixon," "Revolutionary Road" -- all of these transplants from stage or page are impeccably acted, exquisitely production-designed excursions into the recent past. And each one is a hermetically sealed melodrama of received thinking, feverishly advancing a set of themes that are the very opposite of provocative. The suburbs are hell on earth. Richard Nixon was a monster. Literature is good for you… More »

Yuval Levin flags this footnote from a 2006 speech by Barack Obama's new science adviser, John Holdren; it's attached to a line in which Holdren references the threat that "continuing population growth" poses to human flourishing:This was the key insight in Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (Ballantine, New York, 1968), as well as one of those in Harrison Brown's prescient earlier book, The Challenge of Man's Future (Viking, New York, 1954). The elementary but… More »

Jim Carrey's Yes Man opens today. It's almost certainly lousy. But it's also an excellent opportunity to reflect - with James Parker, the Atlantic's new "Moving Pictures" columnist - on Carrey's peculiarly unnerving style of comedy, and the thread (well, more like a rope) of existential anxiety that runs through his filmography. Here's the piece; here's the videotape: More »

While Noam Scheiber does yeoman's work on the subject, Michelle Cottle questions the anti-Caroline backlash:Of course America does political dynasties: Bayh, Biden, Bush, Clinton, Cuomo, Daley, Dole...If you've got an hour to kill, check out Wikipedia's massive entry on U.S. political families, alphabetically subdivided. Sure she'd be skipping a few rungs on the electoral ladder. So did New Jersey's Jon Corzine. So did Virginia's Jim Webb. So did Hillary Clinton,… More »

Responding to my reference to Truman and the atomic bomb in my rambling torture post, Ta-Nehisi asks an important question:[Ross argues] that basically anyone other potential president in Truman's shoes would have done the same thing as Truman. But you simply can't make the same argument about Bush. Indeed, it's not even clear that every potential Republican president would have approved of water-boarding. I think you can fairly argue that Truman was in something… More »

Ben Smith floats the balloon ...If Caroline Kennedy is appointed to the Senate and wins reelection, and Barack Obama serves two successful terms, Senator Kennedy from New York, into her second term after two high-profile campaigns, having amazed the pundits with her ability to step on and off charter jets in Rochester and be friendly to members of the City Council, will be an automatic top-tier candidate for president....and Allahpundit responds:Sounds good, but if… More »

Naturally, the day that I suggested that conservatives have intermixed evasion and silence on the interrogation issue was the day that National Review published an editorial on the subject - blasting the Levin-McCain report, and offering a more detailed defense of the Bush Administration's detainee policy than I've read in some time.I would need something much more detailed, though, to shift my views about the Administration's record on this front. Specifically, I… More »

One of Tyler Cowen's alter egos gives Ben Bernanke some advice:What about that guy who set up the phony investment company? Can the Treasury make a new one of those, only bigger? He took money away from people and gave it to charities and the needy and the arts and higher education. That sounds like stimulus so why are we sending him to jail? Wasn't he ahead of the curve?For more serious stimulus-related commentary, here's Tyler citing a new paper on taxes,… More »

Since I quoted extensively from Mark Bowden's 2003 "Dark Art of Interrogation" essay in my last post, I should note that even as the essay suggested a distinction between coercion/torture-lite and torture proper, it was also quite explicit about how blurry the line between the two categories really is, and how easily coercion, if legally sanctioned, can shade into something darker:It may be clear that coercion is sometimes the right choice, but how does one allow… More »

I haven't written anything substantial, ever, about America's treatment of detainees in the War on Terror. There are good reasons for this, and bad ones. Or maybe there's only one reason, and it's probably a bad one - a desire to avoid taking on a fraught and desperately importantly subject without feeling extremely confident about my own views on the subject. I keep waiting, I think, for somebody else to write a piece about the subject that eloquently captures my… More »

Chris Smith finds a novel way of expressing skepticism about Caroline Kennedy's decision to pursue her birthright an appointment to the U.S. Senate: ... the plot has some weaknesses. Perhaps it's still possible to be a different kind of senator, in the Paul Simon-Pat Moynihan mold: a legislator-intellectual, above and in the fray at the same time, who leaves office with his good name intact. Caroline Kennedy's desire to deploy her brains and her celebrity on a… More »

America's Princess has decided to claim her inheritance:Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of an American political dynasty, has decided to pursue the United States Senate seat being vacated by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, a person told of her decision said on Monday.The decision came after a series of deeply personal and political conversations, in which Ms. Kennedy, whom friends describe as unflashy but determined, wrestled with whether to give up what… More »

If you want a reason why an abortion compromise isn't possible, try this contrast: My idea of a plausible middle ground on the issue requires the overturning of Roe v. Wade, followed by a move toward a system in which abortion is legal but discouraged in, say, the first ten weeks of pregnancy, and basically illegal thereafter. Whereas Will Saletan and Freddie De Boer, both serious-minded pro-choicers, are convinced that a plausible middle ground would involve… More »

Inquiring liberal minds want to know why pro-lifers are eager to have the government stop giving Planned Parenthood hundreds of millions of dollars every year. After all, writes Ezra Klein, "abortion services comprise three percent of the services" that Planned Parenthood delivers, which means that if you cut their funding "you're mainly cutting contraception funding, thus ensuring more unwanted pregnancies and more abortions ... This is how the pro-life movement… More »

Rod Dreher:... the other day I was part of a conversation in which people were talking about the Blagojevich mess, and I overheard an elderly veteran say, "What we need in this country is a coup. Just bring the military in and straighten things out."I asked him if he really meant that, and if he understood what he was saying."Hell yeah," he said. "Look at 'em." He meant Congress and Wall Street.I think we'll be hearing a lot more of this in the years to come.Some… More »

Chris Hayes critiques the Obama-as-pragmatist meme from the left ... The chief failure of Bushism, according to Sunstein, is not its content but its form. Not the substance of ideology but the fact that he was too wedded to it, too rigid and dogmatic. It's a view widely held in Washington. Many, like Sunstein, have drawn a lesson from the past eight years that is not about the failure of conservatism - neo or otherwise - or the dangers of the particularly toxic… More »

John Derbyshire takes note of a study showing that large percentages of Americans believe in ghosts, angels, demons, and so forth, and writes:Nothing very surprising there. It's interesting to note one's own reactions on reading a news item like that. The reaction must, I suppose, be personality-dependendent. It will fall somewhere in a range from: "I am surrounded by idiots!" to: "What an oddball freak I must be!" (I find myself closer to the latter end of… More »