Dowd and Friedman

In “A Tale of Three Women” MoDo ponders iconic items from three 20th-century women: mouse ears, a bright flowered shift and a handbag.  It appears that the Moustache of Wisdom haz a sad.  In “The Arab Quarter Century” he says the Arab Spring now seems more akin to the Thirty Years’ War than the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Here’s MoDo:

One got famous wearing mouse ears. One got famous wearing brightly colored shifts. And one got famous wearing down the opposition while carrying a handbag.

The trio of famous deaths this week seems incongruous. Yet these spirited women — two quintessential Americans known by their first names and one quintessential Brit known by her nickname — were all vivid emblems of their time.

Three very different worlds are conjured up when you think about Annette Funicello, Lilly Pulitzer and Margaret Thatcher.

As a tot, I spent every afternoon in my Mickey Mouse Club ears and underwear, clutching a red patent purse full of Milky Ways, glued to the television watching Annette and company. For my older brother and other boys on the brink of their teens, the blossoming Annette sparked the first frisson of hormones. The comely daughter of an auto mechanic, she grew up in the San Fernando Valley and came across as the unpretentious Italian girl-next-door who might actually be your friend, or date.

She was so shy she asked Walt Disney if she should see a shrink; he said no, that she might cure herself of the very quality that people loved.

Even later, donning two-piece bathing suits in her goofy beach party movies with Frankie Avalon, she seemed as innocent as Sally Field in her flying nun outfit. Mr. Disney, as she always called the man who discovered her at 12 in “Swan Lake” at the Burbank Starlite Bowl, implored her to cover her navel.

Annette was the avatar for carefree childhood and carefree summer. Maybe that’s why it was such a shock when she revealed in 1992 that she had M.S. The merry Mouseketeer and mother of three handled that merciless illness with grace, becoming the face of M.S., founding a fund to benefit research and serving as an ambassador for the Multiple Sclerosis Society. Years after using a walker to accept her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1993, Funicello lost the ability to walk or speak. But not before she shared how proud she was that M.S. sufferers had told her that because she went public, they were less embarrassed to go out with canes and wheelchairs.

“Like Cinderella, I believe a dream is a wish your heart makes,” she said, sweet-tempered even as the disease ravaged her. “I’ve had a dream life.”

Pulitzer, another ambassador of fun, fashioned her dream life by branding a sweet slice of the American dream. Like her fellow Palm Beach resident Jimmy Buffett, she cleverly patented Paradise Found. She made citrus-bright resort wear that was, as Vanity Fair put it, “shorthand for WASP wealth at play.” The clothes had down-to-earth snob appeal, as the magazine said in 2003, noting that Jackie Kennedy and her maid both wore Lillys.

Just as Annette did not give in to her disease, Lilly, the daughter of a Standard Oil heiress, did not give in to the dictates of her stuffy old-money background. After she married a Pulitzer heir and moved to Palm Beach, she wandered the town barefoot, threw wild parties, had three kids and suffered a nervous breakdown. A doctor told her, “You’re not happy because you’re not doing anything.”

Unconcerned about making a spectacle of herself, she opened a stand on Worth Avenue to sell the fruit from her husband’s orchards; then, she and a partner, wearing cheap, brightly patterned sheaths to hide fruit stains, had a eureka moment. Style is more than fashion, she said, and being happy “never goes out of style.”

While Lilly was known as “the ultimate party girl,” Maggie was “the ultimate conservative pinup.”

Margaret Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter and mother of modern conservatism, had her faults, heaven knows. The New Yorker’s John Cassidy called her a combination of Ronald Reagan, Ayn Rand and Dr. Strangelove. François Mitterrand said she had the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.

The Iron Lady could be harsh, but she was that rarest of creatures: a female leader who stayed womanly yet transcended gender. She “handbagged” opponents and offending underlings. She handled pols in the global boys’ club deftly — as little boys, when they needed it, or as swains, when she needed it. (A national security aide confirmed to me once that Reagan had a “sneaker” for her.)

I was in Aspen in 1990 when she told President Bush not to go “wobbly” on Saddam, blithely drilling down on the most sensitive part of the Bush psyche, the fear of being labeled a wimp.

My favorite Thatcher moment came while covering a Group of 7 meeting in Paris in 1989. President Mitterrand had given her bad placement twice compared with other world leaders: once at the opera and once on the reviewing stand for a parade marking the bicentennial of the French Revolution, held where King Louis XVI was guillotined. Also, Michel Rocard, the Socialist French prime minister, chastised her for “social cruelty.”

