The Pasty Little Putz, Dowd, Friedman and Bruni

In “All the Lonely People” The Pasty Little Putz has a question:  Is there a link between suicide and weakened social ties?  This is a particularly poisonous little turd he’s created here, a lovely “blame the victim” essay.  When he says “retreated  … from full time paying work” please feel free to understand he should have said “fired” or “laid off.”  Which should really happen to him.  MoDo is still in her full-blown, snot-slinging hissy fit.  In “Taxing Times for Obama” she says now comes the mess with the I.R.S. The president could use a little J.F.K., and a little Bulworth.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, MoDo.  Your stuff is sounding more and more like you have an awful, unrequited crush…  The Moustache of Wisdom is in Tel Abyad, Syria.  In “Without Water, Revolution” he says the Syrian disaster is like a superstorm. It’s what happens when drought, a fast-growing population, a repressive and corrupt government, and sectarian and religious passions combine.  In “Show Us Your Woe” Mr. Bruni says from “American Idol” to American politics, it’s all about the suffering. And it’s exhausting.  Here’s The Putz:

Over the last decade, the United States has become a less violent country in every way save one. As Americans commit fewer and fewer crimes against other people’s lives and property, they have become more likely to inflict fatal violence on themselves.

In the 1990s, the suicide rate dipped with the crime rate. But since 2000, it has risen, and jumped particularly sharply among the middle-aged. The suicide rate for Americans 35 to 54 increased nearly 30 percent between 1999 and 2010; for men in their 50s, it rose nearly 50 percent. More Americans now die of suicide than in car accidents, and gun suicides are almost twice as common as gun homicides.

This trend is striking without necessarily being surprising. As the University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox pointed out recently, there’s a strong link between suicide and weakened social ties: people — and especially men — become more likely to kill themselves “when they get disconnected from society’s core institutions (e.g., marriage, religion) or when their economic prospects take a dive (e.g., unemployment).” That’s exactly what we’ve seen happen lately among the middle-aged male population, whose suicide rates have climbed the fastest: a retreat from family obligations, from civic and religious participation, and from full-time paying work.

The hard question facing 21st-century America is whether this retreat from community can reverse itself, or whether an aging society dealing with structural unemployment and declining birth and marriage rates is simply destined to leave more people disconnected, anxious and alone.

Right now, the pessimistic scenario seems more plausible. In an essay for The New Republic about the consequences of loneliness for public health, Judith Shulevitz reports that one in three Americans over 45 identifies as chronically lonely, up from just one in five a decade ago. “With baby boomers reaching retirement age at a rate of 10,000 a day,” she notes, “the number of lonely Americans will surely spike.”

There are public and private ways to manage this loneliness epidemic — through social workers, therapists, even pets. And the Internet, of course, promises endless forms of virtual community to replace or supplement the real.

But all of these alternatives seem destined to leave certain basic human yearnings unaddressed.

For many people, the strongest forms of community are still the traditional ones — the kind forged by shared genes, shared memory, shared geography. And neither Facebook nor a life coach nor a well-meaning bureaucracy is likely to compensate for these forms’ attenuation and decline.

This point is illustrated, richly, in one of the best books of the spring, Rod Dreher’s memoir, “The Little Way of Ruthie Leming,” an account of his sister’s death from cancer at the age of 42. A journalist and author, Dreher had left their small Louisiana hometown behind decades before and never imagined coming back. But watching how the rural community rallied around his sister in her crisis, and how being rooted in a specific place carried her family through its drawn-out agony, inspired him to reconsider, and return.

What makes “The Little Way” such an illuminating book, though, is that it doesn’t just uncritically celebrate the form of community that its author rediscovered in his hometown. It also explains why he left in the first place: because being a bookish kid made him a target for bullying, because his relationship with his father was oppressive, because he wasn’t as comfortable as his sister in a world of traditions, obligations, rules. Because community can imprison as well as sustain, and sometimes it needs to be escaped in order to be appreciated.

In today’s society, that escape is easier than ever before. And that’s a great gift to many people: if you don’t have much in common with your relatives and neighbors, if you’re gay or a genius (or both), if you’re simply restless and footloose, the world can feel much less lonely than it would have in the past. Our society is often kinder to differences and eccentricities than past eras, and our economy rewards extraordinary talent more richly than ever before.

The problem is that as it’s grown easier to be remarkable and unusual, it’s arguably grown harder to be ordinary. To be the kind of person who doesn’t want to write his own life script, or invent her own idiosyncratic career path. To enjoy the stability and comfort of inherited obligations and expectations, rather than constantly having to strike out on your own. To follow a “little way” rather than a path of great ambition. To be more like Ruthie Leming than her brother.

Too often, and probably increasingly, not enough Americans will have what the Lemings had — a place that knew them intimately, a community to lean on, a strong network in a time of trial.

And absent such blessings, it’s all too understandable that some people enduring suffering and loneliness would end up looking not for help or support, but for a way to end it all.

Gawd, I’d love to slap him upside the head with a skillet…  Here’s MoDo:

I went to New York last week to cover the TV presentations for the new season, shows like “Scandal,” “Shark Tank” and a faltering “American Idol.”

I may as well have stayed here.

You know that the faltering American idol in the White House must be reeling in this scandalous spring. No Drama Obama is immersed in drama so over the top it could have been scripted by Shonda Rhimes and Karl Rove.

Just four months after his second inauguration, the president is buffeted by gushing investigations, smug and deranged Republicans, and cat-who-ate-the-canary conspiracists. The man who promised in 2008 to make government cool again is instead batting away charges that he has made government “Nixonian” again.

Asked about that on Thursday, Obama might have tried a little J.F.K. wit to dismiss the ridiculous assertion. Instead, he played the pill, as he too often does, huffily telling reporters, “Well, I’ll let you guys engage in those comparisons, and you can go ahead and read the history, I think, and draw your own conclusions.”

The onetime messiah seems like a sad sack, trying to bounce back from a blistering array of sins that are not even his fault. He went to Baltimore on Friday to talk about jobs. But no one was listening. Everybody in the country who hates the I.R.S. — so, then, everybody — was listening to the lugubrious acting I.R.S. commissioner who had been ousted, Steven Miller, tell a House committee that he didn’t know who was to blame for the scheme to unfairly scrutinize conservative groups with words like “Tea Party” and “Patriot” in their titles.

“Is this still America?” demanded Congressman Kevin Brady, a Republican from Texas.

It turns out that Treasury officials knew during the 2012 campaign that an investigation into the targeting was going on. But, enhancing his image as a stranger in a strange land, the president said he learned about it from news reports on May 10. Then he waited three days to descend from the mountain and express outrage.

Democrats are not worried that the rumpuses will hurt Obama’s personal appeal or reputation for integrity. But it can’t help the president’s already limited ability to get anything done in a Congress full of Republicans who live to thwart him, and it may impede his plan to win back the House.

Democrats fret that it will hurt them in 2014. As one strategist put it: “Now the kooky, paranoid Tea Party people will believe they had a reason to be paranoid. And there’s no better way to express their feelings than to vote next year.”

Certainly Obama is getting a clearer understanding that the biggest downside of having the other party control a branch of Congress is its ability to use investigations and subpoenas as anvils.

Unfortunately, the sound and fury and battle for clicks will make the already aggrieved president, who considers himself a serious person stuck in an unserious time, even more aggrieved. The Times’s Peter Baker reported that Obama feels so stymied that he dreams of “going Bulworth,” a reference to the Warren Beatty movie in which a depressed and fading Democratic senator from California starts rapping, speaking with politically incorrect candor and dating Halle Berry.

The president should try candid; wistful and petulant aren’t getting him anywhere. The Republicans who are putting partisan gain above solving the country’s problems deserve a smackdown.

Obama the candidate was romanticized as the pristine relief from Clinton scandals. But his pure personal life did not exempt him from running a government awash in old-school screw-ups.

The Clintons have emerged stronger on the back end of their scandals. For better or worse, Bill is seen as authentic. He is what he is. America’s ultimate survivors are now truly potent or dangerous, depending on how you look at it, because Americans love them Bridget Jones-style, just the way they are, warts and all. “Hillary Clinton eats scandals for breakfast,” Bill Maher said. “If the Republicans keep this up, she’ll not only be president, she’ll appoint Bill to the Supreme Court.”

Obama would never pull what Hillary pulled with her longtime aide Huma Abedin. Abedin was allowed, after the birth of her and Anthony Weiner’s son, to work part time as a top adviser in the State Department for $135,000 while also working as a consultant for private clients, some of whom had to be interested in her influence in the government.

As Politico reported, the arrangement was similar to the way many of Hillary’s aides were paid while she was a senator: “They were compensated partly through work on her government staff, and partly through her political action committee.” And others would later land lucrative gigs at Clinton-friendly organizations.

Hillary has a blind spot on ethics, not minding if things look terrible if they’re technically legit. And she has a tight grip on money, so she didn’t choose to simply shift Huma to her personal payroll.

But Americans have already priced in the imperfections of the Clintons.

Who knows? If Washington keeps imploding, Hillary may run in 2016 on restoring honor to the White House.

Oh, and wouldn’t you just LOVE that, you hissing witch…  Next up we have The Moustache of Wisdom:

I just spent a day in this northeast Syrian town. It was terrifying — much more so than I anticipated — but not because we were threatened in any way by the Free Syrian Army soldiers who took us around or by the Islamist Jabhet al-Nusra fighters who stayed hidden in the shadows. It was the local school that shook me up.

As we were driving back to the Turkish border, I noticed a school and asked the driver to turn around so I could explore it. It was empty — of students. But war refugees had occupied the classrooms and little kids’ shirts and pants were drying on a line strung across the playground. The basketball backboard was rusted, and a local parent volunteered to give me a tour of the bathrooms, which he described as disgusting. Classes had not been held in two years. And that is what terrified me. Men with guns I’m used to. But kids without books, teachers or classes for a long time — that’s trouble. Big trouble.

They grow up to be teenagers with too many guns and too much free time, and I saw a lot of them in Tel Abyad. They are the law of the land here now, but no two of them wear the same uniform, and many are just in jeans. These boys bravely joined the adults of their town to liberate it from the murderous tyranny of Bashar al-Assad, but now the war has ground to a stalemate, so here, as in so many towns across Syria, life is frozen in a no-man’s land between order and chaos. There is just enough patched-up order for people to live — some families have even rigged up bootleg stills that refine crude oil into gasoline to keep cars running — but not enough order to really rebuild, to send kids to school or to start businesses.

So Syria as a whole is slowly bleeding to death of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. You can’t help but ask whether it will ever be a unified country again and what kind of human disaster will play out here if a whole generation grows up without school.

“Syria is becoming Somalia,” said Zakaria Zakaria, a 28-year-old Syrian who graduated from college with a major in English and who acted as our guide. “Students have now lost two years of school, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel, and if this goes on for two more years it will be like Somalia, a failed country. But Somalia is off somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Syria is the heart of the Middle East. I don’t want this to happen to my country. But the more it goes on, the worse it will be.”

This is the agony of Syria today. You can’t imagine the war here continuing for another year, let alone five. But when you feel the depth of the rage against the Assad government and contemplate the sporadic but barbaric sect-on-sect violence, you can’t imagine any peace deal happening or holding — not without international peacekeepers on the ground to enforce it. Eventually, we will all have to have that conversation, because this is no ordinary war.

This Syrian disaster is like a superstorm. It’s what happens when an extreme weather event, the worst drought in Syria’s modern history, combines with a fast-growing population and a repressive and corrupt regime and unleashes extreme sectarian and religious passions, fueled by money from rival outside powers — Iran and Hezbollah on one side, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar on the other, each of which have an extreme interest in its Syrian allies’ defeating the other’s allies — all at a time when America, in its post-Iraq/Afghanistan phase, is extremely wary of getting involved.

I came here to write my column and work on a film for the Showtime series, “Years of Living Dangerously,” about the “Jafaf,” or drought, one of the key drivers of the Syrian war. In an age of climate change, we’re likely to see many more such conflicts.

“The drought did not cause Syria’s civil war,” said the Syrian economist Samir Aita, but, he added, the failure of the government to respond to the drought played a huge role in fueling the uprising. What happened, Aita explained, was that after Assad took over in 2000 he opened up the regulated agricultural sector in Syria for big farmers, many of them government cronies, to buy up land and drill as much water as they wanted, eventually severely diminishing the water table. This began driving small farmers off the land into towns, where they had to scrounge for work.

Because of the population explosion that started here in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to better health care, those leaving the countryside came with huge families and settled in towns around cities like Aleppo. Some of those small towns swelled from 2,000 people to 400,000 in a decade or so. The government failed to provide proper schools, jobs or services for this youth bulge, which hit its teens and 20s right when the revolution erupted.

Then, between 2006 and 2011, some 60 percent of Syria’s land mass was ravaged by the drought and, with the water table already too low and river irrigation shrunken, it wiped out the livelihoods of 800,000 Syrian farmers and herders, the United Nations reported. “Half the population in Syria between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers left the land” for urban areas during the last decade, said Aita. And with Assad doing nothing to help the drought refugees, a lot of very simple farmers and their kids got politicized. “State and government was invented in this part of the world, in ancient Mesopotamia, precisely to manage irrigation and crop growing,” said Aita, “and Assad failed in that basic task.”

Young people and farmers starved for jobs — and land starved for water — were a prescription for revolution. Just ask those who were here, starting with Faten, whom I met in her simple flat in Sanliurfa, a Turkish city near the Syrian border. Faten, 38, a Sunni, fled there with her son Mohammed, 19, a member of the Free Syrian Army, who was badly wounded in a firefight a few months ago. Raised in the northeastern Syrian farming village of Mohasen, Faten, who asked me not to use her last name, told me her story.

She and her husband “used to own farmland,” said Faten. “We tended annual crops. We had wheat, barley and everyday food — vegetables, cucumbers, anything we could plant instead of buying in the market. Thank God there were rains, and the harvests were very good before. And then suddenly, the drought happened.”

What did it look like? “To see the land made us very sad,” she said. “The land became like a desert, like salt.” Everything turned yellow.

Did Assad’s government help? “They didn’t do anything,” she said. “We asked for help, but they didn’t care. They didn’t care about this subject. Never, never. We had to solve our problems ourselves.”

So what did you do? “When the drought happened, we could handle it for two years, and then we said, ‘It’s enough.’ So we decided to move to the city. I got a government job as a nurse, and my husband opened a shop. It was hard. The majority of people left the village and went to the city to find jobs, anything to make a living to eat.” The drought was particularly hard on young men who wanted to study or marry but could no longer afford either, she added. Families married off daughters at earlier ages because they couldn’t support them.

Faten, her head conservatively covered in a black scarf, said the drought and the government’s total lack of response radicalized her. So when the first spark of revolutionary protest was ignited in the small southern Syrian town of Dara’a, in March 2011, Faten and other drought refugees couldn’t wait to sign on. “Since the first cry of ‘Allahu akbar,’ we all joined the revolution. Right away.” Was this about the drought? “Of course,” she said, “the drought and unemployment were important in pushing people toward revolution.”

Zakaria Zakaria was a teenager in nearby Hasakah Province when the drought hit and he recalled the way it turned proud farmers, masters of their own little plots of land, into humiliated day laborers, working for meager wages in the towns “just to get some money to eat.” What was most galling to many, said Zakaria, was that if you wanted a steady government job you had to bribe a bureaucrat or know someone in the state intelligence agency.

The best jobs in Hasakah Province, Syria’s oil-producing region, were with the oil companies. But drought refugees, virtually all of whom were Sunni Muslims, could only dream of getting hired there. “Most of those jobs went to Alawites from Tartous and Latakia,” said Zakaria, referring to the minority sect to which President Assad belongs and which is concentrated in these coastal cities. “It made people even more angry. The best jobs on our lands in our province were not for us, but for people who come from outside.”

Only in the spring of 2011, after the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, did the Assad government start to worry about the drought refugees, said Zakaria, because on March 11 — a few days before the Syrian uprising would start in Dara’a — Assad visited Hasakah, a very rare event. “So I posted on my Facebook page, ‘Let him see how people are living,’ ” recalled Zakaria. “My friends said I should delete it right away, because it was dangerous. I wouldn’t. They didn’t care how people lived.”

Abu Khalil, 48, is one of those who didn’t just protest. A former cotton farmer who had to become a smuggler to make ends meet for his 16 children after the drought wiped out their farm, he is now the Free Syrian Army commander in the Tel Abyad area. We met at a crushed Syrian Army checkpoint. After being introduced by our Syrian go-between, Abu Khalil, who was built like a tough little boxer, introduced me to his fighting unit. He did not introduce them by rank but by blood, pointing to each of the armed men around him and saying: “My nephew, my cousin, my brother, my cousin, my nephew, my son, my cousin …”

Free Syrian Army units are often family affairs. In a country where the government for decades wanted no one to trust anyone else, it’s no surprise.

“We could accept the drought because it was from Allah,” said Abu Khalil, “but we could not accept that the government would do nothing.” Before we parted, he pulled me aside to say that all that his men needed were anti-tank and antiaircraft weapons and they could finish Assad off. “Couldn’t Obama just let the Mafia send them to us?” he asked. “Don’t worry, we won’t use them against Israel.”

As part of our film we’ve been following a Syrian woman who is a political activist, Farah Nasif, a 27-year-old Damascus University graduate from Deir-az-Zour, whose family’s farm was also wiped out in the drought. Nasif typifies the secular, connected, newly urbanized young people who spearheaded the democracy uprisings here and in Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia. They all have two things in common: they no longer fear their governments or their parents, and they want to live like citizens, with equal rights — not as sects with equal fears. If this new generation had a motto, noted Aita, the Syrian economist, it would actually be the same one Syrians used in their 1925 war of independence from France: “Religion is for God, and the country is for everyone.”

But Nasif is torn right now. She wants Assad gone and all political prisoners released, but she knows that more war “will only destroy the rest of the country.” And her gut tells her that even once Assad is gone, there is no agreement on who or what should come next. So every option worries her — more war, a cease-fire, the present and the future. This is the agony of Syria today — and why the closer you get to it, the less certain you are how to fix it.

And now finally we get to Mr. Bruni, who starts out with a dreadful confession:

In the service of what I’m about to write, an admission I’m loath to make: I watch “The Voice.”

It gets worse. I watch “American Idol,” too.

Not whole seasons. Not even whole episodes. If I may brag a little, no one can fast-forward like I can, compressing two recorded hours of “The Voice” into 34 minutes and the “Idol” finale on Thursday night into about 19, including the pauses to top off my Chablis and brush the cracker crumbs from my comforter.

But I’ve experienced enough of these shows to know that they’re not merely singing competitions. They’re misery competitions. Bad-luck bake-offs. I’ll see you your high school expulsion, and I’ll raise you my stint in rehab.

I’ve experienced enough of them, in other words, to feel the onset of hardship fatigue, and changing the channel to CNN or MSNBC doesn’t bring relief. Candidates for elective office tell us not just how high they’ve climbed but how high they’ve climbed against all odds, as if that’s the only way accomplishment really means anything; as if survival itself confers great merit on the survivor; as if the bleak shall inherit the earth.

There’s a vivid streak of this in history, from Abe Lincoln’s log home to Bill Clinton’s turbulent one. But it seems more florid now. The economy’s stubborn funk has ratcheted up our suspicion of perks and privileges and our support for underdogs, to a point where we’re less taken with what people have achieved than with what they’ve endured.

In politics and in prime time, the contestants with the most traction are frequently the contestants with the gravest trials: afflictions, addictions, lost loves, lost dogs. I’m kidding about the canines, but only slightly. If there aren’t any epic setbacks in your biography, your political consultants or your “Voice” producers will find and amplify whatever garden-variety sorrows do exist. They’re like divining rods for tears, Yo-Yo Ma’s of the heartstrings.

That’s surely why a sort of weariness and skepticism was the response among a few New Yorkers I know to last week’s revelations by Christine Quinn, the mayoral candidate, that she’d struggled with bulimia and alcoholism. They’ve grown so inured to the process of public figures rummaging through the past for hard knocks that they greet it in a jaded fashion, wondering how to tell the real aches from the exaggerated ones.

Fetishized misfortune — hardship porn — has numbed them. That’s the biggest problem with it. It equates and mashes everything into one sentimental mush, cheapening uncommon suffering by showcasing it alongside the rest. It bends all life stories into identical arcs, no matter how different those stories are.

Think back to the Republican convention in Tampa, where so many speakers peddled similar tales of heroic forebears and humble origins that genuinely inspirational narratives were lost in the clutter. One moment, Tim Pawlenty was talking about the early death of his mother, when he was just 16; another moment, Rand Paul was reaching back generations to tell the audience: “My great-grandfather, like many, came to this country in search of the American dream. No sooner had he stepped off the boat than his father died.”

Ann Romney remembered the basement apartment and tuna casseroles that she and Mitt once shared in a voice not unlike Condoleezza Rice’s when she flashed back to her Birmingham girlhood in the Jim Crow era. Everyone’s come a long way! Marco Rubio had by then already revised his family’s saga, because he’d been getting it wrong, claiming that his parents had fled Castro’s Cuba when they’d initially left years before he seized power. When you enter the hardship sweepstakes, you tend to overreach.

And anyone who can get in the game does. Democratic and Republican strategists alike crow about what “a great story” a candidate has, meaning that it includes great challenges, which are seen as the handiest routes to rendering the candidate “relatable.” Heidi Heitkamp, the Democratic senator from North Dakota, was toughened by breast cancer, Elizabeth Warren by waiting tables at 13 and Paul Ryan by waking up one morning when he was still in high school and finding his father dead in bed. Those aren’t just anecdotes that flit by. They’re foundational ordeals, mentioned incessantly.

And that suggests another problem with hardship porn: its insinuation that surmounting obstacles equals acquiring real character, which is ostensibly impossible without tough times. Romney was punished by this thinking; that’s why Ann took the oratorical tack she did.

But I know strong, empathetic people who haven’t weathered anything much more distressing than a hangnail, and I know jerks who are graduates of garish travails. Hardship isn’t necessarily the crucible in which virtue is formed. Sometimes it’s just hardship, sad and unenviable, and the man or woman on the far side of it is exactly who he or she was before: kindly or cruel, brave or timid.

I care less about Heitkamp’s grit in the face of disease than about her cowardice in the face of gun-control legislation, which she voted against. I care less about how quickly Ryan was forced to grow up than about how unyielding he can be on certain social and fiscal issues, and what I want to know from Quinn is how she’ll improve the city’s schools and give its kids a real chance.

I can marvel at Olympic athletes’ dominance without the hardscrabble back stories, presented in three minutes of gauzy footage, scored to bathetic music, that speak not just to the sacrifices they made but to the despair that almost swallowed them. In a “Voice” or “Idol” contestant, I prefer perfect pitch to perfect heartbreak.

These shows, like other elimination competitions, are clapping, stomping tributes to obstacles surmounted and pain sloughed off — “Dancing Queen for a Day” — and they have an astonishing knack for attracting talent under true duress. Last season’s “Idol” winner, Phillip Phillips, performed through kidney stones; this season’s runner-up, Kree Harrison, has already lost both her parents.

Over on “The Voice,” there’s nary a sick relative unmentioned or rotten break unplumbed, and contestants are forever stifling sobs. The show, trying to one-up the best of “Idol,” insists on it.

Until about two weeks ago, I was mystified by how Judith Hill, the seeming front-runner on “The Voice” this season, had survived the screening process, given her good fortune. She’s already sung professionally with Michael Jackson and her helicopter parents are always near, beaming and applauding.

Then she shared a secret: she was rehabilitating a “scary” node on her vocal cords. Hardship!

When she hit her high notes that night, it wasn’t just a feat of artistry. It was a triumph over adversity.

She probably developed the node on her vocal cords from voice abuse, which is the most common cause.

The Pasty Little Putz, Dowd, Friedman, Bruni and Collins

The Pasty Little Putz is just seething with righteous indignation.  In “The Taxman vs. the Tea Party” he howls that at the I.R.S. we get a glimpse of the paranoid style of liberal politics.  It’s really all projection all the time with him…  MoDo is gearing up for Benghazigate.  In “When Myths Collide in the Capitol” she says it’s a glorious spring weekend of accusation and obfuscation as Hillaryland goes up against Foxworld.  The Moustache of Wisdom is in Sana, Yemen.  In “The Yemeni Way” he says the national dialogue taking place in Yemen is a lesson for other Arab nations.  Mr. Bruni thinks we’re stupid.  In “America the Clueless” he says on subjects ranging from Obamacare to the Supreme Court, our body politic isn’t especially brainy.  Well, considering that there’s a brand spanking new cable channel called “The Blaze” that’s being advertised down here as “straight from the brain of Glenn Beck” I’m not surprised…  Ms. Collins, in “Is Yours More Corrupt Than Mine?”, says with 32 state officials arrested, New York is setting quite a standard. But it has competition.  Here’s The Putz:

As a taxpayer and a conservative who hopes to remain on good terms with the Internal Revenue Service for many April 15ths to come, I don’t want to speculate too freely about the motives of the “low level” I.R.S. employees who decided to single out Tea Party groups for an inappropriate level of attention during the heat of the 2012 campaign.

But I’m willing to guess this much: Even though an American Civil Liberties Union official described their excessive interest in right-wing groups as “about as constitutionally troubling as it gets,” the bureaucrats in question probably thought they were just doing their patriotic duty, and giving dangerous extremists the treatment they deserved.

Where might an enterprising, public-spirited I.R.S. agent get the idea that a Tea Party group deserved more scrutiny from the government than the typical band of activists seeking tax-exempt status? Oh, I don’t know: why, maybe from all the prominent voices who spent the first two years of the Obama era worrying that the Tea Party wasn’t just a typically messy expression of citizen activism, but something much darker — an expression of crypto-fascist, crypto-racist rage, part Timothy McVeigh and part Bull Connor, potentially carrying a wave of terrorist violence in its wings.

The historical term for this kind of anxiety is “Brown Scare” — an inordinate fear of a vast far-right conspiracy, which resembles the anti-Communist panics of our past. As the historian Philip Jenkins wrote in 2009, Brown Scares no less than Red Scares recur throughout American history. They fasten on real-enough phenomena, from homegrown fascist sympathizers in the 1930s to the militia movements in the 1990s, but then wildly exaggerate both the danger these extremists pose and their ties to the conservative mainstream.

