The Pasty Little Putz, Dowd, Friedman and Bruni

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

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

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

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

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

In which case, Fermi asked, Where is everybody?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time to get to work on that warp drive.

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

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

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

Unfortunately, he still has not learned how to govern.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now here’s Mr. Bruni:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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, Friedman, Kristof and Bruni

We’re spared MoDo this morning.  In “Divided by Abortion, United by Feminism” The Pasty Little Putz has decided to ‘splain to us all how the pro-life movement has learned to love equal opportunity.  He has yet to explain to any of us why the “pro life” movement is so entranced with guns and war, or can justify the murder of gynecologists performing a legal procedure.  “Pro life” my ass — forced birth is the honest name.  The Moustache of Wisdom tells us how “Revolution Hits the Universities” and that nothing has more potential to let us reimagine higher education than massive open online course, or MOOC, platforms.  Mr. Kristof, in “She’s (Rarely) the Boss,” says Sheryl Sandberg, the No. 2 executive at Facebook, offers a provocative take on why women are so underrepresented in leadership positions.  Mr. Bruni, in “Catholicism’s Curse,” says Roman Catholic leaders pay too much heed to insulating, justifying and protecting their priesthood and themselves.  Here’s The Putz:

In 1942, 71 years before last week’s Pentagon decision allowing women on the front lines of combat, the United States government established the Women’s Army Corps, with Athena as its insignia, and welcomed our country’s first female military recruits.

One of these pioneering women was a corporal from Big Spring, Tex., named Nellie Gray. After the war ended, Gray finished college (with an assist from the G.I. Bill) and moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked for decades at the State Department and the Department of Labor, earning a law degree at night from Georgetown University along the way. Then the social upheavals of the 1970s arrived, the soldier-turned-bureaucrat-turned-lawyer helped found one of America’s most enduring mass movements, establishing an annual protest march that continues to the present day.

That protest is the March for Life, the annual rally against Roe v. Wade.

When she organized the first march, in January 1974, it drew 20,000 anti-abortion marchers to the capital. On Friday, 40 years after Roe and six months after Gray’s death at the age of 88, the marchers numbered in the tens or even hundreds of thousands.

If she had chosen a different political cause, Gray’s trajectory — from soldier to working woman to professional activist — would be a case study for students of second-wave feminism. But the cause she did choose — and in whose service she issued strident attacks on “feminist abortionists” — has endured precisely because it has had a more complicated relationship to female advancement than some cultural stereotypes would suggest.

Those stereotypes link the anti-abortion cause to traditionalist ideas about gender roles — to the belief that a woman’s place is in the home, or at least that her primary identity should be maternal rather than professional. Writing in the Reagan era, the sociologist Kristin Luker argued that this dimension of the debate trumped the question of whether unborn human life has rights: “While on the surface it is the embryo’s fate that seems to be at stake, the abortion debate is actually about the meaning of women’s lives.”

This remains a dominant pro-choice understanding of the abortion conflict — and not without reason, since it finds vindication to this day in the idiot “mansplaining” of amateur gynecologists like Todd Akin.

But such an understanding was too simplistic when Nellie Gray founded the March for Life, and it’s grown steadily less compelling with time. As Jon Shields of Claremont McKenna College pointed out last year, pro-life sentiment has been steady over the last four decades even as opposition to women in the work force (or the military, or the White House) has largely collapsed. Most anti-abortion Americans today are also gender egalitarians: indeed, Shields notes, pro-life attitudes toward women’s professional advancement have converged so quickly with pro-choice attitudes that “the average moderately pro-life citizen is a stronger supporter of gender equality than even the typical strongly pro-choice citizen was in the early 1980s.” Among the younger generation, any “divide over women’s roles nearly disappears entirely.”

The pro-life cause has proved unexpectedly resilient, in other words, not because millions of Americans are nostalgists for a world of stricter gender norms, but because they have convinced themselves that the opportunities the feminist revolution won for women can be sustained without unrestricted access to abortion.

This conviction is crucial to understanding why opinion on abortion has been a persistent exception to the liberalizing cultural trends that have brought us gay marriage, medical marijuana and now women in combat. It helps explain, too, why public opinion on the issue doesn’t break down along the gendered lines that many liberals expect — why more women than men, for instance, told the latest Pew survey that abortion was “morally wrong” and (in smaller numbers) that Roe should be overturned.

It also has long-term implications for how the abortion debate plays out. The best way to argue with a Todd Akin is to dismiss him as a chauvinist, a creep and the enemy of a more enlightened future. But the best pro-choice rebuttal to the young idealists at the March for Life or the professional women who lead today’s anti-abortion groups isn’t that they’re too reactionary — it’s that they’re too utopian, too radical, too naïve.

This means that the abortion rights movement, once utopian in its own fashion, is now at its most effective when it speaks the language of necessary evils, warning Americans that while it might be pretty to think so, the equality they take for granted simply can’t be separated from a practice they find troubling.

For its part, if the pro-life movement wants not only to endure but to triumph, then it needs an answer to this argument. That means something more than just a defense of a universal right to life. It means a realist’s explanation of how, in policy and culture, the feminist revolution could be reformed without being repealed.

I defy The Putz to produce a feminist who is against the right of a woman to decide what should happen to her body.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

Lord knows there’s a lot of bad news in the world today to get you down, but there is one big thing happening that leaves me incredibly hopeful about the future, and that is the budding revolution in global online higher education. Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty — by providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve in the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world’s biggest problems. And nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive open online course, or MOOC, platforms that are being developed by the likes of Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and companies like Coursera and Udacity.

Last May I wrote about Coursera — co-founded by the Stanford computer scientists Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng — just after it opened. Two weeks ago, I went back out to Palo Alto to check in on them. When I visited last May, about 300,000 people were taking 38 courses taught by Stanford professors and a few other elite universities. Today, they have 2.4 million students, taking 214 courses from 33 universities, including eight international ones.

Anant Agarwal, the former director of M.I.T.’s artificial intelligence lab, is now president of edX, a nonprofit MOOC that M.I.T. and Harvard are jointly building. Agarwal told me that since May, some 155,000 students from around the world have taken edX’s first course: an M.I.T. intro class on circuits. “That is greater than the total number of M.I.T. alumni in its 150-year history,” he said.

Yes, only a small percentage complete all the work, and even they still tend to be from the middle and upper classes of their societies, but I am convinced that within five years these platforms will reach a much broader demographic. Imagine how this might change U.S. foreign aid. For relatively little money, the U.S. could rent space in an Egyptian village, install two dozen computers and high-speed satellite Internet access, hire a local teacher as a facilitator, and invite in any Egyptian who wanted to take online courses with the best professors in the world, subtitled in Arabic.

You just have to hear the stories told by the pioneers in this industry to appreciate its revolutionary potential. One of Koller’s favorites is about “Daniel,” a 17-year-old with autism who communicates mainly by computer. He took an online modern poetry class from Penn. He and his parents wrote that the combination of rigorous academic curriculum, which requires Daniel to stay on task, and the online learning system that does not strain his social skills, attention deficits or force him to look anyone in the eye, enable him to better manage his autism. Koller shared a letter from Daniel, in which he wrote: “Please tell Coursera and Penn my story. I am a 17-year-old boy emerging from autism. I can’t yet sit still in a classroom so [your course] was my first real course ever. During the course, I had to keep pace with the class, which is unheard-of in special ed. Now I know I can benefit from having to work hard and enjoy being in sync with the world.”

One member of the Coursera team who recently took a Coursera course on sustainability told me that it was so much more interesting than a similar course he had taken as an undergrad. The online course included students from all over the world, from different climates, incomes levels and geographies, and, as a result, “the discussions that happened in that course were so much more valuable and interesting than with people of similar geography and income level” in a typical American college.

Mitch Duneier, a Princeton sociology professor, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education in the fall about his experience teaching a class through Coursera: “A few months ago, just as the campus of Princeton University had grown nearly silent after commencement, 40,000 students from 113 countries arrived here via the Internet to take a free course in introductory sociology. … My opening discussion of C. Wright Mills’s classic 1959 book, ‘The Sociological Imagination,’ was a close reading of the text, in which I reviewed a key chapter line by line. I asked students to follow along in their own copies, as I do in the lecture hall. When I give this lecture on the Princeton campus, I usually receive a few penetrating questions. In this case, however, within a few hours of posting the online version, the course forums came alive with hundreds of comments and questions. Several days later there were thousands. … Within three weeks I had received more feedback on my sociological ideas than I had in a career of teaching, which significantly influenced each of my subsequent lectures and seminars.”

Agarwal of edX tells of a student in Cairo who was taking the circuits course and was having difficulty. In the class’s online forum, where students help each other with homework, he posted that he was dropping out. In response, other students in Cairo in the same class invited him to meet at a teahouse, where they offered to help him stay in the course. A 15-year-old student in Mongolia, who took the same class as part of a blended course and received a perfect score on the final exam, added Agarwal, is now applying to M.I.T. and the University of California, Berkeley.

As we look to the future of higher education, said the M.I.T. president, L. Rafael Reif, something that we now call a “degree” will be a concept “connected with bricks and mortar” — and traditional on-campus experiences that will increasingly leverage technology and the Internet to enhance classroom and laboratory work. Alongside that, though, said Reif, many universities will offer online courses to students anywhere in the world, in which they will earn “credentials” — certificates that testify that they have done the work and passed all the exams. The process of developing credible credentials that verify that the student has adequately mastered the subject — and did not cheat — and can be counted on by employers is still being perfected by all the MOOCs. But once it is, this phenomenon will really scale.

I can see a day soon where you’ll create your own college degree by taking the best online courses from the best professors from around the world — some computing from Stanford, some entrepreneurship from Wharton, some ethics from Brandeis, some literature from Edinburgh — paying only the nominal fee for the certificates of completion. It will change teaching, learning and the pathway to employment. “There is a new world unfolding,” said Reif, “and everyone will have to adapt.”

Next up is Mr. Kristof, writing from Davos, Switzerland:

It’s the annual conclave of the presumed powerful, the World Economic Forum in Davos, with the wealthy flying in on private jets to discuss issues like global poverty. As always, it’s a sea of men. This year, female participation is 17 percent.

Perhaps that’s not surprising, considering that global business and political leaders are overwhelmingly male. In America, only 17 percent of American Fortune 500 board seats are held by women, a mere 3 percent of board chairs are women — and women are barely represented in President Obama’s cabinet.

Indeed, I’m guessing that the average boardroom doesn’t have much better gender equality than a team of cave hunters attacking a woolly mammoth 30,000 years ago.

So what gives? A provocative answer comes from Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, who has written a smart book due out in March that attributes the gender gap, in part, to chauvinism and corporate obstacles — but also, in part, to women who don’t aggressively pursue opportunities.

“We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in,” Sandberg writes in the book, called “Lean In.”

“We internalize the negative messages we get throughout our lives, the messages that say it’s wrong to be outspoken, aggressive, more powerful than men. We lower our own expectations of what we can achieve. We continue to do the majority of the housework and child care. We compromise our career goals to make room for partners and children who may not even exist yet.”

Sandberg and I discussed the issue on a panel here in Davos, and I think that there is something real and important in what she says. When I lecture at universities, the first questions are invariably asked by a man — even at a women’s college. When I point at someone in a crowd to ask a question, the women in the area almost always look at each other hesitantly — and any man in the vicinity jumps up and asks his question.

A McKinsey survey published in April found that 36 percent of male employees at major companies aspired to be top executives, compared with 18 percent of the women. A study of Carnegie Mellon M.B.A. graduates in 2003 found that 57 percent of the men, but only 7 percent of the women, tried to negotiate a higher initial salary offer.

Sandberg, one of the most prominent women in corporate America, is not known as a shrinking violet. She confesses that when she was in elementary school, she trained her younger brother and sister to follow her around, listen to her give speeches and periodically shout: “Right!”

Yet she acknowledges that she has harbored many insecurities, sometimes shedding tears at the office, as well as doubts about her juggling of work and family.

When she joined Facebook as its No. 2, she was initially willing to accept the first offer from Mark Zuckerberg, the founder. She writes that her husband and brother-in-law hounded her to demand more, so she did — and got a better deal.

“I am hoping that each woman will set her own goals and reach for them with gusto,” Sandberg writes. “And I am hoping that each man will do his part to support women in the workplace and in the home, also with gusto.”

Yet I wish that there could be two versions of Sandberg’s book. One marketed to young women would encourage them to be more assertive. One marketed to men (and women already in leadership) would emphasize the need for structural changes to accommodate women and families.

Is Sandberg blaming the victim? I don’t think so, but I also don’t want to relax the pressure on employers to do a much better job of recruiting and promoting women.

Nature and social mores together make motherhood more all-consuming than fatherhood, yet the modern job was built for a distracted father. That’s not great for dads and can be just about impossible for moms — at least those who don’t have great wealth or extraordinary spouses.

Sandberg famously leaves the office at 5:30 most days to be with her kids, but not many women (or men) would dare try that.

Some people believe that women are more nurturing bosses, or that they offer more support to women below them. I’m skeptical. Women can be jerks as much as men.

But we need more women in leadership positions for another reason: considerable evidence suggests that more diverse groups reach better decisions. Corporations should promote women not just out of fairness, but also because it helps them perform better. Lehman Brothers might still be around today if it were Lehman Brothers & Sisters.

So, yes, let’s encourage young women to “lean in,” but let’s also change the workplace so that when they do lean in and assert themselves, we’re directly behind them shouting: “Right!”

Last but not least, here’s Mr. Bruni:

“I have nothing against priests,” writes Garry Wills in his provocative new book, “Why Priests? A Failed Tradition,” and I’d like at the outset to say the same. During a career that has included no small number of formal interviews and informal conversations with them, I’ve met many I admire, men of genuine compassion and remarkable altruism, more dedicated to humanity than to any dogma or selective tradition.

But while I have nothing against priests, I have quite a lot against an institution that has done a disservice to them and to the parishioners in whose interests they should toil. I refer to the Roman Catholic Church, specifically to its modern incarnation and current leaders, who have tucked priests into a cosseted caste above the flock, wrapped them in mysticism and prioritized their protection and reputations over the needs and sometimes even the anguish of the people in the pews. I have a problem, in other words, with the church’s arrogance, a thread that runs through Wills’s book, to be published next month; through fresh revelations of how assiduously a cardinal in Los Angeles worked to cover up child sexual abuse; and through the church’s attempts to silence dissenters, including an outspoken clergyman in Ireland who was recently back in the news.

LET’S start with Los Angeles. Last week, as a result of lawsuits filed against the archdiocese of Los Angeles by hundreds of victims of sexual abuse by priests, internal church personnel files were made public. They showed that Cardinal Roger M. Mahony’s impulse, when confronted with priests who had molested children, was to hush it up and keep law enforcement officials at bay. While responses like this by Roman Catholic bishops and cardinals have been extensively chronicled and are no longer shocking, they remain infuriating. At one point Cardinal Mahony instructed a priest whom he’d dispatched to New Mexico for counseling not to return to California, lest he risk being criminally prosecuted. That sort of shielding of priests from accountability allowed them, in many cases across the United States, to continue their abusive behavior and claim more young victims.

Cardinal Mahony, who led the Los Angeles archdiocese from 1985 to 2011, released a statement last week in which he said that until 2006, when he began to meet with dozens of victims, he didn’t grasp “the full and lasting impact these horrible acts would have” on the children subjected to them. I find that assertion incredible and appalling. It takes no particular sophistication about matters of mental health to intuit that a child molested by an adult — in these cases, by an adult who is supposed to be a moral exemplar and tutor, even a conduit to the divine — would be grievously damaged. The failure to recognize that and to make sure that abusive priests’ access to children was eliminated, even if that meant trials and jail sentences, suggests a greater concern for the stature of clergymen than for the souls of children.