So as Maggie left Paris, she offered a pointed message about the excesses of the French Revolution, slyly presenting Mitterrand a book bound in red leather: “A Tale of Two Cities.”

Of course Dickens never, ever said anything less than completely flattering about his own country…  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

I guess it’s official now: The term “Arab Spring” has to be retired. There is nothing springlike going on. The broader, but still vaguely hopeful, “Arab Awakening” also no longer seems valid, given all that has been awakened. And so the strategist Anthony Cordesman is probably right when he argues: It’s best we now speak of the “Arab Decade” or the “Arab Quarter Century” — a long period of intrastate and intraregional instability, in which a struggle for both the future of Islam and the future of the individual Arab nations blend together into a “clash within a civilization.” The ending: TBD.

When the Arab Spring first emerged, the easy analogy was the fall of the Berlin Wall. It appears that the right analogy is a different central European event — the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century — an awful of mix of religious and political conflict, which eventually produced a new state order.

Some will say: “I told you so. You never should have hoped for this Arab Spring.” Nonsense. The corrupt autocracies that gave us the previous 50 years of “stability” were just slow-motion disasters. Read the U.N.’s 2002 Arab Human Development Report about what deficits of freedom, women’s empowerment and knowledge did to Arab peoples over the last 50 years. Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and Syria are not falling apart today because their leaders were toppled. Their leaders were toppled because for too many years they failed too many of their people. Half the women in Egypt still can’t read. That’s what the stability of the last 50 years bought.

Also, “we” did not unleash the Arab Spring, and “we” could not have stopped it. These uprisings began with fearless, authentic quests for dignity by Arab youths, seeking the tools and freedom to realize their full potential in a world where they could see how everyone else was living. But no sooner did they blow the lids off their societies, seeking governments grounded in real citizenship, than they found themselves competing with other aspirations set loose — aspirations to be more Islamist, more sectarian or to restore the status quo ante.

Still, two things surprise me. The first is how incompetent the Muslim Brotherhood has been. In Egypt, the Brotherhood has presided over an economic death spiral and a judiciary caught up in idiocies like investigating the comedian Bassem Youssef, Egypt’s Jon Stewart, for allegedly insulting President Mohamed Morsi. (See Stewart’s perfect takedown of Morsi.) Every time the Brotherhood had a choice of acting in an inclusive way or seizing more power, it seized more power, depriving it now of the broad base needed to make necessary but painful economic reforms.

The second surprise? How weak the democratic opposition has been. The tragedy of the Arab center-left is a complicated story, notes Marc Lynch, a Middle East expert at George Washington University and the author of “The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East.” Many of the more secular, more pro-Western Egyptian political elites who could lead new center-left parties, he said, had been “co-opted by the old regime” for its own semiofficial parties and therefore “were widely discredited in the eyes of the public.” That left youngsters who had never organized a party, or a grab bag of expatriates, former regime officials, Nasserites and liberal Islamists, whose only shared idea was that the old regime must go.

Since taking power in Egypt, “the Brotherhood has presided over economic failure and political collapse,” said Lynch. “They have lost the center, they are feuding with the Salafists, and they are now down to their core 25 percent of support. There is no way they should win a fair election, which is why the opposition should be running in — not boycotting — the next parliamentary elections.” The old line that you have to wait on elections until a moderate civil society can be built is a proven failure. “You can’t teach someone to be a great basketball player by showing them videos,” he said. “They have to play — and the opposition will not become effective until they compete and lose and win again.”

The old sources of stability that held this region together are gone. No iron-fisted outside powers want to occupy these countries anymore, because all you win today is a bill. No iron-fisted dictators can control these countries anymore, because their people have lost their fear. The first elected governments — led by the Muslim Brotherhood — have the wrong ideas. More Islam is not the answer. More of the Arab Human Development Report is the answer. But the democratic opposition youths don’t yet have leaders to galvanize their people around that vision.

Given all this, America’s least bad option is to use its economic clout to insist on democratic constitutional rules, regular elections and political openness, and to do all it can to encourage moderate opposition leaders to run for office. We should support anyone who wants to implement the Arab Human Development Report and oppose anyone who doesn’t. That is the only way these societies can give birth to their only hope: a new generation of decent leaders who can ensure that this “Arab Quarter Century” ends better than it began.