In the ’30s, Jenkins noted, this mentality inspired the persistent media-fed fear that “the U.S. was about to be overwhelmed by ultra-Right fifth columnists, millions strong, intimately allied with the Axis powers.” In the ’60s, it persuaded many liberals that Dallas’s right-wing fever was somehow responsible for John F. Kennedy’s assassination even though the president’s actual assassin was a Communist sympathizer. (This idée fixe persists to the present day.) After the Oklahoma City bombing, it led many people to tar the entire militia movement as terrorist, not just extremist, and then to conflate the militias (this was one of Bill Clinton’s defter moves) with the mainstream small-government right.

Our own era’s Brown Scare followed a similar pattern. Early in President Obama’s first term, a Department of Homeland Security report predicted an increase in right-wing extremism, citing real threats but also employing “a definition of extremist so broad,” Reason magazine’s Jesse Walker noted, that “it seemed to include anyone who opposed abortion or immigration or excessive federal power.”

As the Tea Party movement gathered steam, liberals consistently echoed the D.H.S. report’s themes, warning that the movement’s fringier elements and often-overheated rhetoric (which were real enough, and worth criticizing) were laying the groundwork for a wave of far-right violence.

Invoking J.F.K.’s assassination and Oklahoma City, these critics then leapt to connect the dots every time a kook pulled a gun or set off a bomb somewhere — whether it was a lone neo-Nazi shooting a guard at the Holocaust museum in Washington, the apparent murder (ultimately ruled a suicide) of a census worker in rural Kentucky, or even the failed Times Square bombing (which turned out to be the work of a would-be jihadist, but not before Michael Bloomberg had suggested that it might be “someone with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something”).

The dots-connecting peaked, of course, with the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, which was instantly deemed a case of right-wing incitement leading to political violence, with the blame going to Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and conservatism in general.

When none of this turned out to be true, however — the shooter was not really a political actor at all, but just a mentally ill lost soul with no connection to partisan politics — the scare began a slow retreat. The Tea Party had won its midterm victory, and as the movement’s ardor cooled and its influence diminished, the fears of its critics began to diminish as well. With Beck off Fox and the Tea Partyers off the streets — replaced by Occupy Wall Street and union protesters, often shouting none-too-moderate slogans of their own — it became harder to look at American conservatism and see Brownshirts or grand wizards on the march.

But moods and prejudices linger even after panics recede. The I.R.S. and the conservative movement have never been on the best of terms, and perhaps the recent abuses just reflect that longstanding tension. But I suspect it’s more than that, and that this episode will be remembered as one of the last embarrassments produced by our era’s Brown Scare.

Now, gawd help us, here’s MoDo:

The capital is in the throes of déjà vu and preview as it plunges back into Clinton Rules, defined by a presidential aide on the hit ABC show “Scandal” as damage control that goes like this: “It’s not true, it’s not true, it’s not true, it’s old news.”

The conservatives appearing on Benghazi-obsessed Fox News are a damage patrol with an approach that goes like this: “Lies, paranoia, subpoena, impeach, Watergate, Iran-contra.”

(Though now that the I.R.S. has confessed to targeting Tea Party groups, maybe some of the paranoia is justified.)

Welcome to a glorious spring weekend of accusation and obfuscation as Hillaryland goes up against Foxworld.

The toxic theatrics, including Karl Rove’s first attack ad against Hillary, cloud a simple truth: The administration’s behavior before and during the attack in Benghazi, in which four Americans died, was unworthy of the greatest power on earth.

After his Libyan intervention, President Obama knew he was sending diplomats and their protectors into a country that was no longer a country, a land rife with fighters affiliated with Al Qaeda.

Yet in this hottest of hot spots, the State Department’s minimum security requirements were not met, requests for more security were rejected, and contingency plans were not drawn up, despite the portentous date of 9/11 and cascading warnings from the C.I.A., which had more personnel in Benghazi than State did and vetted the feckless Libyan Praetorian Guard. When the Pentagon called an elite Special Forces team three hours into the attack, it was training in Croatia — decidedly not a hot spot.

Hillary Clinton and Ambassador Chris Stevens were rushing to make the flimsy Benghazi post permanent as a sign of good faith with Libyans, even as it sat ringed by enemies.

The hierarchies at State and Defense had a plodding response, failing to make any superhuman effort as the siege waxed and waned over eight hours.

In an emotional Senate hearing on Wednesday, Stevens’s second-in-command, Gregory Hicks, who was frantically trying to help from 600 miles away in Tripoli, described how his pleas were denied by military brass, who said they could not scramble planes and who gave a “stand-down” order to four Special Forces officers in Tripoli who were eager to race to Benghazi.

“My reaction was that, O.K., we’re on our own,” Hicks said quietly. He said the commander of that Special Forces team told him, “This is the first time in my career that a diplomat has more” chutzpah “than someone in the military.”

The defense secretary at the time, Leon Panetta, insisted, “We quickly responded.” But they responded that they would not respond. As Emma Roller and David Weigel wrote in Slate: “The die was cast long before the attack, by the weak security at the consulate, and commanders may have decided to cut their losses rather than risking more casualties. And that isn’t a story anyone prefers to tell.”

Truth is the first casualty here when competing fiefs protect their mythologies. Some unhinged ideologues on the right cling to the mythology that Barry and Hillary are out to destroy America.

In the midst of a re-election campaign, Obama aides wanted to promote the mythology that the president who killed Osama was vanquishing terror. So they deemed it problematic to mention any possible Qaeda involvement in the Benghazi attack.

Looking ahead to 2016, Hillaryland needed to shore up the mythology that Clinton was a stellar secretary of state. Prepared talking points about the attack included mentions of Al Qaeda and Ansar al-Sharia, a Libyan militant group, but the State Department got those references struck. Foggy Bottom’s spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, a former Cheney aide, quashed a we-told-you-so paragraph written by the C.I.A. that said the spy agency had “produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to Al Qaeda in Benghazi and eastern Libya,” and had warned about five other attacks “against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British ambassador’s convoy.”

Nuland fretted about “my building leadership,” and with backing from Ben Rhodes, a top White House aide, lobbied to remove those reminders from the talking points because they “could be abused by members” of Congress “to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either?”

Hicks said that Beth Jones, an under secretary of state, bristled when he asked ask her why Susan Rice had stressed the protest over an anti-Muslim video rather than a premeditated attack — a Sunday show marathon that he said made his jaw drop. He believes he was demoted because he spoke up.

Hillary’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, also called Hicks to angrily ask why a State Department lawyer had not been allowed to monitor every meeting in Libya with Congressman Jason Chaffetz, who visited in October. (The lawyer did not have the proper security clearance for one meeting.) Chaffetz, a Republican from Utah, has been a rabid Hillary critic on Fox News since the attack. Hicks said he had never before been scolded for talking to a lawmaker.

All the factions wove their own mythologies at the expense of our deepest national mythology: that if there is anything, no matter how unlikely or difficult, that we can do to try to save the lives of Americans who have volunteered for dangerous assignments, we must do it.

Now here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

If you want to know how bad things can go in Syria, study Iraq. If you want to know how much better things could have gone, study Yemen. Say what? Yemen?

Yes, Yemen. Maybe the most unique postrevolutionary political process happening in any country experiencing an Arab awakening is in poor, fractured, water-starved Yemen. In its own messy way, Yemen is doing what all the other Arab awakening countries failed to do: have a serious, broad-based national dialogue, where the different political factions, new parties, young people, women, Islamists, tribes, northerners and southerners are literally introducing themselves to one another in six months of talks — before they write a new constitution and hold presidential elections. (After decades of autocracy, people in these countries did not know each other.)

It is what Egypt certainly failed to do in any serious way before rushing ahead with presidential elections that have left many people feeling disenfranchised and Islamists running away with the politics. One of the most important things President Obama could do to advance the Arab awakening is give a shout-out to Yemen’s approach. Yes, the odds of success here are still really, really long — the effects of 50 years of overexploiting Yemen’s water and soil could overwhelm even the most heroic politics — but what Yemen is doing is the only way any Arab awakening state can hope to make a stable transition to democracy.

Kicked off on March 18, the 565 delegates to Yemen’s national dialogue are tasked with developing recommendations on how to address nine issues ranging from future relations between the feuding north and south to state-building to the future role of the Army to rights and freedoms — all of which will go into the writing of a new constitution and holding of elections in February 2014.

“In the beginning, it was very tough,” said Yahia Al-Shaibi, a former education minister participating in the dialogue, but, “after a while, things started getting calm, people were sitting together and eating together and we see our different views. Now we can hear what each other says. We are starting to listen to each other and try to come to consensus.”

The official dialogue has stimulated an even bigger unofficial one. Yemeni Facebook pages and Twitter feeds have exploded with debates about politics, women’s rights and the Army. After decades of being silenced, everyone wants to talk now. Women are one-third of the dialogue delegates, and the men are having to adapt. An American democracy adviser here told me this story: “We find that the women members of the dialogue usually come prepared and show up on time. It’s open seating, so sometimes they sit in the front row. The other day a tribal leader came late and went to the front seat, which was already occupied by a woman, and he said, ‘That’s my seat.’ And she said, ‘No, it’s not.’ ”

The dialogue is possible because of the gradual (and messy) way Yemen’s awakening played out. It started in 2011 with youth-led protests that escalated into near civil war and a government breakdown until then-President Ali Abdullah Saleh handed power to a transitional government. Saleh’s party and his followers, along with the biggest opposition bloc, Islah, Yemen’s Muslim Brotherhood, still retained influence. There was no “de-Baathification” or “de-Mubarakization” in Yemen — but much more of a “no-victor-no-vanquished.”

No party was absolutely “defeated,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Mohy al-Dhabbi. It gave everyone a stake in the democracy transition and “allowed for everyone to give concessions.”

It also allowed time for women and the youths who started the revolution “to all get involved politically before the elections,” added Aidrous Bazara, a businessman in the dialogue. Now no one party “can steal” the revolution, he said. That has been reinforced by the recent decision by Yemen’s new president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, to professionalize the Army, starting by purging Saleh’s relatives from the intelligence agency and the elite Republican Guard.

Yemen is a National Rifle Association paradise. It seems as if every Yemeni man owns a gun and many walk around with daggers in their belts. Yet this country may end up having the most extensive Arab awakening dialogue, with relatively few casualties — so far. It is a reminder for Syria’s rebels that better guns may be needed to topple their dictator. But, without a culture of inclusion, it will all be for naught.

Jamila Rajaa, a woman participating in the dialogue, told me she still worries that some old parties, including the Muslim Brotherhood, are happy to let the dialogue distract the country, while they are feverishly working the streets to cultivate votes to win the election in order dominate the next government. Some modern Yemeni women see how the Muslim Brotherhood is ruling in Egypt, when it comes to women, and they want their own Islamists to go through a mind-set shift before assuming any power.

It’s all part of the dialogue — why it is really hard and why it has to succeed, otherwise, as a recent United States Institute of Peace report warned: “Yemen risks falling backward into open conflict.” The good news is that — for now — a lot of Yemenis really want to give politics a chance. You’ve got to root for them.

Next up we have Mr. Bruni:

The problems with our country’s political discourse are many and grave, but an insufficient attention to Obamacare isn’t among them. We have talked Obamacare to death, or at least into home hospice care. The “Obamacare” shorthand itself reflects our need to come up with less of a mouthful than “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” given how regularly the topic recurs. “Obamacare” is like “J. Lo” or “KFC.” It saves syllables and speeds things along.

So explain this: according to a recent poll, roughly 40 percent of Americans don’t even know that it’s a law on the books.

Now if I learned that 40 percent weren’t aware of when Obamacare was to be fully implemented or whether any of it had yet gone into practice or precisely how it’s likely to affect them, I wouldn’t be surprised or distressed. Obamacare is nothing if not unwieldy and opaque: “Ulysses” meets “Mulholland Drive.” The people confused about it include no small number of the physicians I know and probably a few of the law’s authors to boot.

But 40 percent of Americans are clueless about its sheer existence. Some think it’s been repealed by Congress. Some think it’s been overturned by the Supreme Court. A few probably think it’s been vaporized and replaced with a galactic edict beamed down from one of Saturn’s moons. With Americans you never know.

According to a survey I stumbled across just weeks ago, 21 percent believe that a U.F.O. landed in Roswell, N.M., nearly seven decades ago and that the federal government hushed it up, while 14 percent believe in Bigfoot.

According to another survey, taken last year, about 65 percent of us can’t name a single Supreme Court justice. Not the chief one, John Roberts. Not the mute one, Clarence Thomas. Not even the mean one, Antonin Scalia. Though when it comes to Scalia, perhaps the body politic suffers less from ignorance than from repressed memory.

That we Americans are out to lunch isn’t news. But every once in a while a fresh factoid like the Obamacare ignorance comes along to remind us that we’re out to breakfast and dinner as well. And it adds an important, infrequently acknowledged bit of perspective to all the commentary, from us journalists and from political strategists alike, about how voters behave and whom they reward. We purport to interpret an informed, rational universe, because we’d undercut our own insights if we purported anything else.

But only limited sense can be made of what is often nonsensical, and the truth is that a great big chunk of the electorate is tuned out, zonked out or combing Roswell for alien remains. Polls over the last few years have variously shown that about 30 percent of us couldn’t name the vice president, about 35 percent couldn’t assign the proper century to the American Revolution and 6 percent couldn’t circle Independence Day on a calendar. I’m supposing that the 6 percent weren’t also given the holiday’s synonym, the Fourth of July. I’m an optimist through and through.

Here’s one of my favorite findings: in a poll in 2011, after intense, closely chronicled fiscal battles in California, a sampling of the state’s residents were quizzed about which category of spending accounted for the biggest share of California’s budget. Only 16 percent correctly said public education through the 12th grade. And they did this poorly in spite of being given just four possible answers, including the correct one, from which to choose. They more or less underperformed the odds.

Apart from perennial news stories about how many Americans would flunk the citizenship test that immigrants must pass, we mostly gloss over our ignorance or deny it. Election analysts are constantly saying that voters are “too smart” for some ploy or “smarter than” they get credit for being.

And there’s a whole subgenre of nonfiction that assures us that we shouldn’t be spooked by how uneducated we are. “The Wisdom of Crowds” suggests that if enough bumbling people act in concert, they’ll find their way to a less bumbling place, while “Blink” portrays snap judgments as the fruits of an information intake that isn’t easily measured but is meaningful nonetheless. There’s “Emotional Intelligence” as well as nuts-and-bolts knowledge, and we can be guided, profitably, by it.

I buy some of that. I’ve talked to enough voters over enough elections to recognize that their flabby impressions aren’t always antonyms of concrete information but instead cruder, lesser versions of it, colored if not governed by facts that they’ve picked up in a peripheral, semiconscious fashion.

Still. In 2010 in California, I covered a Tea Party rally at which Carly Fiorina, vying for the Republican nomination for a United States Senate seat, was scheduled to speak. I approached a couple whose profusion of hats and buttons and handmade signs — along with their willingness to spend hours in a crowded field under a punishing sun — led me to believe that they were at least somewhat politically engaged. I asked them if they were inclined to support Fiorina. With great seriousness, they said that they hadn’t yet decided between her and Meg Whitman. Whitman was running not for senator but for governor, in a race that hardly wanted for coverage. They didn’t have to choose.

At a heated point of the 2012 presidential primaries, when both Rick Santorum and the news media were making much of his faith and fecundity, less than 30 percent of voters could identify his religious affiliation as Catholic, according to one poll. Months later a different poll asked voters about President Obama’s religious affiliation, persistently mistaken by some Americans to be Muslim. The good news? The share of voters making the Muslim error had dropped, to 10 percent. The weird news? Eighteen percent said Obama was Jewish.

It’s possible, of course, that respondents just mess with pollsters’ heads. He’s a Seventh-day Adventist! He’s a Scientologist! But too many surveys over too many years show too much abject ignorance for the phenomenon to be belittled or dismissed. What’s more, there’s no consoling arc over time, no trajectory of progress. Wherever the Internet is speeding us, it’s not toward greater civic erudition and enlightenment.

Into the vacuum of substantive knowledge rush the unprincipled advertisements, the unctuous hucksters, the “super PACs,” the Swift boating, the Sunday-morning-talk-show spin. A clueless electorate is a corruptible one, and one that seems ill poised to make the smartest, best call about something as sweeping as Obamacare and how it gets tweaked or not down the line. Maybe we’ll blink our way to the right decisions. Or maybe we’ll just stumble around with our eyes closed.

And last but not least we have Ms. Collins:

Let’s talk about what makes a delinquent state legislature. I know it’s been on your mind.

The newest political trend in New York involves corrupt state legislators attempting to curry favor with federal prosecutors by wearing wires to work. Perhaps there have been worse fads. There was a time, not long ago, when Assembly members could punch in early in the day, leave to play golf and still be recorded as voting “yes” on every single bill that hit the floor.

Officials recently revealed that a 74-year-old senator named Shirley Huntley secretly recorded assorted pols who she invited over for a chat while claiming to be laid up with a broken ankle. She was sentenced to prison for embezzlement anyway, but not before putting an entirely new spin on the concept of visiting the sick.

There was also a state assemblyman who was wired up for virtually his entire two-term career, before resigning recently to pursue a new life as a defendant in a perjury case.

All of this raises some interesting questions. Is everybody in Albany now operating under the presumption that everything they say is being secretly recorded for the F.B.I.? Does that improve the legislative ethos or just lead to a lot of uncomfortable breaks in conversation?

Also, is New York’s State Legislature the most corrupt in the country? At last count we had 32 state officials get into deep trouble over the last few years, including four former Senate majority or minority leaders. The offenses ranged from taking bribes to throwing coffee in the face of a staff member. The last was not actually a corruption matter, but it was definitely behavior we wish to discourage.

It’s quite a record, but there are still other states in contention.

“We have three people in the State Legislature facing trial. Four of the last seven governors have gone to jail,” said Andy Shaw of Illinois’ Better Government Association. “And we’re a fiscal train wreck.”

That four-of-the-last-seven-governors record is really hard to argue with. New York, of course, had the disastrous resignation of Eliot Spitzer. But that was about sex. Sex scandals, while embarrassing, are far less depressing than financial corruption. I would way rather have an important elected official who patronized prostitutes than one who spent $60,000 of the taxpayers’ money on sushi and lobster. Although in New York we have recently had both.

Still, we’re not alone. “We used to say — thank God for Illinois,” said Gerald Benjamin, a former Albany hand who is now an executive at the State University of New York in New Paltz.

And then there was the Alabama bingo debacle and the Arizona Fiesta Bowl scandal. Louisiana showed up at the top of a study of political corruption that calculated the number of convictions per capita. Georgia came out as worst on a corruption risk report from the State Integrity Investigation, which measured factors like accountability, transparency and ethics enforcement.

New Jersey got the best grade.

“There was an audible gasp across the entire state,” said Debbie Walsh of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers.

“It was counterintuitive for us as well,” said Gordon Witkin, the managing editor at the Center for Public Integrity. Witkin’s theory is that New Jersey got to be good by being bad. “Where there has been a major, major scandal, that was the catalyst for very specific reform.”

Well, New Jersey has had its problems. Over the last decade there was Gov. James McGreevey’s affair with the male Israeli poet. (The state could have accepted the gay part, and the adultery part, if only McGreevey had not decided to prove his love by making the poet head of homeland security.) That was followed by a slew of political indictments, after which the Legislature did end some of its most notorious ethics loopholes. But it’s still, you know, New Jersey.

It’s at this point in every rant about state legislators that we stop to point out that most of them are honest, and some downright heroic. Really, just try spending a good chunk of your life as a reformer in the New York State Senate. See how you like it.

Also, some entire state legislatures are both honest and effective. People speak highly of the one in Nebraska. (It’s unicameral!) I once covered the Connecticut Legislature, where people took their jobs very seriously, holding endless public hearings on every bill and then having long, earnest debates in which the outcome was not preordained. But that was way back in the 1970s, when Joseph Lieberman was the Senate majority leader, and even at that early age was being accused by the liberals of selling out.

At the time, the Connecticut lawmakers did not think they were all that great. What they wanted, more than anything else, was to be like New York. Yes! Legislators in New York, they kept noting, got serious salaries, and staff, and offices. In Connecticut you were lucky if they gave you a desk.

Reformers call this the drive for professionalization. I’m sure it helps give a good legislature more juice, but when one is off track, it just gives everybody more places to be ineffective. When I first went to Albany, I walked through a mall of offices so grand it felt like something out of the chariot scene in “Ben Hur.” Yet the rank-and-file members had nothing to do in their expansive quarters but send press releases to their constituents. There were almost never any public hearings on anything. And the debates were conducted for the benefit of those people on the golf course.

What does make a difference? I think it’s just that some states have a good political culture. Generally, the good ones are places where the lawmakers have serious work to do beyond passing thick mystery bills that come thonking down from the governor’s office minutes before the voting begins. States with two real, functioning political parties that feel at least a modest obligation to work together.

“There’s a thing down here called the Virginia Way — being as collaborative and bipartisan as possible,” said Dan Palazzolo, a professor of political science at the University of Richmond.

There’s a thing up in Albany called “three guys in a room,” in which all the serious decisions are made behind closed doors, by the Assembly speaker, the Senate majority leader and the governor. Someday, I believe, New York may evolve to the point where there will be two guys and a woman in the room. But that may be the most we can expect.

The other day in Albany, the Republicans decided to take the unusual step of having a public hearing on a campaign financing bill that they opposed. When supporters of the bill showed up to testify, the legislators closed the public hearing to the public.

It feels hopeless. But there are definitely places in more desperate straits. “We don’t have a corrupt legislature, but in part that’s because they don’t have a lot to sell — they don’t have that much discretion,” said Joe Mathews, the author of “California Crackup.”

“I wish we had a little more corruption,” Mathews mused. “That would mean we could do things.”

O.K. — not the way we are intending to go.

You can reform a political culture, but it’s a big lift. First, the voters would have to convince the legislators that they’re being watched by someone other than the lobbyists. Then they’d have to press for laws that would force a change of behavior, like nonpartisan redistricting and ethics reform. Then the voters would have to follow up, year after year, until the old guard was replaced by a whole new generation who went into politics with dreams of drafting serious legislation, rather than just bringing more stuff back into the district or, at worst, shaking down some landlord at the airport for a thousand bucks.

It’s a lot of watching. Or, failing that, we could just have everybody wear wires.

The Pasty Little Putz, Dowd, Friedman and Bruni

The Pasty Little Putz has decided to tell us all “What Health Insurance Doesn’t Do.”  He tries to convince us that there are probably better ways to improve people’s lives.  I’ll bet you two things:  First, this little asshole isn’t about to give up his own health insurance and, second, he doesn’t read Krugman’s blog although he really should.  (As an added bonus Putzy uses Megan “Can’t Keep Track of Decimal Points” McArdle and Slate as his authoritative links.)  MoDo has a question in “In a Gaudy Theme Park Jay-Z Meets Jay-Gatz:”  Why are we borne back ceaselessly to West Egg and Gatsby swag?  Bread and circuses, that’s why.  The Moustache of Wisdom also has a question in “This Ain’t Yogurt:”  Just what would it take to put Syria on a path toward democracy?  Beats the fck out of me, but I will tell you that we do not need to be meddling militarily in the region again.  Mr. Bruni, in “Sexism and the Single Murderess,” says Amanda Knox’s story is just one example of our continued quickness to heap scorn and slurs on women seen as sexually bold.  Here’s The Putz:

In one of the most famous studies of health insurance, conducted across the 1970s, thousands of participants were divided into five groups, with each receiving a different amount of insurance coverage. The study, run by the RAND Corporation, tracked the medical care each group sought out, and not surprisingly found that people with more comprehensive coverage tended to make use of it, visiting the doctor and checking into the hospital more often than people with less generous insurance.

But the study also tracked the health outcomes of each group, and there the results were more surprising: With a few modest exceptions, the level of insurance had no significant effect on the participants’ actual wellness.

Needless to say, experts have been arguing about what the RAND results mean ever since. But the basic finding — that more expensive health insurance doesn’t necessarily lead to better health — just received a major boost. The state of Oregon expanded its Medicaid program via lottery a few years ago, and researchers released the latest data on how health outcomes for the new Medicaid users differed from those for the uninsured. The answer: They didn’t differ much. Being on Medicaid helped people avoid huge medical bills, and it reduced depression rates. But the program’s insurance guarantee seemed to have little or no impact on common medical conditions like hypertension and diabetes.

As liberals have been extremely quick to point out, these findings do not necessarily make a case against the new health care law, which includes a big Medicaid expansion as well as subsidies for private insurance. After all, the first purpose of insurance is economic protection, and the Oregon data shows that expanding coverage does indeed protect people from ruinous medical expenses. The links between insurance, medicine and health may be impressively mysterious, but staving off medical bankruptcies among low-income Americans is not a small policy achievement.

This is true. But it’s also true that the health care law was sold, in part, with the promise (made by judicious wonks as well as overreaching politicians) that it would save tens of thousands of American lives each year. There was so much moral fervor on the issue, so much crusading liberal zeal, precisely because this was not supposed to be just a big redistribution program: it was supposed to be a matter of life and death.

But if it turns out that health insurance is useful mostly because it averts financial catastrophe — which seems to be the consensus liberal position since the Oregon data came out — then the new health care law looks vulnerable to two interconnected critiques.

First, if the benefit of health insurance is mostly or exclusively financial, then shouldn’t health insurance policies work more like normal insurance? Fire, flood and car insurance exist to protect people against actual disasters, after all, not to pay for ordinary repairs. If the best evidence suggests that health insurance is most helpful in protecting people’s pocketbooks from similar disasters, and that more comprehensive coverage often just pays for doctor visits that don’t improve people’s actual health, then shouldn’t we be promoting catastrophic health coverage, rather than expanding Medicaid?

Liberals don’t like catastrophic plans because, by definition, they’re stingier than the coverage many Americans now enjoy. But this is where the second critique comes in: If the marginal dollar of health care coverage doesn’t deliver better health, isn’t this a place where policy makers should be stingy, while looking for more direct ways to improve the prospects of the working poor? Some kind of expanded health security is clearly a good thing — but if we want to promote economic mobility as well, does it really make sense to pour about a trillion dollars into a health care system that everyone agrees is deeply dysfunctional, when some of that money could be returned to Americans’ paychecks instead?

There are a variety of ways this could be accomplished — a bigger child tax credit for struggling families, a payroll tax cut to boost workers, an expanded earned-income tax credit to raise wages at the bottom, health savings accounts that roll over money left unspent. In each case, the goal would be to help people rise by giving them more money and more options for what to do with it, rather than just expanding 1960s-vintage programs that pay medical bills and only medical bills.