Church officials and defenders note that Cardinal Mahony’s gravest misdeeds occurred in the 1980s, before church leaders were properly educated about recidivism among pedophiles and before the dimensions of the child sexual abuse crisis in the church became clear. They point out that the church’s response improved over time. That’s true, but what hasn’t changed is the church’s hubris. This hubris abetted the crisis: the particular sway that abusers held over their victims and the special trust they received from those children’s parents were tied into the church’s presentation of priests as paragons.

And this hubris also survives the crisis, manifest in the way that the Vatican, a gilded enclave so far removed and so frequently out of step with the rest of the world, clamps down on Catholics who challenge its rituals and rules. Much of what these dissenters raise questions about — the all-male priesthood, for example, or the commitment to celibacy that priests are required to make — aren’t indisputable edicts from God. They’re inventions of the mortals who took charge of the faith.

And yet with imperious regularity, Vatican officials issue their relished condemnations. These officials are reliably riled by nuns, a favorite target of their wrath. And they’ve been none too pleased with an Irish priest, the Rev. Tony Flannery, 66, who was suspended from his ministry by the Vatican last year and informed, he recently said, that he could return to it on the condition that he publicly express his endorsement of a range of official positions that he had questioned, including the exclusion of women from the priesthood. Last Sunday he broke a long silence to say that the Vatican had threatened him with excommunication and to call its approach toward him “reminiscent of the Inquisition.”

Among the Vatican’s issues with him was his stated belief in a 2010 article that the priesthood, rather than originating with Jesus and a specially selected group of followers, was selfishly created later by a “privileged group within the community who had abrogated power and authority to themselves.”

That may sound like an extreme assertion, but the new book by Wills, a Pulitzer Prize winner who has written extensively about Christianity and the church, says that at the start, Christianity not only didn’t have priests but opposed them. The priesthood was a subsequent tweak, and the same goes for the all-male, celibate nature of the Roman Catholic clergy and the autocratic hierarchy that this clergy inhabits, an unresponsive government whose subjects — the laity — have limited say.

“It can’t admit to error, the church hierarchy,” Wills told me on the phone on Thursday. “Any challenge to their prerogative is, in their eyes, a challenge to God. You can’t be any more arrogant than that.”

“We Catholics were taught not only that we must have priests but that they must be the right kind of priests,” he writes in the book, which argues that priests aren’t ultimately necessary. “What we were supposed to accept is that all priesthoods are invalid ones except the Roman Catholic.”

That’s an awfully puffed-up position, and there’s a corresponding haughtiness in the fact that bishops can assign priests to parishes without any real obligation to get input or feedback from the parishioners those priests serve. This way of doing business in fact enabled church leaders to shuttle priests accused of molestation around, keeping them one step ahead of their crimes.

It has also helped to turn many Catholics away from the church, while prompting others to regard its leaders as ornamental and somewhat irrelevant distractions. They cherish the essence and beauty of their religion. They just can’t abide the arrogance of many of its appointed caretakers.

Dowd and Friedman

MoDo is having another hissy fit about Obama.  In “Takes One to Tango” she snarls that for Barry, it’s really, really lonely at the top.  The Moustache of Wisdom has sent in “Obama’s 1-2 Punch?” in which he says here’s hoping the president goes big in his plans for his second term.  Here’s MoDo’s tantrum:

President Standoffish doesn’t want to be seen as a stiff.

“Most people who know me know I’m a pretty friendly guy,” he protested at his White House press conference on Monday. “And I like a good party.”

Maybe. But the president always seems to be dancing alone. And that was the vibe of his swan-song press conference for Act One of his presidency.

His words were laced with an edge — churlish, chiding and self-pitying. He sardonically presented himself as Lonely Guy, shafted by the opposition, kicking around the White House on his own. Days before his second inauguration, he seemed to be intimating that the job he had fought so hard for and won against all odds was a bit of a chore, if not a bore.

When the man who once enraptured packed stadiums was asked by The Times’s Jackie Calmes about the criticism that his administration has been too insular, he bristled a tad.

He acknowledged, while conveying that he didn’t believe it, that he could “do a better job” on nurturing personal relationships with lawmakers. (Even if Republicans see him, as Politico’s Glenn Thrush wrote, as “a pedantic, hectoring fuss-budget.”)

“Now that my girls are getting older, they don’t want to spend that much time with me anyway,” he said, as reporters laughed, “so I’ll be probably calling around, looking for somebody to play cards with me or something, because I’m getting kind of lonely in this big house. So maybe a whole bunch of members of the House Republican caucus want to come over and socialize more.”

Some Democrats wish he would start a regular game in the Indian Treaty Room so he could work on his poker face. Others are ready for a Bridget Jones approach: Love the president the way he is. Time to go with the flow.

“He doesn’t reach out very well,” one told me. “People should get over it.”

It is striking how subdued the mood is as the president heads into his second inauguration party.

At his first one, the nation’s capital was suffused with passion and wonder and dreams, nearly two million hope-besotted faces beaming up at the new president, hoping he could save their shirts, shrieking with delight as W.’s helicopter flew away over the Capitol.

Now the thrill is dimmed, with a series of grinding, petty fights ahead. Certainly, there’s a sense among Democrats that they’re happy Obama is president; the race was close enough that they got a metallic taste of how bad the country would have been if that bunch of backward Republicans got in.

But the cost of W.’s misbegotten wars and his mishandling of the economy overwhelmed Obama’s first term. And Obama underwhelmed on traits everyone thought he’d excel at: negotiating, selling, charming, scaring, bully-pulpiting, mobilizing, dealing with Capitol Hill and, especially, communicating. It’s taken the White House four years to develop a coherent message: Pay your bills.

Washington’s mood is as gray as the weather, full of burning Republicans and yearning Democrats.

We’re facing default. Again.

We’re mired in partisan trash-talking. Still.

And despite the tragedy of the children riddled with bullets in Newtown, Conn., no one is expecting any consequential fixes to our absurdly lax gun laws.

Many top Democrats here feel distant from the White House. They like seeing him try to take it to the Republicans on money and, in the all-too-brief time he has left to get things done before he morphs into a lame duck, want him to follow through on guns and immigration, to say this is the right thing to do and this is what we got elected on and either get on board or get out of the way.

The president complained that even when he invites Republicans to a White House picnic and poses with their families, “it doesn’t prevent them from going onto the floor of the House and blasting me for being a big-spending Socialist.”

Steve Stockman, a Republican elected to the House from Texas, has barely started work, but he’s already threatening to start impeachment proceedings against the president if he takes executive action on gun safety measures.

A Greek chorus of historians and pols have been urging the president to spend more time schmoozing with Republican and Democratic lawmakers, as other presidents like Jefferson, Lincoln and L.B.J. did to get their way.

But Obama still resists the idea that personal relationships can be pivotal, noting that his “suspicion” is that the issues will be resolved only if Americans “push hard,” vote recalcitrant lawmakers out and “reward folks who are trying to find common ground.”

And it’s true that Republicans have snubbed the president. John Boehner blew off Obama’s invites for six state dinners and Mitch McConnell skipped all but one.

Unlike Chris Christie, Republicans here want to make sure that the president dances alone.

So Obama is supposed to pal around with the pack of lunatics in charge of the Republican party?  Really, MoDo, you need to get your meds adjusted.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

If election campaigns are supposed to be an exercise in coming to grips with our biggest problems, then the one we just went through was a dismal failure. Our only real solution — a strategy to reignite consistent growth so we can narrow our income gaps and lift the middle class — never got a serious airing. Instead, each side was focused on how to secure a bigger slice of a shrinking pie for its own base. This lousy campaign produced the worst of all outcomes: President Obama won on a platform that had little to do with our core problems and is only a small part of the solution — raising taxes on the wealthy — so he has little incentive to rethink his strategy. And the Republicans did not lose badly enough — they held the House — to have to fully rethink their strategy. It does not bode well.

In his book “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth,” the Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman argues that periods of economic growth have been essential to American political progress; periods of economic prosperity were periods of greater social, political and religious harmony and tolerance. On Sunday, The Times’s Annie Lowrey wrote a piece quoting Friedman who wondered aloud whether we’re not now entering a reverse cycle, “in which our absence of growth is delivering political paralysis, and the political paralysis preserves the absence of growth.”

I think he’s right and that the only way to break out of this deadly cycle is with extraordinary leadership. Republicans and Democrats would have to govern in just the opposite way they ran their campaigns — by offering bold plans that not only challenge the other’s base but their own and thereby mobilizes the center, a big majority, behind their agenda, to break the deadlock. If either party does that, not only will it win the day but the country will win as well.

What would that look like? If the Republican Party had a brain it would give up on its debt-ceiling gambit and announce instead that it wants to open negotiations immediately with President Obama on the basis of his own deficit commission, the Simpson-Bowles plan. That would at least make the G.O.P. a serious opposition party again — with a platform that might actually appeal outside its base and challenge the president in a healthy way. But the G.O.P. would have to embrace the tax reforms and spending cuts in Simpson-Bowles first. Fat chance. And that’s a pity.

As for Obama, if he really wants to lead, he will have to finally trust the American people with the truth. I’d love to see him use his Jan. 21 Inaugural Address and his Feb. 12 State of the Union Message as a one-two punch to do just that — offer a detailed, honest diagnosis and then a detailed, honest prescription.

On the diagnosis side, Obama needs to explain to Americans the world in which they’re now living. It’s a world in which the increasing velocity of globalization and the Information Technology revolution are reshaping every job, workplace and industry. As a result, the mantra that if you “just work hard and play by the rules” you should expect a middle-class lifestyle is no longer operable. Today you need to work harder and smarter, learn and re-learn faster and longer to be in the middle class. The high-wage, middle-skilled job is a thing of the past. Today’s high-wage or decent-wage jobs all require higher skills, passion or curiosity. Government’s job is to help provide citizens with as many lifelong learning opportunities as possible to hone such skills.

In the State of the Union, I’d love to see Obama lay out a detailed plan for tax reform, spending cuts and investments — to meet the real scale of our problem and spur economic growth. We’ll get much more bang for our buck by deciding now what we’re going to do in all three areas, and signaling markets that we are putting in place a truly balanced approach, but gradually phasing it in. If you tell investors and savers that we’re going to put our fiscal house in order with a credible plan, but one that is gradually phased in, all the money now sitting on the sidelines paralyzed by uncertainty will get off the sidelines and we’ll have a real stimulus.

As for investment, I’d love to see the president launch us on an aspirational journey. My choice would be to connect every home and business in America to the Internet at one gigabit per second, or about 200 times faster than our current national household average, in five years. In an age when mining big data will be a huge industry, when online lifelong learning will be a vital necessity, and when we can’t stimulate our way to prosperity but have to invent our way there, no project would be more relevant.

I still believe that America’s rich and the middle classes would pay more taxes and trim entitlements if they thought it was for a plan that was fair, would truly address our long-term fiscal imbalances and set America on a journey of renewal that would ensure our kids have a crack at the American dream. Then again, I may be wrong. Maybe my baby-boomer generation really does intend to eat it all and leave our kids a ticking debt bomb. If only we had a second-term president, unencumbered by ever having to run again, who was ready to test what really bold leadership might produce.

Man, The ‘Stache just can’t wait until granny’s eating Purina, can he?

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

In “The Obama Synthesis” The Pasty Little Putz says the nominations of Chuck Hagel and John Brennan, two men with Bush-era perspectives, tells us something about the president’s foreign policy.  MoDo says “We Offer More Thank Ankles, Gentlemen,” and that all the president’s men can’t figure out why all the president has is men.  The Moustache of Wisdom has consulted his dictionary.  In “Collaborate vs. Collaborate” he says that one word seems to have two different meanings on the two coasts.  He is to be somewhat congratulated, however, because in this column he doesn’t seem to use his usual “but both sides do it” argument.  Mr. Kristof has a question:  “Is Delhi So Different From Steubenville?”  He says India’s horrific rape case is symptomatic of a global problem, and Americans who view it with condescension should also look in the mirror.  Mr. Bruni has decided to be a scold.  All he sees are “Democrats Behaving Badly.”  He whines that between Harry Reid’s inflations and President Obama’s nominations, Democrats are playing a game of arrogance and needless errors.  In his third from the last paragraph he grudgingly notes that Republicans haven’t been perfect…  Here’s The Putz:

As both his critics and admirers argue, the nomination of Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense last week tells us something important about Barack Obama’s approach to foreign policy. But so does the man who was nominated alongside Hagel, to far less controversy and attention: John Brennan, now head of the White House’s counterterrorism efforts, and soon to be the director of the C.I.A.

Both men were intimately involved in foreign policy debates during George W. Bush’s administration, but had very different public profiles. As a C.I.A. official, Brennan publicly defended some of Bush’s most controversial counterterrorism policies, including the “rendition” of terror suspects for interrogation in foreign countries. As a senator, Hagel was one of the few prominent Republicans to (eventually) turn against the war in Iraq. Now it’s fitting that Obama has nominated them together, because his foreign policy has basically synthesized their respective Bush-era perspectives.

Like the once-hawkish Hagel, Obama has largely rejected Bush’s strategic vision of America as the agent of a sweeping transformation of the Middle East, and retreated from the military commitments that this revolutionary vision required. And with this retreat has come a willingness to make substantial cuts in the Pentagon’s budget — cuts that Hagel will be expected to oversee.

But the Brennan nomination crystallizes the ways in which Obama has also cemented and expanded the Bush approach to counterterrorism. Yes, waterboarding is no longer with us, but in its place we have a far-flung drone campaign — overseen and defended by Brennan — that deals death, even to American citizens, on the say-so of the president and a secret administration “nominations” process.

Meanwhile, the imprimatur of a liberal president means that other controversial Bush-era counterterror policies are more secure than ever. Just last month, for instance, while Congress was embroiled in furious partisan arguments over the fiscal cliff, the practice of warrantless wiretapping was reaffirmed with broad bipartisan support.

To the extent that it’s possible to define an “Obama Doctrine,” then, it’s basically the Hagel-Brennan two-step. Fewer boots on the ground, but lots of drones in the air. Assassination, yes; nation-building, no. An imperial presidency with a less-imperial global footprint.

This is a popular combination in a country that’s tired of war but still remembers 9/11 vividly. Indeed, Obama’s foreign policy has been an immense political success: he’s co-opted foreign policy realists, neutralized antiwar Democrats and isolated Republican hawks.

This success, in turn, has given him a freer hand to choose appointees who embody his worldview. The left objected, successfully, when Brennan was floated as a possibility for C.I.A. director after Obama’s 2008 victory, but the opposition is likely to be weaker this time around. Hagel’s hawkish opponents have a slightly better chance, mostly because his views on Iran and Israel are more dovish than the White House’s own stated positions. But the campaign against his nomination has often been more desperate than effective, offering tissue-thin charges of anti-Semitism and embarrassingly opportunistic criticisms of Hagel’s record on gay rights.

If Hagel does get through, it will be the clearest sign yet that Obama enjoys more trust — and with it, more latitude — on foreign policy than any Democrat since Harry Truman. And in many ways he’s earned it: his mix of caution and aggression has thus far avoided major military disasters (an underrated virtue in presidents), prevented major terror attacks and put an end to America’s most infamous foe.

But that’s a provisional judgment, contingent on events to come. The Obama way of statecraft has offered a plausible course correction after the debacles of the Bush era, but the ripples from many of his biggest choices — to leave Iraq outright, to surge and then withdraw in Afghanistan, to intervene more forcefully in Libya than in Syria — are still spreading, and the ultimate success of those policies is still very much in doubt. Likewise with his looming defense cuts, whose wisdom depends entirely on what actually is trimmed.

Foreign policy is always a balancing act, in which no ideological system can guarantee success, and no effective action is without cost. The recent careers of the two nominees illustrate this point. Hagel was absolutely right to decide that the Iraq war was a blunder, but he was dead wrong (as was Obama) to then assume that the 2007 surge — a salvage job, but a brave and necessary one — would only make the situation worse. The drone campaign that Brennan has overseen has undoubtedly weakened Al Qaeda. But it’s also killed innocents, fed anti-American sentiment and eroded the constraints on executive power in troubling ways.