Well, at least Tommy’s not banging on the war drums.

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?

Dowd and Friedman

In “Happily Never After?” MoDo says an unmodern court debates a modern issue, all of which has left a friend completely exhausted. He shares his perspective.  The Moustache of Wisdom has a question in “My Little (Global) School:”  Ever wonder how your kid’s school compares with one in China? Now you can find out.  Here’s MoDo:

I’m worried about the Supreme Court.

I’m worried about how the justices can properly debate same-sex marriage when some don’t even seem to realize that most Americans use the word “gay” now instead of “homosexual”; when Chief Justice John Roberts thinks gays are merely concerned with marriage as a desirable “label,” and when Justice Samuel Alito compares gay marriage to cellphones.

The Nine are back there in their Miss Havisham lairs mulling, disconcertingly disconnected. In his zeal to scare people about the “possible deleterious effect” of gay parents adopting, Justice Antonin Scalia did not seem fully cognizant that gays and lesbians can have their own biological children.

Max Mutchnick, who created and wrote “Will & Grace” with David Kohan, is worried as well. His landmark show came up as a cultural marker during the court proceedings challenging Prop 8. When I was in California covering that trial in 2010, I spent time in Los Angeles with Max, his husband, Erik Hyman, an entertainment lawyer, and their bewitching twin daughters born through a surrogate, Evan and Rose. (In an amazing biological feat, both men fertilized the eggs, so that one daughter looks like Erik and one like Max.)

Erik told me then that taking vows in front of a rabbi and their families (two weeks before Prop 8 passed) made him feel different. “Now that I’m actually married,” he said, “it drives me completely crazy when the other side talks about ‘the sanctity of marriage.’ I’m committed to my spouse. We’re faithful to each other. We’re raising twin girls together. It’s deeply offensive to hear someone say that what we’re doing is robbing them of the ‘sanctity’ of what they’re doing, as though my very existence is unholy.”

On Sunday, stealing a moment in the midst of taking Evan and Rose to a West Hollywood park and a stage version of “Beauty and the Beast” at the Pantages, Max e-mailed me about how discouraged he felt after last week’s arguments at the Supreme Court: “I’m like every other dad in this park: horn-rimmed glasses and baseball hat, New York Times folded in quarters, ignoring my kids dressed in Ralph Lauren Collection playing. But the difference is, every day I open the paper and read about the fact that I’m just kind of gross, according to a lot of people. It’s such an odd thing to live with. I’m so tired of it.”

I asked Max to elaborate. This is what he wrote:

•

One of my favorite episodes of “Will & Grace” was “Homo for the Holidays,” the story of Jack coming out to his mother. The gang finds out that Jack is not the “out and proud” poster child that he pretends to be, but, in fact, has been telling his mother that Grace was his ex-girlfriend. Will confronts his best friend about his lying and pointedly asks Jack, “Aren’t you tired yet?”

I believe if you’re a homosexual of a certain age or one born on the wrong block in this country, your first steps are inextricably fused with lying. It makes the journey of life much heavier. Like Jack, I eventually grew tired of lying and came out to everyone. Now, however, I find myself tired of telling the truth.

It’s tiring being a member of the last group in America subject to official discrimination. If the gay civil rights movement were a musical comedy, it might be titled “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Supreme Court.”

More and more people think it’s wrong to hate gays. The support for same-sex marriage now exceeds the opposition to it. According to Rick Santorum, that’s all because of “Will & Grace.” (Thanks, cutie. DVD sales are way up!) But, if the good guys are on my side, why do I feel so depleted? I live in a place where all men are created equal, but, for some reason, I am not afforded the same rights. Should my take-away be: I am not a man? It feels as though the Supreme Court is O.K. with that notion. This court is speaking some of the same language that was being used before Stonewall.

Justice Alito raised the question of whether or not it’s too soon to allow gay people to marry. Is it better to keep doing what’s wrong until people are good and ready to do what’s right? Scalia uses the word “homosexual” the way George Wallace used the word “Negro.” There’s a tone to it. It’s humiliating and hurtful. I don’t think I’m being overly sensitive, merely vigilant. I once had to be vigilant for fear that people would find out what I am. Now I have to be vigilant for fear that I will be discriminated against for what I am. Then, as now, it’s a defense against danger.

No wonder I’m tired. I’m committed to fighting this battle until the war is won. I owe it to my inner gay child and my daughters. As Dr. King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It’s the long part that’s kicking my butt.