It’s to the Republican Party’s great discredit that these policies and goals don’t have enough conservative champions at the moment. But it’s to liberals’ discredit that they remain wedded to the dream of a health care bureaucracy that pays and pays and pays, when in all likelihood we could be spending much less with similar results, and finding better ways to help the poor.

Yeah, Putzy, by all means let’s not let them have health insurance, because it doesn’t prevent illness.  You stupid jackass.  Here’s MoDo:

When I started out in journalism, I spent five long years as a reporter in Montgomery County, Md., a cosseted suburb of Washington.

I felt suffocated, as though I’d never escape to the blazing, gritty larger world I dreamed of covering.

Driving to work every day, I passed a small cemetery connected to St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Rockville. I would always look up and give a silent salute to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was buried there in the Fitzgerald family plot. His modest headstone features the indelible final line of “The Great Gatsby”: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

There was something both incongruous and congruous in the final resting spot for the shimmering American chronicler of corrosive glamour and crushed dreams: next to a busy highway peppered with tacky strip malls.

When Fitzgerald died of a heart attack at 44 after a failed stint as a screenwriter, a losing struggle with alcoholism and a relationship with the Hollywood gossip columnist Sheila Graham, his Hollywood funeral attracted only 30 people, including his editor, Maxwell Perkins, and required hired pallbearers. For 35 years, Fitzgerald was buried in a Protestant cemetery two miles from St. Mary’s, until the Catholic Church got over the idea that his decadence precluded a Catholic burial and let him and Zelda in.

Surveying his own crushed dreams once, Fitzgerald — who sold the movie rights to “The Great Gatsby” for $16,666 in the 1920s, sparking a long succession of green lights for his enchanted green-light saga — famously said that there are no second acts in American life. For someone who wrote an iconic American novel (as Lionel Trilling observed, “Gatsby, divided between power and dream, comes inevitably to stand for America itself”) it was a bad miscalculation. Americans love sin and redemption and reinvention almost as much as they love stuff.

Fitzgerald is not only having a glittering second act, he’s having it in the third dimension.

All over Manhattan, in anticipation of the opening of Baz Luhrmann’s $104.5 million 3-D theme-park ride of a “Great Gatsby,” with its hip-hop-studded soundtrack and gorgeous Prada dresses, Fitzgerald is being celebrated with starry parties; Tiffany’s jazz-baby windows; Brooks Brothers boaters, bow ties and canes; and a Vogue cover of the latest Daisy Buchanan, Carey Mulligan, gleaming in diamonds and pearls, looking as if she would sound like money.

“She’s in her own TV show,” Mulligan said of her character. “She’s like a Kardashian.”

In this gaudy, blingy, frenzied version that puts the roaring in Roaring Twenties, gin bottles, bits of the novel’s text and Gatsby’s passel of pastel shirts come flying off the screen right at you.

“It will be interesting,” Robert Redford wryly told me, “to see how many in the audience grab for a shirt.”

The 3-D glasses, though, just get in the way of seeing the more subtle elements of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece: the decay of souls, the crumbling mythology and the dark side of social mobility.

Some at screenings last week muttered at how appalled they were that “Gatsby” was being treated like a Disney pirate movie. One woman said the dizzying kaleidoscope made her long to see a small black-and-white version of the film. But the Australian director argues that Fitzgerald was a modernist who was fascinated with new cinematic techniques and jazz when it was dangerous, so he would have been intrigued by 3-D and rap.

Luhrmann told The Wall Street Journal that when he met with Jay-Z about scoring the soundtrack and showed him a rough cut, that Jay, who started as Shawn Carter, immediately connected with the other Jay, who started as James Gatz: “Jay turns to me and goes, ‘It’s an aspirational film. You know, the thing about this story is that it’s not a question of how Gatsby made his money, it’s is he a good person or not? Is there meaning in his life? And all these characters, do they have a moral compass?’ ”

Robert Evans, the legendary producer, was running Paramount when the studio made the 1974 “Gatsby” for $6.4 million with Redford and Mia Farrow, a commercial success despite being pronounced “as lifeless as a body that’s been too long at the bottom of a swimming pool” by The Times’s Vincent Canby. Evans said he spent some time with Luhrmann before Baz started the film and warned him not to overcommercialize and overpublicize the movie. (In vain, given the movie’s high-end tie-ins and the swag online, including “I party with Jay Gatsby” tank tops, Dr. T. J. Eckleburg laptop decals, and green-light pendants.)

“The trouble we had with our ‘Gatsby’ was that everything was Gatsbyized from your toes to your hats, from your stockings to your pants,” Evans told me. “It took it away from a work of art to a work of commerce.”

He believes the movie was damaged by a 1974 Time cover on the hype involved in selling “Gatsby,” a story that started with this Evans quote: “The making of a blockbuster is the newest art form of the 20th century.”

The most successful rendering of the novel was the most literal, unadorned one: “Gatz,” the Public Theater’s seven-hour reading of the novel by actors.

John Collins, the director of “Gatz,” who says he has listened to the novel read more than 200 times, was generous about the “contemporary sensibilities” of the latest iteration, even big changes like having the narrator, Nick Carraway, end up in a sanitarium because of his “morbid alcoholism.” That’s where Luhrmann’s Nick writes the novel and narrates the movie.

“The movie is almost kind of a comic book idea of ‘The Great Gatsby,’” Collins said. “I don’t mean that in a pejorative way. It’s an imaginative project.”

Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, understands that we’re drawn back to “Gatsby” because we keep seeing modern buccaneers of banking and hedge funds, swathed in carelessness and opulence. “But what most people don’t understand is that the adjective ‘Great’ in the title was meant laconically,” he said. “There’s nothing genuinely great about Gatsby. He’s a poignant phony. Owing to the money-addled society we live in, people have lost the irony of Fitzgerald’s title. So the movies become complicit in the excessively materialistic culture that the novel set out to criticize.”

He noted that Gatsby movies are usually just moving versions of Town and Country or The Times’s T magazine, and that filmmakers “get seduced by the seductions that the book itself is warning about.”

A really great movie of the novel, he argues, would “show a dissenting streak of austerity.” He thinks it’s time for a black Gatsby, noting that Jay-Z might be an inspirational starting point — “a young man of talents with an unsavory past consumed by status anxiety and ascending unstoppably through tireless self-promotion and increasingly conspicuous wealth.”

The problem with the “Gatsby” movies, he said, “is that they look like they were made by Gatsby. The trick is to make a Gatsby movie that couldn’t have been made by Gatsby — an unglossy portrait of gloss.”

All you really need to see are the promos for this POS on the TV to see that it will be crap.  Now here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

An Arab friend remarked to me that watching the United States debate how much to get involved in Syria reminded him of an Arab proverb: “If you burn your tongue once eating soup, for the rest of your life you’ll blow on your yogurt.”

After burning our tongues in Iraq and Afghanistan, and watching with increasing distress the aftermath of the revolutions in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, President Obama is right to be cautious about getting burned in Damascus. We’ve now seen enough of these Arab transitions from autocracy to draw some crucial lessons about what it takes to sustain positive change in these countries. We ignore the lessons at our peril — especially the lesson of Iraq, which everyone just wants to forget but is hugely relevant.

Syria is Iraq’s twin: an artificial state that was also born after World War I inside lines drawn by imperial powers. Like Iraq, Syria’s constituent communities — Sunnis, Alawite/Shiites, Kurds, Druze, Christians — never volunteered to live together under agreed rules. So, like Iraq, Syria has been ruled for much of its modern history by either a colonial power or an iron-fisted autocrat. In Iraq, the hope was that once the iron-fisted dictator was removed by us it would steadily transition to a multisectarian, multiparty democracy. Ditto for Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen.

But we now see the huge difference between Eastern Europe in 1989 and the Arab world in 2013. In most of Eastern Europe, the heavy lid of communist authoritarian rule was suppressing broad and deeply rooted aspirations for democracy. So when that lid was removed, most of these countries relatively quickly moved to freely elected governments — helped and inspired by the European Union.

In the Arab world, in contrast, the heavy lid of authoritarianism was suppressing sectarian, tribal, Islamist and democratic aspirations. So, when the lids were removed, all four surfaced at once. But the Islamist trend has been the most energetic — helped and inspired not by the European Union but by Islamist mosques and charities in the Persian Gulf — and the democratic one has proved to be the least organized, least funded and most frail. In short, most of Eastern Europe turned out to be like Poland after communism ended and most of the Arab countries turned out to be like Yugoslavia after communism ended.

As I said, our hope and the hope of the courageous Arab democrats who started all these revolutions, was that these Arab countries would make the transition from Saddam to Jefferson without getting stuck in Khomeini or Hobbes — to go from autocracy to democracy without getting stuck in Islamism or anarchism.

But, to do that, they need either an external midwife to act as a referee between all their constituent communities (who never developed trust in one another) as they try to replace sectarianism, Islamism and tribalism with a spirit of democratic citizenship or they need their own Nelson Mandela. That is, a homegrown figure who can lead, inspire and navigate a democratic transition that is inclusive of all communities.

America, we all know, played that external referee role in Iraq — hugely ineptly at first. But, eventually, the U.S. and moderate Iraqis found a way back from the brink, beat back both Sunni and Shiite violent extremists, wrote a constitution and held multiple free elections, hoping to give birth to that Iraqi Mandela. Alas, they got Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite who, instead of building trust with other communities, is re-sowing sectarian division. Decades of zero-sum politics — “I’m-weak-how-can-I-compromise/I’m-strong-why-should-I-compromise” — are hard to extinguish.

I believe if you want to end the Syrian civil war and tilt Syria onto a democratic path, you need an international force to occupy the entire country, secure the borders, disarm all the militias and midwife a transition to democracy. It would be staggeringly costly and take a long time, with the outcome still not guaranteed. But without a homegrown Syrian leader who can be a healer, not a divider, for all its communities, my view is that anything short of an external force that rebuilds Syria from the bottom up will fail. Since there are no countries volunteering for that role (and I am certainly not nominating the U.S.), my guess is that the fighting in Syria will continue until the parties get exhausted.

Meanwhile, wherever we can identify truly “good” rebels, we should strengthen them, but we should also be redoubling our diplomatic efforts to foster a more credible opposition leadership of reconciliation-minded Syrians who can reassure all of Syria’s communities that they will have an equitable place at a new cabinet table. (Never underestimate how many Syrians are clinging to the tyrannical Bashar al-Assad out of fear that after him comes only Hobbes or Khomeini.) That way, when the combatants get exhausted and realize that there can be no victor and no vanquished — a realization that took 14 years in Lebanon’s civil war next door — a fair power-sharing plan will be in place. Even then, Syrians will almost certainly need outside help to reassure everyone during the transition, but we can cross that bridge when we come to it.

Here’s the one alternative that won’t happen: one side will decisively defeat the other and usher in peace that way. That is a fantasy.

Lastly we have Mr. Bruni:

“Sex game gone wrong,” “sex game gone awry,” “sex-mad flatmate,” “sex-crazed killer.”

That’s from just the first three minutes of the ABC News special on Amanda Knox last week, a veritable drumbeat of sexual shaming that leaves no doubt about what elevated a college student accused of murder into an object of international fascination, titillation and scorn.

It wasn’t the crime itself. It was the supposed conspiracy of her libido, cast as proof that she was out of control, up to no good, lost, wicked, dangerous. A girl this intent on randy fun was a girl who couldn’t be trusted and got what was coming to her, even if it was prison and even if there was plenty of reason — as the eventual reversal of her initial conviction made clear — to believe that she might not belong there.

“Knox knew, it seemed, no boundaries, leaving a vibrator in a transparent washbag and enjoying one-night stands,” wrote Tobias Jones in a 2011 article in the British newspaper The Observer. One-night stands? How could she?!? Of course if a guy has one of those, it’s a triumph: all the pleasure, none of the commitment. And boys, after all, will be boys.

We’ll never know precisely what happened on the night in Perugia, Italy, in 2007 when Meredith Kercher, 21, was killed. Knox, her housemate, was found guilty, then acquitted and will soon, despite the profoundly flawed case against her, face another trial. The Italian judicial system works about as smoothly as the Italian government.

But we know this: the double standard concerning men’s versus women’s sexuality not only survives but thrives, manifest in the enduring notoriety of “Foxy Knoxy,” whose memoir was published on the same day last week that the ABC News special aired. Keep the rest of her story the same but make her a man in the midst of erotic escapades abroad. Are we still gawking? Is ABC trumpeting Diane Sawyer’s exclusive sit-down with the lascivious pilgrim?

Similar questions can be asked about Jodi Arias, 32, whose murder trial in Arizona was winding down last week. The Arias case hasn’t made quite the leap from the tabloids into the mainstream that Knox’s did. But HLN, the cable network on which Nancy Grace fulminates, has enjoyed a ratings bonanza with its saturation coverage of the courtroom proceedings.

Arias has admitted to stabbing, shooting and slashing the throat of a former lover: an act of self-defense, she unpersuasively claims. And while his death was certainly grisly enough to explain a baseline of media interest, the amount of attention it has received stems from the courtroom juxtaposition of the defendant, outfitted in nerdy eyeglasses and a frumpy hairstyle, and evidence of what a steamy, pliable playmate she was. It stems from pictures of her genitalia that she let her lover take, audiotapes of the phone sex that the two of them had — and that she recorded. It stems from the shock and censure of such potent female desire.

Knox and Arias aren’t just women accused of murder. They’re minxes accused of murder, sitting in their courtroom seats with scarlet letters emblazoned on their chests, no jury needed to pronounce them guilty of wantonness at the very least. For men, lust is a tripwire. For women, it’s a noose.

I’ve heard quite a bit lately about David Petraeus’s road to redemption. I’ve heard less about Paula Broadwell’s. Yes, he’s the more public figure, but the disparity also reflects the way their affair was often portrayed in the first place. He strayed; she preyed. He was weak; she was wily. He was the fly, she the spider.

Let’s bring a few other recent news stories into this. Let’s indulge in a few hypotheticals.

What if it had been Antonia Weiner who took to Twitter and there had been a different architecture to the image she tweeted? Would she be able even to entertain the idea of a political comeback? And would the spouse standing dutifully by her be seen as a brave and magnanimous stalwart, the way Huma Abedin is viewed in some quarters, or dismissed by one and all as a pitiable pushover?

Had a Southern governor named Marcia Sanford been entangled with a Latin lover when reputedly hiking the Appalachian Trail, would she today be her party’s nominee for an open Congressional seat? We know the answer, and we know that Wilhelmina Clinton and Newtina Gingrich wouldn’t have rebounded from their infidelities as robustly as Bill and Newt did.

Men get passes, women get reputations, and real, lasting humiliation travels only one way. The size and scope of that mortification, despite many decades of happy talk about dawning gender equality, are suggested by recent news stories of one teenage girl in California and another in Nova Scotia who hanged themselves after tales or cellphone pictures of their sexual violation circulated among peers. It’s impossible not to wonder if shame drove them to suicide, and it’s impossible not to ask what sort of world allows the victims of such assaults to feel more irredeemably branded — more eternally damned — than their accused assailants by all appearances do.

I’ll tell you what sort: a world in which there’s a cornucopia of synonyms for whore and slut and no comparably pejorative vocabulary for promiscuous or sexually rapacious men. A world in which Knox’s vibrator and the lingerie she was said to have bought in a Perugia store were presented not just as newsworthy but as germane to the charge of murder against her: referendums on her character, glimmers of her depravity, clues to precisely how a good girl went bad. A world in which her erotic appetite made her a “man eater,” as the Italian press wrote and as the rest of the world more or less parroted. A world in which her tally, scribbled on a sheet of paper in her prison cell, of seven sexual partners in all of her life was seen as sensational. A similar count for a guy in his early 20s would provoke not derision but disagreement: swordsman or slacker?

When we chart and lament the persistence of sexism in society, we look to the United States Congress, where women are still woefully underrepresented. We look to corporate boardrooms, where the glass ceiling hasn’t really shattered. But we needn’t look any further than how perversely censorious of women’s sex lives we remain, and how short the path from siren to slut and from angel to she-devil can be.

The Pasty Little Putz, Dowd, Friedman and Bruni

In “Worlds Away From Here” The Pasty Little Putz offers, amid a miserable week on Earth, a glimpse of distant planets.  He of course starts off with the assumption that nobody follows the news the way he does…  MoDo has found another excuse to simultaneously bash the president and display ignorance.  She has a question in “No Bully in the Pulpit:”  Why doesn’t 90 percent of America equal 60 senators?  Lemme see if I can ‘splain it to you in words of one syllable, MoDo:  They don’t give a fck what we think or want.  Does that clarify matters for you?  Oh — and it was interesting that you managed to write an entire column about the failure of gun control legislation without once mentioning the NRA.  You stupid bitch.  The Moustache of Wisdom has decided to tell us “How to Put America Back Together Again.”  He says we need to redouble our efforts to make our country stronger and healthier. A good place to start is with a carbon tax.  Right, Tommy.  I’m sure the Teatards and the rest of the lunatics in the Republican party will jump all over that.  Mr. Bruni is “Questioning the Mission of College,” and says a Texas tussle over accessibility and practicality strikes at the heart of higher education.  Can we please just all make the assumption that, until proven otherwise, anything coming out of Texas is bull crap?  Here’s The Putz:

And now for some counterprogramming. You probably missed it, what with the Boston Marathon bombing, the ricin-laced letters, the fertilizer plant explosion and an entire city locked down while cops hunted the bombing suspect, but we discovered another world last week. Two, actually — both somewhat larger than Earth, circling a star with the sadly unromantic name of Kepler 62, 1,200 light-years away.

These planets are not the first Earth-like bodies astronomers have discovered, but their size and position make them particularly promising candidates to have liquid water — and with it, perhaps, some form of life.

But their promise only adds to a mystery that’s been building the further our probes and telescopes have pushed into the unknown. If Earth-like planets are relatively common, as scientists increasingly believe, then where are all the Earth-like civilizations?

This mystery is known as the Fermi paradox, after the physicist Enrico Fermi, who raised it at lunch with fellow scientists in 1950. He pointed out that our Sun is a relatively young star, and billions of other suns are billions of years older. If even a tiny fraction of those suns have planets like ours, and even a tiny fraction of those planets developed life, and even a tiny fraction of those life forms achieved human-level intelligence … well, the number of civilizations capable of interstellar communication and travel should be theoretically large enough to crowd our galaxy with signals, ships, artifacts.

In which case, Fermi asked, Where is everybody?

The potential answers to this question can feel as numberless as the stars themselves. (The Wikipedia entry on the Fermi paradox runs to just over 10,000 words.) But two seem particularly plausible. Perhaps life and consciousness are rare enough, mysterious enough, impossible enough, that even multiplying Earth-like worlds a billion times over would not necessarily produce either one again. Or alternatively, perhaps the gulfs between the stars are just too wide to bridge, and our current limited attempts at exploration are as far as any creatures of flesh and blood can ever hope to get.

The first possibility obviously raises theological as well as scientific questions. In one sense, it elevates humanity, restoring us to an almost pre-Copernican position in the cosmos. At the same time, though, plenty of religious believers are untroubled (or even inspired) by the idea of extraterrestrial life, while the possibility that the cosmos might be as empty as it is vast raises troubling questions about what, exactly, its Designer had in mind. (“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread,” wrote the great Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal.)

Maybe, an optimistic believer might venture, the cosmos only seems empty because we haven’t fulfilled our destiny and populated it. But here the second possible answer to Fermi’s paradox intervenes: What if it can’t be populated at all? What if our own solar system is as far as we’ll ever get?

Obviously that’s not a question we’re presently equipped to answer, after less than 60 years of spaceflight. But it haunts our era in subtle, unacknowledged ways.

There’s a sense in which Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 argument about how the idea of the frontier shaped American history can apply to the entire modern project. Exploration, expansion, the promise that a better life was just a long voyage away — all of these helped fuel the sense of historical mission, the assumption of perpetual progress, which shaped and defined the modern age.

Go back and read the science fiction of the 1940s and ’50s, and you’ll be struck by the vaulting confidence that this expansion would continue upward and outward, and that a new age of exploration was just waiting to be born.

Today that confidence has vanished. Our Mars rovers are impressive and our billionaires keep pouring money into private spaceflight, but neither project captures the public’s imagination, and the very term “Space Age” seems antique. The Kepler 62 discovery might have earned more headlines at a less horrific moment, but it would have fallen out of the news soon enough.

It’s possible that we’re less interested in space travel because we feel that it’s a luxury good at a time when we have bigger problems here on Earth. But it’s also possible that we’ve gradually turned inward, to our smartphone screens and Facebook profiles, because we know that spaceflight isn’t going to get us to another world anytime soon.

Obviously exploration is not a cure for unhappiness or evil. But it can be an antidote to the mix of anxiety and exhaustion that seems to permeate the developed world these days.

And after a week as grimly claustrophobic as this one, with its spasms of nihilistic violence, its frantic online rumor mill, its locked-down Boston streets, it seems worth hoping that the human desire for wider horizons — for new worlds to wonder at, reach for and understand — will someday be fulfilled again.

Time to get to work on that warp drive.

Here’s hoping you decide to take the first flight…  Next up is that bitch MoDo:

The graying man flashing fury in the Rose Garden on behalf of the Newtown families, the grieving man wiping away tears after speaking at the Boston memorial service, is not the same man who glided into office four years ago.

President Obama has watched the blood-dimmed tide drowning the ceremony of innocence, as Yeats wrote, and he has learned how to emotionally connect with Americans in searing moments, as he did from the White House late Friday night after the second bombing suspect was apprehended in Boston.

Unfortunately, he still has not learned how to govern.

How is it that the president won the argument on gun safety with the public and lost the vote in the Senate? It’s because he doesn’t know how to work the system. And it’s clear now that he doesn’t want to learn, or to even hire some clever people who can tell him how to do it or do it for him.

It’s unbelievable that with 90 percent of Americans on his side, he could get only 54 votes in the Senate. It was a glaring example of his weakness in using leverage to get what he wants. No one on Capitol Hill is scared of him.

Even House Republicans who had no intention of voting for the gun bill marveled privately that the president could not muster 60 votes in a Senate that his party controls.

President Obama thinks he can use emotion to bring pressure on Congress. But that’s not how adults with power respond to things. He chooses not to get down in the weeds and pretend he values the stroking and other little things that matter to lawmakers.

After the Newtown massacre, he and his aides hashed it out and decided he would look cold and unsympathetic if he didn’t push for some new regulations. To thunderous applause at the State of the Union, the president said, “The families of Newtown deserve a vote.” Then, as usual, he took his foot off the gas, lost momentum and confided his pessimism to journalists.

The White House had a defeatist mantra: This is tough. We need to do it. But we’re probably going to lose.

When you go into a fight saying you’re probably going to lose, you’re probably going to lose.

The president once more delegated to the vice president. Couldn’t he have come to the Hill himself to lobby with the families and Joe Biden?

The White House should have created a war room full of charts with the names of pols they had to capture, like they had in “The American President.” Soaring speeches have their place, but this was about blocking and tackling.

Instead of the pit-bull legislative aides in Aaron Sorkin’s movie, Obama has Miguel Rodriguez, an arm-twister so genteel that The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker wrote recently that no one in Congress even knows who he is.

The president was oblivious to red-state Democrats facing tough elections. Bring the Alaskan Democrat Mark Begich to the White House residence, hand him a drink, and say, “How can we make this a bill you can vote for and defend?”

Sometimes you must leave the high road and fetch your brass knuckles. Obama should have called Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota over to the Oval Office and put on the squeeze: “Heidi, you’re brand new and you’re going to have a long career. You work with us, we’ll work with you. Public opinion is moving fast on this issue. The reason you get a six-year term is so you can have the guts to make tough votes. This is a totally defensible bill back home. It’s about background checks, nothing to do with access to guns. Heidi, you’re a mother. Think of those little kids dying in schoolrooms.”

Obama had to persuade some Republican senators in states that he won in 2012. He should have gone out to Ohio, New Hampshire and Nevada and had big rallies to get the public riled up to put pressure on Rob Portman, Kelly Ayotte and Dean Heller, giving notice that they would pay a price if they spurned him on this.

Tom Coburn, the Republican senator from Oklahoma, is one of the few people on the Hill that the president actually considers a friend. Obama wrote a paean to Coburn in the new Time 100 issue, which came out just as Coburn sabotaged his own initial effort to help the bill.

Obama should have pressed his buddy: “Hey, Tom, just this once, why don’t you do more than just talk about making an agreement with the Democrats? You’re not running again. Do something big.”

Couldn’t the president have given his Rose Garden speech about the “shameful” actions in Washington before the vote rather than after?

There were ways to get to 60 votes. The White House just had to scratch it out with a real strategy and a never-let-go attitude.

Obama hates selling. He thinks people should just accept the right thing to do. But as Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat, noted, senators have their own tough selling job to do back home. “In the end you can really believe in something,” he told The Times’s Jennifer Steinhauer, “but you have to go sell it.”

The president said the Newtown families deserved a vote. But he was setting his sights too low. They deserved a law.

You too, MoDo, are hereby offered a huge plate of salted weasel dicks for a snack.  And it really is time for you to STFU about the Senate.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

Until we fully understand what turned two brothers who allegedly perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombings into murderers, it is hard to make any policy recommendation other than this: We need to redouble our efforts to make America stronger and healthier so it remains a vibrant counterexample to whatever bigoted ideology may have gripped these young men. With all our warts, we have built a unique society — a country where a black man, whose middle name is Hussein, whose grandfather was a Muslim, can run for president and first defeat a woman in his own party and then four years later a Mormon from the opposition, and no one thinks twice about it. With so many societies around the world being torn apart, especially in the Middle East, it is vital that America survives and flourishes as a beacon of pluralism.

Rebuilding our strength has to start with healing our economy. In that regard, it feels as if our budget drama has dragged on for so long that it has not only been drained of all emotional energy but nobody even remembers the plot anymore. It’s worth recalling: What are we trying to do?

We’re trying to put America back on a sustainable growth track that will expand employment, strengthen our fiscal balance sheet to withstand future crises and generate resources to sustain the most needy and propel the next generation. That requires three things: We need to keep investing in the engines of our growth — infrastructure, government-financed research, education, immigration and regulations that incentivize risk-taking but prevent recklessness. We need to reform Social Security and Medicare so they can support all the baby boomers about to retire. And we need to raise more revenues, in the least painful way possible, because we can’t just cut everything. As I’ve said, you can lose weight quickly by cutting off both thumbs, but that will be a problem at work.