These are not reasons to deny them the chance to serve this president in his second term. But they are reasons to ask them hard questions, and to look carefully for places where Obama’s post-Bush course correction may need to be corrected in its turn.

It does need to be corrected, Putzy.  Gitmo needs to be closed, drone strikes need to stop…  Now here’s MoDo:

President Obama ran promoting women’s issues.

But how about promoting some women?

With the old white boys’ club rearing its hoary head in the White House of the first black president, the historian Michael Beschloss recalled the days when the distaff was deemed biologically unsuited for the manly discourse of politics. He tweeted: “1/12/1915, U.S. House refused women voting rights. One Congressman: ‘Their ankles are beautiful … but they are not interested in the state.’ ”

Now comes a parade of women to plead the case for the value of female perspective in high office: Women reach across the aisle, seek consensus, verbalize and empathize more, manage and listen better. Women are more pragmatic, risk-averse and, unburdened by testosterone, less bellicose.

Unfortunately, these “truisms” haven’t held true with many of the top women I’ve covered in Washington.

Janet Reno was trigger-happy on Waco, and a tragic conflagration ensued. Hillary Clinton’s my-way-or-the-highway obduracy doomed her heath care initiative; she also voted to authorize the Iraq invasion without even reading the National Intelligence Estimate, and badly mismanaged her 2008 campaign. Condi Rice avidly sold W.’s bogus war in Iraq. One of Susan Rice’s most memorable moments was when she flipped the finger at Richard Holbrooke during a State Department meeting.

Maybe these women in the first wave to the top had to be more-macho-than-thou to succeed. And maybe women don’t always bring a completely different or superior skill set to the table. And maybe none of that matters.

We’re equal partners in life and governance now, and we merit equal representation, good traits and bad, warts and all.

It’s passing strange that Obama, carried to a second term by women, blacks and Latinos, chooses to give away the plummiest Cabinet and White House jobs to white dudes.

If there’s one thing white men have never had a problem with in this clubby, white marble enclave of Washington, it’s getting pulled up the ladder by other men. (New York magazine claims that of late, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has a better record of appointing top women than Obama does.)

Last week, The New York Times ran a startling photo, released by the White House, of the president in the Oval Office surrounded by 10 male advisers (nine white and one black). Valerie Jarrett was there, but was obscured by a white guy (though a bit of leg and “beautiful ankle” did show).

Obama has brought in a lot of women, including two he appointed to the Supreme Court, but it is more than an “optics” problem, to use the irritating cliché of the moment. Word from the White House is that the president himself is irritated, and demanding answers about the faces his staff is pushing forward. Unfortunately, he has only a bunch of white guys to offer an explanation of why the picture looks like a bunch of white guys.

Right from the start, the president who pledged “Change We Can Believe In” has been so cautious about change that there have been periodic eruptions from women and minorities.

Maybe Obama thinks he’s such a huge change for the nation to digest that everything else must look like the Eisenhower administration, with Michelle obligingly playing Laura Petrie. But it’s Barry tripping over the ottoman.

In more “He’s Like Ike” moments, the president spends his free time golfing with white male junior aides. The mood got sour early in the first term when senior female aides had a dinner to gripe directly to Obama about lack of access and getting elbowed out of big policy debates.

Some women around Obama who say that he never empowers women to take charge of anything are privately gratified at the latest kerfuffle, hoping it will shut down the West Wing man cave. It’s particularly galling because the president won re-election — and a record number of women ascended to Congress — on the strength of high-toned denunciations of the oldfangled Mitt Romney and the Republican kamikaze raid on women.

“We don’t have to order up some binders to find qualified, talented, driven young women” to excel in all fields, the president said on the trail, vowing to unfurl the future for “our daughters.”

It may be because the president knows what a matriarchal world he himself lives in that he assumes we understand that the most trusted people in his life have been female — his wife, his daughters, his mother, his grandmother, his mother-in-law, his closest aide, Valerie.

But this isn’t about how he feels, or what his comfort zone is, or who’s in his line of sight. It’s about what he projects to the world — not to mention to his own daughters.

Obama is an insular man who is not as dependent on his staff as some other presidents. With no particular vision for his staff, he surrounds himself with guys who then hire their guy friends.

Most people who work in the top tier of campaigns are men; most people who work for Obama now were on his campaigns; ergo, most people in his inner circle are men. Pretty soon, nobody’s thinking it through and going out of the way to reflect a world where daughters have the same opportunities as sons.

And then the avatars of modernity hit the front page of The Times, looking just as backward as the pasty, patriarchal Republicans they mocked.

Again with the “insular” slap at Obama.  As if she has an earthly clue about what he’s really like…  Now we have The Moustache of Wisdom:

col-lab-o-rate [k uh-lab- uh-reyt]

verb (used without object), col-lab-o-rat-ed, col-lab-o-rat-ing.

1. to work, one with another; cooperate, as on a literary work: They collaborated on a novel.

2. to cooperate, usually willingly, with an enemy nation, especially with an enemy occupying one’s country: He collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.

IT is often said that Britain and America are two countries divided by a common language. That is also true of Washington and Silicon Valley. The other day, I was interviewing Alan S. Cohen, an expert on networks who has been involved in several successful start-ups. At one point, Cohen began talking about the importance of “collaboration” both within and between firms in Silicon Valley. Then he stopped and said it’s interesting that in Silicon Valley “collaboration” is defined as something you do with another colleague or company to achieve greatness — something to be praised — as in: “They collaborated on that beautiful piece of software.” But in Congress “collaboration” means something very different today. It’s the second definition — collaboration is an act of treason — something you do when you cross over and vote with the other party. In Silicon Valley, great “collaborators” are prized; in Washington, they are hanged. Said Cohen, who was vice president at Nicira, a networking start-up that recently sold for $1.26 billion: “In Washington, when they say ‘collaborator’ they mean ‘traitor’; here they mean ‘colleague.’

It’s not the only reason, but it’s a big reason that Silicon Valley is thriving more than ever, finding more ways to solve bigger and bigger problems faster, and that Washington is only capable of producing 11th-hour, patched-together, Rube Goldberg compromises, with no due diligence, that produce only suboptimal outcomes to our biggest problems. In Washington today collaboration happens only to avert crises or to give out pork, not to build anything great. That is why if Congress were a start-up, the early-stage investors would have long ago been wiped out and the firm shuttered. Cause of death: an inability of the partners to collaborate. “People in Washington,” said Cohen, “forgot that they are developers: ‘I am on this committee. I have to fix this problem and write some software to do it,’ and that requires collaboration. They have forgotten their job and the customer.”

Don’t get me wrong, Silicon Valley is not some knitting circle where everyone happily shares their best ideas. It is the most competitive, dog-eat-dog, I-will-sue-you-if-you-even-think-about-infringing-my-patents innovation hub in the world. In that sense, it is, as politics is and should always be, a clash of ideas. What Silicon Valley is not, though, is only a clash of ideas.

Despite the heated competition, lots of collaboration still happens here for one main reason: to serve the customer the best product or service. One way is through new open-source innovation platforms like GitHub — a kind of “Wikipedia for programmers” — where hobbyists, start-ups and big firms share ideas in order to enlist more people (either within a firm in restricted ways or from the outside in a wide open manner) to help improve their software or Web sites.

Another way is through “co-opetition.” There are many examples here of companies trying to kill each other in one market but working together in another — to better serve customers. Microsoft Windows runs on Apple Macs because customers wanted it. When Apple Maps failed, Apple asked its users to download Google Maps. Finally, within firms, it is understood that to thrive in today’s market, solve the biggest problems and serve customers, you need to assemble the best minds from anywhere in the world.

“When you obsess about the customer, you end up defeating your competition as a byproduct,” said K.R. Sridhar, the founder of Bloom Energy, a fuel-cell company. “When you are just obsessed about the competition, you end up killing yourself” as a byproduct — “because you are not focused on the customer.”

The far-right lurch of the G.O.P.’s base has made this problem worse. When President Obama built his health care plan on Mitt Romney’s operating system in Massachusetts, Romney was so focused on coddling his base to beat Obama — rather than trying to improve Obama’s iteration of Romney’s own design to best serve all the customers — that Romney disowned his own software. What company would do that?

“Sure competition here is sharp-elbowed,” said Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn. “But no one can succeed by themselves. Apple today is totally focused on how it can better work with its [applications] developer community.” It cannot thrive without them. “The only way you can achieve something magnificent is by working with other people,” said Hoffman. “There is lots of co-opetition.” LinkedIn competes with headhunters and is used by headhunters.

With collaboration, one plus one can often turn out to be four, says Jeff Weiner, the C.E.O. of LinkedIn, adding: “I will always work with you — if I know we’ll get to four. You can’t build great products alone. And if everyone understood that you can’t build great government alone our country would be in a different place.”

Tommy, sweetie, the Teatards will not now, nor will they ever, “collaborate” with The Kenyan Usurper for the good of the country.  Now here’s Mr. Kristof:

In India, a 23-year-old student takes a bus home from a movie and is gang-raped and assaulted so viciously that she dies two weeks later.

In Liberia, in West Africa, an aid group called More Than Me rescues a 10-year-old orphan who has been trading oral sex for clean water to survive.

In Steubenville, Ohio, high school football players are accused of repeatedly raping an unconscious 16-year-old girl who was either drunk or rendered helpless by a date-rape drug and was apparently lugged like a sack of potatoes from party to party.

And in Washington, our members of Congress show their concern for sexual violence by failing to renew the Violence Against Women Act, a landmark law first passed in 1994 that has now expired.

Gender violence is one of the world’s most common human rights abuses. Women worldwide ages 15 through 44 are more likely to die or be maimed because of male violence than because of cancer, malaria, war and traffic accidents combined. The World Health Organization has found that domestic and sexual violence affects 30 to 60 percent of women in most countries.

In some places, rape is endemic: in South Africa, a survey found that 37 percent of men reported that they had raped a woman. In others, rape is institutionalized as sex trafficking. Everywhere, rape often puts the victim on trial: in one poll, 68 percent of Indian judges said that “provocative attire” amounts to “an invitation to rape.”

Americans watched the events after the Delhi gang rape with a whiff of condescension at the barbarity there, but domestic violence and sex trafficking remain a vast problem across the United States.

One obstacle is that violence against women tends to be invisible and thus not a priority. In Delhi, of 635 rape cases reported in the first 11 months of last year, only one ended in conviction. That creates an incentive for rapists to continue to rape, but in any case that reported number of rapes is delusional. They don’t include the systematized rape of sex trafficking. India has, by my reckoning, more women and girls trafficked into modern slavery than any country in the world. (China has more prostitutes, but they are more likely to sell sex by choice.)

On my last trip to India, I tagged along on a raid on a brothel in Kolkata, organized by the International Justice Mission. In my column at the time, I focused on a 15-year-old and a 10-year-old imprisoned in the brothel, and mentioned a 17-year-old only in passing because I didn’t know her story.

My assistant at The Times, Natalie Kitroeff, recently visited India and tracked down that young woman. It turns out that she had been trafficked as well — she was apparently drugged at a teahouse and woke up in the brothel. She said she was then forced to have sex with customers and beaten when she protested. She was never allowed outside and was never paid. What do you call what happened to those girls but slavery?

Yet prosecutors and the police often shrug — or worse. Dr. Shershah Syed, a former president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Pakistan, once told me: “When I treat a rape victim, I always advise her not to go to the police. Because if she does, the police might just rape her again.”

In the United States, the case in Steubenville has become controversial partly because of the brutishness that the young men have been accused of, but also because of concerns that the authorities protected the football team. Some people in both Delhi and Steubenville rushed to blame the victim, suggesting that she was at fault for taking a bus or going to a party. They need to think: What if that were me?

The United States could help change the way the world confronts these issues. On a remote crossing of the Nepal-India border, I once met an Indian police officer who said, a bit forlornly, that he was stationed there to look for terrorists and pirated movies. He wasn’t finding any, but India posted him there to show that it was serious about American concerns regarding terrorism and intellectual property. Meanwhile, that officer ignored the steady flow of teenage Nepali girls crossing in front of him on their way to Indian brothels, because modern slavery was not perceived as an American priority.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has done a superb job trying to put these issues on the global agenda, and I hope President Obama and Senator John Kerry will continue her efforts. But Congress has been pathetic. Not only did it fail to renew the Violence Against Women Act, but it has also stalled on the global version, the International Violence Against Women Act, which would name and shame foreign countries that tolerate gender violence.

Congress even failed to renew the landmark legislation against human trafficking, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. The obstacles were different in each case, but involved political polarization and paralysis. Can members of Congress not muster a stand on modern slavery?

(Hmm. I now understand better the results of a new survey from Public Policy Polling showing that Congress, with 9 percent approval, is less popular than cockroaches, traffic jams, lice or Genghis Khan.)

Skeptics fret that sexual violence is ingrained into us, making the problem hopeless. But just look at modern American history, for the rising status of women has led to substantial drops in rates of reported rape and domestic violence. Few people realize it, but Justice Department statistics suggest that the incidence of rape has fallen by three-quarters over the last four decades.

Likewise, the rate at which American women are assaulted by their domestic partners has fallen by more than half in the last two decades. That reflects a revolution in attitudes. Steven Pinker, in his book “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” notes that only half of Americans polled in 1987 said that it was always wrong for a man to beat his wife with a belt or a stick; a decade later, 86 percent said it was always wrong.

But the progress worldwide is far too slow. Let’s hope that India makes such violence a national priority. And maybe the rest of the world, especially our backward Congress, will appreciate that the problem isn’t just India’s but also our own.

Good luck getting Congress to do anything when it’s rife with people who think that there is a term like “legitimate rape.”  Now here’s Mr. Bruni, who haz a huge sad about bad manners:

For the textbook definition of not knowing enough to quit while you’re ahead, please turn your attention to Harry Reid, he of the scabrous tongue and rotten temper, a boxer in his youth and a pugilist to this day, throwing mud along with punches and invariably soiling himself.

Reid, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, couldn’t just stand back and relish the recent spectacle of House Republicans making callous fools of themselves by stalling aid to communities walloped by Hurricane Sandy. He wasn’t satisfied that these Republicans were vilified not only in the news media but also by some members of their own tribe, like Peter King and Chris Christie. No, he had to get into the ring himself, and his genius strategy once there was to pit one storm’s victims against another’s, to stage a bout between Atlantic City’s splintered boardwalks and Louisiana’s failed levees. What a titan of meteorological tact.

Noting that Congress had provided help after Hurricane Katrina more quickly and generously than after Sandy, Reid said: “The people of New Orleans and that area, they were hurt, but nothing in comparison to what happened to the people in New York and New Jersey. Almost one million people have lost their homes. One million people lost their homes. That is homes, that is not people in those homes.”

Let’s put aside, for the moment, his fleeting difficulty distinguishing a biped with a weak spot for reality TV from a wood, brick or maybe stucco structure in which several bipeds watch TV. Let’s focus instead on his math. The one million figure is easily more than twice the combined tally of domiciles not only destroyed but also damaged in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. It’s an invention. And if comparisons are to be made, consider this one: as a result of Katrina, 1,833 people died — more than nine times as many as died in connection with Sandy. Using the word “nothing” anywhere in the vicinity of Katrina defies both belief and decency, and Reid was indeed forced last week to apologize, his effort to shame his Republican foes having brought a full measure of shame to his own doorstep, yet again.

Why did he make the effort in the first place? Democrats came out of the 2012 elections looking good, and the country’s changing demographics suggest that they could come out of 2016 and beyond looking even better, especially if Republicans don’t accomplish a pretty thorough image overhaul. And that overhaul isn’t exactly proceeding at a breakneck pace. The perseverance of far-right obstructionists in the House stands in the way, leaving the party in grave trouble. If its foes were smart and humble, they’d do what a sports team with a big lead does. They’d play error-free ball.