Now here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

There was a time when middle-class parents in America could be — and were — content to know that their kids’ public schools were better than those in the next neighborhood over. As the world has shrunk, though, the next neighborhood over is now Shanghai or Helsinki. So, last August, I wrote a column quoting Andreas Schleicher — who runs the global exam that compares how 15-year-olds in public schools around the world do in applied reading, math and science skills — as saying imagine, in a few years, that you could sign on to a Web site and see how your school compares with a similar school anywhere in the world. And then you could take this information to your superintendent and ask: “Why are we not doing as well as schools in China or Finland?”

Well, that day has come, thanks to a successful pilot project involving 105 U.S. schools recently completed by Schleicher’s team at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which coordinates the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA test, and Jon Schnur’s team at America Achieves, which partnered with the O.E.C.D. Starting this fall, any high school in America will be able to benchmark itself against the world’s best schools, using a new tool that schools can register for at www.americaachieves.org. It is comparable to PISA and measures how well students can apply their mastery of reading, math and science to real world problems.

The pilot study was described in an America Achieves report entitled “Middle Class or Middle of the Pack?” that is being released Wednesday. The report compares U.S. middle-class students to their global peers of similar socioeconomic status on the 2009 PISA exams.

The bad news is that U.S. middle-class students are badly lagging their peers globally. “Many assume that poverty in America is pulling down the overall U.S. scores,” the report said, “but when you divide each nation into socioeconomic quarters, you can see that even America’s middle-class students are falling behind not only students of comparable advantage, but also more disadvantaged students in several other countries.”

American students in the second quarter of socioeconomic advantage — mostly higher middle class — were significantly outperformed by 24 countries in math and by 15 countries in science, the study found. In the third quarter of socioeconomic advantage — mostly lower middle class — U.S. students were significantly outperformed by peers in 31 countries or regions in math and 25 in science.

The good news, though, said Schnur, “is that, for the first time, we have documented that there are individual U.S. schools that are literally outperforming every country in the world.”

“BASIS Tucson North, a nonselective high school serving an economically modest middle-class student population in Arizona, outperformed the average of every country in the world in reading, math, and science,” the report said. “Three nonselective high schools in Fairfax, Va., outperformed the average of virtually every country in the world.” One of them, Woodson, outperformed every region in the world in reading, except Shanghai. But the pilot also exposed some self-deception. “One school, serving students similar to Woodson’s, lags behind 29 countries in math but received an A on its state’s accountability system based primarily on that state’s own test,” Schnur said.

Paul Bambrick-Santoyo is managing director of North Star Academies in Newark, an Uncommon Schools network of nine low-income charter schools that took part and cracked the world’s Top 10. “We have always had state tests and SATs,” he told me, “but we never had an international metric. This was a golden opportunity to see where we stand — if we have to prepare our kids to succeed not only in this country but in a global marketplace.” He said he was particularly motivated by the fact that Shanghai’s low-income kids “could outperform” most U.S. schools, because this gave his school a real international peer for a benchmark.

“We got 157 pages of feedback” from participating in the pilot, added Jack Dale, the superintendent of Fairfax County’s schools, which is so valuable because the PISA test exposes whether your high school students can apply their math, science and reading skills to 21st-century problems. “One of my principals said to me: ‘This is not your Virginia Standards of Learning Test.’ ”

So what’s the secret of the best-performing schools? It’s that there is no secret. The best schools, the study found, have strong fundamentals and cultures that believe anything is possible with any student: They “work hard to choose strong teachers with good content knowledge and dedication to continuous improvement.” They are “data-driven and transparent, not only around learning outcomes, but also around soft skills like completing work on time, resilience, perseverance — and punctuality.” And they promote “the active engagement of our parents and families.”

“If you look at all the data,” concluded Schnur, it’s clear that educational performance in the U.S. has not gone down. We’ve actually gotten a little better. The challenge is that changes in the world economy keep raising the bar for what our kids need to do to succeed. Our modest improvements are not keeping pace with this rising bar. Those who say we have failed are wrong. Those who say we are doing fine are wrong.” The truth is, America has world-beating K-12 schools. We just don’t have nearly enough.

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…

Dowd and Friedman

MoDo is back.  In “Courting Cowardice” she says the highest court in the land is bold at all the wrong moments of history.  In “Caution, Curves Ahead” The Moustache of Wisdom says there is a strong argument for everyone doing more to end the Syrian civil war, but satisfactory answers are needed first to some crucial questions.  Stunning.  For once he’s not banging on the war drum…  Here’s MoDo:

As the arguments unfurled in Tuesday’s case on same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court justices sounded more and more cranky.