It was good to see President Obama put out a budget proposal that addressed all three needs. The attacks on him from the left are unfair because, ultimately, we will need to do all three even more. As Bloomberg News reported on Monday: “Typical wage-earners retiring in 2010 will receive at least $3 for every $1 they contributed to the Medicare health-insurance program, according to an Urban Institute study.” That’s unsustainable. The Republican budget plan, though, would cut so much so fast — including taxes — that it would leave virtually nothing for investing in our growth engines. That’s irresponsible.

So what to do?  We need a more “radical center” — one much more willing to suggest radically new ideas to raise revenues, not the “split-the-difference-between-the-same-old-options center.” And the best place to start is with a carbon tax.

A phased-in carbon tax of $20 to $25 a ton could raise around $1 trillion over 10 years, as we each pay a few more dimes and quarters for every gallon of gasoline or hour of electricity. With that new revenue stream, we’d have so many more options. One, preferred by Republicans like the statesman George Shultz and the Nobel laureate Gary Becker, is to make the carbon tax “revenue neutral.” It could be offset entirely by a rebate or by cutting tax rates for every U.S. citizen and corporation, which would increase spending. Another option, the one I’d prefer, would devote half the carbon-tax revenues to individual and corporate tax cuts, use a quarter for new investments in infrastructure, preschool education, community colleges and research — which would create jobs now and tomorrow — and then use a quarter on deficit reduction.

In short, if you added such a carbon tax to Obama’s budget, you’d have the makings of a radical grand bargain: Republicans would have the income tax cuts they want; Democrats would get the additional infrastructure stimulus they want, plus a new revenue stream to start gradually addressing the deficit, while reducing the amount that we’d have to bite from entitlements now; and the country would have a vehicle to address climate change, to drive clean-tech innovation (and to take money away from people who fund jihadist hate sites on the Internet).

However we divide the money, a carbon tax would enable a radical grand bargain that would be more fiscally responsible for the long run and more stimulative in the short run, paving the way to more sustainable growth. (Yes, a carbon tax is not painless. We would have to, and easily can, cushion the poor from its impact.) We’d be serving the present and the future. Here’s one example how: Today states are slashing budgets for community colleges, just when every good job requires more skill. That is truly cutting off our thumbs to lose weight. Last week, I interviewed Gary Green, the president of Forsyth Technical Community College, in Winston-Salem, N.C., with 10,000 students.

“We have a labor surplus in this country and a labor shortage at the same time,” Green explained to me. Workers in North Carolina, particularly in textiles and furniture, who lost jobs either to outsourcing or the recession in 2008, often “do not have the skills required to get a new job today” in the biotech, health care and manufacturing centers that are opening in the state.

If before, he added, “you just needed a high school shop class or a short postsecondary certificate to work in a factory, now you need an associate degree in machining,” a two-year program that requires higher math, I.T. and systems skills. In addition, some employers are now demanding that you not only have an associate degree but that nationally recognized skill certifications be incorporated into the curriculum to show that you have mastered the skills they want, like computer-integrated machining.

I know: If we can’t get some simple gun control, how do we get a carbon tax to pay for all of this? With both, you have to try and keep trying, until the unimaginable becomes the inevitable. Our goal is not just balancing the budget. It’s generating the resources in the most intelligent way possible to renew America for the 21st century. I hope the president swings for the fences. It’s the only way to revive the country and a moribund Republican Party.

“Margaret Thatcher’s big ideas set the context for the creation of New Labour,” said Don Baer, the former Clinton administration communications chief. “Ronald Reagan’s big ideas did the same for the New Democrats.” Maybe only big ideas from President Obama can give birth to New Republicans — and the revival of the country. Competition works. But if we treat every good big idea as “dead on arrival” then so are we. We cannot allow that. A more interdependent world desperately needs an America at its best.

And now here’s Mr. Bruni:

The flagship campus of the University of Texas here has been in the national news often over the last year, mainly because of a legal challenge to its race-conscious, diversity-minded admissions policy. The Supreme Court heard arguments in the case in October; its decision, not yet rendered, could affect affirmative action nationwide.

But there’s another, equally weighty contest being waged at the school, and it concerns nothing less than the future of higher education itself.

Do we want our marquee state universities to behave more like job-training centers, judged by the number of students they speed toward degrees, the percentage of those students who quickly land good-paying jobs and the thrift with which all of this is accomplished? In the service of that, are we willing to jeopardize some of the trailblazing research these schools have routinely done and the standards they’ve maintained?

Those questions are being asked and fostering acrimony on campus after campus, the one here in Austin chief among them. In public remarks over the last few years, Hunter Rawlings, the president of the Association of American Universities, has called Texas both the “epicenter of public debate about the function” of higher education and “ground zero” in a welling crisis.

Rawlings is referring to the tension between the nine regents who set policy for the University of Texas at Austin, all of them appointed by Gov. Rick Perry, and the university’s president, Bill Powers. The regents’ apparent animosity toward Powers, whose most recent request for a modest in-state tuition increase they denied, reached a point where state lawmakers passed several resolutions in February making their support for him clear. That was a slap at the regents — and, by extension, at Governor Perry.

And while it reflected political factionalism, it also tapped into a philosophical divide. The regents, Perry and a conservative think tank with great sway over the governor have all called for, or mused publicly about, reforms at the university that many other Texans have deep and warranted reservations about.

The reformers want professors evaluated by how many students they teach and how many research dollars they attract, metrics that favor large classes and less speculative, visionary science.

They want the school to figure out a way, despite huge cutbacks in public funding, to offer students a four-year degree for a sum total of $10,000 in tuition, which is a small fraction of the current cost and seemingly impossible without a diminution in the quality of instruction.

They want expanded online classes. And they want programs tailored more precisely to the job market of the moment.

Powers says he’s open to much of this — to a point. “I and every other university president I know has made efficiency and affordability and using new teaching systems a high priority,” he told me when I met with him last week. The issue, he added, is how to do this while still “educating students at the highest level.”

The pressures on him and university administrators around the country stem from the severity of the country’s economic downturn and state governments’ accordant budgetary woes. Funding of public universities hasn’t just declined; it’s plummeted. Increases in tuition have been necessary, even as students find it more difficult to afford. Some students can’t make it to the finish line of a bachelor’s degree, which betters their odds of employment. Others graduate with crippling debt into a grim job market and wind up with work that doesn’t reflect the level or focus of their education.

And so colleges in Virginia are now required to provide information for a database that shows what graduates majored in and what they wound up earning 18 months after getting their diplomas. Florida lawmakers have toyed with encouraging students to study engineering by making their tuition cheaper than humanities majors’. Pat McCrory, the new governor of North Carolina, recently advocated legislation to distribute funds to the state’s colleges based not on their enrollments — or, as he said on a radio show, on “butts in seats” — but instead on “how many of those butts can get jobs.”

“If you want to take gender studies, that’s fine, go to a private school,” he added. “But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.”

How practical versus idealistic should the approach to college be? I’m somewhat torn, and past columns have reflected that. I applaud proposals to give young people better information about how various fields of study match up with the job market and about projected returns on their investments in college. And for students who want college to be an instant pivot into a job with decent pay, a nudge toward certain disciplines makes excellent sense.

But college is about more than that, with less targeted, long-term benefits that aren’t easily captured by metrics. And some of the reforms being promoted right now lose sight of that and threaten to lessen the value of a degree.

“You just don’t know what your education is going to result in,” Rawlings told me by phone last week. “Many of the kids graduating from college these days are going to hold a number of different jobs in their lives, and many of those jobs have not yet been invented. For a world like that, what’s the best education? Seems to me it’s a very general education that enables you to think critically.” For precisely that reason, he said, the push in China now is for more young people to study humanities, even as the new emphasis here is vocational.

He and Powers raised an additional concern: that the devaluation of any university research that doesn’t have an imminent payoff or attract outside sponsorship could put the country at a global disadvantage down the line. “You never know where scientifically driven curiosity will lead you,” Powers told me, and he’s dead right. Sometimes game-changing, immensely lucrative epiphanies lie on the far side of seemingly esoteric inquiries.

I’d sound yet another alarm. Scratch the surface of some of the efforts to reform state universities and you find more than just legitimate qualms about efficiency and demands for accountability. You find the kind of indiscriminate anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism popular among more than a few right-wing conservatives.

It’s worth noting that Governor Perry has dismissed global warming as “one contrived, phony mess” and that many of the voices calling most loudly for change at the University of Texas are from the Tea Party fringe.

In other words there’s some crude, petty politics in all of this. And as we tackle the very real, very important challenge of giving young Americans the best and most useful education possible in an era of dwindling resources, that’s the last thing we need.

The Pasty Little Putz, Dowd and Bruni

The Moustache of Wisdom is off today.  The Pasty Little Putz, in “Balance and Bias,” has seen fit to explain to us all that the problem with the media’s quest for neutrality is that it coexists with the obvious ideological thrust of its editorial decisions.  Oddly enough, the word “Fox” does not appear anywhere in his column…  In “Chris Murphy’s Crucible” MoDo says Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, barely on the job, sees a tipping point in trigger-happy America.  Mr. Bruni, in “Love, Love Them. Do.”, says American politics teems with affirmation addicts. Recent portraits of Anthony Weiner and Jim McGreevey cast them as especially love-hungry specimens.  Here’s The Putz:

The traditional American mass media — the crumbling, Internet-besieged edifice of newspapers and news shows, magazines and roundtables and journalism schools — evolved to believe with equal vigor in two not entirely compatible ideals.

One is an ideal of balance, nonpartisanship and near-perfect neutrality — distilled to its essence, perhaps, by the former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie Jr.’s longstanding refusal to cast a vote, “so that I never make up my mind which party, candidate or ideology should be in power.”

The other is a much more ideological ideal, which treats journalism as a kind of vanguard profession — fighting for the powerless against the powerful and leading America toward enlightenment.

Both of these visions have inspired great journalists and impressive publications. But many of the establishment media’s worst habits arise from the doomed attempt to pursue both of them at once.

Consider, for instance, the Washington press’s tendency toward what critics have dubbed “bipartisanthink” — in which journalists fetishize centrism and deal making, and assume that the best of all possible legislation, regardless of its actual content, is the kind that has both parties’ fingerprints on it. By conflating the march of progress with the march of legislation through Congress, bipartisanthink allows journalists to take sides and root for particular outcomes without having to explicitly choose sides.

Usually this happens on fiscal issues, where the mainstream press’s attitude for the last few years has often been: “We need a grand bargain and we don’t care what is in it!” And usually bipartisanthink irritates liberals more than conservatives, because liberals sense — accurately enough — that many of the media personalities talking up, say, the Simpson-Bowles deficit plan would actually be perfectly happy with President Obama’s deficit plan, but feel a professional obligation not to admit it. Conservatives, meanwhile, tend to be more frustrated by bipartisanthink’s cousin, “leading the conversation.” This is how the mainstream media tend to cover social issues, and it involves acting as a crusading vanguard while denying, often self-righteously, that anything of the sort is happening.

I’m borrowing the term from The Daily Beast’s Howard Kurtz, who used it to describe how the press (while also “being fair to all sides”) should handle the aftermath of the Newtown shootings. The trouble is that when you set out to “lead” a conversation, you often end up deciding where it goes, which side wins the arguments and even who gets to participate. This was clear enough in Kurtz’s own piece, which assumed that stricter gun control was the only rational policy response to Newtown. And it’s been clear enough in all of the culturally charged debates — over guns and gay marriage, immigration and abortion — that have attracted media attention of late.

On these issues, an official journalistic commitment to neutrality coexists with the obvious ideological thrust of a thousand specific editorial choices: what kinds of questions are asked of which politicians; which stories get wall-to-wall coverage and which ones end up buried; which side is portrayed as aggressors and which side as the aggrieved party, and on and on and on.

“Leading the conversation” is how you end up with the major Sunday shows somehow neglecting to invite a single anti-amnesty politician on a weekend dominated by the immigration debate. It’s how you end up with officially nonideological anchors and journalists lecturing social conservatives for being out of step with modern values. And it’s how you end up with a press corps that went all-in for the supposed “war on women” having to be shamed and harassed — by two writers in particular, Kirsten Powers in USA Today and Mollie Ziegler Hemingway of GetReligion — into paying attention to the grisly case of a Philadelphia doctor whose methods of late-term abortion included snipping the spines of neonates after they were delivered.

As the last example suggests, the problem here isn’t that American journalists are too quick to go on crusades. Rather, it’s that the press’s ideological blinders limit the kinds of crusades mainstream outlets are willing to entertain, and the formal commitment to neutrality encourages self-deception about what counts as crusading.

The core weakness of the mainstream media, in this sense, is less liberalism than parochialism. The same habits of mind that make bipartisanthink seem like the height of wisdom also make it easy to condescend to causes and groups that seem disreputable and to underplay stories that might vindicate them.

The best response to this problem probably doesn’t involve doubling down on a quest for an illusory neutrality. We’d be better off, instead, if our battered-but-still-powerful media establishment did more to lean into the Internet era, which for all its challenges offers opportunities as well — the chance to multiply perspectives, to promote a diverse (and, yes, sometimes competing) array of causes and to pursue a wider variety of journalistic ideals.

Next up we have MoDo:

Even as he fights the N.R.A., Chris Murphy understands that guns are in the DNA.

The very junior senator from Connecticut, the father of two small boys, long ago decided not to allow any toy guns in the house or violent video games or even Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

“We have lots of trucks and trains,” he said, pausing before adding about his 4-year-old: “But you know it doesn’t matter. My son still picks up anything that’s shaped like a gun, like a certain construction of Legos, and uses it as a gun. But he knows that when I leave home I’m working on getting guns away from the bad guys, so he’s a little more sensitive now.”

At 39, Murphy is the youngest member of the Senate. He’s tall, attractive and crisp in blue shirt and blue striped tie. He was a blank slate and back-bench congressman before Newtown, known mostly for tweeting about Justin Bieber and surviving a more than $40 million onslaught by the WWE’s Linda McMahon in the 2012 campaign.

Gun safety was not his cause; his district didn’t include any big cities. But he was transformed by the massacre in serene Newtown of Sandy Hook’s “beautiful babies,” in Joe Biden’s words.

“I got to the firehouse a couple hours after the shooting,” Murphy says, his voice thrumming with emotion as he recalled being with parents while they learned the unthinkable. “I sometimes wish I didn’t see some of the things I saw. It’s not that in the past I’ve been disconnected from the issues I’ve worked on. But this is the first one in which I’ve felt an emotional imperative to deliver. These parents are my contemporaries. I’ve got two little boys at home just younger than the ones that were killed.”

The new senator, cramped in the basement, has not even moved into a permanent office. Yet he has been thrust to the forefront of the Sisyphean battle for gun safety in a Congress where some N.R.A. puppets are still arguing to allow felons to conceal guns, and to let imbalanced veterans and people who have been locked up in mental institutions bear arms too. It’s the same Congress where the campaign of one lawmaker, the Texas Republican Steve Stockman, tweeted a new bumper sticker: “If babies had guns they wouldn’t be aborted.”

Murphy said it was hard, flying down on Air Force One with the trepidatious Sandy Hook families, to explain that they would be lobbying to get a vote on a vote. “They thought they were coming down here to argue for a ban on high-capacity magazines and universal background checks, and we told them that they were coming to argue to avert a filibuster and allow us to debate,” he said. “And that was really heartbreaking and deflating for some of them. But they rose to the occasion, and it was wonderful to see them at the end of the trip feeling like they had made a difference.”

On Wednesday, Murphy made his maiden speech on the Senate floor, telling the story of Anne Marie Murphy, a Sandy Hook special education teacher who died with an autistic student, 6-year-old Dylan Hockley, enfolded tightly in her arms, trying in vain to protect him.

“That morning, I read it aloud in my office by myself and I cried,” he recalled. “I made it through, barely, on the floor. I’m not an overly emotional guy, but I’ve been as emotional as I’ve ever been for the past four months.”

He has been debunking the N.R.A. with reports and mocking it with tweets, including one making fun of Barry Manilow’s being on the N.R.A. Enemies’ List (a list that has since been removed from the group’s Web site). He petitioned Nascar — unsuccessfully — to drop the N.R.A. as the sponsor of this weekend’s race. And he wants the Hollywood ratings arbiters to “pay as much attention to violence as they do to sex.”

“Gun ownership has dramatically dropped over the last 20 years, so now it’s about selling a larger number of more expensive weapons to a smaller number of customers,” the senator said. “The N.R.A., doing the bidding of the industry, ratchets up paranoia about government so that those people will go out and buy more guns.”

His mother, a Republican who has also morphed into a militant for stricter gun control, sends him several e-mails a day urging him on — or apologizing for being so hard on his former colleagues in the State Legislature as she lobbies them to come around on the issue.

One Connecticut rifle manufacturer is leaving the state because of its strict new gun restrictions. “If we made our schools safer at the expense of a handful of jobs,” Murphy said coolly, “I think that’s a trade-off we have to make.”

How did he feel about the Manchin-Toomey background check compromise?

“It was both insufficient and sufficient,” he replied. “When my 4-year-old asks for two scoops of ice cream and he gets one and a half, he still eats the one and a half. You’re not going to disenfranchise the N.R.A. overnight. I think ultimately we will get the assault weapons ban because I don’t think this is the last time a man will walk into a crowded place with an AR-15.”

Senator Murphy left to go to Connecticut for the weekend, where he would debrief the families. “And I’ve had to carve out time to spend with my boys,” he said solemnly. “That’s more important to me now than it was prior to Dec. 14.”

And last but not least we have Mr. Bruni:

He was a darling of the cable news shows, which indulged his appetite for attention so frequently that he carried his own makeup kit, to be ready and pretty at a moment’s notice. But the lights and the cameras weren’t enough.

At campaign rallies and other events, he bathed in applause and requests: for autographs, photos, handshakes, hugs. These weren’t enough, either.

He’d be stopped in the airport, complimented by a complete stranger. Still not enough.

So when he was all alone, no television anchor to make him feel important, no acolyte to make him feel adored, he trawled cyberspace for fans. For a fix. Maybe someone somewhere was saying something sweet about him. Maybe he could bump up against just a little more love.

Last week, at long last, Anthony Weiner provided a detailed accounting of how he ended up involved, over Twitter and Facebook and e-mail and phone, with a half-dozen women he didn’t really know, and of what preceded and prompted the crotch shot seen round the world.

“By definition, when you are a politician, you want people to like you,” he told Jonathan Van Meter in a story in The Times’s Sunday magazine. Thanks to the Internet and social media, Weiner said, “Not only could I go to a town-hall meeting or a senior center or in front of the TV camera, but now I could sit and hear what people were saying all around. Search your name on Google, begat read comments on your Facebook page, begat looking at what people are saying about you on Twitter, to then trying to engage them.”

That’s a lot of begetting, and soon he was misbegotten.

Weiner’s testimonial yields the most bracing portrait of love gluttony in politics since, well, the release a few weeks ago of “Fall to Grace,” a documentary about Jim McGreevey, the former New Jersey governor, by Alexandra Pelosi.

Here, from the movie, is McGreevey on what drove him toward the governorship: “It was the need to be acclaimed, the need to be adored.”

“My addiction is to being central in the world, to being accepted and adored in the way that celebrities are adored — by strangers, in abundance,” he adds, reading aloud from his 2006 memoir, “The Confession.” “That’s what I loved about campaigning.”

Note that while the statement about campaigning is in the past tense, the one about addiction is in the present. In “Fall to Grace,” McGreevey claims to have looked hard at his failings and grown, but the movie raises the question of whether he has found grace and peace or just a different drug. To reflect on how hungry for notice and approval he once was, he allows Pelosi to trail him for hours on end, and revels in his soliloquies on the redemption of Jim McGreevey. Love, love him. Do.

“People with this need are often drawn to politics, just as they are to religious ministry or to Hollywood,” says McGreevey in the movie. He’s now in religious ministry. And while he frames his cooperation with Pelosi in terms of his hope to spotlight the struggles and dignity of the female prisoners he counsels, his agenda doesn’t seem quite that neat, clean and selfless.

What a powerful magnet for affirmation junkies the political arena is, especially in the age of cable television, social media and the permanent campaign, which enables the needy, and maybe favors them as well. They suffer its mortifications most willingly, if they suffer at all. It’s not difficult to drop to bended knee when you’re a serial romancer and you live to hear people accept your proposals and tell you you’re the one.

That yearning is palpable in Mark Sanford, now groveling for a second chance and a ticket to Congress. It defined John Edwards. And in their cases, as in Weiner’s, it expressed itself not just in public ambitions but in private transgressions. What led them to run and what led them to stray were to some extent the same hunger. The same hormone.

That’s true, too, of Bill Clinton, who made a startling comment in an interview with Stephen Colbert last week. Colbert asked the two-term former president, a globe-trotting megacelebrity with stratospheric approval ratings, why he doesn’t tweet.

Clinton’s answer?

That he’s “sort of insecure.” That he might not get any response. If a tweet falls in cyberspace and no one acknowledges it, did it really make the rounds?

“There’s nothing worse than a friendless tweeter, right?” Clinton said to Colbert.

He’s the lord of the love gluttons, as his nearly 50-minute convention speech last year reminded us. But that’s actually been his great strength as much as his vulnerability. The gluttony cuts both ways.

What is politics, after all, but the fine art and vulgar craft of winning over voters and fellow lawmakers? That’s how victories are sealed and legislation passed, and there have certainly been junctures in Barack Obama’s presidency when a bigger, sloppier craving for comrades and a more energetic effort at wooing might have served him well. Who among us doesn’t want to be courted?

Weiner has seldom been courtly. That’s one of the oddest parts of a story plenty odd already. Although he said in The Times that he was looking for love, he always seemed instead to be spoiling for a fight. Where Clinton bit his lower lip, Weiner bared his teeth. Maybe that’s just the difference between the South and New York, a city in which Ed Koch could make the question “How’m I doin’?” sound less deferential than defiant. Tell me I’m doin’ great — or else.

Or maybe Weiner just doesn’t have a clue. His interview was the beginning of a bid, like Sanford’s, for a do-over, a clean slate. And while that called for humility, he couldn’t quite manage it. In the interview he presented a laundry list of reasons that his adventures in cyberspace generated what he apparently believed was a puzzling intensity of attention. He blamed not only a slow news period and his surname but also the supposed luminosity of his and Huma Abedin’s marriage, which he said had “this kind of Camelot feel to it.” Would he be Arthur or Lancelot?

There’s no riddle to unravel. The attention came because he was a presumed front-runner to be the next mayor of one of the most important cities in the world, and in a given instant, that promise paled beside his eagerness to have one more person, in one more way, admire one more dimension of him. The attention came because he threw so much away, but even more so because his ambition and undoing were so thoroughly entwined, and we’d seen that fateful braid before.

The Pasty Little Putz, Dowd, Friedman, Nocera and Bruni

In “The Secrets of Princeton” The Pasty Little Putz informs us that Ivy Leaguers don’t need advice on how to preserve their privilege.  No shit — really?  Putzy should know, he’s a Harvard man himself…  MoDo has a question:  “Can We Get Hillary Without the Foolery?”  She claims that Democrats feel the inevitable, inexorable, inescapable pull of the Clintons.  The SASQ to MoDo’s question is “NO.”  The Moustache of Wisdom is hankering after another war, apparently.  In “How We Wasted Our Timeout” he says for the last five years, the world has had a break from major conflict. That may be about to end.  You can practically hear the hope in his voice…  Mr. Nocera also has a question in “What Gun Lovers Think:”  Could a gun-owning liberal explain the thinking of the other side?  Gee, Joe, I don’t know.  Let’s see if Mr. Bruni will weigh in on the matter.  In “Day of the Hunter” Mr. Bruni says that a first experience with a shotgun and pheasants only heightened my worry about guns and my support for gun control.  Here’s the Putz:

Susan Patton, the Princeton alumna who became famous for her letter urging Ivy League women to use their college years to find a mate, has been denounced as a traitor to feminism, to coeducation, to the university ideal. But really she’s something much more interesting: a traitor to her class.

Her betrayal consists of being gauche enough to acknowledge publicly a truth that everyone who’s come up through Ivy League culture knows intuitively — that elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class.

Every elite seeks its own perpetuation, of course, but that project is uniquely difficult in a society that’s formally democratic and egalitarian and colorblind. And it’s even more difficult for an elite that prides itself on its progressive politics, its social conscience, its enlightened distance from hierarchies of blood and birth and breeding.

Thus the importance, in the modern meritocratic culture, of the unacknowledged mechanisms that preserve privilege, reward the inside game, and ensure that the advantages enjoyed in one generation can be passed safely onward to the next.

The intermarriage of elite collegians is only one of these mechanisms — but it’s an enormously important one. The outraged reaction to her comments notwithstanding, Patton wasn’t telling Princetonians anything they didn’t already understand. Of course Ivy League schools double as dating services. Of course members of elites — yes, gender egalitarians, the males as well as the females — have strong incentives to marry one another, or at the very least find a spouse from within the wider meritocratic circle. What better way to double down on our pre-existing advantages? What better way to minimize, in our descendants, the chances of the dread phenomenon known as “regression to the mean”?

That this “assortative mating,” in which the best-educated Americans increasingly marry one another, also ends up perpetuating existing inequalities seems blindingly obvious, which is no doubt why it’s considered embarrassing and reactionary to talk about it too overtly. We all know what we’re supposed to do — our mothers don’t have to come out and say it!

Why, it would be like telling elite collegians that they should all move to similar cities and neighborhoods, surround themselves with their kinds of people and gradually price everybody else out of the places where social capital is built, influence exerted and great careers made. No need — that’s what we’re already doing! (What Richard Florida called “the mass relocation of highly skilled, highly educated and highly paid Americans to a relatively small number of metropolitan regions, and a corresponding exodus of the traditional lower and middle classes from these same places” is one of the striking social facts of the modern meritocratic era.) We don’t need well-meaning parents lecturing us about the advantages of elite self-segregation, and giving the game away to everybody else. …

Or it would be like telling admissions offices at elite schools that they should seek a form of student-body “diversity” that’s mostly cosmetic, designed to flatter multicultural sensibilities without threatening existing hierarchies all that much. They don’t need to be told — that’s how the system already works! The “holistic” approach to admissions, which privileges résumé-padding and extracurriculars over raw test scores or G.P.A.’s, has two major consequences: It enforces what looks suspiciously like de facto discrimination against Asian applicants with high SAT scores, while disadvantaging talented kids — often white and working class and geographically dispersed — who don’t grow up in elite enclaves with parents and friends who understand the system. The result is an upper class that looks superficially like America, but mostly reproduces the previous generation’s elite.