Not Reid. And not President Obama, whose recent actions have been careless at best and cavalier at worst. There was the gratuitously provocative nomination of Chuck Hagel for defense secretary, followed by the gratuitously insulting invitation of Louie Giglio, a Georgia pastor, to give the inaugural benediction. That plan was abandoned after the revelation of Giglio’s past remarks that homosexuality offends God, that homosexuals yearn to take over society and that a conversion to heterosexuality is the only answer for them. Giglio would have been the second florid homophobe in a row to stand with Obama and a Bible in front of the Capitol — Rick Warren, in January 2009, was the first — and while it appears that this double bigotry whammy wasn’t the administration’s intent, it’s an example of vetting so epically sloppy that it gives an observer serious pause about the delicacy with which Obama and his allies, no longer worried about his re-election, are operating.

The pick of Hagel underscores that indelicacy. There’s a potent case to be made for his installation as secretary of defense, but there are potent cases for others, and it’s hard to believe that Obama couldn’t have found someone who shared his values and would further his agenda but wouldn’t be such a guaranteed lightning rod for his Jewish, LGBT and female supporters, all of whom played crucial roles in his November victory.

Regarding women, Hagel’s record on reproductive freedom is as conservative as his record on gay rights, and it included his support for a ban on abortions in military hospitals, even for servicewomen prepared to pay for the procedures themselves. What’s more, Obama rolled Hagel out in a cluster of other high-profile nominees (John Brennan, Jack Lew, John Kerry) sure to be noted for their gender uniformity and to rekindle questions about the predominantly male club of advisers and golf and basketball partners who have the president’s ear. The upset was predictable and avoidable.

It has been noted, rightly, that the president put two additional women on the Supreme Court and that his percentage of female appointees is as good as President Bill Clinton’s was. But given the march of time since then, and given the questions raised during his first term about how valued women in the administration felt, and given his drumbeat that he was a champion for women in a way Mitt Romney could never be, shouldn’t he be surpassing Clinton? Going out of his way? There’s a perverse streak of defiance in him, and as donors and even Democratic lawmakers have long complained, gratitude isn’t his strong suit.

While Hagel lurched toward his confirmation hearings and Giglio skittered away, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced that it was sending each of the 35 Republican freshmen in the House a “tea party membership card,” which spelled out their rights to put “ideology over solutions,” to be horrid to women, to coddle Big Oil and “to create and/or ignore any national crisis.” Thus did the Dems turn legitimate gripes into schoolyard taunts that were more likely to inflame G.O.P. freshmen than to bully them into bipartisanship. What, beyond the theater of the gesture, was the point of it?

Granted, Republicans had done their own adolescent taunting, calling Democrats lap dogs in the Nancy Pelosi obedience school. But Democrats pride and market themselves as the reasonable adults in the equation, and that’s part of their currency with many voters. Why fritter it away?

And why abide the overwrought antics of Reid? He once compared opponents of Obama’s health care reform to enemies of emancipation. He took valid questions about Romney’s low tax bill and spun them into the unsubstantiated claim that Romney hadn’t paid any taxes for an entire 10-year period. Then he said the burden was on Romney to prove the charge untrue. Good thing our criminal courts don’t work that way.

Just before and after the 2012 election, it looked as if Republicans might be successfully burying themselves. All Democrats had to do was hammer the nail in the coffin. But the way they’re behaving, they’ll raise the dead.

Brooks, Cohen and Krugman

Bobo is playing armchair psychologist again.  In “Beware Stubby Glasses” he says a weighty new book is an acknowledgement of the need for public policy to pay more attention to behavioral research. Just waiting on the politicians.  Mr. Cohen has a question in “One Life in One Place:”  What happens to an urban humanity estranged from solitude and silence?  In “Coins Against Crazies” Prof. Krugman looks at that $1 trillion coin and says hey, desperate times call for creative answers.  Here’s Bobo:

If you want to deter crime, it seems that you’d want to lengthen prison sentences so that criminals would face steeper costs for breaking the law. In fact, a mountain of research shows that increases in prison terms have done nothing to deter crime. Criminals, like the rest of us, aren’t much influenced by things they might have to experience far in the future.

If a police officer witnesses the death of his partner, it seems that you’d want to quickly send in a grief counselor. In fact, this sort of immediate counseling freezes and fortifies memories of the trauma, making the aftershocks more damaging.

If you want to get people to vote more, it seems you’d want to tell them what a problem low turnout is. In fact, if you want people to vote, tell them everybody else is already voting and they should join the club. Voting is mostly about social membership and personal expression.

These are three examples of policies and practices that are based on bad psychology. The list of examples could go on and fill this page. That’s because we spend trillions of dollars putting policies and practices into place, but most of these efforts are based on the crudest possible psychological guesswork.

Fortunately, people in the behavioral sciences are putting policies to the test. I know of groups at Duke and Penn that are applying behavioral research findings to policy issues. Eldar Shafir of Princeton has edited a weighty new book, “The Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy,” which is a master compendium of what we know.

One of the things we know is that seemingly trivial changes can have big effects. People who are presented with a wide variety of choices of, say, yogurt, will eat more than people who are presented with a small array of choices or no choice. People who were randomly given a short, wide 22-ounce glass, poured 88 percent more juice or soda into it than people who were offered a tall, narrow 22-ounce glass, but they believed they only poured in half as much as they actually did.

Sometimes the behavioral research leads us to completely change how we think about an issue. For example, many of our anti-discrimination policies focus on finding the bad apples who are explicitly prejudiced. In fact, the serious discrimination is implicit, subtle and nearly universal. Both blacks and whites subtly try to get a white partner when asked to team up to do an intellectually difficult task. In computer shooting simulations, both black and white participants were more likely to think black figures were armed. In emergency rooms, whites are pervasively given stronger painkillers than blacks or Hispanics. Clearly, we should spend more effort rigging situations to reduce universal, unconscious racism.

The research is also leading to new policy approaches. The most famous involve default settings. Roughly 98 percent of people take part in organ donor programs in European countries where you have to check a box to opt out. Only 10 percent or 20 percent take part in neighboring countries where you have to check a box to opt in.

In one clever program, dieters were told to phone in their weight to a nurse daily. Every day they called, they got an encouraging text and a lottery ticket, with a chance of winning a small amount. These dieters lost three times more weight than people who didn’t get tickets. Another ingenious program automatically diverts some money into your savings account every time you buy a state lottery ticket.

Prime Minister David Cameron’s government in Britain has gone furthest in implementing these sorts of programs. Personalized text messages were found to be six times more effective in getting people to pay fines than warning letters. If you tell people what percentage of their neighbors has already paid their taxes, you are more likely to get late filers to actually pay than if you nag them another way.

My problem with these efforts is that they are still so modest. What about the big problems? How do we get people to restrain government commitments now so that debt down the road won’t be so ruinous? How do we calculate the multiplier effects of tax cuts or spending increases among different subgroups of the population, or under different emotional conditions? How do we rig the context of budget negotiations so participants can actually come to a deal? How are people in different cultures likely to react to drone strikes? How do we structure sanctions against Iran to cause the greatest psychic humiliation?

These are the big questions, and most of our policies rely on crude folk psychology from a few politicians. But there’s hope. As Brian Wansink notes in Eldar Shafir’s volume, the 20th century saw great gains in sanitation and public health. The 21st century could be a great period for behavior change.

Now here’s Mr. Cohen, writing from Llangurig, Wales:

I came up to this small Welsh village the other day to celebrate one life lived in one place over 83 years at one with the land and with God — the kind of life that is dying out in a restless world.

The life belonged to Alun Jones, born in 1929, the youngest of seven children, on a farm in central Wales called Ystradolwyn. He never moved from there. He knew every inch of the dales and, it seemed, every one of his sheep. He loved the lambing season. London, a five-hour drive away, was a remote universe. He liked a bit of banter in his cheery voice. But, as his Presbyterian minister Jenny Garad put it at his funeral service, he believed above all that, “You got on with it.”

Jones died last week after his lungs, the source of that voice so often raised in joyous song, gave out. He was a neighbor of sorts. My father bought the next-door farm 40 years ago. His amazement at my wandering never abated. “Well, boyo,” he would say, and shake his head; and when once again after a couple of days I made the unwise decision to leave those dales, he would bid me “Tara” with a wave of his stick.

I was talking to his son Tony, who runs the farm now, a couple of days before the funeral service. We mused on Alun’s life and his loss. Then Tony brought the conversation to a close saying he had to finish building a fence up in the wood. “You got on with it.”

Urban livers wallow in emotion — about death among other things — because of a dearth of necessity. Cut off from natural patterns of life and death, they become sentimental. Reality shows take the place of the realities of life. You do not find heroes among the dales. The word would be considered indulgent. You do what has to be done.

A vast human experiment is under way: What happens to humanity when it is cut off from the anchors of rural life? As early as the 11th century a French cleric named Marbod noted that, “Town takes a man out of the truth of himself.”

One of the scariest things I have read recently was this: “Owing to rapid urbanization in the developing world, the volume of urban construction for housing, office space and transport services over the next 40 years could roughly equal the entire volume of such construction to date in world history.”

That sentence appeared in a study of the future published late last year by the U.S. National Intelligence Council. This spreading gridlocked concrete jungle will cater to the 60 percent of the world population (4.9 billion people of a projected 8.3 billion) who will be living in cities by 2030, up from about 50 percent today. In 1950, less than a third of humanity was urban.

The problems arising from this rapid transformation are usually framed in economic terms — water and energy supply, transportation challenges, housing. But the deeper question is moral.

Once most of humanity is estranged from nature, rootless, unfamiliar with the rhythms of the seasons and the cycle of passing and renewal, bound by material considerations alone, uncomfortable with solitude and silence and darkness, jostled by the crowd and the hum and the neon, the danger is that some essential ethical ballast and reference is lost.

The funeral was about essentials. It was held in an unadorned chapel. The minister related how Jones did not talk much about his faith but expressed it in the hymns he loved to sing. “Faith gave him joy in living and courage in dying,” she said.

She quoted from John, Chapter 10: “I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd gives his life for the sheep. But he that is a hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, sees the wolf coming, and leaves the sheep, and flees.”

The minister did not talk about a contemporary culture of hirelings — here was a faith that would never hector, that was not angry, that was intrinsic to community. An all-male choir raised their beautiful Welsh voices. The roof might have lifted off to the heavens.

Afterward, at the graveside, there was a last hymn: “In the sweet by and by, we shall meet on that beautiful shore.”

Back at Ystradolwyn, there was news: A January lamb! It never happens but had. Last year a ewe fell on her back and when that happens she cannot get up. The crows come and always go straight for the eyes. Why, nobody knows. The ewe usually dies, infected through her eyes.

Jones had put the ewe in with the rams for protection just in case she survived — and this one had. In fact she had not merely been kept safe but pestered by the rams. And here — in the form of a January lamb from a blinded ewe — was the fruit.

“Look after the stock and the stock will look after you,” Jones once told me. Now over in the sweet by and by, he would have liked this story of near-death and life.

Last but not least here’s Prof. Krugman:

So, have you heard the one about the trillion-dollar coin? It may sound like a joke. But if we aren’t ready to mint that coin or take some equivalent action, the joke will be on us — and a very sick joke it will be, too.

Let’s talk for a minute about the vile absurdity of the debt-ceiling confrontation.

Under the Constitution, fiscal decisions rest with Congress, which passes laws specifying tax rates and establishing spending programs. If the revenue brought in by those legally established tax rates falls short of the costs of those legally established programs, the Treasury Department normally borrows the difference.

Lately, revenue has fallen far short of spending, mainly because of the depressed state of the economy. If you don’t like this, there’s a simple remedy: demand that Congress raise taxes or cut back on spending. And if you’re frustrated by Congress’s failure to act, well, democracy means that you can’t always get what you want.

Where does the debt ceiling fit into all this? Actually, it doesn’t. Since Congress already determines revenue and spending, and hence the amount the Treasury needs to borrow, we shouldn’t need another vote empowering that borrowing. But for historical reasons any increase in federal debt must be approved by yet another vote. And now Republicans in the House are threatening to deny that approval unless President Obama makes major policy concessions.

It’s crucial to understand three things about this situation. First, raising the debt ceiling wouldn’t grant the president any new powers; every dollar he spent would still have to be approved by Congress. Second, if the debt ceiling isn’t raised, the president will be forced to break the law, one way or another; either he borrows funds in defiance of Congress, or he fails to spend money Congress has told him to spend.

Finally, just consider the vileness of that G.O.P. threat. If we were to hit the debt ceiling, the U.S. government would end up defaulting on many of its obligations. This would have disastrous effects on financial markets, the economy, and our standing in the world. Yet Republicans are threatening to trigger this disaster unless they get spending cuts that they weren’t able to enact through normal, Constitutional means.

Republicans go wild at this analogy, but it’s unavoidable. This is exactly like someone walking into a crowded room, announcing that he has a bomb strapped to his chest, and threatening to set that bomb off unless his demands are met.

Which brings us to the coin.

As it happens, an obscure legal clause grants the secretary of the Treasury the right to mint and issue platinum coins in any quantity or denomination he chooses. Such coins were, of course, intended to be collectors’ items, struck to commemorate special occasions. But the law is the law — and it offers a simple if strange way out of the crisis.

Here’s how it would work: The Treasury would mint a platinum coin with a face value of $1 trillion (or many coins with smaller values; it doesn’t really matter). This coin would immediately be deposited at the Federal Reserve, which would credit the sum to the government’s account. And the government could then write checks against that account, continuing normal operations without issuing new debt.

In case you’re wondering, no, this wouldn’t be an inflationary exercise in printing money. Aside from the fact that printing money isn’t inflationary under current conditions, the Fed could and would offset the Treasury’s cash withdrawals by selling other assets or borrowing more from banks, so that in reality the U.S. government as a whole (which includes the Fed) would continue to engage in normal borrowing. Basically, this would just be an accounting trick, but that’s a good thing. The debt ceiling is a case of accounting nonsense gone malignant; using an accounting trick to negate it is entirely appropriate.

But wouldn’t the coin trick be undignified? Yes, it would — but better to look slightly silly than to let a financial and Constitutional crisis explode.

Now, the platinum coin may not be the only option. Maybe the president can simply declare that as he understands the Constitution, his duty to carry out Congressional mandates on taxes and spending takes priority over the debt ceiling. Or he might be able to finance government operations by issuing coupons that look like debt and act like debt but that, he insists, aren’t debt and, therefore, don’t count against the ceiling.

Or, best of all, there might be enough sane Republicans that the party will blink and stop making destructive threats.

Unless this last possibility materializes, however, it’s the president’s duty to do whatever it takes, no matter how offbeat or silly it may sound, to defuse this hostage situation. Mint that coin!

Brooks, Cohen, Nocera and Bruni

Bobo thinks he knows “Why Hagel Was Picked.”  He squeals that as our budget braces for Medicare’s tyranny, we just need a good overseer to manage the inevitable military decline.  Jesus…  Mr. Cohen, in “Israel’s True Friends,” says the Hagel nomination will spur a much-needed debate in America on what constitutes friendship toward Israel.  In “Bloomberg Takes on the N.R.A.” Mr. Nocera says the country needs New York’s mayor to lead it to a saner gun policy.  Mr. Bruni, in “For Each Age, Its Agonies,” says “This is 40” and “Girls” uphold the tradition of deeming your own juncture of life the most significant of all.  Here’s Bobo’s latest tirade against old farts like me:

Americans don’t particularly like government, but they do want government to subsidize their health care. They believe that health care spending improves their lives more than any other public good. In a Quinnipiac poll, typical of many others, Americans opposed any cuts to Medicare by a margin of 70 percent to 25 percent.