Things were moving too fast for them.

How could the nine, cloistered behind velvety rose curtains, marble pillars and archaic customs, possibly assess the potential effects of gay marriage? They’re not psychics, after all.

“Same-sex marriage is very new,” Justice Samuel Alito whinged, noting that “it may turn out to be a good thing; it may turn out not to be a good thing.” If the standard is that marriage always has to be “a good thing,” would heterosexuals pass?

“But you want us to step in and render a decision,” Alito continued, “based on an assessment of the effects of this institution, which is newer than cellphones or the Internet? I mean, we do not have the ability to see the future.”

Swing Justice Anthony Kennedy grumbled about “uncharted waters,” and the fuddy-duddies seemed to be looking for excuses not to make a sweeping ruling. Their questions reflected a unanimous craven impulse: How do we get out of this? This court is plenty bold imposing bad decisions on the country, like anointing W. president or allowing unlimited money to flow covertly into campaigns. But given a chance to make a bold decision putting them on the right, and popular, side of history, they squirm.

“Same-sex couples have every other right,” Chief Justice John Roberts said, sounding inane for a big brain. “It’s just about the label in this case.” He continued, “If you tell a child that somebody has to be their friend, I suppose you can force the child to say, ‘This is my friend,’ but it changes the definition of what it means to be a friend.”

Donald Verrilli Jr., the U.S. solicitor general arguing on the side of same-sex marriage, told the justices, “There is a cost to waiting.” He recalled that the argument by opponents of interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia in 1967 was to delay because “the social science is still uncertain about how biracial children will fare in this world.”

The wisdom of the Warren court is reflected two miles away, where a biracial child is faring pretty well in his second term in the Oval Office.

The American Academy of Pediatrics last week announced its support for same-sex marriage, citing evidence that children of gays and lesbians do better when the couples marry. It may take another case, even another court, to legitimize same-sex marriage nationally, but the country has moved on. An ABC/Washington Post poll showed that 81 percent of Americans under 30 approve of gay marriage. Every time you blink, another lawmaker comes out of the closet on supporting the issue.

Charles Cooper, the lawyer for the proponents of Prop 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California, was tied in knots, failing to articulate any harm that could come from gay marriage and admitting that no other form of discrimination against gay people was justified. His argument, that marriage should be reserved for those who procreate, is ludicrous. Sonia Sotomayor was married and didn’t have kids. Clarence and Ginny Thomas did not have kids. Chief Justice Roberts’s two kids are adopted. Should their marriages have been banned? What about George and Martha Washington? They only procreated a country.

As Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out to Cooper, “Couples that aren’t gay but can’t have children get married all the time.”

Justice Elena Kagan wondered if Cooper thought couples over the age of 55 wanting to get married should be refused licenses. Straining to amuse, Justice Antonin Scalia chimed in: “I suppose we could have a questionnaire at the marriage desk when people come in to get the marriage — you know, ‘Are you fertile or are you not fertile?’ ”

Scalia didn’t elaborate on his comment in December at Princeton: “If we cannot have moral feeling against homosexuality, can we have it against murder?”

Cooper replied that a 55-year-old man would still be fertile, which was a non sequitur, given that he hails marriage as a bulwark against “irresponsible procreative conduct outside of marriage.”

He said that California should “hit the pause button” while “the experiment” of gay marriage matures. And he urged that we not refocus “the definition of marriage away from the raising of children and to the emotional needs and desires of adults.” Did he miss the last few Me Decades?

The fusty legal discussion inside was a vivid contrast with the lusty rally outside. There were some offensive signs directed at gays, but the vibrant crowd was overwhelmingly pro same-sex marriage. One woman summed it up nicely in a placard reading “Gays have the right to be as miserable as I make my husband.”

The only emotional moment in court was when Justice Kennedy brought up the possible “legal injury” to 40,000 children in California who live with same-sex parents. “They want their parents to have full recognition and full status,” he told Cooper. “The voice of those children is important in this case, don’t you think?”

While Justice Alito can’t see into the future, most Americans can. If this court doesn’t reject bigotry, history will reject this court.