But don’t come out and say it! Next people will start wondering why the names in the U.S. News rankings change so little from decade to decade. Or why the American population gets bigger and bigger, but our richest universities admit the same size classes every year, Or why in a country of 300 million people and countless universities, we can’t seem to elect a president or nominate a Supreme Court justice who doesn’t have a Harvard or Yale degree.

No, it’s better for everyone when these questions aren’t asked too loudly. The days of noblesse oblige are long behind us, so our elite’s entire claim to legitimacy rests on theories of equal opportunity and upward mobility, and the promise that “merit” correlates with talents and deserts.

That the actual practice of meritocracy mostly involves a strenuous quest to avoid any kind of downward mobility, for oneself or for one’s kids, is something every upper-class American understands deep in his or her highly educated bones.

But really, Susan Patton, do we have to talk about it?

Christ, he gets worse and worse…  Now let’s slog through MoDo:

Please don’t ask me this anymore.

It’s such a silly question. Of course Hillary is running. I’ve never met a man who was told he could be president who didn’t want to be president. So naturally, a woman who’s told she can be the first commandress in chief wants to be.

“Running for president is like sex,” James Carville told me. “No one ever did it once and forgot about it.”

Joe Biden wants the job. He’s human (very). But he’s a realist. He knows the Democratic Party has a messianic urge to finish what it started so spectacularly with the election of Barack Obama — busting up the world’s most exclusive white-bread old-boys’ club. And he knows that women, both Democratic and Republican, want to see one of their own in the White House and became even more militant while listening to the G.O.P.’s retrogressive talk about contraception and vaginal probes last year.

Also, Joe genuinely likes Hillary. These two have no appetite for tearing each other apart.

As long as there are no more health scares — the thick glasses are gone — Hillary’s age won’t stop her. The Clinton scandals and dysfunction are in the rearview mirror at the moment, and the sluggish economy casts a halcyon glow on the Clinton era. Hillary is a symbol and a survivor, running on sainthood. Ronald Reagan, elected at 69, was seen as an “ancient king” gliding through life, as an aide put it. Hillary, who would be elected at 69, would be seen as an ancient queen striding through life.

She was supposed to go off to a spa, rest and get back in shape after her grueling laps around the world. But instead she’s a tornado of activity, speaking at global women’s conferences in D.C. and New York; starting to buck-rake on the speaking circuit; putting out a video flipping her position to support gay marriage; and signing a lucrative deal for a memoir on world affairs — all as PACs spring up around her, Bill Clinton and Carville begin to foment, and Chelsea lands on the cover of this week’s Parade, talking about how “unapologetically and unabashedly” biased she is about her mother’s future.

“I can’t see her taking it easy and sitting on the couch eating a bowl of popcorn,” said Randall Johnston, a 25-year-old New York University Law School student who helped pass out “Ready for Hillary” signs on Friday outside Lincoln Center, while her icon was inside enthralling the crowd at Tina Brown’s “Women in the World” conference.

Hillary jokes that people regard her hair as totemic, and just so, her new haircut sends a signal of shimmering intention: she has ditched the skinned-back bun that gave her the air of a K.G.B. villainess in a Bond movie and has a sleek new layered cut that looks modern and glamorous.

In a hot pink jacket and black slacks, she leaned in for a 2016 manifesto, telling the blissed-out crowd of women that America cannot truly lead in the world until women here at home are full partners with equal pay and benefits, careers in math and science, and “no limit” on how big girls can dream.

“This truly is the unfinished business of the 21st century,” she said. But everyone knew the truly “unfinished business” Hillary was referring to: herself.

“She’s gone to hell and back trying to be president,” Carville said. “She’s paid her dues, to say the least. The old cliché is that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line. But now Republicans want a lot of people to run and they want to fall in love. And Democrats don’t want to fight; they just want to get behind Hillary and go on from there.”

The real question is not whether but whither. Does Hillary have learning software? Did she learn, from her debacle with health care, to be more transparent and less my-way-or-the-highway? Did she learn, after voting to support W.’s nonsensical invasion of Iraq without even reading the intelligence estimate, that she doesn’t need to overcompensate to show she’s tough? (No one, even Fox News, thinks she’s a Wellesley hippie anymore.)

Did she learn, from her viper’s nest and money pit of a campaign in 2008, how to manage an enterprise rather than be swamped by rampant dysfunction? Did she learn, when she wrapped herself in an off-putting and opaque mantle of entitlement in the primary, that she’s perfectly capable of charming reporters and voters if she wants to, without the obnoxious undertone of “I’m owed this”?

Even top Democrats who plan to support Hillary worry about her two sides. One side is the idealistic public servant who wants to make the world a better place. The other side is darker, stemming from old insecurities; this is the side that causes her to make decisions from a place of fear and to second-guess herself. It dulls her sense of ethics and leads to ends-justify-the-means wayward ways. This is the side that compels her to do anything to win, like hiring the scummy strategists Dick Morris and Mark Penn, and greedily grab for what she feels she deserves.

If Obama is the kid who studies only on the night before and gets an A, Hillary is the kid who studies all the time, stays up all night and does extra credit work to get the A. She doesn’t know how not to drive herself into the ground.

As Carl Bernstein wrote in his Hillary biography, “A Woman in Charge,” her insecurities grew from her herculean effort to win paternal praise: “When Hillary came home with all A’s except for one B on her report card, her father suggested that perhaps her school was too easy, and wondered half-seriously why she hadn’t gotten straight A’s. Hillary tried mightily to extract some unequivocal declaration of approval from her father, but he had tremendous difficulty in expressing pride or affection.”

Hillary was an indefatigable secretary of state — she logged 956,733 diplomatic frequent-flier miles — and a star ambassador, especially on women’s issues. But many experts feel, as John Cassidy wrote in The New Yorker, that, compared with the work of more geopolitical secretaries, her “signature achievements look like small beer.”

Still, the job allowed her to get out of her husband’s codependent shadow and develop a more authentic aura of inevitability. President Obama allowed his former rival to take Hillaryland into the State Department and then build it out, burnishing her own feminist brand around the world.

The idea of Hillary is winning, a grand historical gender bender: first lady upgrading to president. But is the reality winning? The Clintons have a rare talent for finding puddles to step in. Out of public life, can she adapt and make the leaps needed, in a world changing at a dizzying tempo, to keep herself on top?

Her challenge is to get into the future and stay there, adding fresh people and perspectives and leaving the Clinton mishegoss and cheesiness in the past.

The real question about Hillary is this: When people take a new look at her in the coming years, will they see the past or the future — Mrs. Clinton or Madam President?

And now we come to The Moustache of Wisdom, who’s never met a conflict he didn’t love, at least at first, for a few FUs…:

Yes, it’s true — a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. But a “timeout” is also a terrible thing to waste, and as I look at the world today I wonder if that’s exactly what we’ve just done. We’ve wasted a five-year timeout from geopolitics, and if we don’t wake up and get our act together as a country — and if the Chinese, Russians and Europeans don’t do the same — we’re all really going to regret it.

Think about what a relative luxury we’ve enjoyed since the Great Recession hit in 2008. We, the Europeans and the world’s other major powers all have been able to focus almost entirely on healing our own economies — without having to worry about a major war or globe-rattling conflict that would snuff out our fragile economic recoveries or require extensive new defense spending. Relatively speaking, the world in the last five years has had a geopolitical timeout.

But now, everywhere you turn, you see different actors standing with their toes on red lines, seemingly ready and willing, even itching, to cross them at any moment. North Korea’s boy king, Kim Jong-un, who seems totally off the grid, has ordered his strategic rocket forces to be on standby, ready to hit U.S. and South Korean targets at a moment’s notice. Which is why you see the South Koreans starting to wonder aloud whether they should stay on this side of the red line and not be building their own nuclear bomb. Iran is also steadily getting closer to a similar combination of a homemade nuclear weapon and delivery system, and so far no sanctions have deterred Tehran. Meanwhile, Egypt is running out of money to buy bread for its people and is perilously close to crossing the red line into failed-state status, which would destabilize the whole region. At the same time, Syria’s mad leader, Bashar al-Assad, having been given the choice of “rule or ruin,” has chosen ruin for his country, which is also approaching state collapse, raising the prospect of jihadist militias picking through the rubble to obtain chemical weapons and sophisticated surface-to-air missiles — with no adult supervision.

Finally, the bailed-out euro zone states just had to bail out Cyprus — a bailout by the bailed-out — leading one to wonder just how many more Band-Aids the European Union has left. Maybe you can bail out Cyprus and its people will accept the haircut on their bank accounts, but we are one thin red line away from Spaniards’ waking up one morning and asking why they should keep their money in euros in their banks, when there is a real possibility they could get a similar haircut. Warren Buffett likes to say that if you ever walk by a bank and there is a long line of people out front, “get in it.” A bank run is a terrible thing to miss.

If any one of these red lines, let alone all of them together, get crossed, we will rue the day that we did not use these last five years to make our own economy more resilient. After all, in sports, timeouts are when you catch your breath, try to make sense of what is coming at you at high speed, figure out what has been working and what has not, design a play to win the game and then collaborate on its execution.

Future historians will surely ask how we in America could not agree on sensible near-term infrastructure investment — to upgrade our country with cheap money — paired with a long-term package of tax reforms and spending cuts, phased in gradually as the economy improves, so we have a much sturdier balance sheet to survive any geopolitical storms. We’re now driving around without a bumper and a spare tire, just when the world seems poised to turn into a crash ’n’ smash derby. (Kudos to President Obama for still trying for a Grand Bargain. Will the G.O.P. step up?)

But historians will also ask China: What were you thinking? When will you realize that whatever is bad for America is not necessarily good for you? Will it take South Korea, Japan, Vietnam and Taiwan all getting nuclear weapons? China controls food and fuel going into North Korea. It could end the freak show there anytime it wants, by cutting off both and opening its border to refugees. Yes, it is worried about a united, nuclear Korea and a flood of refugees, but America could help facilitate a united, nonnuclear Korea and dealing with refugees.

Then there is the Russian president, Vladimir Putin — the man who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple, because his country has so much oil and gas. Refusing to ease Assad out in Syria, rather than hanging tough with him, at best could alienate Russia from the next generation of rulers in Syria and at worst could help Syria turn into another Afghanistan. Do the Russians really believe that indulging Iran’s covert nuclear program, to spite us, won’t come back to haunt them with a nuclear-armed Iranian Islamist regime on its border?

In many ways Russia and China are more irresponsible than we are. We need to make ourselves resilient but are not. We are being shortsighted. They are being downright harmful.

But the net result is that we could all look back one day and wish we had used this timeout from any global geopolitical contagion more wisely. I hope historians won’t say that for five years we were lucky. And then we weren’t.

And now we have Mr. Nocera:

In most respects, Dan Baum is a political liberal. But he has always had a thing for guns and has just written a book, “Gun Guys: A Road Trip,” which is part gun country travelogue and part meditation on what it means to be a gun lover at this particular moment. Baum, who lives in Colorado, agreed to come to New York, where he grew up, to debate the issue with me.

JOE: Let’s start here: Connecticut just passed what may be the toughest gun law in the country, which includes restrictions on magazine capacity and an assault rifle ban. Sounds good to me.

DAN: I’m not one of those gun owners who says, “You can’t ever infringe my rights.” My orientation is safety. How are we going to live more safely? And, to me, the impulse to ban guns and large-capacity magazines is rooted in a delusion — that somehow if we ban them, we’ll be rid of them. That might have been a good idea 75 years ago, but it’s too late. There are 300 million guns in the country.

JOE: In your book, though, you make a very different argument for not banning assault weapons. You argue that very few people are killed with them.

DAN: That is true. They’ve been used in these big high-profile mass killings, no doubt about it. But there were no assault rifles at Virginia Tech or Fort Hood.

JOE: But assault rifles were used in Aurora and Newtown. And here is my larger point. When I talk to gun absolutists, they claim that we shouldn’t make such a big deal out of mass shootings because they are statistically insignificant. But so what? We have turned this society upside down because 3,000 people died on 9/11. In the scheme of things, that number is also statistically insignificant. Yet we take extraordinary measures, limiting people’s personal freedoms, to prevent another act of terrorism on our soil. Besides, we enact regulations all the time designed to keep people safe, even when the number of people who have been harmed is small. Why are guns different?

DAN: The answer is because we already have so many of them. You need gun owners — the “gun guys” as I call them. They are the custodians of the guns. I also think, though, that gun guys need to take their responsibility as gun owners seriously. A lot of gun owners are perfectly fine, for instance, with universal background checks. I know I am. They are fine with it so long as it doesn’t lead to a database and de facto registration.

Gun guys need to lock ’em up; gun guys need to take our responsibility to us much more seriously.

JOE: And what if they don’t?

DAN: Then I think we need to punish gun guys. If a gun guy leaves his gun in the glove compartment of a car and it’s stolen and used in a crime, perhaps he should be criminally liable. If a gun guy leaves a gun unlocked and a child finds it and kills himself or somebody else, that gun guy should perhaps be liable. And laws that require people to lock their guns up, I think they’re great. Report them if they’re stolen.

JOE: So why don’t “responsible gun owners” — and I know there are a lot — why don’t they support such laws?

DAN: There is no tree for them to gather under. And this is a big problem. Because they don’t feel represented by the N.R.A. This is why I started on this book — I don’t feel represented by the N.R.A., and I know a lot of gun guys who don’t. But we don’t have — perhaps because we don’t feel strongly enough about it — there is no other organization of the sane gun guys, of the nice gun guys, the reasonable, socially minded gun guys. Gun guys, I think, need to take much more seriously that they’re custodians of firearms. Their guns affect everybody and they need to be much more responsible with them. And in order to get them there, we need to make allies of them. And frankly, forgive me, you and your rhetoric make enemies of them, and that’s making us less safe. Look at what Connecticut is doing. You’re not going to get any public safety benefit out of that. I think you’re gonna make us less safe. Because you drive the gun guys into that defensive crouch that’s so destructive.

My essential belief is that we need to treat gun owners with more respect while also demanding a higher level of responsibility.

JOE: Why do gun owners get to have this level of “respect” that no other segment of society has? I could say, “I’m a responsible driver. Why does the government get to tell me that I have to wear a seat belt?”

DAN: It’s not a question of fairness. I am not making a rights argument, or a fairness argument. I’m interested in what will make the country safer.

JOE: Actually, you do make a fairness argument. Toward the end of your book, you write about how you had gained a greater appreciation for the way many Americans feel “over-managed and under-respected.” You use the example of a neonatal nurse in California, irate that the state passed legislation mandating that hospitals lock up certain drugs that had always been readily available to the nursing staff. “We’re nurses,” you quote her as saying. “We’re responsible professionals who know how to take care of our medications.” And then you write, “Substitute a word or two and she might have been any gun guy who is certain that his gun will never be a public safety problem.”

DAN: We have a tendency to say, “There oughtta be a law!” Why would you ever think that someone who’s bent on homicide is going to obey any of these laws? Also, you’re operating in a la-la land if you think that by banning guns we’ll be rid of them.

JOE: Forget about banning. What if the law said, “Your gun must be locked up at home. If it’s not, we’ll prosecute you.”

DAN: I’m with you.

JOE: If a child finds a loaded gun in his house and accidentally shoots himself or someone else, should his parents be prosecuted?

DAN: Perhaps they should be. But let me ask you this. Do you favor having a course in school for children, “What to do if you find a gun?” To educate children on how to handle a gun — would you favor that? Because most liberal parents would not.

JOE: I don’t know. Here’s what I would like to see, though. I would like to see a cultural change, like the cultural shift that took place with drunken driving, where a behavior that was once acceptable becomes unacceptable. I would like to see a cultural protocol, for instance, that would make it O.K. for parents to ask other parents if there is a loaded gun in the house prior to allowing a play date.

DAN: That’s fine. But then you should also ask, “Do you have a backyard swimming pool?” since young kids are more likely to die from a swimming pool accident.

JOE: Here we go! The classic gun guy’s argument.

DAN: I’m not trying to make an ideological point. I’m talking about being safer. And we get there, I think, by being respectful to the people who own the guns.

JOE: Once again, your argument seems to be, we’re going to treat gun owners differently from everyone else.

DAN: Well, maybe we have to, because guns are so dangerous.

JOE: Why, because they’re going to shoot us?

DAN: No, no! Because we need the gun guys. You won’t get there by vilifying them or treating them like children. I think most of what happens with guns that is bad in this country could be solved by the gun guys themselves.

JOE: I disagree.

DAN: You don’t understand guns, and you don’t know gun guys, yet you want to make rules for things you don’t understand for people you don’t know. And that is not how we’re going to end up safer. Where gun guys draw the line is having you make consumer decisions for them. Because what you’re saying, Joe — you, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — you want to say to some guy in Kansas, “You can have this rifle. But you can’t have that one.” And they’re saying, “What does Joe Nocera know about guns? What does Joe Nocera know about me?” It is offensive. We should be insisting on real responsibility from gun owners instead of doing what we’re doing now, which doesn’t get us anywhere. Because you don’t really think that by adjusting the number of rounds in a magazine we’re going to make everybody safer. You can’t possibly believe that.

JOE: When there is a mass shooting, and you’ve limited the number of rounds in a magazine, fewer people might get killed. That seems obvious to me.

DAN: Once you have made a consumer decision for 100 million gun owners that they can’t have these magazines because they are too irresponsible, you have now driven them out of the conversation.

JOE: After Newtown, Wayne LaPierre said, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Do you believe that?

DAN: As much as I dislike the N.R.A., there’s a cold logic to it. It’s the reason we have armed guards in airports and shopping malls. When you see an armed guard someplace, what you’re hoping is, if somebody pulls out a gun and does something bad, that the guard will use his gun to protect you.

JOE: Actually, what the N.R.A. means by that statement is that if somebody attempts a mass shooting in a movie theater, someone else in the theater will have a gun and shoot the shooter. Which seems crazy to me.

DAN: I can’t imagine anything worse than one guy with a gun bent on mass murder in a room full of unarmed people. Anything is better than that.

JOE: The idea that some heroic figure is going to be able to get up and actually be able to shoot them…

DAN: Then why do cops carry guns? Disarm the police.

JOE: That’s an absurd, extremist argument.

DAN: Why? I carried a concealed weapon…

JOE: And did you think you were going to save somebody?

DAN: I was not nearly well-trained enough. I think somebody who wants to carry a gun should be at least as well trained as the police. Right now, for example, if I wanted to carry a gun, my permit would be good in 30 states. But in every state it’s different. I can wear it in a restaurant in this state, but not in that state. In this place, I can take it near a school, but in that place I can’t. Flip the script. Say, “If you get licensed to carry a handgun, you can carry it anywhere. But you have to be trained at least as well as a police officer.” Do you worry when there’s a police officer in your kid’s school? No. You trust the police officer. Trust gun owners. Raise everybody’s level of responsibility instead of treating them like children. It’s getting us nowhere. Folks like you, who have a cultural aversion to guns, who want to stick it to the gun guys…

JOE [interrupts]: I find it astonishing that you say we’re deepening the divide but the N.R.A….

DAN: Oh, they are, too! A pox on both their houses. Absolutely. The N.R.A. is a hideous organization. Every day I get e-mails from people who say, “I’m a gun guy, and I can’t stand the N.R.A.” We need to speak with a different voice. It’s really important.

It’s cute that Dan thinks everyone trusts police officers…  Last but not least we have Mr. Bruni:

People who rhapsodize about the glory of hunting never mention what an unfair fight it is.

Or was, in my case. I went last week, for the first time, visiting a bird-hunting grounds in Pennsylvania with two companions. The pheasants and partridges there had wings, which gave them one advantage over us. Over them we had something like 50 advantages: the number of shells for our shotguns. The gun on loan to me, a semiautomatic, could fire three rounds in rapid succession, which seemed to me as many as anybody could want or need before reloading. I’m a lousy aim, and still I killed.

I had never used a firearm before, not even on a shooting range, and understood the allure instantly. My 12-gauge semi was black, sleek, elegant and Italian-made, as much an accessory as an instrument of death. The Vinci, it’s named, as in Leonardo da, the “Renaissance inventor, artist and thinker who shattered the technological boundaries of his world,” according to the Web site of the manufacturer, Benelli. This is how thoroughly a weapon can be romanticized and fetishized, as if it were a Rolex. As if it were a shoe.

Holding it, I felt potent. But also anxious, even panicked, with a new grasp of how much could go wrong. The safety on the Vinci is a small, gray button, and the difference between on and off is perhaps a quarter-inch. In a moment’s distraction, I could mistake one for the other. In a burst of adrenaline, I could deactivate the safety too soon before a shot or wait too long after to reactivate it.

I could forget, when not aiming at a bird, to keep the gun pointed toward the sky or the ground. Or my pivot as I followed a bird’s flight could bring one of my companions, so perilously near me, into my sights. I was haunted by this and by the fact that although I was a first-timer, I needed no background check, no training, no proof of any dexterity to hold this shotgun and squeeze its trigger, not on the kind of regulated hunting grounds (called a preserve) that we went to. This country of ours makes it astonishingly easy for people to arm themselves and take aim. Is it any wonder that we have an exceptional harvest of gun-related injuries and deaths, many accidental?

I went hunting mainly for dinner. A few weeks ago I was in a favorite Manhattan restaurant, Tertulia, and its chef, Seamus Mullen, mentioned that he had been shooting and cooking game birds. I said that I had never eaten anything I’d killed myself and had never acknowledged, in that way, the connection between an animal’s death and my nourishment and pleasure. We agreed that I should join him on his next expedition. An experience of hunting made ethical sense.

Political sense, too. Hunting is always coming up when the country is debating new restrictions on firearms, as we are now. Opponents of such basic gun-control measures as universal background checks and an assault-weapons ban talk of slippery slopes and raise the specter of parents’ being unable to lend shotguns to their children for a wholesome duck or deer hunt. They assert the importance to hunters of certain semiautomatics that might be prohibited.

Hunting enthusiasts recently went as far as advocating a boycott of Colorado because the state had passed some entirely reasonable new gun restrictions. There’s this assiduously orchestrated outcry that a primal, virile, broadly beloved American pastime is under dire siege from disconnected lawmakers.

And it’s hooey. Let’s take the broadly beloved part first. The popularity of hunting has generally declined over the last four decades. According to a survey by the Fish and Wildlife Service, only 13.7 million Americans 16 or older hunted in 2011, the most recent year for which figures are available. That’s in a country of more than 313 million people.

In Pennsylvania, the number of people interested enough in hunting to get licenses dropped from 1.2 million in the 1980s to about 930,000 now, according to Joe Neville, a spokesman for the game commission. And fewer than half of those people are such committed hunters that they renew their licenses regularly.

Hunters are already governed by a thicket of state and local regulations about whether they can use a rifle or a shotgun in a certain place, for a certain quarry; about how many bullets or shells it can hold; about when they can hunt; about how much, or even what gender, of a creature they can kill. Any tinkering that new federal measures would do is so puny in contrast as to be almost irrelevant. It’s not going to threaten hunting as we know it.

And hunting as it’s done doesn’t always hew to the mythic man-in-nature images often promoted. Paul Ryan with his bow and arrow is one kind of hunter; a klutz like me with my Vinci loafer — I mean shotgun — is another.

The pheasants and chukar partridges, or chukars, that I was after had been scattered across a patch of property expressly so that Seamus, a friend of his and I could chase them down. That’s how preserves work. The birds are raised there, and some are released from their pens just before the hunt.

Pennsylvania has more than 300 bird preserves, including the one where we hunted, Pheasant Hill Birds, in Honesdale. For about $325, its owner released 20 pheasants and chukars. For another $60, he lent us his Brittany spaniel, Red, to find and flush out the birds. Red was Advantage No. 51.

Advantage No. 52: many of the birds weren’t so quick to use their wings. We would be within inches of one of them before it fluttered skyward, and it would be maybe 20 feet away when one of us took our shot, which wasn’t a single bullet but rather — Advantage No. 53 — a scattering of pellets.

If we missed a bird, it tended to land close enough to be flushed out anew. Only three birds actually fled the area and escaped death.

All of that explains how even I managed to down a chukar. Maybe a pheasant as well: it was sometimes hard to tell whose shot had hit what.

And there was a thrill to it, no question. My heart hammered. My curiosity spiked. Will a dinner of these birds — gutted, cleaned and cooked by Seamus, thankfully — be different from another? On my blog next week, I’ll let you know.

I’d hunt again, though I’m in no rush. It was impossible for me not to be nervous around guns, even with Seamus patiently teaching me and repeatedly urging vigilance.

He’s 38 and has hunted on and off since his teens. I asked him if more stringent gun control would cramp his and other hunters’ style.

“A totally bogus argument,” he said without hesitation or elaboration, then he flitted to a topic that accommodated more disagreement. How should the pheasant be prepared?

The Pasty Little Putz, Friedman, Dowd and Bruni

It really isn’t fair that after singing for 2 Easter Masses that I have to confront The Pasty Little Putz.  I’ll just put it down to the NYT hating Episcopalians…   (HEY — that sort of “I’m being hated and put upon” thing seems to work for Talibangelicals…)  So.  Putzy has decided to tell us that “Marriage Looks Different Now.”  The poor, terrified little creature squeaks that we’re seeing a revolution with wider ripples than its supporters admit.  I still want one, just ONE, of the Talibangelical bigots explain to me how my two friends’ marriage will endanger theirs.  (Did you assume my friends were of the same sex?  WRONG!  They’re both too old to procreate.  Which is one of two main branches the Talibangelicals hang their support of “same sex” marriage on…)  Passing along and hopefully ignoring The Putz we come to The Moustache of Wisdom.  Apparently the world is much flatter than we ever knew…  Wee Silly Tommy suggests the following:  “Need a Job? Invent It.”  Wee Silly Tommy has managed to shoot himself in his own wee foot.   Guess what, Tommy?  We’re not Finland.  Finland actually gives a shit about the future of its young.  We don’t, and certainly won’t pay for that sort of equality.  Next up comes MoDo.  She has a question:   “Will Gays Be Punished For Success?”  She says once more, the Supremes are singing: You can’t hurry love.  There are many, many times when I’ll hammer MoDo, but she’s on the right side of this issue.  Poor Mr. Bruni offers us “A Childless Bystander’s Baffled Hymn,” in which he suggests we’re obsessed with every nuance of child-rearing and offers us his view from the bleachers.  Obviously this guy has never seen an episode of “Supernanny” and has no earthly idea that some folks actually can learn how to raise children…  God help us, here’s the Putz:

In 1997, two prominent conservative writers, David Frum and Andrew Sullivan, debated same-sex marriage for the online magazine Slate.