In a democracy, voters get what they want, so the line tracing federal health care spending looks like the slope of a jet taking off from LaGuardia. Medicare spending is set to nearly double over the next decade. This is the crucial element driving all federal spending over the next few decades and pushing federal debt to about 250 percent of G.D.P. in 30 years.

There are no conceivable tax increases that can keep up with this spending rise. The Democrats had their best chance in a generation to raise revenue just now, and all they got was a measly $600 billion over 10 years. This is barely a wiggle on the revenue line and does nothing to change the overall fiscal picture.

As a result, health care spending, which people really appreciate, is squeezing out all other spending, which they value far less. Spending on domestic programs — for education, science, infrastructure and poverty relief — has already faced the squeeze and will take a huge hit in the years ahead. President Obama excoriated Paul Ryan for offering a budget that would cut spending on domestic programs from its historical norm of 3 or 4 percent of G.D.P. all the way back to 1.8 percent. But the Obama budget is the Ryan budget. According to the Office of Management and Budget, Obama will cut domestic discretionary spending back to 1.8 percent of G.D.P. in six years.

Advocates for children, education and the poor don’t even try to defend their programs by lobbying for cutbacks in Medicare. They know that given the choice, voters and politicians care more about middle-class seniors than about poor children.

So far, defense budgets have not been squeezed by the Medicare vice. But that is about to change. Oswald Spengler didn’t get much right, but he was certainly correct when he told European leaders that they could either be global military powers or pay for their welfare states, but they couldn’t do both.

Europeans, who are ahead of us in confronting that decision, have chosen welfare over global power. European nations can no longer perform many elemental tasks of moving troops and fighting. As late as the 1990s, Europeans were still spending 2.5 percent of G.D.P. on defense. Now that spending is closer to 1.5 percent, and, amid European malaise, it is bound to sink further.

The United States will undergo a similar process. The current budget calls for a steep but possibly appropriate decline in defense spending, from 4.3 percent of G.D.P. to 3 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

But defense planners are notoriously bad at estimating how fast postwar military cuts actually come. After Vietnam, the cold war and the 1991 gulf war, they vastly underestimated the size of the cuts that eventually materialized. And those cuts weren’t forced by the Medicare vice. The coming cuts are.

As the federal government becomes a health care state, there will have to be a generation of defense cuts that overwhelm anything in recent history. Keep in mind how brutal the budget pressure is going to be. According to the Government Accountability Office, if we act on entitlements today, we will still have to cut federal spending by 32 percent and raise taxes by 46 percent over the next 75 years to meet current obligations. If we postpone action for another decade, then we have to cut all non-interest federal spending by 37 percent and raise all taxes by 54 percent.

As this sort of crunch gradually tightens, Medicare will be the last to go. Spending on things like Head Start, scientific research and defense will go quicker. These spending cuts will transform America’s stature in the world, making us look a lot more like Europe today. This is why Adm. Mike Mullen called the national debt the country’s biggest security threat.

Chuck Hagel has been nominated to supervise the beginning of this generation-long process of defense cutbacks. If a Democratic president is going to slash defense, he probably wants a Republican at the Pentagon to give him political cover, and he probably wants a decorated war hero to boot.

All the charges about Hagel’s views on Israel or Iran are secondary. The real question is, how will he begin this long cutting process? How will he balance modernizing the military and paying current personnel? How will he recalibrate American defense strategy with, say, 455,000 fewer service members?

How, in short, will Hagel supervise the beginning of America’s military decline? If members of Congress don’t want America to decline militarily, well, they have no one to blame but the voters and themselves.

Disgusting.  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

President Obama’s decision to nominate Chuck Hagel, a maverick Republican with enough experience of war to loathe it, as his next secretary of defense is the right choice for many reasons, chief among them that it will provoke a serious debate on what constitutes real friendship toward Israel.

That debate, which will unfold during Senate confirmation hearings, is much needed because Jewish leadership in the United States is often unrepresentative of the many American Jews who have moved on from the view that the only legitimate support of Israel is unquestioning support of Israel, and the only mark of friendship is uncritical embrace of a friend.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, fired an opening salvo by telling CNN that, “This is an in-your-face nomination by the president to all of us who are supportive of Israel.”

The comment, based on Hagel’s lack of enthusiasm for war on Iran and his single allusion to advocates of Israel as “the Jewish lobby,” was of a piece with last year’s in-your-face Republican line that Obama, a strong supporter of Israeli security, had thrown Israel “under the bus.”

Jewish voters, who overwhelmingly favored Obama once again, despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unsubtle nudges, demonstrated at the ballot box what they thought of this characterization of the president.

Identifying Israel’s enemies is easy. Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader, illustrated why when he declared: “Palestine is ours from the river to the sea and from the south to the north. There will be no concession on an inch of the land. We will never recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli occupation and therefore there is no legitimacy for Israel, no matter how long it will take.”

That is the sort of absolutist, annihilation-bent position that has been a losing proposition since 1948 and will continue to undermine the legitimate Palestinian quest for statehood alongside a secure Israel — the one embraced by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas — for as long as it is advocated by self-serving merchants of hatred.

But deciding who Israel’s real friends are is more difficult — and that decision is critical both for Israel itself and for the future of U.S. policy toward the Jewish state.

The question has been on the president’s mind for a long time. During the 2008 campaign, in a meeting with the Cleveland Jewish community, Obama said: “This is where I get to be honest and I hope I’m not out of school here. I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you’re anti-Israel and that can’t be the measure of our friendship with Israel. If we cannot have an honest dialogue about how do we achieve these goals, then we’re not going to make progress.”

He suggested that to equate asking “difficult questions” with “being soft or anti-Israel” was a barrier to moving forward.

Five years on, that needed dialogue has scarcely advanced. Self-styled “true friends” of Israel now lining up against the Hagel nomination are in fact true friends only of the Israeli right that pays no more than lip service to a two-state peace (when it even does that); scoffs at Palestinian national aspirations and culture; dismisses the significant West Bank reforms that have prepared Palestine for statehood; continues with settlement construction on the very shrinking land where a Palestinian state is envisaged (and was granted nonmember observer status at the United Nations last November by 138 votes to 9 with 41 abstentions, including Germany); cannot find a valid Palestinian interlocutor on the face of the earth despite the moderate reformist leadership of Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad; ignores the grave implications for Israel of its unsustainable, corrosive dominion over another people and the question of how Israel can remain Jewish and democratic without a two-state solution (it cannot); bays for war with Iran despite the contrary opinions of many of Israel’s intelligence and military leaders; and propels Israel into repetitive miniwars of dubious strategic value.

These “true friends” shout the loudest. They are well-organized and remorseless.

Then there are the other friends of Israel, the quieter ones, the many who are unwaveringly committed to Israel’s security within its 1967 borders (with agreed land swaps); who believe continued settlement expansion in the West Bank is self-defeating and wrong; who hold that a good-faith quest for a two-state solution that will involve painful compromises on both sides (Palestinian abandonment of the “right of return” and Israeli abandonment of conquered land) is the only true path to Israeli security and the salvaging of its core Jewish values; who counsel against go-it-alone military adventurism against Iran; and who are troubled by a rightward nationalist drift in Israel whose central political tenet seems to be that holding on to all the land is doable and sustainable.

Hagel, like Obama, is a quiet strong friend of Israel. The movement against him is a relic of a binary with-Israel or against-Israel vision that does not have the true interests of Israel or the United States at heart.

Next up is Mr. Nocera:

TO: Michael Bloomberg

FROM: Joe Nocera

RE: Your Next Act

Dear Mayor Bloomberg,

This time next year, as you’re keenly aware, you will no longer be the mayor of New York. We all know how much you love the job, and how much you’ll miss it. No question about it: though you have had your critics (including, at times, me), you’ve been a very good mayor.

They say that you’re thinking a lot these days about what to do next. When you step down you’ll be 71, and plenty vital enough to do something significant. And of course, with a net worth of $20 billion or so, you certainly have the financial wherewithal to affect the issues that are important to you. You showed it in the last election, ginning up a super PAC and spending around $10 million on a handful of elections across the country where you thought your money could make a difference. Even though you got into the game late, you won more than you lost.

I know you have lots of interests, but after listening to you these past few weeks — ever since the horrible massacre in Newtown, Conn. — I am hoping you will direct your postmayoral energies to one issue: gun control. There is, quite simply, no one else in America who has a better chance of moving the country toward a saner gun policy than you. It is an effort worthy of your talents, and your money.

First, there is your obvious passion for the issue. They say it was your experience as mayor that sensitized you to the issue — and how could it not, with the funerals you’ve had to attend, and the mothers of murdered children you’ve had to console? Since the Newtown tragedy, no other high-profile politician has been as forceful in condemning gun violence and demanding “immediate action” in Congress. Millions of Americans — indeed, a majority of them — agree with you. They are looking for somebody to lead the charge against the National Rifle Association.

Second, though your message has been blunt, your tactics have been politically shrewd. In 2006, you started a new organization to fight gun violence: Mayors Against Illegal Guns. You thought that mayors had the credibility to reframe the issue as one of crime control, rather than gun control. Mayors Against Illegal Guns now has more than 800 mayors, and nearly one million “active supporters.” It has lobbyists in Washington and elsewhere, and has had success resisting recent N.R.A. legislative initiatives. Its short-term agenda — ban assault weapons, require background checks for all gun sales, make gun trafficking a federal crime, and so on — is a good, sensible place to start regulating guns.

Third — and let’s not be coy here — you’re rich. The N.R.A. has an annual budget that is reported to be $300 million. In 2011, the combined budgets of all the groups trying to prevent gun violence came to around $16 million. The best-known of those groups, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, has seen its support and its funding dwindle in recent years. Meanwhile, the N.R.A. and its allies have done a brilliant job at pushing through laws that make it nearly impossible to prevent gun violence. There are more than 200 members of Congress who regularly get a perfect score from the N.R.A. It is going to take money to change that because money is what Congress responds to.

To be honest, Mr. Mayor, I wish you could start tomorrow. With each passing day, the urgency that accompanied the Newtown shooting slips further away. President Obama, who seems absolutely terrified to take on the gun lobby, didn’t even mention guns when asked about his second-term priorities. Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, has said that the first months of the new Congressional session will be devoted to the issue of federal spending. Guns, he said, will just have to wait.

In recent years, even in states that experienced horrific mass killings, gun laws have only become looser. In Virginia, the State Legislature repealed a law that barred people from buying more than one handgun a month, and passed a law “to allow permit holders to carry concealed and loaded weapons into bars and restaurants,” according to ProPublica. That same article reported that in Texas, two years after the Fort Hood shooting, legislators “gave gun carriers greater freedom to take their weapons to more places.”

The only two gun bills President Obama has signed were laws that expanded gun rights. “The country needs his leadership,” you said of Obama after he announced that Vice President Joe Biden was going to lead a panel making a new effort to reduce gun violence.

With all due respect, sir, what the country needs is your leadership on this issue. The sooner the better.

We’ll see a rational gun policy in this nation when pigs fly.  Teatard lunatics made a show of carrying weapons to political rallies and that was just fine (remember, IOKIYAR), but OWS peaceful protesters were pepper sprayed.  You think we’ll get gun control?  I don’t.  Here’s Mr. Bruni:

In the new movie “This is 40,” the writer and director Judd Apatow casts the arrival of life’s four-decade mark as a uniquely brutal crossroads, flagged by sputtering libido, suffocating commitments and curdled dreams.

Judd, buddy, add another eight years, then talk to me. Your body will be even wobblier, your obligations weightier, and time running out more ruthlessly on the gaudiest of your plans. This is 48: in the mail last week, I got a solicitation from AARP. It included a membership card, ready to be activated just as soon as I send in dues, which won’t be anytime soon. And while that premature come-on reflects the group’s relentlessness more than anything else, it’s an accurate reminder that I’m closer to when I’ll quit working than to when I started, my hopes and my hair so fluffy and intact.

That was in my 20s, a period with travails all its own, depicted in another project that Apatow is involved in, as an executive producer. I speak of “Girls,” whose post-college, pre-mortgage heroines flail professionally, fumble romantically and make deeply puzzling wardrobe choices, their outfits emblems of their befuddlement.

The half-hour comedy-drama will begin its second season this coming weekend, and HBO made the first few episodes available to us media types, who have proved that we simply can’t stop gnawing on it. “Girls” is to cultural arbiters what rawhides are to cocker spaniels.

The new episodes immediately reintroduce Lena Dunham’s naked body, which was introduced aplenty in the old episodes. At this fleshy point I could draw it, I could paint it, I could probably reproduce it in clay. Dunham’s character, Hannah, has a new roommate, gay, and a new playmate, Republican. There’s considerable friction, out of bed as well as in.

And there’s a portrait of the period between 20 and 30 as one of peerlessly keen neediness and doubt. You yearn to believe that you’ve figured out the dating game, not yet realizing that it’s eternally unfathomable. You ache for an assurance that you’re pointed in a purposeful direction, but suspect that you’re going nowhere fast. Your desire to project confidence is inversely proportional to your store of it, and you have some really, really bad furniture. I recall, from my mid-20s, a lacquered black table with fake gold accents that cost me next to nothing except, for many years afterward, an undying, unspeakable shame.

We’re a self-absorbed species, and one wrinkle of our self-absorption is our tendency, reflected in our art and entertainment, to believe that there’s no passage of human existence as fraught with perils and as peculiarly significant as the one we just so happen to be going through. Dunham is 26, and “Girls,” which she created, is predicated on the notion that the 20s herald an inimitable sequence of humiliations and unrivaled state of ambivalence. Apatow is 45, and his new movie maintains that to enter your 40s is to encounter an especially messy set of questions about the road taken and the unsmooth pavement ahead. Could any other age compare?

Well, the 30s are no picnic, as we learned in the television drama “thirtysomething,” whose four-season run began in 1987, when its sires, Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, turned 35. The characters they hatched were roughly their age peers, and turned soul searching into an exercise so vigorous it practically burned calories. Angst overwhelmed them as surely as hormones capsize teenagers.

Speaking of teens, they support whole submarkets of publishing and series of movies dedicated to reassuring them that their pimply predicament is by far the worst: cliques, virginity, trigonometry. But I’m clinging to the conviction that the late 40s are tougher — just try to find a 17-year-old whose left shoulder creaks like mine, and who suddenly has to pitch in thousands toward his apartment building’s new elevators — so that I can congratulate myself for every day I successfully muddle through, every smile I courageously summon.

Then again, this passage isn’t really so insufferable. By 48 you’ve come to know, and quite possibly accept, the well-intentioned wretch that you are, and you most likely have the furniture situation worked out.

The 20s, too, have their perks. You get the freedom of full-fledged adulthood but can make big mistakes without paying huge prices, because there are still so many opportunities ahead for amends.

Dunham isn’t blind to this. In “Girls” she finds the exhilaration amid the mortification. And Apatow’s new movie ultimately understands that being weighed down is just a pessimist’s way of looking at — and talking about — being grounded, which so many of us struggle to achieve. What feel like tethers one day feel like roots the next.

This is 25 and 35 and 40 and, I’ll wager, 50: a matchless kind of awful, a particular stripe of wonderful and just another phase in a struggle that, like our narcissism, is ageless.

The Pasty Little Putz, Dowd, Friedman and Bruni

The Pasty Little Putz takes a look at a moron.  In “The Years of Senator DeMint” he babbles that for Republicans, there was a return to first principles but not enough new economic thinking.  Even a cretin like DeMint can see the future of the party he helped turn into the collection of lunatics…  MoDo has managed to create a mash-up of politics, pop culture and the Mayans.  In “A Lost Civilization” she gurgles that Republican tribe is being wiped out, and not by plague, drought or Conquistadors.  Of course, she ends with the obligatory swipe at the Clintons, without which no column is complete.  The Moustache of Wisdom is in Tel Aviv, and has a question in “The Full Israeli Experience:”  In a neighborhood where there is no mercy for the weak, how should we expect Israel to act?  Mr. Bruni addresses “Bin Laden, Torture and Hollywood” and says one of the year’s most lavishly praised movies may vex the White House and critics of the previous administration’s “enhanced” interrogations.  Here’s The Putz:

In November 2008, just after John McCain was routed by Barack Obama, Jim DeMint addressed a Myrtle Beach conference on the future of the Republican Party. The first-term South Carolina senator was there to reassure his audience: Republicans might have lost an election, but conservatism hadn’t lost the country.