Next up we have The Moustache of Wisdom:

There are mounting reports that the U.S. is getting more deeply involved in supporting the Syrian rebels trying to topple President Bashar al-Assad. There is a strong argument for everyone doing more to end the Syrian civil war before the Syrian state totally collapses and before its sectarian venom and refugees further destabilize Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan. But I hope that before President Obama gets more deeply involved in Syria, he gets satisfactory answers to the following questions:

The uprising against Assad began on March 15, 2011. His downfall has been predicted every month since. Why has he been able to hold on so long? Russian and Iranian military aid certainly help, but so does the support he still enjoys in key communities. Assad’s Alawite minority sect, which has been ruling since 1970 and constitutes 12 percent of Syria’s 22 million population, believes that either they rule or they die at the hands of the country’s Sunni Muslim majority (74 percent). The Syrian Christians, who are 10 percent, and some secular Sunni Muslims, particularly merchants, have also thrown in their lot with Assad, because they believe that either he rules or chaos does. None of them believe the rebels can or will build a stable, secular, multisectarian democracy in Assad’s wake. Why do we think they are wrong?

What are Qatar’s and Saudi Arabia’s goals? Are we to believe that these two archrival Wahhabi fundamentalist monarchies, the two main funders and arms suppliers of the Syrian uprising, are really both interested in creating a multisectarian, multiparty democracy in Syria, which they would not tolerate in their own countries?

Syria’s rebels fall into three groups: those democrats who want to be free to be citizens in a country where everyone has the same rights; those who want to be free to be more Islamic; and those who want to be free to be more sectarian — to see Syria’s Sunni majority oust the ruling Alawite minority. Last week, Moaz al-Khatib, the president of the main Syrian opposition coalition, resigned. Khatib had pushed for talks with the Syrian regime, which many rebels reject. Who can reassure the Syrian Alawites or Christians that they will have a place in a post-Assad Syria, if the rebels can’t get along with one another?

The Lebanese civil war burned for 14 years. It was finally settled with the 1989 Taif peace accord, based on the principle “no victor, no vanquished.” It allowed Lebanon’s Christian minority to be “overrepresented” to reassure them that their interests would be protected in a future Lebanon. Although the Christians made up probably 35 percent of the population, they were given a 50-50 split with Lebanese Muslims in the Parliament. One cannot expect Syria’s Sunni majority, tens of thousands of whom have been slaughtered by Assad, to reach out overnight to the Alawites. In time, though, can we expect the rebels to guarantee a future for Alawites and Christians in Syria, which is the only way the state can remain intact? Or are we fine with the Alawites carving out their own homeland in Syria, the Sunnis taking the rest and the Christians moving to Canada?

The lesson of Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia and Libya is that the sooner you re-establish security, the more people are ready to think and act like citizens rather than sects or tribes. After Assad falls, who will mediate between the communities and militias inside Syria to bring order? Do we really believe that a post-Assad Syria, which doesn’t seem to have a Nelson Mandela, will be able on its own to build a multisectarian government to rule the whole country without a well-armed, boots-on-the-ground international force, blessed by the U.N. or Arab League, to act as a referee? And who in the Milky Way Galaxy wants that job?

My bottom line: We know what kind of Syria we’d like to see emerge, and we have a good idea of the terrible costs of not achieving that and the war continuing. But I don’t see a consensus inside Syria — or even inside the opposition — for the kind of multisectarian, democratic Syria to which we aspire. In this kind of situation, there are three basic options: We and some global coalition can invade Syria, as we did Iraq, sit on the parties and forge the kind of Syria we want. But that hasn’t succeeded in Iraq yet, at huge cost, and there is zero support for that in America. Forget it. We can try to contain the conflict by hardening Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel, wait for the Syrian parties to get exhausted and then try to forge a cease-fire/power-sharing deal. Or we can let the war take its course with the certainty of more terrible killings, the likelihood of its spreading to neighboring states and the possibility of its leading to the fracturing of Syria into Sunni, Alawite and Kurdish mini-states.

I’m dubious that just arming “nice” rebels will produce the Syria we want; it could, though, drag us in in ways we might not want. But if someone can make the case that arming the secular-nationalist rebels increases the chances of forcing Assad and the Russians into a settlement, and defeating the Islamists rebels after Assad falls, I’m ready to listen.

This is the problem from hell. Sometimes the necessary and desirable are impossible, which is why I commend the president on his caution, up to now.

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.