Frum defended what was then the consensus conservative (and consensus national) position. Redefining marriage to include same-sex couples, he argued, would explicitly sever the institution’s connection to the two interrelated realities, gender difference and procreation, that it had evolved to address. In so doing, it would replace a traditional view of matrimony with a broader, thinner, more adult-centric view, which would ultimately be less likely to bind parents to children, husbands to wives.

“Proponents of gay marriage can only get what they want,” Frum wrote, “by weakening Americans’ attachment to the traditional family even more than it has already been weakened,” and speeding the “process of social dissolution” that the 1960s and 1970s began.

Sullivan countered that the “process” Frum feared was simply an established fact. Heterosexuals had already severed marriage from procreation and permanence, and so there was no more reason to deny same-sex couples marriage licenses than to deny them to the infertile and elderly. Indeed, far from being radical, gay marriage was more likely to be stabilizing, “sending a message about matrimonial responsibility and mutual caring” to gays and straights alike.

Half a generation later, Sullivan’s view has carried the day almost completely. The conservative argument still has serious exponents, but it’s now chuckled at in courtrooms, dismissed by intellectuals, mocked in the media and (in a sudden, recent rush) abandoned by politicians. Indeed, it has been abandoned by Frum himself, who is now energetically urging Republicans to embrace the redefinition of marriage he once warned against.

Yet for an argument that has persuaded so few, the conservative view has actually had decent predictive power. As the cause of gay marriage has pressed forward, the social link between marriage and childbearing has indeed weakened faster than before. As the public’s shift on the issue has accelerated, so has marriage’s overall decline.

Since Frum warned that gay marriage could advance only at traditional wedlock’s expense, the marriage rate has been falling faster, the out-of-wedlock birthrate has been rising faster, and the substitution of cohabitation for marriage has markedly increased. Underlying these trends is a steady shift in values: Americans are less likely to see children as important to marriage and less likely to see marriage as important to childbearing (the generation gap on gay marriage shows up on unwed parenting as well) than even in the very recent past.

Correlations do not, of course, establish causation. The economy is obviously playing a leading role in the retreat from marriage — the shocks of recession, the stagnation of wages, the bleak prospects of blue-collar men. Culturally, what matters most is the emergence of what the National Marriage Project calls a “capstone” understanding of marriage, which treats wedlock less as a foundation for adulthood and more as a celebration of adult achievement — and which seems to work out far better for our disciplined upper class than for society as a whole.

But there is also a certain willed naïveté to the idea that the advance of gay marriage is unrelated to any other marital trend. For 10 years, America’s only major public debate about marriage and family has featured one side — judges and journalists, celebrities and now finally politicians — pressing the case that modern marriage has nothing to do with the way human beings reproduce themselves, that the procreative understanding of the institution was founded entirely on prejudice, and that the shift away from a male-female marital ideal is analogous to the end of segregation.

Now that this argument seems on its way to victory, is it really plausible that it has changed how Americans view gay relationships while leaving all other ideas about matrimony untouched?

You can tell this naïveté is willed because it’s selective. There are plenty of interesting arguments, often from gay writers, about how the march to gay marriage might be influencing heterosexual norms — from Alex Ross’s recent musings in The New Yorker on the sudden “queer vibe” in straight pop culture to Dan Savage’s famous argument that straights might do well to imitate the “monogamish” norms of some gay male couples. It’s only the claim that this influence might not always be positive that is dismissed as bigotry and unreason.

A more honest, less triumphalist case for gay marriage would be willing to concede that, yes, there might be some social costs to redefining marriage. It would simply argue that those costs are too diffuse and hard to quantify to outweigh the immediate benefits of recognizing gay couples’ love and commitment.

Such honesty would make social liberals more magnanimous in what looks increasingly like victory, and less likely to hound and harass religious institutions that still want to elevate and defend the older marital ideal.

But whether people think they’re on the side of God or of History, magnanimity has rarely been a feature of the culture war.

To be as polite as I can possibly be, BITE ME you stupid little shit.  If you ever bothered to read the comments that the few are allowed to leave before the Times cuts them off you’d realize exactly how stupid you are.  Sorry, but now we’re forced to confront The Moustache of Wisdom (who also was skewered in the comments, which were cut off and closed by 4:00 AM EDT…):

When Tony Wagner, the Harvard education specialist, describes his job today, he says he’s “a translator between two hostile tribes” — the education world and the business world, the people who teach our kids and the people who give them jobs. Wagner’s argument in his book “Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World” is that our K-12 and college tracks are not consistently “adding the value and teaching the skills that matter most in the marketplace.”

This is dangerous at a time when there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever. Which is why the goal of education today, argues Wagner, should not be to make every child “college ready” but “innovation ready” — ready to add value to whatever they do.

That is a tall task. I tracked Wagner down and asked him to elaborate. “Today,” he said via e-mail, “because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge. As one executive told me, ‘We can teach new hires the content, and we will have to because it continues to change, but we can’t teach them how to think — to ask the right questions — and to take initiative.’ ”

 My generation had it easy. We got to “find” a job. But, more than ever, our kids will have to “invent” a job. (Fortunately, in today’s world, that’s easier and cheaper than ever before.) Sure, the lucky ones will find their first job, but, given the pace of change today, even they will have to reinvent, re-engineer and reimagine that job much more often than their parents if they want to advance in it. If that’s true, I asked Wagner, what do young people need to know today?

“Every young person will continue to need basic knowledge, of course,” he said. “But they will need skills and motivation even more. Of these three education goals, motivation is the most critical. Young people who are intrinsically motivated — curious, persistent, and willing to take risks — will learn new knowledge and skills continuously. They will be able to find new opportunities or create their own — a disposition that will be increasingly important as many traditional careers disappear.”

So what should be the focus of education reform today?

“We teach and test things most students have no interest in and will never need, and facts that they can Google and will forget as soon as the test is over,” said Wagner. “Because of this, the longer kids are in school, the less motivated they become. Gallup’s recent survey showed student engagement going from 80 percent in fifth grade to 40 percent in high school. More than a century ago, we ‘reinvented’ the one-room schoolhouse and created factory schools for the industrial economy. Reimagining schools for the 21st-century must be our highest priority. We need to focus more on teaching the skill and will to learn and to make a difference and bring the three most powerful ingredients of intrinsic motivation into the classroom: play, passion and purpose.”

What does that mean for teachers and principals?

“Teachers,” he said, “need to coach students to performance excellence, and principals must be instructional leaders who create the culture of collaboration required to innovate. But what gets tested is what gets taught, and so we need ‘Accountability 2.0.’ All students should have digital portfolios to show evidence of mastery of skills like critical thinking and communication, which they build up right through K-12 and postsecondary. Selective use of high-quality tests, like the College and Work Readiness Assessment, is important. Finally, teachers should be judged on evidence of improvement in students’ work through the year — instead of a score on a bubble test in May. We need lab schools where students earn a high school diploma by completing a series of skill-based ‘merit badges’ in things like entrepreneurship. And schools of education where all new teachers have ‘residencies’ with master teachers and performance standards — not content standards — must become the new normal throughout the system.”

Who is doing it right?

“Finland is one of the most innovative economies in the world,” he said, “and it is the only country where students leave high school ‘innovation-ready.’  They learn concepts and creativity more than facts, and have a choice of many electives — all with a shorter school day, little homework, and almost no testing. In the U.S., 500 K-12 schools affiliated with Hewlett Foundation’s Deeper Learning Initiative and a consortium of 100 school districts called EdLeader21 are developing new approaches to teaching 21st-century skills. There are also a growing number of ‘reinvented’ colleges like the Olin College of Engineering, the M.I.T. Media Lab and the ‘D-school’ at Stanford where students learn to innovate.”

Do bear in mind that wee, dumb little Tommy probably earns in one week more than you do in a year.  Why?  He invented his own job………  And actually found the twitching corpse of a once great newspaper to publish him.  Brace yourself, here comes MoDo:

Gays might not win because they’ve already won?

That was the moronic oxymoron at the heart of the Supreme Court debate on same-sex marriage.

As Washington shivered in a chilly spring, there was no music of history at America’s highest court. The justices offered no pearls on liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Justice Antonin Scalia didn’t even know how many states allowed gay marriage. Clarence Thomas looked distracted, whispering to clerks and tilting horizontally in his chair.

Justice Anthony Kennedy had a single compassionate moment, mentioning the children whose gay parents were stuck in marital limbo. But for the most part, the human factor, how demeaning it feels to be shunted to a lower plane than your fellow citizens, was ignored.

Kennedy offered no lovely odes to fairness as he did in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, striking down a sodomy law, when people in the courtroom actually wept at his majority opinion, which stated that “the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

Brushing back originalists and troglodytes then, Kennedy said that “times can blind us to certain truths, and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress.”

On Wednesday, Chief Justice John Roberts played Karl Rove, musing not about moral imperatives but political momentum.

“You don’t doubt that the lobby supporting the enactment of same-sex marriage laws in different states is politically powerful, do you?” he asked Roberta Kaplan, the New York lawyer representing Edie Windsor, the captivating 83-year-old who argued that she would not have been socked with a whopping estate tax bill if her spouse had been named Theo instead of Thea.

Roberts pressed the point, noting, “As far as I can tell, political figures are falling over themselves to endorse your side of the case.”

Certainly, the cascading headlines were buoying. “Gay Marriage Already Won,” Time proclaimed. “Why the Gay-Marriage Fight Is Over,” The New Yorker deemed. It was hard to find vocal opponents in the vibrant demonstration outside the Supreme Court, and Rush Limbaugh conceded, “This issue is lost.” There was even a Chick-fil-A franchise in Southern California giving free meals to gay-marriage supporters.

But Justice Roberts’s suggestion that gays are banishing a long, egregious history of blatant, disgusting, government-sponsored discrimination on their own is absurd. You could almost hear him thinking, “They’ve got ‘Glee,’ they’ve got Ellen, they’ve got Tammy Baldwin — what are they whining about?”

Can you imagine Chief Justice Earl Warren, a Republican, making a similar point about blacks during the 1967 Loving v. Virginia arguments? In that case, the 1964 Civil Rights Act had been passed and the 1967 movie “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” was a harbinger of a sea change on mixed-race marriages. The court noted in its opinion that the political process had achieved significant progress around the country, with 14 states in 15 years repealing laws outlawing interracial marriages.

Yet the justices struck down the law anyway because, as they said, “the freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” (Paving the way for Clarence and Ginni Thomas to live happily ever after in Virginia.)

When the suit against Proposition 8, the initiative that banned gay marriage in California, was filed in 2009, opponents argued that it was too soon and that a court decision favoring gay rights could cause a backlash. Now opponents say things are going so well for gays that they don’t need help from the Supreme Court. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. (Or in this case, damned if you say “I do.”)

Gays may be winning on atmospherics, but there’s only so much more progress they can make politically.

Women are protected from discrimination under the law even though they make up 51 percent of the population and are as responsible as anybody for putting Barack Obama in the Oval Office twice.

But Congress has passed no federal protections for gays on employment, housing and education. In 29 states, it is perfectly legal to fire someone because of his or her sexual orientation. The F.B.I. says the only uptick in hate crimes involves attacks on gays.

Thirty-one states have enacted Constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage. Beyond the nine states where they can marry, plus D.C., gays may pick up Illinois and Delaware, but then there’s a hard stop. Those struck by Cupid in places like Alabama, Arkansas and Utah will long be left either moving or saying, “I’m deliriously, madly in love with you, but let’s leave it to the states, honey.”

Even with Hispanics riding high in the public arena, the “wetback” crack by the Republican Congressman Don Young of Alaska shows bigotry is always lurking.

What the political world giveth, it can taketh away. The Supreme Court should know that civil rights are not supposed to be determined on the whims of the people.

Bless her heart, there have been many, many, many times that I’ve howled at MoDo but when she gets it right she gets it right.  Next up we have childless, but pissed off about how YOU are raising YOUR children, Mr. Bruni:

Modern parenting confuses me. The vocabulary, for starters.

Take the word “last.” Usually it means final. Last exit: there are none beyond it. Last rites: you’re toast.

But the “last chance” for a 4-year-old to quit his screeching, lest he get a timeout? There are usually another seven or eight chances still to go, in a string of flaccid ultimatums: “Now this is your last chance.” “This is really your last chance.” “I’m giving you just one more chance. I’m not kidding.”

Of course you are, and your kids know it. They’re not idiots.

But they’re also not adults, so why this whole school of thought that they should be treated as if they are, long before they can perform such basic tasks of civilization as driving, say, or decanting?

Why all the choices — “What would you like to wear?”— and all the negotiating and the painstakingly calibrated diplomacy? They’re toddlers, not Pakistan. I understand that you want them to adore you. But having them fear you is surely the saner strategy, not just for you and for them but for the rest of us and the future of the republic.

Above all I’m confounded by the boundless fretting, as if ushering kids into adulthood were some newfangled sorcery dependent on a slew of child-rearing books and a bevy of child-rearing blogs. The counsel keeps coming, from every possible corner and from unexpected shamans. The actress Jessica Alba just produced a book, “The Honest Life,” which includes her take on mothering, and she noted pointedly in a recent interview that it’s more relevant than the tidbits proffered by the actress Gwyneth Paltrow in her online newsletter, goop.

Seemingly everyone has parenting opinions, so I hereby present mine, which are those of someone who isn’t in fact a parent and maybe has a valuable distance and objectivity as a result. Instead of the battle hymn of a tiger mother, it’s the baffled hymn of a cubless bystander, his thoughts turned toward children as the calendar reaches yet another holiday when we shower them with attention and chocolate.

While I have no kids of my own, I have many I can (and sometimes do) lease for the weekend: 11 actual nieces and nephews, whom I’ll be with this Easter Sunday, and perhaps twice that number of honorary ones. I have put in my time around tots and teens, and enjoy them. I have seen my share of parenting, and am not certain what to make of it.

Just a few decades ago, parenting wasn’t even a proper verb or gerund. Now it’s a compound one. There’s of course helicopter parenting, which hovers, and “free range” parenting, which doesn’t, but only by principled choice.

As the Me Generation spawned generations of mini-me’s, our rigorous self-fascination expanded to include the whole brood and philosophies about its proper care and feeding.

About the feeding: explain to me what’s gained by the voluminous discussions, within earshot of little Edwin or Edwina, of what he or she probably won’t eat or definitely won’t eat or must somehow be made to eat, perhaps with a bribe. Any food that lands on the table after that much tortured preamble is bound to be eyed with suspicion and ultimately spurned, in part because it has ceased to be a vessel of nutrition or an answer to hunger at that point. It has become a power struggle: the parents’ wishes versus the child’s defiance. And the battle seems to end one and only one way. With chicken fingers.

I’m equally confounded by the all-encompassing praise. Not every kid is gifted at every endeavor, and I wonder about the wisdom of telling him or her that a bit of doggerel is Shakespearean or that a wan patch of warbling is an “American Idol” audition waiting to happen. I wonder why everybody has to be a winner. You can eliminate the valedictorians from high school but you can’t eliminate them from life, which metes out Super Bowl rings and stock options with an uneven hand, and is probably best tackled with some preparatory girding for that. Do today’s parents provide it?

There’s a line between filling a kid with self-esteem and larding a kid with delusions, just as there’s a line between making your children feel that they’re the center of your universe, which they most definitely should be, and making them feel that they’re the center of the universe, which only Honey Boo Boo is.

Help me out here. Why is an adolescent’s TV watching patrolled more scrupulously than his or her iPhone use, which can lead to infinitely greater trouble? For that matter, why does an adolescent need an iPhone in the first place?

Yes, I know, it enables your kids to stay in touch with you, and vice versa. But 13-year-olds in my era didn’t have iPhones, and we got home. Eventually.

Parents routinely surrender control when they shouldn’t, replacing rules with requests, and children are expected to chart their own routes to good behavior, using the faulty GPS’s of their flowering consciences, I suppose. Families are run as democracies. Parents forget: in the political realm, you don’t get a say until you’re 18. There’s a reason for that.

Then parents turn around and try to grab control over circumstances that don’t readily yield to it, responding to children’s setbacks or shortcomings with insistences on diagnoses, accommodations, remedies. They can’t seem to bear the inevitability that their children will suffer disappointments and will have to reckon with inadequacies. They cling to the possibility of perfection, and seem to hold themselves responsible for it.

That part I do get. When you love people, really love them, you do everything you can to protect and help them. To give them a leg up. And in a world in which the competition grows ever crueler and the jockeying for advantage more intense, parents feel it’s more incumbent on them than ever to leave no stone unturned and to play an error-free game. They walk on eggshells and torment themselves.

But from my vantage point, watching the kids of my three siblings and of my many peers grow up, I’m struck less by the genius or folly of diverse child-rearing techniques than by the way most of the children matured into who they seemed, from the get-go, destined to be.

Some of them were held to early bedtimes and some weren’t. Some had their own computers and some shared. Some had nannies and some didn’t. Some of their parents were yellers, and some of their parents were brooders. All of them ate too many chicken fingers.

And while they were indeed coaxed toward better or worse etiquette and cleaner or sloppier rooms, they weren’t, generally speaking, transformed. At age 8 they were essentially larger, more articulate versions of who they’d been at age 4, and at age 13 they were larger and more articulate versions still, with iPhones affixed to their palms. What had always been wonderful about them remained so. What was difficult did, too.

This suggests to me that there’s something more consequential than Kumon or Montessori, a Ritalin prescription or rugby practice, attachment parenting or minimalist parenting, Alba’s doctrine or Paltrow’s dictums. Nature gets its say. Always has and always will.

So parents: cut yourselves some slack. Take a deep breath. No one false step or one missed call is going to consign your children to an entirely different future. Make sure that they know they’re loved. Make sure that they know their place. And make peace with the fact that you don’t hold all or even most of the cards. There may be a frustrating sense of helplessness in that realization. But there’s a mercy, too.

Goodness gracious.  It has dawned on me that y’all are probably very, very lucky that I usually do this very early in the morning before I’ve had enough tea to get really cross at these folks…

The Pasty Little Putz, Friedman and Bruni

MoDo is off today.  In “The Obama Era, Brought to You by the Iraq War” The Pasty Little Putz tells us that the current Democratic majority was forged in the backlash against George W. Bush’s Middle East policies.  Poor little Putzy seems to have forgotten everything about the reign of C+ Augustus.  The Moustache of Wisdom has a question in “Israel: Bits, Bytes and Bombs:”  President Obama paid a visit. Now what will the Israelis and Palestinians do?  My prediction is that in a few weeks Tommy will be haring off to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv to ask a cab driver.  Mr. Bruni, in “Marriage and the Supremes,” says the context for the high court’s hearings on gay marriage is a profound social and political revolution.  Here’s the Putz:

When prominent people in Washington spend an anniversary apologizing for being catastrophically, unforgivably wrong about a decade-old decision, you might expect that the decision in question had delivered their party to disaster or defeat. But last week’s many Iraq war mea culpas were rich in irony: one by one, prominent liberals lined up to apologize for supporting a war that’s responsible for liberalism’s current political and cultural ascendance.

History is too contingent to say that had there been no Iraq invasion in 2003, there would be no Democratic majority in 2012. (It’s easy enough to imagine counterfactuals that might have put Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office.) But the Democratic majority that we do have is a majority that the Iraq war created: its energy and strategies, its leadership and policy goals, and even its cultural advantages were forged in the backlash against George W. Bush’s Middle East policies.

All those now-apologetic liberals who supported the war in 2003 are a big part of this story, because without their hawkishness there would have been no antiwar rebellion on the left — no Michael Moore and Howard Dean, no Daily Kos and all its “netroots” imitators.

This rebellion divided the Democrats, but it also energized them. During the long Reagan era, American liberalism was an ossified establishment pitted against a successful right-wing insurgency. But the anti-Iraq war insurgency created something new in modern politics — a kind of “movement liberalism” that thought of itself in the same scrappy, ideologically driven terms as the conservative movement, and that was determined to imitate conservatism’s tactics, institutions and success.

Had the Iraq invasion turned out differently, this movement and the Democratic establishment might have spent a decade locked in conflict. But when the W.M.D. didn’t turn up and the occupation turned into a fiasco, the two wings of the party made peace: the establishment embraced the grass roots’ anti-Bush fervor, and the insurgents helped transform liberalism’s infrastructure and organizing and communication.

This synthesis was then solidified by the Obama campaign. Obama the candidate convinced both the insurgents (who originally preferred John Edwards) and the Hillary-favoring establishment that he was one of them, and his team leveraged grass-roots enthusiasm and online savvy to build the juggernaut that won in 2008 and 2012.

But Obama didn’t just benefit from the zeal that entered the Democratic Party through the antiwar movement; he also benefited from the domestic policy vacuum left by Bush’s Iraq-ruined second term. The Bush White House’s “compassionate conservatism” was the last major Republican attempt to claim the political center — to balance traditional conservative goals on taxes and entitlement reform with more bipartisan appeals on education, health care, immigration and poverty. And as long as the Republican Party was successfully hovering near the middle, the Democrats had to hover there as well.

But once Bush’s foreign policy credibility collapsed, his domestic political capital collapsed as well: moderates stopped working with him, conservatives rebelled, and the White House’s planned second-term agenda — Social Security reform, tax and health care reform, immigration overhaul — never happened.

This collapse, and the Republican Party’s failure to recover from it, enabled the Democrats to not only seize the center but push it leftward, and advance far bolder proposals than either Al Gore or John Kerry had dared to offer. The Iraq war didn’t just make Obama possible — it made Obamacare possible as well.

Nor is it a coincidence that these liberal policy victories have been accompanied by liberal gains in the culture wars. True, there’s no necessary connection between the Bush administration’s Iraq floundering and, say, the right’s setbacks in the gay-marriage debate. But cultural change is a complicated thing, built on narratives and symbols and intuitive leaps.

As The American Conservative’s Dan McCarthy noted in a shrewd essay, the Vietnam War helped entrench a narrative in which liberal social movements were associated with defeat in Indochina — and this association didn’t have to be perfectly fair to be politically and culturally potent.

In a similar way, even though Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney weren’t culture warriors or evangelical Christians, in the popular imagination their legacy of incompetence has become a reason to reject social conservatism as well. Just as the post-Vietnam Democrats came to be regarded as incompetent, wimpy and dangerously radical all at once, since 2004 the Bush administration’s blunders — the missing W.M.D., the botched occupation — have been woven into a larger story about Youth and Science and Reason and Diversity triumphing over Old White Male Faith-Based Cluelessness.

Of all the Iraq war’s consequences for our politics, it’s this narrative that may be the war’s most lasting legacy, and the most difficult for conservatives to overcome.

Next up is The Moustache of Wisdom:

Reading the news from the wider Middle East and then watching President Obama visiting Israel triggered this thought: The president looked as if he were visiting an atoll in the Pacific, or maybe New Zealand — but definitely some kind of island state surrounded by roiling seas.

Ari Shavit of the daily Haaretz captured this mood in his column the other day, which began: “A few months ago Amnon Dankner published a sharp, amusing article in the new newspaper Sof Hashavua. He described how Shimon Peres’s innovative technological project causes Israel to detach from the Middle East and sail westward through the Mediterranean Sea, like a sort of floating island. Laughter aside, Dankner nailed the spirit of the time. In recent years Israel has been feeling, thinking and behaving as though it is no longer located in West Asia and can exist as an island that has broken off from it. As if there was no Arab world, no Palestine, no Iran. No Arabs, no settlers, no occupation.”

In fact, while President Obama was in Israel there was a report that chemical weapons were used next door in Syria and rockets were fired into Israel from next door in Gaza. But, at the very same time, Globes, Israel’s business newspaper, published this item: “Accel Partners has completed the closing of Accel London IV, a $475 million fund focused on Europe and Israel. … Accel London IV will invest in the firm’s core areas of expertise, including consumer Internet, big data, cloud, SaaS and mobile. Accel partner Kevin Comolli said, ‘The fact that Accel London IV was raised in eight weeks and was significantly over-subscribed is a powerful endorsement of Accel London and the market opportunity in Europe and Israel.’ ”

Rockets arrive from Gaza in the morning and venture capital from London in the afternoon. Israel’s ability to live as if it were disconnected from the rest of the region is impressive and necessary. It’s also illusory and dangerous.

It’s impressive and necessary because Israel is the only country in the world today that has nonstate actors, armed with missiles, nested among civilians on four out of five of its borders: the Sinai, Gaza, southern Lebanon and Syria. Beyond them lies a hinterland of states consumed by internal turmoil, and Iran. Yet Israel has managed to juggle bits, bytes and bombs — with high walls that neutralize its enemies and high-tech that nourishes its economy.

But there is a fine line between keeping danger out and locking fantasy in, between keeping your people alive and keeping crazy dreams alive. Israel is close to crossing that line.

The dangerous illusion Israel is dwelling in, argues Shavit, is the notion that “it can live like an autarky with no relation to the environment.” But no nation can do that, he argued, “certainly not a nation in which six million Jews share the land with more than five million Palestinians. Certainly not a nation that insists, even in the second decade of the third millennium, on occupying another nation.”

Indeed, the crazy dream Israel is keeping alive is that it can permanently occupy the West Bank, with its 2.5 million Palestinians, to satisfy biblically inspired settlers, who now hold major cabinet positions, like the housing portfolio, in Israel’s new government. With nearly 600,000 Israelis now living in Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank, the window for a two-state solution “is slowly vanishing from the earth,” notes the Hebrew University philosopher Moshe Halbertal. Amazingly, polls still show a majority on both sides for a two-state deal, “but there is a deep trust problem” that has to be overcome — fast.

Nahum Barnea, the veteran Israeli columnist of Yediot Aharonot, told me Obama made a real “breakthrough” to the Israeli public with his speech on Thursday. “If he was considered an enemy before, he is now considered a friend,” said Barnea. “Even those who still disagree with him don’t think he has bad intentions toward Israel.”