His party’s only problem, DeMint promised, was insufficient ideological commitment. Republicans had strayed too far from small-government principle during the Bush era, and then foolishly nominated a moderate like McCain. “Americans do prefer a traditional conservative government,” he told his listeners. But in 2008, between Bush’s deficit spending and McCain’s heterodoxies, “they just did not believe Republicans were going to give it to them.”

This comforting perspective quickly became the official conventional wisdom on the post-Bush right, mouthed with varying degrees of conviction by politicians, pundits and Tea Party activists. But DeMint wasn’t content with rhetoric. He decided to put theory into action and throw his support behind primary candidates who fit his vision of a more authentically conservative Republican Party.

DeMint’s zeal gave his party’s leadership headaches, and his support for no-hopers like Christine O’Donnell helped cost Republicans seats they might have won. But his crusade also succeeded in making the Republican Senate caucus much more interesting — thinning the ranks of time-servers, and elevating rising stars like Marco Rubio and idiosyncratic figures like Rand Paul.

More important, DeMint — and the larger Tea Party wave he rode — also succeeded in making Republicans more serious about limited government than the party had ever been under Bush. On spending questions small and large, from earmarks to entitlement reform, the party moved sharply rightward between 2008 and 2012, testing DeMint’s theory that a return to first principles would be enough to win back the White House.

But as things turned out, the theory failed the test, and now it’s DeMint rather than Obama who will be leaving office in January. Last Thursday the South Carolinian surprised most of Washington by announcing that he’d be departing the Senate just two years into his second term, to become president of the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Some of DeMint’s admirers quickly portrayed this move as a brilliant way to expand his campaign to remake the Republican Party. But it’s more likely that moving from the Senate to the world of think tank fund-raising (where he’ll probably excel) and policy (where his experience is thinner) will reduce his public profile, and close a chapter in the history of conservatism in the process.

This chapter — the DeMint chapter, the Tea Party chapter, call it what you will — was probably a necessary stage for the American right. It’s normal for defeated parties and movements to turn inward for a period of ideological retrenchment before new thinking takes hold.

What’s more, the DeMint worldview wasn’t so much wrong as incomplete. It really was important for Republicans to get more serious about entitlements and to shake off their Bush-era blitheness about deficits. The principles of many Tea Partiers really were an improvement over the transparent cynicism of a Tom DeLay.

But if DeMint-style retrenchment was necessary for Republicans, it wasn’t anywhere near sufficient. The conservatism of 2011 and 2012 had a lot to say about the long-term liabilities of the American government but far too little to say about the most immediate anxieties of American citizens, from rising health care costs to stagnating wages to the socioeconomic malaise spreading across the country’s working class. Neither the Reagan legacy nor the current conservative catechism holds the solutions to these problems; they require Republicans to apply their principles more creatively, and think about policy anew.

So it’s fitting, perhaps, that the same week DeMint announced his departure from the Senate, one of the conservatives he fostered gave a speech that tried to do just that. This was Marco Rubio, who used an address at the Jack Kemp Foundation dinner to speak frankly about problems that too many Republicans have ignored these last four years — the “opportunity gap” opening between the well educated and the rest, the barriers to upward mobility, the struggles of the poor.

The speech didn’t offer the kinds of policy breakthroughs the party ultimately requires. Rubio mixed a few modest forays into fresh territory (mostly on education) with a long list of recycled proposals, and he stopped short of the leaps Republicans need to make on taxes, health care and other issues.

But his tone and themes represented a very different response to an electoral drubbing than the kind of retrenchment Republicans embraced four years ago. And as DeMint exits electoral politics stage right, his legacy ultimately depends on whether that difference turns out to be real or superficial — and whether the younger generation he helped catapult to prominence can prove itself more supple, creative and farsighted than its departing patron.

You keep on whistling past the graveyard, Putzy…  Here’s MoDo:

My college roommates and I used to grocery shop and cook together. The only food we seemed to agree on was corn, so we ate a lot of corn.

My mom would periodically call to warn me in a dire tone, “Do you know why the Incas are extinct?”

Her maize hazing left me with a deeply ingrained fear of being part of a civilization that was obliviously engaging in behavior that would lead to its extinction.

Too bad the Republican Party didn’t have my mom to keep it on its toes. Then it might not have gone all Apocalypto on us — becoming the first civilization in modern history to spiral the way of the Incas, Aztecs and Mayans.

The Mayans were right, as it turns out, when they predicted the world would end in 2012. It was just a select world: the G.O.P. universe of arrogant, uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys.

Just another vanishing tribe that fought the cultural and demographic tides of history.

Someday, it will be the subject of a National Geographic special, or a Mel Gibson movie, where archaeologists piece together who the lost tribe was, where it came from, and what happened to it. The experts will sift through the ruins of the Reagan Presidential Library, Dick Cheney’s shotgun casings, Orca poll monitoring hieroglyphics, remnants of triumphal rants by Dick Morris on Fox News, faded photos of Clint Eastwood and an empty chair, and scraps of ancient tape in which a tall, stiff man, his name long forgotten, gnashes his teeth about the 47 percent of moochers and the “gifts” they got.

Instead of smallpox, plagues, drought and Conquistadors, the Republican decline will be traced to a stubborn refusal to adapt to a world where poor people and sick people and black people and brown people and female people and gay people count.

As the historian Will Durant observed, “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”

President Obama’s victory margin is expanding, as more votes are counted. He didn’t just beat Romney; he’s still beating him. But another sign of the old guard’s denial came on Friday, a month after the election, when the Romney campaign ebulliently announced that it raised $85.9 million in the final weeks of the campaign, making its fund-raising effort “the most successful in Republican Party history.”

Why is the Romney campaign still boasting? You can’t celebrate at a funeral. Go away and learn how to crunch data on the Internet.

Outside the Republican walled kingdom of denial and delusion, everyone else could see that the once clever and ruthless party was behaving in an obtuse and outmoded way that spelled doom.

The G.O.P. put up a candidate that no one liked or understood and ran a campaign that no one liked or understood — a campaign animated by the idea that indolent, grasping serfs must be kept down, even if it meant creating barriers to letting them vote.

Although Stuart Stevens, the Romney strategist, now claims that Mitt “captured the imagination of millions” and ran “with a natural grace,” there was very little chance that the awkward gazillionaire was ever going to be president. Yet strangely, Republicans are still gobsmacked by their loss, grasping at straws like Sandy as an excuse.

Some G.O.P. House members continue to try to wrestle the president over the fiscal cliff. Romney wanders in a daze, his hair not perfectly gelled. And his campaign advisers continue to express astonishment that a disastrous campaign, convention and candidate, as well as a lack of familiarity with what Stevens dismissively calls “whiz-bang turnout technologies,” could possibly lead to defeat.

Who would ever have thought blacks would get out and support the first black president? Who would ever have thought women would shy away from the party of transvaginal probes? Who would ever have thought gays would work against a party that treated them as immoral and subhuman? Who would have ever thought young people would desert a party that ignored science and hectored on social issues? Who would ever have thought Latinos would scorn a party that expected them to finish up their chores and self-deport?

Republicans know they’re in trouble when W. emerges as the moral voice of the party. The former president lectured the G.O.P. on Tuesday about being more “benevolent” toward immigrants.

As Eva Longoria supersedes Karl Rove as a power player, Republicans act as shellshocked as the Southern gentry overrun by Yankee carpetbaggers in “Gone with the Wind.” As the movie eulogized: “Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.”

Gun sales have burgeoned since the president’s re-election, with Black Friday weapons purchases setting records as the dead-enders rush to arm themselves.

But history will no doubt record that withering Republicans were finally wiped from the earth in 2016 when the relentless (and rested) Conquistadora Hillary marched in, General Bill on a horse behind her, and finished them off.

MoDo, take a pill.  Go and see someone about your Clinton obsession.  It’s not healthy…  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

These were the main regional news headlines in The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday: “Home Front Command simulates missile strike during drill.” Egypt’s President “Morsi opts for safety as police battle protestors.” In Syria, “Fight spills over into Lebanon.” “Darkness at noon for fearful Damascus residents.” “Tunisian Islamists, leftists clash after jobs protests.” “NATO warns Syria not to use chemical weapons.” And my personal favorite: “ ‘Come back and bring a lot of people with you’ — Tourism Ministry offers tour operators the full Israeli experience.”

Ah, yes, “the full Israeli experience.”

The full Israeli experience today is a living political science experiment. How does a country deal with failed or failing state authority on four of its borders — Gaza, South Lebanon, Syria and the Sinai Desert of Egypt — each of which is now crawling with nonstate actors nested among civilians and armed with rockets. How should Israel and its friends think about this “Israeli experience” and connect it with the ever-present question of Israeli-Palestinian peace?

For starters, if you want to run for office in Israel, or be taken seriously here as either a journalist or a diplomat, there is an unspoken question in the mind of virtually every Israeli that you need to answer correctly: “Do you understand what neighborhood I’m living in?” If Israelis smell that you don’t, their ears will close to you. It is one reason the Europeans in general, and the European left in particular, have so little influence here.

The central political divide in Israel today is over the follow-up to this core question: If you appreciate that Israel lives in a neighborhood where there is no mercy for the weak, how should we expect Israel to act?

There are two major schools of thought here. One, led by Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, comprises the “Ideological Hawks,” who, to the question, “Do you know what neighborhood I am living in?” tell Israelis and the world, “It is so much worse than you think!” Bibi goes out of his way to highlight every possible threat to Israel and essentially makes the case that nothing Israel does has ever or can ever alter the immutable Arab hatred of the Jewish state or the Hobbesian character of the neighborhood. Netanyahu is not without supporting evidence. Israel withdraws from both South Lebanon and Gaza and still gets hit with rockets. But this group is called the “ideological” hawks because most of them also advocate Israel’s retaining permanent control of the West Bank and Jerusalem for religious-nationalist reasons. So it’s impossible to know where their strategic logic for holding territory stops and their religious-nationalist dreams start — and that muddies their case with the world.

The other major school of thought here, call it the “Yitzhak Rabin school,” was best described by the writer Leon Wieseltier as the “bastards for peace.”

Rabin, the former Israeli prime minister and war hero, started exactly where Bibi did: This is a dangerous neighborhood, and a Jewish state is not welcome here. But Rabin didn’t stop there. He also believed that Israel was very powerful and, therefore, should judiciously use its strength to try to avoid becoming a garrison state, fated to rule over several million Palestinians forever. Israel’s “bastards for peace” believe that it’s incumbent on every Israeli leader to test, test and test again — using every ounce of Israeli creativity — to see if Israel can find a Palestinian partner for a secure peace so that it is not forever fighting an inside war and an outside war. At best, the Palestinians might surprise them. At worst, Israel would have the moral high ground in a permanent struggle.

Today, alas, not only is the Israeli peace camp dead, but the most effective Israeli “bastard for peace,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak, is retiring. As I sat with Barak in his office the other day, he shared with me his parting advice to Israel’s next and sure-to-be-far-right government.

Huge political forces, with deep roots, are now playing out around Israel, particularly the rise of political Islam, said Barak. “We have to learn to accept it and see both sides of it and try to make it better. I am worried about our tendency to adopt a fatalistic, pessimistic perception of history. Because, once you adopt it, you are relieved from the responsibility to see the better aspects and seize the opportunities” when they arise.

If Israel just assumes that it’s only a matter of time before the moderate Palestinian leaders in the West Bank fall and Hamas takes over, “why try anything?” added Barak. “And, therefore, you lose sight of the opportunities and the will to seize opportunities. … I know that you can’t say when leaders raise this kind of pessimism that it is all just invented. It is not all invented, and you would be stupid if you did not look [at it] with open eyes. But it is a major risk that you will not notice that you become enslaved by this pessimism in a way that will paralyze you from understanding that you can shape it. The world is full of risks, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have a responsibility to do something about it — within your limits and the limits of realism — and avoid self-fulfilling prophecies that are extremely dangerous here.”

Last but not least, here’s Mr. Bruni:

I’m betting that Dick Cheney will love the new movie “Zero Dark Thirty.”

Who could have predicted that? Hollywood, after all, is supposed to be a West Coast annex of the Democratic National Committee, and the makers of this gripping thriller, about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, were expected to repay the Obama administration for its indulgence of them with a tribute to the current president’s wisdom and grit.

But the movie of the year is also the political conundrum of the year, a far, far cry from the rousing piece of pro-Obama propaganda that some conservatives feared it would be. “Zero Dark Thirty,” which opens in theaters on Dec. 19 and presents itself as a quasi-journalistic account of what really happened, gives primary credit for the killing of Bin Laden to neither the Bush nor the Obama administrations but to one obsessive C.I.A. analyst whose work spans both presidencies. And it presents the kind of torture that Cheney advocated — but that President Obama ended — as something of an information-extracting necessity, repellent but fruitful.

Even as David Edelstein, the film critic for New York magazine, named “Zero Dark Thirty” the best movie of 2012 in a recent article, he digressed to say that it “borders on the politically and morally reprehensible,” because it “makes a case for the efficacy of torture.”

Edelstein isn’t the only critic in a morally complicated swoon over “Zero Dark Thirty.” Last week the New York Film Critics Circle awarded it the best movie of the year. So did the National Board of Review. Surprises atop surprises: not only does “Zero Dark Thirty” decline to toe a conventionally liberal line, but it is being embraced by many cultural arbiters who are probably at some level horrified by the conclusions it seems to reach.

Will they wrestle honestly with that, as Edelstein did? Or will they elect unsullied rapture for “Zero Dark Thirty” and either ignore or come up with a selective interpretation of its policy implications? That will be one of the fascinating wrinkles of the imminent debate about a movie that demands close examination.

With ample reason, we often dismiss what comes out of the commercially minded dream factory of Hollywood as simplistic, candied, trivial. Yet “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Lincoln,” another of the year-end movies at the center of the unfolding Oscar race, are dedicated to the ethical ambiguities and messy compromises of governing — to the muck and stink that sometimes go into the effort of keeping this mighty country of ours intact and safe.

“Lincoln” looks at that through the prism of our 16th president and the legislative art and chicanery by which he and his allies passed the 13th Amendment, ending slavery. “Zero Dark Thirty” uses the war on terror as its lens and raises big, complicated questions about whether one brand of evil excuses another and the preservation of freedom hinges on targeted applications of savagery. From Hollywood during the holiday season, we’re getting not just “The Hobbit” and the inevitable Tom Cruise vehicle. We’re getting a civics lesson.

“Zero Dark Thirty” takes its title from a military term for half past midnight, which is when Navy SEALs raided Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. It’s the work of the director Kathryn Bigelow and the screenwriter Mark Boal, who previously collaborated on “The Hurt Locker.” As they researched their new movie, they got considerable cooperation from the C.I.A. and the Defense Department, provoking complaints from some conservatives, who smelled an Obama hagiography in the making.

They smelled wrong. Obama isn’t a character in the movie but, rather, a part of the backdrop to a narrative about the bloody drama and bloodless tedium of intelligence gathering over the course of nearly 10 years between 9/11 and the killing of Bin Laden. It’s about finding a needle in a uniquely messy and menacing haystack. “Enhanced interrogation techniques” like waterboarding are presented as crucial to that search, and it’s hard not to focus on them, because the first extended sequence in the movie shows a detainee being strung up by his wrists, sexually humiliated, deprived of sleep, made to feel as if he’s drowning and shoved into a box smaller than a coffin.