Friedman, solo

MoDo is off.  Oh, dear sweet baby Jesus on a tricycle…  As we all know it’s the 10th anniversary of the debacle in Iraq.  The Moustache of Wisdom, the author of the Friedman Unit, takes note of Iraq again.  In “Democrats, Dragons or Drones?” he gurgles that Iraq might seem to have been the last place in the Middle East we should have tried to help establish a democracy, but it was the most important.  Lord God above, but invincible ignorance is a thing to behold…  Here he is:

On this 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, three things are clear. First, whatever happens in Iraq, we overpaid for it in lives and treasure and focus. Second, you can overpay for something decent and you can overpay for total junk. What exactly we overpaid for in Iraq is not yet clear and will be decided by Iraqis. Third, as much as we’d prefer to forget about Iraq, what happens there matters more than ever for the Middle East.

Given its history of brutal dictatorship, Iraq might seem to be the last place in the Middle East we should have tried to help give birth to a self-governing democracy. In fact, it was the most important. Just look at Syria and you’ll understand why. Iraq was made up of all the sects that populate the different Arab countries and have been held together over the last 50 years by iron-fisted dictators. If Iraqis could demonstrate that, once their dictator was removed, the constituent communities of Iraq (Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkmen, Christians) could forge their own social contract for living together peacefully — rather than being ruled brutally from the top down — then some kind of democratic future was possible throughout the Arab world.

That possibility is yet to be fulfilled. We toppled the dictator in Iraq. The people have done the same in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya and, soon, Syria, but the same questions hang over all of them: Can they produce stable, decent, representative governments? Can Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Christians — or secularists and Islamists — live together as citizens and share power? If so, democratic politics has a future in this region. If not, the future will be a Hobbesian nightmare, where the iron-fisted dictators are removed but are replaced by rival sects, gangs and tribes, making impossible the decent governance needed for human development for millions of Arabs.

Today there are no outsiders — no Ottomans, Europeans, Americans, Arab League or U.N. — who want to govern in the place of dictators and no dictators who can sustain their iron fists. So either the communities in these Arab states find a way to share power or the entire Arab world is going to become like one of those regions on medieval maps labeled: “Beware: Here Be Dragons.”

That is why the most important peace process in the Middle East today is the one needed between Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, Kurds, as well as Islamists and secularists. Despite our costly mistakes — and all of Iraq’s neighbors and Sunni jihadists trying to make Iraq fail (see Tuesday’s killings) — we eventually helped Iraqis write their own democratic Constitution to resolve their differences politically, if they want to. None of the other Arab transition states have either an external midwife or internal Nelson Mandela to do this. All are at the start of long, hard struggles.

Anyone interested in what is actually happening in Iraq today should read Roula Khalaf’s lengthy 10th-anniversary piece in Saturday’s Financial Times, which shows a country progressing and regressing at the same time. “Outside Baghdad University,” she wrote, “I sit in a minibus and chat with students. Alia, a 24-year-old studying for a master’s degree in biology, says young people are enjoying access to the Internet, to the dozens of satellite channels that have been set up in Iraq, and adds that, despite the political struggle between the elite, there is no sense of division between Sunni and Shia at the university. Yet she too is dissatisfied, her family always worried about her whereabouts. … ‘Freedom is important, but it doesn’t give me enough,’ she says. ‘Freedom should be about being able to do what you want, not just talk.’ ”

That student represents the hope for Iraq. I believe the real agent of change in postauthoritarian societies is something that takes 9 months and 21 years to develop. It’s called “a new generation,” one that thinks and acts differently from its parents’. The first mass democratic protests against Vladimir Putin began almost exactly 9 months and 21 years after the end of communism. Can Iraq know just enough political and sectarian stability so a new generation can grow up reading what it wants, traveling where it wants, voting for whom it wants, starting any business it wants and organizing politically as it wants — and, in the process, produce enough Iraqis who think of themselves as citizens willing and able to live in peace with those from other groups. Europe didn’t build democracy overnight; Iraq surely can’t.

“Iraqi society under Saddam has been traumatized, and the impact of 35 years of authoritarian rule will not dissipate quickly,” says Joseph Sassoon, a Baghdad-born professor at Georgetown University and the author of “Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime.”

It may take two generations for those young voices of Baghdad University to prevail. Or it may take much longer. Or it may never happen. Any honest look at Iraq today reveals seeds of civil society sprouting and poisonous sectarianism spreading. For their sake, for the sake of stability in the Arab world and for the sake of all who sacrificed so Iraqis could have an opportunity for decent governance, I hope the 20th anniversary is an occasion for a more positive judgment.