Obama embraced Israelis with both understanding and honesty. He noted in his speech: “As Ariel Sharon said — I’m quoting him — ‘It is impossible to have a Jewish democratic state [and], at the same time to control all of [the land of] Israel. If we insist on fulfilling the dream in its entirety, we are liable to lose it all.’ ”

Which is why Palestinians need to drop all their preconditions and enter negotiations and Israel needs to halt settlements and test and test again whether President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad of the Palestinian Authority can deliver. Thanks to their cooperation with the Israeli security services, no Israeli was killed in the West Bank by terrorism in 2012. But Palestinians won’t sustain that restraint without movement toward a Palestinian state. The best way for Israel to deal with the chaos around it is not to put its head in the sand but to collaborate with Palestinians to build a West Bank state that is modern, secular and Westernizing; one where Muslims, Christians and Jews can work together and that stands in daily refutation of the failing Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood models elsewhere. If Israelis and Palestinians do not try everything — now — to make that happen, this will be remembered not as a lost opportunity but the lost opportunity, and no island will escape the storm that will follow.

And now we come to Mr. Bruni:

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen advocates of gay rights — of equal rights, I should say — as revved up as they are right now, with the Supreme Court poised, on Tuesday and Wednesday, to consider same-sex marriage in two separate cases.

But while they’re watching this moment raptly and hopefully, it’s not with a sense that the fate of the cause hangs in the balance. Quite the opposite. They’re watching it with an entirely warranted confidence, verging on certainty, that no matter what the justices say during this coming week’s hearings and no matter how they rule months from now, the final chapter of this story has in fact been written. The question isn’t whether there will be a happy ending. The question is when.

That’s what’s truly remarkable about this juncture: the aura of inevitability that hovers over it. In an astonishingly brief period of time, this country has experienced a seismic shift in opinion — a profound social and political revolution — when it comes to gay and lesbian people. And it’s worth pausing, on the cusp of the court hearings, to take note of this change and to mull what’s behind it.

As for the change itself, look at the last month alone. Look merely at the Republican Party. Although its 2012 platform called for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, scores of prominent Republicans, including a few senior advisers to Mitt Romney’s campaign, broke ranks in late February and put their names to a Supreme Court amicus brief in favor of marriage equality.

That these dissidents can’t be dismissed as pure anomalies was made clear at the annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference last weekend. CPAC, mind you, is no enclave of moderation and reason. It’s more like an aviary for the far-right “wacko birds” whom John McCain recently called out.

But as BuzzFeed’s Chris Geidner, who covered the conference, noted, “Opponents of gay rights spoke to a nearly empty room, while supporters had a standing-room-only crowd.” That observation came under a headline that said, “At CPAC, the Marriage Fight Is Over.” The article went on to quote a bit of counsel that the Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin gave her fellow conservatives. On the issue of same-sex marriage, she told them, the country was headed in one and only one direction. Republicans could either get with the program or get comfy with their image of being woefully out of touch.

The BuzzFeed article was posted last Sunday. On Thursday, in Politico, came the sweeping declaration that March 2013 would perhaps go down as “the month when the political balance on this issue shifted unmistakably from risky to safe.” That assessment reflected formal endorsements of same-sex marriage, in less than a week’s span, by both Rob Portman and Hillary Clinton.

Clinton, tellingly, didn’t just articulate her position in the course of a broader interview or speech. She released a precisely scripted video dedicated to marriage equality, and that spotlight and care spoke volumes about the way this issue has suddenly become central to Democratic politics: something a serious national figure who wants party approval and donor dollars must support and must get right.

What a difference four years make. In 2008, both Clinton and Barack Obama publicly opposed same-sex marriage. Just a year ago, that was still Obama’s formal stance. But by the summer of 2012, marriage equality had made its way into the party platform. Now it’s woven into the party’s very fiber.

There’s no going back. In an ABC News/Washington Post survey released early last week, respondents nationwide favored marriage equality by a 58-to-36 margin. That’s an exact flip of a similar survey just seven years ago, when the margin was 36-to-58.

And among young Americans, who will obviously make up more and more of the electorate as time goes by, support was stronger still. The ABC/Washington Post survey showed that 81 percent of people in the 18-to-29 age group endorsed marriage equality.

The buildup to the Supreme Court hearings has demonstrated the breadth of diversity of support for it. There have been amicus briefs signed, or proclamations of solidarity issued, by dozens of professional athletes and by the American Academy of Pediatrics, by tech giants and accounting firms and retailers and airlines. Somewhere along the way, standing up for gay marriage went from nervy to trendy. It’s the Harlem Shake of political engagement.

And the unstoppable advances made by gays and lesbians were suggested by a quiet but revealing statement recently by the president of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, who signaled that the organization would put a new emphasis on transgender equality.

These advances happened in largest part because of the increased visibility of gay people who have had the courage and optimism to share their lives and truths with family, friends, colleagues. Although many critics nitpicked Portman for changing his views only out of what was deemed a selfish concern for his own gay son, that’s precisely the way many people are illuminated and tugged along: by emotion, not abstraction; by what’s immediate and personal, not what’s foreign and theoretical. Clinton has acknowledged as much by citing the influence of gays and lesbians she has known and respected. And the decades-long rallying cry of the gay-rights movement — come out, come out, so that Americans understand the impact of discrimination on people they care about — was predicated on that wrinkle of human nature.

Additionally, the quest for same-sex marriage has forced many Americans to view gays and lesbians in a fresh light. We’re no longer so easily stereotyped and dismissed as rebels atop parade floats, demanding permission to behave outside society’s norms. We’re aspirants to tradition, communicating shared values and asserting a fundamentally conservative desire, at least among many of us, for families, stability, commitment. What’s so threatening about any of that?

And who really loses if we win? Where’s the injured party? The abortion debate grinds on in part because to those who believe that life begins at conception and warrants full protection from then on, every pro-choice victory claims victims. The gun debate grinds on because new restrictions are just that — restrictions — and no matter how justifiable and necessary they may be, opponents will rail that their freedom is being curtailed.

But the legalization of same-sex marriage takes nothing from anyone, other than the illusion, which is all it is and ever was, that healthy, nurturing relationships are reserved for people of opposite sexes.

The Supreme Court cases and their resolutions indeed matter. If the court doesn’t dismantle the Defense of Marriage Act, there’s no telling how many more years will pass before this repugnant 1996 law tumbles in some other way and before gay and lesbian couples married in states that allow such weddings are treated equally under federal law.

And the court could, in its ruling on the constitutionality of a California ban against same-sex marriage, hasten the spread of marriage equality beyond those nine states and the District of Columbia. For now the count builds slowly, through time-consuming, patience-fraying, expensive legislative and referendum battles, and a matter of basic fairness is beholden to local politics and pockets of enduring bigotry.

But fairness is where we’re heading, at least in regard to marriage, which has emerged as the terrain on which Americans are hashing out their feelings about gays and lesbians. The trajectory is undeniable. The trend line is clear. And the choice before the justices is whether to be handmaidens to history, or whether to sit it out.

The Pasty Little Putz, Keller, Friedman and Bruni

MoDo is off today, so I guess that’s why we get Keller today instead of Monday…  The Pasty Little Putz has decided to tell us “What the Church Needs Now.”  He says renewal from below depends on moral credibility at the top.  Mr. Keller, in “Smart Drones,” says coming soon: weapons that have minds of their own.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “It’s Lose-Lose vs. Win-Win-Win-Win-Win,” says a carbon tax would be a better budget solution than the foolish sequester.  In “Beyond the Bedroom” Mr. Bruni says the Catholic Church is more persuasive on economic justice than on sexual morality. The new pope should put his focus there.  Here’s the Putz:

The man who was transformed last week from Jorge Mario Bergoglio into the first Pope Francis faces a long list of challenges, each seemingly more daunting than the last. There’s the immediate need to reform a Vatican bureaucracy whose dysfunction helped sabotage his predecessor’s reign. There’s the larger challenge of lifting the shadow of the sex abuse crisis from the Western church. And then comes the task of making Catholic Christianity seem vital and appealing in cultures where the new pope’s church is widely regarded as archaic, irrelevant, or malign.

But in a sense all of these challenges have one solution, or at least one place where any solution has to start. Francis’s reign will be a success if it begins to restore the moral credibility of the church’s hierarchy and clergy, and it will be a failure if it does not.

Catholics believe that their church is designed to survive the lapses of its leaders. The Mass is the Mass even if the priest is a sinner. Bishops do not need to be holy to preserve the teachings of the faith. The litany of the saints includes countless figures — from Joan of Arc to the newly canonized Mary MacKillop, an Australian nun involved in the reporting of child abuse by a priest — who suffered injustices from church authorities in their lifetimes.

But it’s one thing for Catholics in a Catholic culture, possessed of shared premises and shared moral ideals, to accept a certain amount of “do as I say, not as I do” from their pastors and preachers.

It’s quite another to ask a culture that doesn’t accept Catholic moral ideals to respect an institution whose leaders can’t seem to live out the virtues that they urge on others.

In that culture — our culture — priestly sex abuse and corruption in the Vatican aren’t just seen as evidence that all men are sinners. They’re seen as evidence that the church has no authority to judge what is and isn’t sin, that the renunciation Catholicism preaches mostly warps and rarely fulfills, and that the world’s approach to sex (and money, and ambition) is the only sane approach there is.

Such worldliness should not be confused with atheism. Our age is still religious; it’s just made its peace with human appetites and all the varied ways they intertwine. From the sermons of Joel Osteen to the epiphanies of “Eat, Pray, Love,” our spiritual oracles still urge us to seek the supernatural, the numinous, the divine. They just dismiss the idea that the divine could possibly want anything for us except for what we already want for ourselves.

Religion without renunciation has obvious appeal. But its cultural consequences are not all self-evidently positive. Absent ideals of chastity, people are less likely to form families. Absent ideals of solidarity, more people live and age and die alone. The social landscape that we take for granted is one that many earlier generations would have regarded as dystopian: sex and reproduction have both been ruthlessly commodified, adult freedoms are enjoyed at the expense of children’s interests, fewer children grow up with both a mother and a father, and fewer and fewer children are even born at all.

So there are shadows on our liberated society, doubts that creep in around the edges, moments when scolds and moralists and even popes almost seem to have a point. Which helps explain, perhaps, the strange, self-contradictory defensiveness that greets the Catholic Church’s persistent refusal to simply bless every new development and call it progress. (Nobody cares what the pope thinks — and I demand that he think exactly as I do!)

It explains, too, why the appropriate moral outrage with which the secular press has covered scandals in the church has often included a subtext of vindication and relief. (They stand in judgment on the rest of us, but their own “ideals” just lead to repression and perversion. They claim to be above materialism, but they’re obviously in it for the same things as everyone else …)

If Catholicism has a future in the Western world as something more than a foil, an Other and a symbol of the Benighted Past We Have Safely Left Behind, it needs its leaders to set an example that proves these voices wrong. Before anything else, that requires a generation of priests and bishops who hold themselves to a higher standard — higher than their immediate predecessors, and higher than the world.

It also requires more from the new pope than an evocative name and a humble posture. Catholicism needs someone like Pius V, the 16th-century pontiff at whose tomb Francis prayed on the day after his elevation — a disciplinarian whose housecleaning helped further the Counter-Reformation. The Vatican needs purgation at the top, to enable real renewal from below. And the church as a whole needs to offer and embody proof — in Rome, the local parish and everywhere in between — that the alternative Catholicism preaches can actually be lived.

And now cometh Mr. Keller and the dystopian future:

If you find the use of remotely piloted warrior drones troubling, imagine that the decision to kill a suspected enemy is not made by an operator in a distant control room, but by the machine itself. Imagine that an aerial robot studies the landscape below, recognizes hostile activity, calculates that there is minimal risk of collateral damage, and then, with no human in the loop, pulls the trigger.

Welcome to the future of warfare. While Americans are debating the president’s power to order assassination by drone, powerful momentum — scientific, military and commercial — is propelling us toward the day when we cede the same lethal authority to software.

Next month, several human rights and arms control organizations are meeting in London to introduce a campaign to ban killer robots before they leap from the drawing boards. Proponents of a ban include many of the same people who succeeded in building a civilized-world consensus against the use of crippling and indiscriminate land mines. This time they are taking on what may be the trickiest problem arms control has ever faced.

The arguments against developing fully autonomous weapons, as they are called, range from moral (“they are evil”) to technical (“they will never be that smart”) to visceral (“they are creepy”).

“This is something people seem to feel at a very gut level is wrong,” says Stephen Goose, director of the arms division of Human Rights Watch, which has assumed a leading role in challenging the dehumanizing of warfare. “The ugh factor comes through really strong.”

Some robotics experts doubt that a computer will ever be able to reliably distinguish between an enemy and an innocent, let alone judge whether a load of explosives is the right, or proportional, response. What if the potential target is already wounded, or trying to surrender? And even if artificial intelligence achieves or surpasses a human level of competence, the critics point out, it will never be able to summon compassion.

Noel Sharkey, a computer scientist at the University of Sheffield and chairman of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, tells the story of an American patrol in Iraq that came upon a group of insurgents, leveled their rifles, then realized the men were carrying a coffin off to a funeral. Killing mourners could turn a whole village against the United States. The Americans lowered their weapons. Could a robot ever make that kind of situational judgment?

Then there is the matter of accountability. If a robot bombs a school, who gets the blame: the soldier who sent the machine into the field? His commander? The manufacturer? The inventor?

At senior levels of the military there are misgivings about weapons with minds of their own. Last November the Defense Department issued what amounts to a 10-year moratorium on developing them while it discusses the ethical implications and possible safeguards. It’s a squishy directive, likely to be cast aside in a minute if we learn that China has sold autonomous weapons to Iran, but it is reassuring that the military is not roaring down this road without giving it some serious thought.

Compared with earlier heroic efforts to outlaw land mines and curb nuclear proliferation, the campaign against licensed-to-kill robots faces some altogether new obstacles.

For one thing, it’s not at all clear where to draw the line. While the Terminator scenario of cyborg soldiers is decades in the future, if not a complete fantasy, the militaries of the world are already moving along a spectrum of autonomy, increasing, bit by bit, the authority of machines in combat.

The military already lets machines make critical decisions when things are moving too fast for deliberate human intervention. The United States has long had Aegis-class warships with automated antimissile defenses that can identify, track and shoot down incoming threats in seconds. And the role of machinery is expanding toward the point where that final human decision to kill will be largely predetermined by machine-generated intelligence.

“Is it the finger on the trigger that’s the problem?” asks Peter W. Singer, a specialist in the future of war at the Brookings Institution. “Or is it the part that tells me ‘that’s a bad guy’?”

Israel is the first country to make and deploy (and sell, to China, India, South Korea and others) a weapon that can attack pre-emptively without a human in charge. The hovering drone called the Harpy is programmed to recognize and automatically divebomb any radar signal that is not in its database of “friendlies.” No reported misfires so far, but suppose an adversary installs its antiaircraft radar on the roof of a hospital?

Professor Sharkey points to the Harpy as a weapon that has already crossed a worrisome threshold and probably can’t be called back. Other systems are close, like the Navy’s X-47B, a pilotless, semi-independent, carrier-based combat plane that is in the testing stage. For now, it is unarmed but it is built with two weapons bays. We are already ankle-deep in the future.

For military commanders the appeal of autonomous weapons is almost irresistible and not quite like any previous technological advance. Robots are cheaper than piloted systems, or even drones, which require scores of technicians backing up the remote pilot. These systems do not put troops at risk of death, injury or mental trauma. They don’t get tired or frightened. A weapon that is not tethered to commands from home base can continue to fight after an enemy jams your communications, which is increasingly likely in the age of electromagnetic pulse and cyberattacks.

And no military strategist wants to cede an advantage to a potential adversary. More than 70 countries currently have drones, and some of them are hard at work on the technology to let those drones off their virtual leashes.

“Even if you had a ban, how would you enforce it?” asks Ronald Arkin, a computer scientist and director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory at Georgia Tech. “It’s just software.”

The military — and the merchants of war — are not the only ones invested in this technology. Robotics is a hyperactive scientific frontier that runs from the most sophisticated artificial intelligence labs down to middle-school computer science programs. Worldwide, organized robotics competitions engage a quarter of a million school kids. (My 10-year-old daughter is one of them.) And the science of building killer robots is not so easily separated from the science of making self-driving cars or computers that excel at “Jeopardy.”

Professor Arkin argues that automation can also make war more humane. Robots may lack compassion, but they also lack the emotions that lead to calamitous mistakes, atrocities and genocides: vengefulness, panic, tribal animosity.

“My friends who served in Vietnam told me that they fired — when they were in a free-fire zone — at anything that moved,” he said. “I think we can design intelligent, lethal, autonomous systems that can potentially do better than that.”

Arkin argues that autonomous weapons need to be constrained, but not by abruptly curtailing research. He advocates a moratorium on deployment and a full-blown discussion of ways to keep humans in charge.

Peter Singer of Brookings is also wary of a weapons ban: “I’m supportive of the intent, to draw attention to the slippery slope we’re going down. But we have a history that doesn’t make me all that optimistic.”

Like Singer, I don’t hold out a lot of hope for an enforceable ban on death-dealing robots, but I’d love to be proved wrong. If war is made to seem impersonal and safe, about as morally consequential as a video game, I worry that autonomous weapons deplete our humanity. As unsettling as the idea of robots’ becoming more like humans is the prospect that, in the process, we become more like robots.

And next up is The Moustache of Wisdom who seems to have forgotten that the Republicans will refuse to consider any new taxes:

One of my favorite quotes about the state of U.S. politics was offered a couple years ago by Gerald Seib, a Wall Street Journal columnist, when he observed that “America and its political leaders, after two decades of failing to come together to solve big problems, seem to have lost faith in their ability to do so. A political system that expects failure doesn’t try very hard to produce anything else.” That’s us today — our entire political system is guilty of the “soft bigotry of low expectations” for ourselves.

I raise this now because it strikes me as crazy that one of the obvious solutions to our budget, energy and environmental problems — the one that would be the least painful and have the best long-term impact (a carbon tax) — is off the table. Meanwhile, the solution that is as dumb as the day is long — a budget sequester that slashes spending indiscriminately — is on the table.

Shrinking the tax deduction for charity is on the table. Shrinking Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for the poor are on the table. But a carbon tax that could close the deficit and clean the air, weaken petro-dictators, strengthen the dollar, drive clean-tech innovation and still leave some money to lower corporate and income taxes is off the table. So the solutions that are lose-lose and divisive are on the table, while the solution that is win-win-win-win-win — and has both liberal and conservative supporters — is off the table.

Writing in this newspaper in support of a carbon tax back in 2007, N. Gregory Mankiw, the Harvard economist, who was a senior adviser to President George W. Bush and to Mitt Romney, argued that “the idea of using taxes to fix problems, rather than merely raise government revenue, has a long history. The British economist Arthur Pigou advocated such corrective taxes to deal with pollution in the early 20th century. In his honor, economics textbooks now call them ‘Pigovian taxes.’ Using a Pigovian tax to address global warming is also an old idea. It was proposed as far back as 1992 by Martin S. Feldstein on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. … Those vying for elected office, however, are reluctant to sign on to this agenda. Their political consultants are no fans of taxes, Pigovian or otherwise. Republican consultants advise using the word ‘tax’ only if followed immediately by the word ‘cut.’ Democratic consultants recommend the word ‘tax’ be followed by ‘on the rich.’ ”

Yes, to win passage of any carbon tax, Republicans would insist that it be revenue neutral — to be offset entirely by cuts in corporate taxes and taxes on personal income. But maybe they could be persuaded otherwise. In an ideal world, you would have 45 percent go to pay down the deficit so that we don’t have to cut entitlements as much — appealing to liberals and greens — and have 45 percent go to reducing corporate and income taxes — to encourage work and investment and appeal to conservatives. The remaining 10 percent could be rebated to low-income households for whom such a tax would be a burden.

According to the Center for Climate and Electricity Policy at the nonpartisan Resources for the Future, a tax of $25 per ton of carbon-dioxide emitted — through the combustion of fossil fuels used in electricity production, commercial and residential heating and transportation — “would raise approximately $125 billion annually.” This $125 billion “could allow federal personal income tax reductions of about 15 percent or corporate income tax reductions of about 70 percent, if all carbon tax revenues were used to replace current tax revenues. Alternatively, the federal deficit could be reduced by approximately $1.25 trillion over 10 years” — roughly what we are trying to do through the foolish sequester. Such a tax would add about 21 cents per gallon of gasoline and about 1.2 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity. It could be phased in gradually as the economy improves.

Experts believe that the mere signal of a carbon tax would get companies to become more energy efficient. And that’s the point. As part of any grand bargain — which will have to include spending cuts and tax increases — introducing a carbon tax into the mix makes all kinds of options easier and smarter.

Alas, right now both sides are trying to inflict maximum pain on the other, rather than framing the debate as: “Here’s the world we’re living in; here’s what we need to thrive; and, if we cut and tax here, we can invest in these 21st-century growth engines over here.” Our goal is not to balance the budget. It’s to make America great.

So how come the best ideas are off the table? (Blessedly, Representative Henry Waxman, a Democrat of California, is now working to get some kind of carbon tax on the table.) Several reasons, argues Adam Garfinkle, editor of The American Interest and author of a smart new e-book, “Broken: American Political Dysfunction and What to Do About It.”

First, because our democracy today is perverted more than ever by deep-pocketed lobbies and oligopolies. So, “in order to get and stay elected today, you have to raise huge sums of money from corporations, wealthy individuals and dues-laden unions,” Garfinkle notes, and all that money leads to “twisted decision-making at the high-politics level” and “regulatory capture” at the bureaucratic-administrative level. The fossil fuel, auto and power companies have bought a lot of politicians to block a carbon tax.

The only way around them, argues Garfinkle, would be for leaders to galvanize the public, but that requires building “governing coalitions” in the center rather than “political coalitions” that can get you elected but little else after that. Obama is belatedly trying to do that; the Republican Party hasn’t even tried. “This is what real leaders do,” said Garfinkle. “They change the conversation.” They don’t just read the polls; they shape the polls.

But we can’t put this all on lobbyists. It’s also our generation. “We’re the most self-indulgent generation in American history,” argues Garfinkle, always demanding more services than we’re ready to pay for. “Too many of us want to be unbound by broader social obligations, but the network of those obligations creates the moral ballast that makes good governance possible.”

As Nathan Gardels and Nicolas Berggruen note in their insightful book, “Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century: A Middle Way Between West and East,” we prefer a “Diet Coke culture — sweetness without calories, consumption without savings and safety nets without taxes.” No wonder anything hard or smart is off the table. We pushed it there.

And last but not least we have Mr. Bruni:

It was too much to hope that after the white smoke rose and the TV anchors began nervously filling time and the cameras lingered for what seemed an eternity on that balcony over St. Peter’s Square, the man who stepped onto it would be someone open to revisiting the most archaic, obsolete matters of Roman Catholic doctrine. The group electing him was assembled by the last two popes, both conservatives. Its choice was bound to be more carbon copy than new page.

But it’s not too much to hope that the man who did appear there — and who has lived a willfully humble material existence until now, and took the name of the poor’s patron saint — will change the church’s emphasis. That’s the great opportunity before Pope Francis, whose biography and style make him an ideal candidate to point the church toward a new conversation and a better focus for its spiritual energies. To have it dwell less in the bedroom, more in the soup kitchen.

It’s time for the church to stop talking so much about sex. It’s the perfect time, in fact.

It’s on matters of sexual morality that the church has lost much of its authority. And it’s on matters of sexual morality that it largely wastes its breath. By insisting on mandatory celibacy for a priesthood winnowed and sometimes warped by that, by opposing the use of contraceptives for birth control, by casting judgment on homosexuals and by decrying divorce while running something of an annulment mill, the church’s leaders have enraged and alienated Catholics whose common sense and whose experience of the real world tell them that none of that is wise, kind or necessary.

The church’s leaders have also set themselves up to be dismissed as hypocrites, unable to uphold the very virtues they promulgate. Just weeks before the conclave, the most senior Catholic prelate in Britain, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, resigned his post, forgoing a trip to Rome and a vote on the next pope, because he’d been accused of, and admitted to, sexual misconduct. His case suggested the potential loneliness of a Catholic clergyman’s circumstances, and those circumstances, in the eyes of many Catholics, cast priests as odd, flawed messengers and counselors on the subject of a person’s intimate life.

The new pope’s own story includes a bold lesson on Catholics’ estrangement from, and defiance of, church edicts in this regard. More than 90 percent of Argentines identify themselves as Catholic, and in 2010, as the country’s politicians debated the nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage, Pope Francis — who was then a cardinal, and arguably the most prominent church official in the country — lobbied vociferously, even venomously, against that proposed law. He called it nothing less than a “plan of the devil.” It nonetheless passed, with some observers speculating that the stridency of his opposition worked in its favor. Argentina is now one of 11 countries that have legalized gay marriage. Two of the others, Spain and Portugal, also have populations that are overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, at least nominally.

The child sexual abuse crisis, of course, has factored mightily into the church’s eroded credibility on sexual morality. And the media’s sustained examination of that crisis has made it difficult for church leaders to redirect attention toward the church’s concern for economic justice, its ministry to the needy and the extraordinary work that many of the church’s servants perform on those fronts.

But new cases and new revelations are ebbing or certain to ebb. Fewer cardinals and bishops now indulge the kind of denial that protected molesters and abetted cover-ups. And there’s not a watchful parent anywhere who would unquestioningly let a son or daughter go off with Father Bruce for long periods of time. Years ago, such permission aggravated the problem: priests — men of God — were trusted in situations where no other adult with an unusually intense interest in children would be. That epoch is over, that innocence lost.

POPE Francis comes along at an opportune juncture. There’s a growing consciousness and worry about inequities of wealth in a world in which the estimated 1.3 billion people living in extreme poverty, with an income of $1.25 a day or less, outnumber the roughly 1.2 billion Catholics.

That desperation is fertile territory for the church, whose voice is most persuasive and essential on the landscapes of hunger, homelessness, sickness, war. To many Catholics, active and lapsed, the beauty of the faith and the essence of Jesus Christ reside in a big-hearted compassion that has been eclipsed and often contradicted by church leaders’ excursions into the culture wars.

Pope Francis could pull back on those excursions. He’d be wise to, and he’s well positioned to. In Argentina he was known in part for his rejection of material wealth and his concern for those without it. He opted for a simple apartment over a baronial residence. Did his own cooking. Rode the bus. Advised supporters not to travel all the way to Rome for the ceremony in which he became a cardinal.

The money necessary for the trip, he told them, was better donated to a good cause.

And during his first 48 hours as pope, he clung to that sort of humility, riding with other cardinals in a minivan rather than alone in a papal chariot. The vigor with which fellow cardinals and Vatican spokesmen heralded this suggested their eagerness for a new image for the church and their understanding that the pivot from Benedict XVI to Francis — from furs to frugality — might provide it.