The explicit detail with which all of this is depicted could, I suppose, be read as the moviemakers’ indictment of it, and to some extent “Zero Dark Thirty” will function as a Rorschach test, different viewers seeing in it what they want to see. But the torture sequence immediately follows a bone-chilling, audio-only prologue of the voices of terrified Americans trapped in the towering inferno of the World Trade Center. It’s set up as payback.

And by the movie’s account, it produces information vital to the pursuit of the world’s most wanted man. No waterboarding, no Bin Laden: that’s what “Zero Dark Thirty” appears to suggest. And the intelligence agents involved in torture seem not so much relieved as challenged by Obama’s edict that it stop. Their quest for leads just got that much more difficult.

That’s hardly a universally accepted version of events. “Some of the F.B.I. agents and C.I.A. officers involved in this program at the really gritty, firsthand level were the ones who blew the whistle on it, because they were really horrified,” said Jane Mayer, the author of the best-selling book “The Dark Side,” which is widely considered the definitive account of the interrogation program.

“Zero Dark Thirty” doesn’t convey that, nor does it reflect many experts’ belief that torture is unnecessary, yielding as much bad information as good. “The military, the F.B.I., the C.I.A. itself — along with G.O.P. hawks like McCain, who was himself tortured — say there’s no justification, no need and no excuse,” Mayer said.

And for the drone attacks that have been a favored tactic of the Obama administration, leading to the assassinations of people never tried or convicted? Is there ample justification for that? The end of “enhanced interrogation” wasn’t the end of methods seemingly outside the usual precepts of American law, and as “Zero Dark Thirty” reminds us, Obama ordered the raid that led to Bin Laden’s death without any guarantee that Bin Laden would be there and that the bullet-riddled bodies in that Pakistan compound would be his and his associates’.

In the name of our democracy, we have long done and we continue to do some ruthless cost-benefit analyses and some very ugly things, to which we should never turn a blind eye. Whatever “Zero Dark Thirty” gets wrong, it gets that much right.

Dowd, Cohen and Friedman

MoDo is having another Clinton tantrum.  In “Mighty Morphin’ Hillary” she has a question, and then supplies her own answer:  Longing to start the 2016 campaign? So’s Hillary.  Mr. Cohen has decided to give us his 2 cents on Susan Rice.  In “The Rice Question” he says Susan Rice is capable and tough, but her judgment can be troubling.  The Moustache of Wisdom is in Tel Aviv.  In “Iron Empires, Iron Fists, Iron Domes” he says going from Syria to Turkey to Tel Aviv raises a question of whether there are just three governing option.  Here’s MoDo, displaying her irrationality when it comes to anything named “Clinton:”

Everyone expected Hillary to lower the boom on Bibi Friday night.

The bullying Israeli prime minister is fond of demanding that America set red lines on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But he blithely stuck a finger in the eye of President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton Friday and went over a red line for successive American administrations: Israel gave the White House only a few hours’ notice that it was defying the U.S. and planning new settlements in the most sensitive territory east of Jerusalem, a move that Washington fears could obliterate any prospect of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“If such a project were to go beyond blueprints,” Jodi Rudoren and Mark Landler wrote in The Times, “it could prevent the creation of a viable, contiguous Palestinian state” by closing off the West Bank from East Jerusalem.

The brazen and counterproductive action, designed to punish the Palestinians, flouted the Obama administration, which had Israel’s back twice recently: in the clash with Hamas over Gaza and, despite increased diplomatic isolation, in opposing the successful vote to upgrade Palestine to a nonmember observer state in the United Nations.

The provocation preceded Hillary’s speech at the Saban Forum at the Willard Hotel here Friday night. The conference on the Middle East is run by Haim Saban, an Israeli-American media and entertainment mogul from Beverly Hills who is best known for three things: bringing the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers from Japan to America, being a vocal supporter of Israel and lavishing the Clintons with donations. (He gave $5 million to the Clinton presidential library, $5 million to the Clinton foundation and avidly supported Hillary’s ’08 bid against Obama.)

Last year, at the Saban forum, Hillary infuriated some Israeli ministers when she said she was alarmed about the rights of women and “antidemocratic” bills proposed by far-right members of the Netanyahu government. She talked about her dismay at learning that some religious Israeli soldiers walked out of events where women were singing and that some buses in Jerusalem operated under gender apartheid — “reminiscent of Rosa Parks,” as she put it. So, many in the audience this time assumed that the outgoing secretary of state would lay down the law to Bibi on settlements, and they were surprised when she pulled her punches and made only a mild reference, eschewing the word “settlements.”

“These activities,” she said, “set back the cause of a negotiated peace.”

She said the Palestinians could have a state “as old as I am” if in 1947 they had made “the right decision” or if they had “worked with my husband” in 2000. And she urged Israel to be “generous” toward the Palestinians. But she didn’t whack Bibi, as he deserved. Many there came away assuming that it was the beginning of Hillary’s 2016 campaign, that she was thinking about her future rather than her present. Her reasoning, they reckoned, was this: If Obama doesn’t want to have anything to do with the settlement issue, if he’d rather spend his time in Myanmar than Israel, then why should she stir up trouble with Israel and her pro-Israel supporters on her way out the door?

And aside from the dog that didn’t bark, there was the video that roared. A film that introduced Hillary featured leaders and Israeli pols — including Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, Shimon Peres and Tzipi Livni — gushing over the secretary.

In a dispatch headlined “Hillary Is Running,” David Remnick, The New Yorker editor, wrote: “The film was like an international endorsement four years in advance of the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary.”

How can we focus on Barry’s transition when Hillary’s is so much more riveting? Far from being depleted and ready for a spa, she’s energetically rounding up the usual suspects. She “took steps to solidify her relationships with some Democrats by sending hand-signed notes to candidates who got bested in close Congressional races,” offering them encouragement and succor, The New York Observer’s politics blog reports. That provided a marked contrast to Obama, who did not bother to rally Democrats in his acceptance speech.

Secretary Clinton also reached out for the first time to reunite her Irish-American fund-raisers and top supporters. IrishCentral.com reports that Kris Balderston, a Hillary aide at State, sent invitations to several prominent Irish Democrats who raised millions for her Senate and presidential runs to accompany the top diplomat to events in Dublin and Belfast this week. Though other possible 2016 contenders, like Joe Biden, Andrew Cuomo and Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland, have Irish connections, Hillary is the cushla, or darling.

“I hope this means Hillary is running,” said Niall O’Dowd, the publisher of IrishCentral.com and other Irish publications in New York, who is joining the secretary in Ireland at her invitation. “She has enormous strength in the Irish-American community because of the Clintons’ massive role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland. She’s a country mile ahead of every other contender with the Irish.”

I guess it makes no difference whatsoever to anyone that she’s repeatedly said she’s not going to run.  After all, she’s only a woman and they change their minds all the time…  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

When Thomas Pickering took up the No.3 position at the U.S. State Department in 1997, his attention turned to Sudan. The U.S. Embassy in Khartoum had been vacated the previous year after the C.I.A. reported threats, but Pickering wanted the mission reopened in a country that had harbored Osama bin Laden until May 1996 and had more experience than most with violent Islamist extremism.

“The intelligence reports that prompted the closure of the embassy were false and I felt strongly that the embassy should be reopened,” Pickering, who has served as ambassador to Nigeria, Israel, India, Russia and the United Nations, told me. “But Susan Rice and Sandy Berger felt strongly it should remain closed and so it did not get reopened for a long while.”

Rice, now U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a leading candidate along with Senator John Kerry to become the next secretary of state, was then assistant secretary for African affairs. She had strong views about Sudan and plenty of reasons to hold them: a terror-sponsoring Sudanese government playing host to anti-American Islamist radicals and engaged in a brutal war with its own citizens in the south.

But while under no illusions about the Sudanese government, Pickering, then under secretary of state for political affairs, saw an opportunity to probe possible shifts in Khartoum. “My view was that we needed to be in contact with governments around the world whatever their characters, and we might change Sudan’s attitude through being there,” he said. “Susan took a different view.”

Today we are at a crucial juncture for American power. President Obama’s priority in preserving U.S. influence in the world must be domestic: reviving the economy. He needs a secretary of state able to chart her or his own course at times, with a team-of-rivals independence, and the ability to talk to enemies — Iran being top of that list.

Susan Rice is certainly capable and tough. One person who has spent a lot of time with Rice is struck by her “bristling certitude.” A former U.S. ambassador told me, “Rice does not know how to be unblunt.” But it is her judgment at critical moments — as displayed on whether to reopen the Sudan embassy or in her handling of the talking points on the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans — that troubles me.

Of course, the ultimate decision on returning U.S. diplomats to Khartoum in 1997 did not lie with Rice. Samuel R. Berger, as national security adviser to President Clinton, had more clout. Still, as the State Department’s point person on Africa, her opinion had weight.

Rice’s thinking at the time, as described to me by several officials, ran like this: Reopening the U.S. Embassy would have been interpreted by the Sudanese as a reward for good behavior. The United States, she felt, could not send that signal to a country on the terrorist list and involved in the worst human rights abuses. Moreover, nothing she saw at the time suggested that the Sudanese offers of intelligence assistance were serious.

What difference a U.S. decision to engage with Khartoum would have made to intelligence gathering on Al Qaeda, preventing the August 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, averting the mistaken 1998 U.S. cruise-missile attack on a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, and blocking the path to 9/11 is unclear.

On one particular issue — whether in 1996 (when Rice was a senior director for Africa at the National Security Council) Sudan offered to hand over Bin Laden — the 9/11 Commission Report “found no credible evidence that this was so.”

“Ambassador Rice believes that it is far better to have a diplomatic presence than not,” her spokeswoman, Erin Pelton, said in an e-mail message. “Thus her inherent predisposition is to try to reopen embassies as soon as possible. However, when the U.S. is dealing with countries that are state sponsors of terrorism, that decision cannot be made without regard to the policy signal it sends.”

Tim Carney, the ambassador to Sudan at the time, had to leave the country in early 1996 when the embassy was vacated. He believes that the decision not to reopen the following year was disastrous.

“We took our eye off the ball,” he told me. “We did not know what was happening in Khartoum, a center of extremist Islam. There was no logic to our policy beyond punishing Khartoum and supporting the rebellion in south Sudan. That the Sudanese could not ensure our security was complete and utter nonsense. In my experience, Rice failed in her judgment. Our interests suffered.”

Pickering was in general impressed with Rice, a woman of strong ideas navigating an effective course in many areas of African policy, including Ethiopia and Eritrea. It was only on Sudan, he said, that “we disagreed, and I was not happy.”

Rice, as Sudan suggests, is decisive: She joined the Obama team early in his first campaign when other foreign policy heavyweights backed Hillary Clinton. She is known to be very close to the president. He has made clear that he is prepared to spend significant political capital to defend her if he nominates her for secretary of state. During the first term, foreign policy was very White House-centered. If Obama plans a similar second-term set-up, Rice would be a natural fit.

Over the years I have heard Rice, whom I once met briefly, described as smart, loyal, earnest, combative, certain of her views and not particularly worldly. Her convictions on human rights, shaped through the Rwandan genocide that in turn influenced her views on south Sudan, are passionate.

She famously clashed with the late Richard Holbrooke (and successfully helped keep him from Obama’s inner circle); an attempt at a reconciliatory breakfast ended with him giving her his private cellphone number without the gesture being reciprocated.

One senior Obama administration official who was very close to Holbrooke and so, in her words, “got off on the wrong foot with Rice,” has become a great admirer. Rice, she argues, has done great things at the United Nations.

“The notion that she is a walkover for Obama is just nonsense,” she told me.

According to this official’s account, Rice was the “only cabinet member arguing for what we ended up doing in Libya” — a military intervention, backed by a strong U.N. resolution Rice managed to secure, that saved Benghazi and ended with the ousting of Muammar el-Qaddafi.

“She knows how to transcend the limits of American power by knowing the limits of American power,” the official said. “She uses all the tools in the toolbox. When the cry goes up in a crisis, ‘Save the peacekeepers,’ she says, ‘No, save the people!”’

Rice has been the object of egregious Republican attacks over her now notorious Benghazi television interviews on Sept. 16. Their attempt to portray her covering up a supposedly premeditated terrorist attack that left four Americans dead does not hold up. My understanding is there is no evidence of premeditation — as in advance planning — or even that the attackers knew that Ambassador Chris Stevens, who happened to be visiting Benghazi, was there. The charged Al Qaeda epithet has been loosely thrown around for a local militant group called Ansar al-Shariah.

Still, Rice’s performance raises questions. If the C.I.A. was the main editor of her talking points, and that editing involved the last-minute removal of references to Ansar al-Shariah for fear of tipping them off, would it not have been wise to avoid alluding to the killings as a “horrific incident where some mob was hijacked ultimately by a handful of extremists” — as she said on CNN? And if the C.I.A. knew that two of its own had been killed, why did Rice tell ABC News that “two of the four Americans who were killed were there providing security”?

We now know, thanks to reporting by David Ignatius of The Washington Post among others, that the two C.I.A. agents, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, were killed with mortar fire a full six hours after Stevens in a separate Benghazi location. By the time Rice went on TV, five days had elapsed since the killings, and the C.I.A. had done extensive debriefing.

Why then did Rice not step back, ask questions and hedge her talking points rather than plunge ahead with an account of a spontaneous reaction by “folks in Benghazi,” like the one in Cairo, to the anti-Muhammad video? As is now clear, the demonstration never happened.

Stevens is mentioned just once in the various Rice interviews. The killing becomes an almost abstract “violence” committed by “extremists.” The video is “hateful,” “heinous,” “disgusting,” “offensive” and “reprehensible.” The killing of four Americans is “condemnable,” “unacceptable,” “reprehensible” and “horrific.”

Somewhere in all those adjectives the distinction on the scales of iniquity between mischief and murder is lost.

The U.S. secretary of state needs several skills: leadership, strategic vision, an inner compass, knowledge of the world and judgment. The most effective secretaries — Dean Acheson, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and James Baker come to mind — have served their presidents, of course, but were also shapers and clinchers of policy.

The recent precedent of Colin Powell’s reluctant support for the Iraq war shows how important it can be for the secretary to stand up to the White House — even to the point of resignation, as Cyrus Vance did in 1980 over a disagreement with Jimmy Carter.

In diplomacy the core question is often this: What do I want to get and what do I have to give to get it? Certitudes and bluntness get you only so far. It is less a question of what you know than how curious you are about what you do not.

Susan Rice’s story includes several significant achievements. But, from Khartoum to Benghazi, it has been more one of knowing than asking.

And now here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

I went to synagogue on Saturday not far from the Syrian border in Antakya, Turkey. It’s been on my mind ever since.

Antakya is home to a tiny Jewish community, which still gathers for holidays at the little Sephardic synagogue. It is also famous for its mosaic of mosques and Orthodox, Catholic, Armenian and Protestant churches. How could it be that I could go to synagogue in Turkey on Saturday while on Friday, just across the Orontes River in Syria, I had visited with Sunni Free Syrian Army rebels embroiled in a civil war in which Syrian Alawites and Sunnis are killing each other on the basis of their ID cards, Kurds are creating their own enclave, Christians are hiding and the Jews are long gone?

What is this telling us? For me, it raises the question of whether there are just three governing options in the Middle East today: Iron Empires, Iron Fists or Iron Domes?

The reason that majorities and minorities co-existed relatively harmoniously for some 400 years when the Arab world was ruled by the Turkish Ottomans from Istanbul was because the Sunni Ottomans, with their Iron Empire, monopolized politics. While there were exceptions, generally speaking the Ottomans and their local representatives were in charge in cities like Damascus, Antakya and Baghdad. Minorities, like Alawites, Shiites, Christians and Jews, though second-class citizens, did not have to worry that they’d be harmed if they did not rule. The Ottomans had a live-and-let-live mentality toward their subjects.