What a towering pile of shite.

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.

Friedman, Solo

MoDo is off today.  Let us pray that she isn’t on her way to Rome to cover the conclave…  In “Mr. Obama Goes to Israel” The Moustache of Wisdom puts forth a few questions the president might ask on his visit to Israel next week.  Here he is:

In case you haven’t heard, President Obama leaves for Israel next week. It is possible, though, that you haven’t heard because it is hard for me to recall a less-anticipated trip to Israel by an American president. But there is a message in that empty bottle: Little is expected from this trip — not only because little is possible, but because, from a narrow U.S. point of view, little is necessary. Quietly, with nobody announcing it, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has shifted from a necessity to a hobby for American diplomats. Like any hobby — building model airplanes or knitting sweaters — some days you work on it, some days you don’t. It depends on your mood, but it doesn’t usually matter when that sweater gets finished. Obama worked on this hobby early in his first term. He got stuck as both parties rebuffed him, and, therefore, he adopted, quite rationally in my view, an attitude of benign neglect. It was barely noticed.

The shift in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from necessity to hobby for the U.S. is driven by a number of structural changes, beginning with the end of the cold war. There was a time when it was truly feared that an Arab-Israeli war could trigger a wider superpower conflict. During the October 1973 war, President Nixon raised America’s military readiness to Defcon 3 to signal the Soviets to stay away. That is not likely to happen today, given the muted superpower conflict over the Middle East. Moreover, the discovery of massive amounts of oil and gas in the U.S., Canada and Mexico is making North America the new Saudi Arabia. So who needs the old one?

Of course, oil and gas are global commodities, and any disruption of flows from the Middle East would drive up prices. But though America still imports some oil from the Middle East, we will never again be threatened with gas lines by another Arab oil embargo sparked by anger over Palestine. For China and India, that is another matter. For them, the Middle East has gone from a hobby to a necessity. They are both hugely dependent on Middle East oil and gas. If anyone should be advancing Arab-Israeli (and Sunni-Shiite) peace diplomacy today it is the foreign ministers of India and China.

Writing in Foreign Policy magazine last week, Robin M. Mills, the head of consulting at Manaar Energy, noted that “according to preliminary figures reported this week, China has overtaken the United States as the world’s largest net oil importer.” Mills described this as a “shift as momentous as the U.S. eclipse of Britain’s Royal Navy or the American economy’s surpassing of the British economy in the late 19th century. … The United States is set to become the world’s biggest oil producer by 2017.”

At the same time, while the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict emotionally resonates across the Arab-Muslim world, and solving it is necessary for regional stability, it is clearly not sufficient. The most destabilizing conflict in the region is the civil war between Shiites and Sunnis that is rocking Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain and Yemen. While it would be a good thing to erect a Palestinian state at peace with Israel, the issue today is will there be anymore a Syrian state, a Libyan state and an Egyptian state.

Finally, while America’s need to forge Israeli-Palestinian peace has never been lower, the obstacles have never been higher: Israel has now implanted 300,000 settlers in the West Bank, and the Hamas rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza have seriously eroded the appetite of the Israeli silent majority to withdraw from the West Bank, since one puny rocket alone from there could close Israel’s international airport in Lod.

For all these reasons, Obama could be the first sitting American president to visit Israel as a tourist.

Good news for Israel, right? Wrong. While there may be fewer reasons for the U.S. to take risks to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there is still a powerful reason for Israel to do so. The status quo today may be tolerable for Israel, but it is not healthy. And more status quo means continued Israeli settlements in, and tacit annexation of, the West Bank. That’s why I think the most important thing Obama could do on his trip is to publicly and privately ask every Israeli official he meets these questions:

“Please tell me how your relentless settlement drive in the West Bank does not end up with Israel embedded there — forever ruling over 2.5 million Palestinians with a colonial-like administration that can only undermine Israel as a Jewish democracy and delegitimize Israel in the world community? I understand why Palestinian dysfunction and the Arab awakening make you wary, but still. Shouldn’t you be constantly testing and testing whether there is a Palestinian partner for a secure peace? After all, you have a huge interest in trying to midwife a decent West Bank Palestinian state that is modern, multireligious and pro-Western — a totally different model from the Muslim Brotherhood variants around you. Everyone is focused on me and what will I do. But, as a friend, I just want to know one thing: What is your long-term strategy? Do you even have one?”

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.