It’s a gilded enclave that Francis is entering, one of grand rooms, majestic artwork, regal costumes. From my time on the papal plane a decade ago, I remember sumptuous meals wheeled up to the first-class section where Vatican officials sat. They ate well.

And that has turned off many Catholics: the perception that these officials are coddled, arrogant and out of touch. Francis could challenge that and, in doing so, have a real impact.

I know more than a few Catholics who, despite no other involvement in the church, make it a point to have their children christened. I always figured them to be superstitious. They’re hedging their bets.

But there’s more to it. On the far side of all the church scandals and all its misspent energy, these Catholics still see a fundamental set of values, a compass, that they don’t want to lose touch with or give up on. The church’s stubborn attachment to certain negotiable traditions and unenlightened positions has distanced them, but they’re not entirely gone. It’ll be interesting to see how, and if, Francis tries to bring them back.

The Pasty Little Putz, Dowd, Friedman, Nocera and Bruni

The Pasty Little Putz has a question:  “What Hath Rand Paul Wrought?”  He gurgles that he’s coaxing the Republican Party to move past the Bush-era foreign policy.  No, Putzy, Aqua Buddha stood up in front of everyone and howled “MEEEE” for hours.  Even though I may agree with him about the use of drones I have no delusions that he’s anything but a self-aggrandizing asshole.  Although, all things being equal, I’d rather read Putzy nattering on about Aqua Buddha than be subjected to a column on the conclave…  In “As Time Goes Bye” MoDo indulges in a reverie about the news magazine’s days of roast beef, Scotch and snazzy adjectives.  The Moustache of Wisdom sends us “No to Keystone.  Yes to Crazy.”  He says if the oil pipeline is approved, President Obama will need to make it up to his green base.  No, Tommy, he won’t.  Why should he bother?  In “Rigging the I.P.O. Game” Mr. Nocera tells us what a decade-old dot-com I.P.O. case says about Wall Street today.  In “Of Fraud and Filet” Mr. Bruni (who used to be the food writer) says food surprises on both sides of the Atlantic are reminders that almost every bite we take is a leap of faith.  Here’s The Putz:

The Republican Party built an advantage on foreign policy across generations, and then began demolishing it 10 years ago this month. What the cold war made, the invasion of Iraq largely unmade: beginning in 2003, a party that had long promised — and mostly delivered — peace through strength became identified with an intelligence fiasco, a botched occupation and the squandering of American resources, credibility and lives.

Two Republicans running for president in 2012, Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul, seemed to have some grasp of what Iraq had done to their party’s reputation. But they were both niche candidates who spoke to small constituencies (libertarians in Paul’s case, journalists in Huntsman’s). Paul’s isolationism was hectoring and eccentric, with a “we had it coming” view of terrorism that the Republican electorate was never likely to embrace. Huntsman’s attempt to rehabilitate foreign policy realism was as passionless and flat-footed as his entire campaign. Neither had much influence on Mitt Romney, whose foreign policy rhetoric left the impression that his party had learned nothing from the Bush era.

But where Huntsman and Paul the elder mostly failed, Rand Paul has been enjoying remarkable success. The Kentucky senator’s recent ascent to prominence, which achieved escape velocity with last week’s 13-hour filibuster delaying the confirmation of President Obama’s nominee to lead the C.I.A., hasn’t just made the younger Paul one of the most talked-about politicians in Washington today. It has offered the first real sign that the Republican Party might someday escape the shadow of the Iraq war and enter the post-post-9/11 era.

Officially, Paul’s filibuster was devoted to a specific question of executive power — whether there are any limits on the president’s authority to declare American citizens enemy combatants and deal out death to them. But anyone who listened (and listened, and listened) to his remarks, and put them in the context of his recent speeches and votes and bridge-building, recognized that he was after something bigger: a reorientation of conservative foreign policy thinking away from hair-trigger hawkishness and absolute deference to executive power.

Exactly where such a reorientation would take the party is unclear. Depending on the context, Paul can sometimes sound like a libertarian purist, sometimes like a realist in the Brent Scowcroft mode and sometimes like — well, like a man who was an ophthalmologist in Bowling Green, Ky., just a few short years ago.

But if his ideas are still evolving, his savvy is impressive. Paul has recognized, as a figure like Huntsman did not, that to infuse new ideas into a moribund party you need to speak the language of the base, and sell conservatives as well as moderates on your proposed course correction. (There’s a reason his recent foreign policy speech was delivered at the Heritage Foundation — normally a redoubt of Cheneyism — and his two big interviews after his filibuster were with Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.) And he’s exploited partisan incentives to bring his fellow Republicans around to his ideas, deliberately picking battles — from the Libya intervention to drone warfare — where a more restrained foreign policy vision doubles as a critique of the Obama White House.

Those incentives, rather than an intellectual sea change on the right, explain why his filibuster enjoyed so much Republican support. (Most of the senators who gave him an assist were just looking for a chance to score points against a Democratic White House.) But if Paul hasn’t won the party over to his ideas, he’s clearly widened the space for intra-Republican debate. And if he runs for president in 2016, that debate will become more interesting than it’s been for many, many years.

There’s a lesson here for his fellow Republican politicians — though that lesson is not, I repeat not, that they should all remake themselves as Paul-style libertarians. One can appreciate the Kentucky senator’s evolution away from his father’s crankishness without completely trusting that it’s genuine, and on domestic policy a swing to libertarian purism is something the present Republican Party doesn’t need.

Rather, the lesson of Paul’s ascent is that being a policy entrepreneur carries rewards as well as risks — and that if you know how to speak the language of the party’s base, it’s possible to be a different kind of Republican without forfeiting your conservative bona fides.

This is something that the party’s other ambitious officeholders have been slow to recognize. Since the 2012 election, a number of prominent Republicans — Eric Cantor, Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio, and so on — have given speeches that tiptoe toward new ideas, new policies, new visions of what their party might stand for and support. But ultimately they’ve all stopped short of actually breaking with the policy consensus that sent Romney down to defeat.

Paul, by contrast, has actually challenged that consensus in a substantive and constructive way. And far from being excommunicated for it, he’s been rewarded with greater prominence and increased conservative support.

For those with ears, let them hear.

Now that we’ve survived that, here’s MoDo:

Auspicious my debut at Time was not.

In 1981, I started working in the Washington bureau of the newsmagazine famously mocked by The New Yorker’s Wolcott Gibbs for its inverted Homeric style. “Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind,” Gibbs satirized. “Where it all will end, knows God!”

I thought my first Monday morning story conference would be my last. The bureau chief wanted to see how we felt about the prospect of a Time cover on salt. He called on me first.

“My mom puts salt on everything,” I replied. “She’s not worried about it.”

A veteran reporter across the table looked at me scornfully. “He’s talking about SALT II,” she sneered, referring to the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty between the U.S. and the Soviets.

I cringed. But to my astonishment, the bureau chief corrected my tormentor. “No,” he said, “I’m talking about table salt.”

That’s the kind of place Time was. One week, the Ayatollah Khomeini was the villain on the cover, the next week, Salt the Killer. One week, you worked on Qaddafi hit squads; the next, cats. (I got a byline on the cat cover for a penetrating interview with a cat psychologist named Fox who did Swedish massages on Burmese felines.)

“Father Time,” Henry Luce, wanted everything in his magazine to be either “epic” or “titillating trivialities.” Luce and his fellow Yalies started Time in 1923 with a breezy tone, snazzy adjectives and the promise to keep “busy men” informed, concisely.

Headlines about Time Warner’s breakup with Time Inc. sent me into a reverie about my salad days in Time’s glory days. In “The American Century,” as Luce dubbed it, nabbing the cover of Time was the most coveted honor in our culture. Now the humbled magazine, bleeding ad revenue like the rest of print media, is facing a future, as The New York Post’s Keith Kelly put it, “untethered from the Time Warner mother ship,” which prefers to focus on its two better-performing children, TV and film.

After my stint in Washington, Time moved me to the New York headquarters, with its “Mad Men” aura of whisky, cigarettes, four-hour sodden lunches and illicit liaisons. (Partake of which, unfortunately, I did not.) The researchers, a largely female staff, were referred to as “the vestal virgins.” To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, a woman’s writing about national affairs was like a dog’s walking on its hind legs; that we could do it at all was seen by some older editors as surprising.

On Friday nights, when the magazine was going to bed, there were sumptuous platters of roast beef rolled in, and bars in editors’ offices.

Sometimes you’d go in a senior writer’s office as the drinking wore on and just see two feet sticking out from under the desk, like the scene in “The Wizard of Oz” when the house falls on the witch.

It was a plummy time when a top editor could arrive in Paris and think nothing of sending a staffer from Paris to London to fetch a necktie he had left in his hotel room, or of sending a minion flying off to fetch a box of his favorite cigars, or of having articles about the Nicaraguan contras flown to his Martha’s Vineyard house so he could make sure the political tilt was right.

Mere writers got to expense dial-a-cabs out to the Hamptons after working late Fridays, at $150 a pop; and people rarely shared, snaking out to Sag Harbor in a pampered convoy.

Even then, it struck me that newsmagazines were doomed, with the strange bifurcation of reporters who were not allowed to write and writers who were not allowed to report. I reckoned the genre had a few years at most. When Time named the computer the Machine of the Year for 1982, we were still writing on typewriters.

A Time cover does not mean the same thing in a world of pure media entropy. Now, if something hits, it hits; if it doesn’t, there’s another thing coming along in a minute, somewhere else.

Journalism, spooked by rumors of its own obsolescence, has stopped believing in itself. Groans of doom alternate with panicked happy talk.

Before this sends yet another shudder through the media establishment, remember this: It may be a funeral for the Henry Luce era, but it’s not a funeral for us. We can’t wear black crepe every time someone prefers to read on a tablet; we can’t be like the auto industry and the G.O.P., who got accustomed to waiting around for it to be 1965 again.

It will be good if this moment provokes a reckoning about what really needs to be preserved in the culture, about what is valuable.

Many content providers and managers — formerly known as reporters and editors — have stopped believing in their own value and necessity. But the gatekeepers in the content class have to understand the world in which we’re living and wield their judgment.

Digital platforms are worthless without content. They’re shiny sacks with bells and whistles, but without content, they’re empty sacks.

It is not about pixels versus print. It is not about how you’re reading. It is about what you’re reading.

Next up we have The Moustache of Wisdom.  (I’d love to see a steel cage death match between him and Nocera over the Keystone pipeline…):

I hope the president turns down the Keystone XL oil pipeline. (Who wants the U.S. to facilitate the dirtiest extraction of the dirtiest crude from tar sands in Canada’s far north?) But I don’t think he will. So I hope that Bill McKibben and his 350.org coalition go crazy. I’m talking chain-themselves-to-the-White-House-fence-stop-traffic-at-the-Capitol kind of crazy, because I think if we all make enough noise about this, we might be able to trade a lousy Keystone pipeline for some really good systemic responses to climate change. We don’t get such an opportunity often — namely, a second-term Democratic president who is under heavy pressure to approve a pipeline to create some jobs but who also has a green base that he can’t ignore. So cue up the protests, and pay no attention to people counseling rational and mature behavior. We need the president to be able to say to the G.O.P. oil lobby, “I’m going to approve this, but it will kill me with my base. Sasha and Malia won’t even be talking to me, so I’ve got to get something really big in return.”

Face it: The last four years have been a net setback for the green movement. While President Obama deserves real praise for passing a historic increase in vehicle mileage efficiency and limits on the emissions of new coal-fired power plants, the president also chose to remove the term “climate change” from his public discourse and kept his talented team of environmentalists in a witness-protection program, banning them from the climate debate. This silence coincided with record numbers of extreme weather events — droughts and floods — and with a huge structural change in the energy marketplace.

What was that change? Put simply, all of us who had hoped that scientific research and new technologies would find cheaper ways to provide carbon-free energy at scale — wind, solar, bio, nuclear — to supplant fossil fuels failed to anticipate that new technologies (particularly hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling at much greater distances) would produce new, vastly cheaper ways to tap natural gas trapped in shale as well as crude oil previously thought unreachable, making cleaner energy alternatives much less competitive.

It’s great that shale gas is replacing coal as a source of electricity, since it generates less than half the carbon dioxide. As the oil economist Philip Verleger Jr. notes in the latest edition of the journal International Economy, these breakthroughs will also lead to much more oil and gas at lower prices, which will help American consumers, manufacturers and jobs. But, he adds, “it will be harder and harder to push for renewable energy programs as hydrocarbon prices fall,” and “the new technologies that allow us to tap shale oil and shale gas could release vast quantities of methane” if not done properly. Methane released in the atmosphere contributes much more to climate change than CO₂.

If Keystone gets approved, environmentalists should have a long shopping list ready, starting with a price signal that discourages the use of carbon-intensive fuels in favor of low-carbon energy. Nothing would do more to clean our air, drive clean-tech innovation, weaken petro-dictators and reduce the deficit than a carbon tax. One prays this will become part of the budget debate. Also, the president can use his authority under the Clean Air Act to order reductions in CO₂ emissions from existing coal power plants and refiners by, say, 25 percent. He could then do with the power companies what he did with autos: negotiate with them over the fairest way to achieve that reduction in different parts of the country. We also need to keep the president’s feet to the fire on the vow in his State of the Union address to foster policies that could “cut in half the energy wasted by our homes and businesses over the next 20 years.” About 30 percent of energy in buildings is wasted.

Finally, the president could make up for Keystone by introducing into the public discourse the concept of “natural infrastructure,” argues Mark Tercek, the president and chief executive of The Nature Conservancy, and the co-author of “Nature’s Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature.”

“Forests, wetlands and other ecosystems are nature’s infrastructure for controlling floods, supplying water, and doing other things we need to adapt to climate change,” Tercek wrote in an e-mail. “Before Hurricane Sandy, Cape May, N.J., had the foresight to restore its dunes and wetlands to provide storm protection and wildlife habitat. When Sandy struck, Cape May was spared the damage that neighboring towns suffered.”

Since the president is rightly calling for infrastructure investment, which makes sense at a time of high unemployment, added Tercek, “he should emphasize natural infrastructure as well. Federal programs like the Land and Water Conservation Fund and the Farm Bill can be expanded to make communities more resilient; changes in the tax code and other federal rules can incentivize private investment.”

So, sure, we need to be realistic about our near-term dependence on fossil fuels, or we will pay a big price. But we also need to be realistic about the need to keep building a bridge to a different energy future, or we will pay an even bigger price. Let’s make sure we don’t forget the latter in the Keystone debate.

Tommy, he’s going to approve that ghastly thing and nobody will give a shit about what environmentalists say.  Business as usual, since it lines the pockets of the MOTU.  Here’s Mr. Nocera:

Once upon a time, in a very different age, an Internet start-up called eToys went public. The date was May 20, 1999. The offering price had been set at $20, but investors in that frenzied era were so eager for eToys shares that the stock immediately shot up to $78. It ended its first day of trading at $77 a share.

The eToys initial public offering raised $164 million, a nice chunk of change for a two-year-old company. But it wasn’t even close to the $600 million-plus the company could have raised if the offering price had more realistically reflected the intense demand for eToys shares. The firm that underwrote the I.P.O. — and effectively set the $20 price — was Goldman Sachs.

After the Internet bubble burst — and eToys, starved for cash, went out of business — lawyers representing eToys’ creditors’ committee sued Goldman Sachs over that I.P.O. That lawsuit, believe it or not, is still going on. Indeed, it has taken on an importance that transcends the rise and fall of one small company during the first Internet craze.

The plaintiffs charge that Goldman Sachs had a fiduciary duty to maximize eToys’ take from the I.P.O. Instead, Goldman purposely set an artificially low price, so that its real clients, the institutional investors clamoring for the stock, could pocket that first-day run-up. According to the suit, Goldman then demanded that some of those easy profits be kicked back to the firm. Part of their evidence for the calculated underpricing of eToys, according to the plaintiffs’ complaint, was that Lawton Fitt, the Goldman executive who headed the underwriting team and was thus best positioned to gauge the market demand, actually made a bet with several of her colleagues that the price would hit $80 at the opening. (Through a Goldman Sachs spokesman, Fitt declined to comment. Goldman denies that it did anything wrong, about which more shortly.)

On some level, this argument — between those who believe companies are routinely sold down the river by their underwriters and those who insist that underwriting requires a complex balancing of the interests of both company and investors — has been going on ever since. Just a couple of years ago when the social media company LinkedIn went public and the stock quickly doubled, I wrote that the company had been scammed by its underwriters, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch unit. Money that rightly belonged to the company had instead gone to investment clients, I argued. A number of market observers responded by saying that I lacked a nuanced understanding of the complicated dynamics between companies, investors and underwriters.

Recently, however, I came across a cache of documents related to the eToys litigation that seem to tilt the argument in favor of the skeptics. Although the documents were supposed to be under seal, they were sitting in a file at the New York County Clerk’s Office, available to anyone who asked for them. I asked.

What they clearly show is that Goldman knew exactly what it was doing when it underpriced the eToys I.P.O. — and many others as well. (According to the lawsuit, Fitt led around a dozen underwritings in 1999, several of which were also woefully underpriced.) Taken in their entirety, the e-mails and internal reports show Goldman took advantage of naïve Internet start-ups to fatten its own bottom line.

Goldman carefully calculated the first-day gains reaped by its investment clients. After compiling the numbers in something it called a trade-up report, the Goldman sales force would call on clients, show them how much they had made from Goldman’s I.P.O.’s and demand that they reward Goldman with increased business. It was not unusual for Goldman sales representatives to ask that 30 to 50 percent of the first-day profits be returned to Goldman via commissions, according to depositions given in the case.

“What specifically do you recall” your Goldman broker wanting, asked one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers in a deposition with an investor named Andrew Hale Siegal.

“You made $50,000, how about $25,000 back?” came the answer. “You know, you made a killing.”

“Did he ever explain to you how to pay it back?” asked the lawyer.

“No. But we both knew that I knew how,” Siegal replied. “I mean, commissions, however I could generate.”

In one e-mail, a Goldman Sachs executive named David Dechman described hot I.P.O. deals as “a currency.” He asked, “How should we allocate between the various Firm businesses to maximize value to GS?”

Robert Steel, who was then co-head of equity sales at Goldman Sachs and is now one of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s top deputies, sent an e-mail to one of the firm’s biggest clients, Putnam Investments in Boston, in which he wrote bluntly, “It is my view that we should be rewarded with additional secondary business for offering access to capital market product” — like hot I.P.O.’s.

Did the clients knuckle under?

Are you kidding?

According to data compiled by the plaintiffs, Capstar Holding, an investing client, made a series of pointless trades solely for Goldman’s benefit. The lawsuit quotes an investment manager at the firm, Christopher Rule, as saying that 70 percent of his trading activity in May 1999 was done to generate commissions for Goldman, “pursuant to an ‘understanding’ with his Goldman broker that he needed to generate money for Goldman in order to receive I.P.O.’s.”

On Thursday, Goldman Sachs issued a statement that read, in part, “We did not engage in quid pro quos for allocation of hot I.P.O.’s, and none of the decade-old documents distorted by the eToys litigants suggests otherwise.” I have posted a variety of the documents on The Times’s Web site, so that readers can decide for themselves what story they really tell.

Goldman supporters also point out that it was hardly the only underwriter to allocate shares of Internet public offerings based on what it would get in return. In the aftermath of the bubble, Goldman wound up paying fines to the Securities and Exchange Commission for I.P.O. excesses. But so did a lot of other firms. None of the government’s allegations, by the way, were related to the kind of practices alleged in the eToys lawsuit. As for the litigation itself, Goldman has argued that, contrary to popular belief, underwriters do not have a fiduciary duty to the companies they are underwriting. In recent years, this argument has held sway in the New York court system, although it has yet to be argued before the Court of Appeals.

Goldman also pointed me to an e-mail Lawton Fitt wrote the day before the I.P.O., hoping to prevent firms that “are not long-term investors/aftermarket buyers” from getting too large an allocation. Even so, that e-mail made it clear that the “flippers” who didn’t care about eToys were still going to get around 20 percent of the allocation. The e-mail isn’t quite the ringing defense that Goldman makes it out to be.

What is undeniably true, of course, is that the documents are old. Some will dismiss them as relics of another era. But I continue to believe that the mind-set created by the I.P.O. madness of the late 1990s never really went away. To this day, an I.P.O. with a big first-day jump is considered a success, even though the company is being short-shrifted. To this day, investors know that they are expected to find ways to reward the firms that allocate them hot I.P.O. shares. The only thing that is truly different today is that few on Wall Street are so foolish as to put such sentiments in an e-mail.

Earlier this week, I tracked down Toby Lenk, the founder and former chief executive of eToys. Back when the S.E.C. was investigating I.P.O. excesses, the government deposed him. During the deposition, he mostly defended Goldman Sachs, even though he had the uneasy feeling that eToys had been taken advantage of.

After the deposition, he recalled, the S.E.C. lawyers began to show him some Goldman Sachs documents. He saw that one big firm after another had been allocated shares — and had immediately flipped them, even though Goldman had promised that its clients would support the stock. “That’s when I thought, ‘We really got screwed,’” Lenk told me.

Although the experience still angered him, he now has 14 years’ worth of perspective. “Look at what has happened since then,” he said. “If you think eToys got screwed, what do you think happened to the country?”

“What Wall Street did to us in 1999 pales in comparison to what they did to the country in 2008,” he said.

But, of course, the Attorney General says that the Wall Street banks are too big to prosecute…  And now we get to Mr. Bruni:

There are many lessons a person might rightly or wrongly divine from the horse meat scare in Europe, including this: You should perhaps think twice before buying meatballs from a furniture purveyor, unless those meatballs are humongous and nonperishable, and double as ottomans.

I’m referring of course to the Swedish retail giant Ikea, whose repertory extends bafflingly from couches to canapés, and to its recent discovery that a food produced for sale in its European stores contained something in addition to the beef and pork meant to be there. This secret ingredient was the chromosomal kin of Seabiscuit, a rendered member of My Friend Flicka’s extended family, and it represented not just a culinary fraud but a cultural affront, at least to people who prefer not to eat what they can saddle. “War Horse,” after all, explores the equine potential for military heroism, not for pot roast.

But to focus on Ikea would be wrong, because traces of unadvertised, unauthorized horse meat were also found last month in beef sold by other European merchants, notably in Ireland and Britain. And to focus on horse meat would be wrong as well. At the same time that European Union officials were trying to figure out precisely how furtively horsey the Continent’s food supply had become, German officials announced an investigation into whether millions of eggs from as many as 150 German and 36 Dutch poultry farms had been sold (at higher prices) as organic, a designation connoting more humane treatment of the hens that lay them, when they were anything but.

There was concurrent fishiness in America. The conservation group Oceana announced the results of a two-year study of more than 1,200 samples of seafood from about 675 stores and restaurants in 20 states and the District of Columbia, and the survey determined that one-third of these samples had been peddled as something other than what they were. The tuna? Not necessarily tuna. The red snapper? Not so red, and maybe not any of the dozens of species of snapper, either. And this bait-and-switch was less common at run-of-the-mill grocery stores than at the rarefied perches where a customer’s expectations run highest and his or her wallet is most quickly drained: sushi counters.

But should we really be surprised by any of this? Where there’s money, there’s mischief, and food isn’t exempt. “The fish and horse meat are connected by one fundamental thing, which is pure greed,” said Eric Schlosser, the author of “Fast Food Nation” and one of the makers of the documentary “Food, Inc.”

And where there’s mass production, there are more opportunities for things to go wrong. When I discussed the horse meat scare with my Times colleague Michael Moss, the author of a new book on the snack industry titled “Salt Sugar Fat,” he observed that the global sourcing and sheer complexity of many food operations left companies with less control.

“That’s a huge issue going forward,” said Moss, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for reporting on contaminated meat. “A hamburger isn’t a hunk of one cow or one shoulder,” he said, noting that there are many principled exceptions. “In most places, it’s an amalgam of scraps from all over the world.” In fact Ikea’s meatballs were made by another Swedish firm, which in turn got some of its meat from Polish slaughterhouses.

We’ve been down this road, or versions of it, many times before. There was the outrage last year over so-called pink slime in ground beef.

And on a less squirm-inducing but arguably more fraudulent front, there are perennial media exposés about advertised calorie counts that bear scant relation to actual calorie counts, a phenomenon so extensively chronicled and widely suspected that a deli just blocks from me mounts an adverbial defense against customer skepticism. One of the breakfast items on its menu is a “truly fat-free muffin.”

Just last month, a short documentary on The Times’s Web site made clear that government efforts to get more merchants to post the number of calories in foods fail to account for one overarching problem: the inaccuracy of those postings. The documentary’s makers subjected five items from retailers in New York City to independent assessments, and all but one of those items had more calories than the number promised. The worst culprit was the item masquerading as the most healthful: a vegan, kosher sandwich made with tofu. It had more than double the 228 calories on the label.

That lie isn’t likely to cause you grave harm, at least not directly and not right away. (With enough unintended weight gain over enough time, there could indeed be trouble.) Likewise, there are experts who say that the concern with pink slime, a mush of leftover scraps less repellently known as “lean, finely textured beef,” is one of aesthetics and proper disclosure more than public health.

And apart from worries that certain veterinary drugs might enter the food chain through unauthorized, uninspected horse meat, that meat isn’t a hazard. It’s generally leaner than beef and eaten on purpose by many people in many countries. One omnivore’s horror is another’s hors d’oeuvre.

CONTEXT is everything. At the restaurant Noma in Copenhagen, the trailblazing and lavishly celebrated chef René Redzepi has been known to serve live ants. When I ate there nearly three years ago, he served me live shrimp. I managed to get down only one of them, and only after persuading myself that doing so was an act of honesty and proper responsibility: instead of having someone else kill my dinner out of view, I was administering the last rites myself, with my teeth. Wriggle, wriggle, chomp, chomp.

Our food rituals often lack rhyme and reason, but we want at least to know that we’re getting what we bargained for. We want assent.

We’re spooked by the horse meat story, disturbed by the fish tale and riveted by other instances of false food advertising because they remind us of a truth we try hard to forget. Every time we eat something that we haven’t grown and reaped and cooked ourselves — which means, for most of us, every time we eat — we’re taking a leap of faith: that it was protected from contamination; that it was inspected properly; that the cook didn’t mix in something objectionable; that the waiter didn’t drop it on the floor. We’re in a position of both extraordinary vulnerability and extreme trust.

And while we can ratchet up our vigilance, that goes only so far. We can be local. We can be seasonal. We can be sustainable and organic and buy our pork somewhere other than where we buy our throw pillows. But we can never be entirely sure.