When Britain and France carved up the Ottoman Empire in the Arab East, they forged the various Ottoman provinces into states — with names like Iraq, Jordan and Syria — that did not correspond to the ethnographic map. So Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, Christians, Druze, Turkmen, Kurds and Jews found themselves trapped together inside national boundaries that were drawn to suit the interests of the British and French. Those colonial powers kept everyone in check. But once they withdrew, and these countries became independent, the contests for power began, and minorities were exposed. Finally, in the late 1960s and 1970s, we saw the emergence of a class of Arab dictators and monarchs who perfected Iron Fists (and multiple intelligence agencies) to decisively seize power for their sect or tribe — and they ruled over all the other communities by force.

In Syria, under the Assad family’s iron fist, the Alawite minority came to rule over a Sunni majority, and in Iraq, under Saddam’s iron fist, a Sunni minority came to rule over a Shiite majority. But these countries never tried to build real “citizens” who could share and peacefully rotate in power. So what you are seeing today in the Arab awakening countries — Syria, Iraq, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen — is what happens when there is no Iron Empire and the people rise up against the iron-fisted dictators. You are seeing ongoing contests for power — until and unless someone can forge a social contract for how communities can share power.

Israelis have responded to the collapse of Arab iron fists around them — including the rise of militias with missiles in Lebanon and Gaza — with a third model. It is the wall Israel built around itself to seal off the West Bank coupled with its Iron Dome antimissile system. The two have been phenomenally successful — but at a price. The wall plus the dome are enabling Israel’s leaders to abdicate their responsibility for thinking creatively about a resolution of its own majority-minority problem with the Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

I am stunned at what I see here politically. On the right, in the Likud Party, the old leadership that was at least connected with the world, spoke English and respected Israel’s Supreme Court, is being swept aside in the latest primary by a rising group of far-right settler-activists who are convinced — thanks, in part, to the wall and dome — that Palestinians are no threat anymore and that no one can roll back the 350,000 Jews living in the West Bank. The far-right group running Israel today is so arrogant, and so indifferent to U.S. concerns, that it announced plans to build a huge block of settlements in the heart of the West Bank — in retaliation for the U.N. vote giving Palestinians observer status — even though the U.S. did everything possible to block that vote and the settlements would sever any possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state.

Meanwhile, with a few exceptions, the dome and wall have so insulated the Israeli left and center from the effects of the Israeli occupation that their main candidates for the Jan. 22 elections — including those from Yitzhak Rabin’s old Labor Party — are not even offering peace ideas but simply conceding the right’s dominance on that issue and focusing on bringing down housing prices and school class sizes. One settler leader told me the biggest problem in the West Bank today is “traffic jams.”

I am glad that the wall and the Iron Dome are sheltering Israelis from enemies who wish to do them ill, but I fear the wall and the Iron Dome are also blinding them from truths they still badly need to face.

The Pasty Little Putz, Dowd and Friedman

Mr. Blow and Mr. Kristof are off today, so we’re left with the dregs.  In “Our Enemy, The Payroll Tax” the Pasty Little Putz gurgles that both parties should do everything they can to make the payroll tax holiday permanent.  He loves the idea, because then the Republicans can then start chipping away at the safety net all the while squealing that they’ve done wonderful things for the non-1%.  That screeching harpy MoDo has a question:  “But Can They Eat 50 Eggs?”  She hisses that there are two Cool Hands with a grip on the nation’s capital. The president should take some leadership lessons from the new football wunderkind.  I think her leftover turkey gravy has started to ferment, or her rolls had ergot in them…  The Moustache of Wisdom takes a look at “Morsi’s Moment” and says the latest Israeli-Hamas conflict was as much a test for Egypt as anyone.  Here’s The Putz:

We have two political parties in America, runs a saying that conservatives like to quote. One is stupid, the other is evil. And when they join forces to do something that’s both stupid and evil — well, that’s what we call “bipartisanship.”

[warning from the blogger — that link will take you to the Washington Times.  If you go there you lose 50 IQ points.  Back to The Putz:]

The payroll tax holiday that passed Congress in the winter of 2010 was a rare exception to this pessimistic rule. Cutting the payroll tax was good short-term politics for both Democrats and Republicans: it was a tax cut that liberals hoped would double as stimulus, and a boost to the middle class that conservatives could support without embracing new federal spending. But more important, it opened the door to what would be good long-term policy as well — because more than almost any feature of the American tax code, the payroll tax deserves to be pared away into extinction.

But now Washington is in danger of practicing payroll-tax bipartisanship of a more destructive sort. While the White House and Congressional Republicans wrestle over where to set income tax rates and how and whether to cut spending, the payroll tax holiday has been orphaned. Lacking noisy champions and press attention, it’s in danger of expiring at the end of the year out of political indifference.

That outcome would be unfortunate. Payroll taxes are a relic of New Deal Machiavellianism: by taking a bite of every worker’s paycheck and promising postretirement returns, Franklin Roosevelt effectively disguised Social Security as a pay-as-you-go system, even though the program actually redistributes from rich to poor and young to old. That disguise has helped keep Social Security sacrosanct — hailed by Democrats because it protects the poor and backed by Republicans as a reward for steady work.

But the costs of this disguise have grown too great to bear. Whatever its past political advantages, the payroll tax now imposes an unnecessary burden on a stagnating economy. In an era of mass unemployment, mediocre wage growth and weak mobility from the bottom of the income ladder, it makes no sense to finance our retirement system with a tax that falls directly on wages and hiring and imposes particular burdens on small business and the working class.

What’s more, the payroll tax as it exists today can’t cover the program’s projected liabilities anyway, and the pay-as-you-go myth stands in the way of the changes required to keep Social Security solvent. All of the components of a sensible Social Security reform — means-testing for wealthier beneficiaries, changing the way benefits adjust for inflation, a slow increase in the retirement age — become easier if the program is treated as normal safety-net spending rather than an untouchable entitlement with a dedicated funding stream.

By cutting the tax rate and promising to make up the difference out of general revenue, the payroll tax holiday took a big step in this direction — and letting it expire would take a big step back. Republicans have every reason to recognize this reality: their long-term size-of-government goals require Social Security reform, and the illusions fostered by the payroll tax are an obstacle — originally created by their political enemies! — to any restraint in what the program spends.

Instead, a mix of ideology and cynicism has tilted Republicans against the payroll tax cut. The party’s ideologues regard the issue as a distraction from the more important debate over income taxes, and some of them fret, à la Mitt Romney with the “47 percent,” about taking too many Americans off the tax rolls. The party’s cynics, meanwhile, have seized on the opportunity to imitate liberal scare campaigns on Social Security, and posture as staunch defenders of the retirement status quo.

It’s been left to a few prominent Democrats, including Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, to make the case for letting the holiday continue. This is a positive sign for liberalism, since it suggests a preference for middle-class paychecks over middle-class entitlements, and a willingness to recognize that the ideals of work and thrift and upward mobility aren’t necessarily well served by the way we tax and spend today.

It will be a discouraging sign for conservatism if these Democrats don’t find Republican allies. Nothing cost the Republican Party more dearly in the last election than the sense that the party didn’t care about the struggles of the middle class. The payroll tax cut is addressed directly to those struggles — and it’s also a case where the short-term interests of Americans living paycheck to paycheck align with the long-term conservative interest in entitlement reform.

That combination doesn’t often come around. So there is only one question conservatives should be asking about the payroll tax holiday: How do we make it permanent?

I love how they keep calling Social Security an “entitlement.”  Yeah, you stupid putz, I’m “entitled” to it because I paid into it for about 49 years.  Asshole.  Here’s MoDo, FSM help us:

The two electrifying rookies exploded onto the scene with killer smiles, undeniable gifts, an affinity for superheroes, poise beyond their years and the ability to play at top form when it’s all on the line. Both stay so calm under pressure that they have evoked comparisons to Cool Hand Luke.

The capital of winning and losing now revolves around two natural-born world shakers: the president of the United States and the quarterback of the Washington Redskins. Only one of them, however, is old enough to appreciate the compliment of being compared to Paul Newman’s character in the 1967 classic prison drama “Cool Hand Luke.”

   “Coach said you’re just like Cool Hand Luke,” a reporter said to Robert Griffin III, after the Baylor graduate and Heisman Trophy winner returned home to Texas on Thanksgiving and scored four touchdowns to lasso the Dallas Cowboys, the Redskins’ biggest rival. “Do you know who Cool Hand Luke is?”

   The 22-year-old Griffin did not. But he laughed, shaking his braids held back with a silver headband, and observed, “He must be pretty cool.”

   RGIII has made the Redskins vibrant again and coalesced the city around football. The Redskins have only a 5-6 record — that was the first Thanksgiving game the team had won since 1973 —  but the city has gone wild for the charismatic Griffin, who is as fleet on the field as an unopposed incumbent with a super PAC.

  Comparing him favorably with the “impossibly wasteful” Tony Romo, The Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins wrote that RGIII is the “one with flash and beauty, and substance, and urgency.” He is having less a rookie season, The Post noted, than a coronation.

Even the crowd at Cowboys Stadium could not resist, chanting “RGIII!” and booing their own team off the field at halftime. “The most valuable player in the entire National Football League,” declared Jimmy Johnson, the former Cowboys coach, on the Fox halftime show.

 My family of rabid Redskins fans stopped talking to me about football back in the 70s, when they took me to a game and I didn’t recognize Roger Staubach. So they’re stunned now at my sudden desire to dissect RGIII’s mastery of the bootleg.

His passes thrill, and his partnership with another unpretentious rookie, the compact but fierce running back Alfred Morris, dazzles. But what is really endearing is his spirit: a zeal to make every play count, a work ethic and self-effacing charm that has everyone rooting for him, a leadership style that causes teammates to lift their games. You can see RGIII going up and down the sidelines patting his teammates for encouragement. And in a rare move, the team voted to make the rookie quarterback a captain.

  In a sports world dimmed by fallen heroes like Tiger Woods, Joe Paterno and Lance Armstrong, RGIII offers values on and off the field that make us feel that it’s O.K. to believe again.

   The Bears fan in the White House has talked about inviting RGIII (who got his degree in political science) over for a basketball game, as long as they are on the same team. The president should take the opportunity to absorb some leadership lessons from the new wunderkind.

  While Obama has developed an unnerving and enervating pattern of going into a prewin slump — as in New Hampshire and Texas in the 2008 primaries or the first debate with Mitt Romney — RGIII never allows his batteries to run down while he’s playing. His parents were Army sergeants — he was born in Okinawa, Japan, and his father served in Iraq — who imbued their son with the ethos of hard work and discipline. The only time Griffin drooped was when he got a concussion in the game against Atlanta.

  While Obama prefers to preen as the man alone in the arena — keeping other pols at a distance on stage, parsimoniously handing out thanks and failing to mention his party or top surrogate Bill Clinton in his last victory speech — RGIII never passes up a chance to share credit.

  While Obama — who has had a failure to communicate — finds media a bother, Griffin has an easy charm with the press. He never shows aggrievement.

  While Obama gets tangled up in his head — trying to decide if he’s too noble to play politics or if spending some evenings schmoozing with pols and flattering them to further his agenda will leave him too depleted — RGIII keeps the joy, intensity and bonhomie in his game.

  As a Democratic senator recently told me: “If only the president would have us over to the White House sometimes and talk to us, it could really help. When Bill Clinton called and asked if he could have my vote, I was more prone to do it because we had developed a rapport.”

  Let’s hope that as Barry watches Robert, he’ll learn that stunning opponents with big plays, and then building on that excitement, can energize his teammates, scare his opponents and lead to big wins.

I don’t follow feetsball, so I have no idea what she’s babbling about, but I do think I’ve heard that her Redskins are about as likely to be in any post-season games as I am.  Now here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

The Israeli-Hamas miniwar last week was the first test of the post-Arab awakening order in the Middle East. Hamas, by getting embroiled in a missile duel with Israel and then calling on Arab countries for support, particularly Egypt, was testing Cairo as much as Israel. And the question Hamas was posing to Egyptians was simple: Did Egypt have a democratic revolution last year to become more like Iran or more like China? In other words, is Egypt ready to sacrifice the Camp David peace, U.S. aid and economic development to support Hamas’s radical, pro-Iranian agenda, or not?

The answer from Cairo was no. President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood’s party did not want to get dragged into a total breach with Israel on behalf of Hamas, and instead threw Egypt’s weight into mediating a cease-fire. But that raises an even more intriguing question going forward — whether Morsi, having shown himself, for the moment, to prefer being more Deng Xiaoping than Ayatollah Khomeini, has any inclination to also be Anwar Sadat, that is, to use his clout to forge an Israeli-Palestinian breakthrough so that Egypt isn’t caught in this vice again.

It is impossible not to be tantalized by how much leverage Morsi could wield in the peace process, if he ever chose to engage Israel. Precisely because he represents the Muslim Brotherhood, the vanguard of Arab Islam, and precisely because he was democratically elected, if Morsi threw his weight behind an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, it would be so much more valuable to Israel than the cold peace that Sadat delivered and Hosni Mubarak maintained. Sadat offered Israelis peace with the Egyptian state. Morsi could offer Israel peace with the Egyptian people and, through them, with the Muslim world beyond.

Ironically, though, all of this would depend on Morsi not becoming a dictator like Mubarak, but on him remaining a legitimately elected president, truly representing the Egyptian people. That is now in doubt given Morsi’s very troubling power grab last week and the violent response from the Egyptian street. President Obama has to be careful not to sell out Egyptian democracy for quiet between Israel and Egypt and Hamas. We tried that under Mubarak. It didn’t end well.

No doubt Morsi’s price for engaging with Israel would be the Arab Peace Initiative — full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem, save for mutually agreed-upon land swaps, and some return of refugees, in return for full normalized relations. If Morsi advanced such a proposal in direct talks with Israelis, he could single-handedly revive the Israeli peace camp.

Do I expect that? No more than I expect to win the lottery. The Muslim Brotherhood has long hated the Jewish state, as well as political and religious pluralism and feminism. Therefore, here’s what I do expect: More trouble between Israel and Hamas that will constantly threaten to drag in Egypt. Hamas is a shameful organization. It subordinates the interests of the Palestinian people to Iran (and earlier to Syria), which wants Hamas to do everything it can to make a two-state solution impossible, because that will lock Israel into a permanent death grip on the West Bank, which will be the undoing of the Jewish democracy and will distract the world from Iran’s and Syria’s murderous behaviors.

Israel left all of Gaza in 2005, and Hamas had a choice: It could recognize Israel, have an open border and import computers, or it could continue to deny Israel’s existence, keep the border sealed, and smuggle in rockets. It chose rockets over computers. With each rocket that lands near Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, another Israeli says, “How can we possibly let go of the West Bank and risk our airport being shut down?” That is just what Hamas and Iran want — a permanent, grinding, democracy-eroding, legitimacy-destroying, globally isolating Israeli occupation of the West Bank — and they are very happy to use the Palestinian people as a human sacrifice for that goal.

The best way for Israel to undercut Hamas is by empowering the secular Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmoud Abbas, in the West Bank to gain greater independence and build a thriving economy, so every Palestinian can compare which strategy works best: working with Israel or against Israel. This Israeli government has failed to do that. It is so shortsighted. But Hamas makes it easy for Israel to get away with that by ignoring what we know from history: that whoever makes the Israeli silent majority feel morally insecure about occupation, but strategically secure in Israel, wins. After Sadat flew to Jerusalem, Israelis knew there was no way morally that they could hold onto the Sinai and strategically they no longer felt the need. When King Hussein of Jordan and Yasir Arafat did the same, they each got land back. Today, nothing makes Israelis feel more strategically insecure and morally secure with occupation than Hamas’s stupid rocket attacks, even after Israel has withdrawn.

So, as you can see, the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the future of Egyptian democracy and the U.S.-Israel-Arab struggle with Iran and Syria are now all intertwined. Smart, courageous leadership today could defuse the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, advance Egyptian democracy and isolate the Iranian, Syrian and Hamas regimes. Weak or reckless leadership will empower all three. This is a big moment.