The Pasty Little Putz, Dowd, Friedman and Bruni

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lastly we have Mr. Bruni:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pasty Little Putz, Friedman and Bruni

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next up is The Moustache of Wisdom:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now we come to Mr. Bruni:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brooks, Cohen, Nocera and Bruni

Oh, gawd.  Bobo’s decided to go all “data man” on us.  In “What Data Can’t Do” he opines that data can’t account for everything in our experience, nor serve as the only guide for our thinking, planning and decision-making.  (Of course, he opens his column by saying he recently had dinner with the chief executive of a large bank…)  Mr. Cohen, in “Beltway Foreign Policy,” splains to us how the first-term Obama White House shunned diplomacy for domestic political calculation.  Mr. Nocera LURVES him some big oil.  In “How Not to Fix Climate Change” he states that stopping the Keystone XL oil pipeline is actually counterproductive in more ways than one.  Mr. Bruni, in “The Pope’s Muffled Voice,” says don’t let the media frenzy fool you. American Catholics pay only glancing attention to the Vatican.  Here’s Bobo:

Not long ago, I was at a dinner with the chief executive of a large bank. He had just had to decide whether to pull out of Italy, given the weak economy and the prospect of a future euro crisis.

The C.E.O. had his economists project out a series of downside scenarios and calculate what they would mean for his company. But, in the end, he made his decision on the basis of values.

His bank had been in Italy for decades. He didn’t want Italians to think of the company as a fair-weather friend. He didn’t want people inside the company thinking they would cut and run when times got hard. He decided to stay in Italy and ride out any potential crisis, even with the short-term costs.

He wasn’t oblivious to data in making this decision, but ultimately, he was guided by a different way of thinking. And, of course, he was right to be. Commerce depends on trust. Trust is reciprocity coated by emotion. People and companies that behave well in tough times earn affection and self-respect that is extremely valuable, even if it is hard to capture in data.

I tell this story because it hints at the strengths and limitations of data analysis. The big novelty of this historic moment is that our lives are now mediated through data-collecting computers. In this world, data can be used to make sense of mind-bogglingly complex situations. Data can help compensate for our overconfidence in our own intuitions and can help reduce the extent to which our desires distort our perceptions.

But there are many things big data does poorly. Let’s note a few in rapid-fire fashion:

Data struggles with the social. Your brain is pretty bad at math (quick, what’s the square root of 437), but it’s excellent at social cognition. People are really good at mirroring each other’s emotional states, at detecting uncooperative behavior and at assigning value to things through emotion.

Computer-driven data analysis, on the other hand, excels at measuring the quantity of social interactions but not the quality. Network scientists can map your interactions with the six co-workers you see during 76 percent of your days, but they can’t capture your devotion to the childhood friends you see twice a year, let alone Dante’s love for Beatrice, whom he met twice.

Therefore, when making decisions about social relationships, it’s foolish to swap the amazing machine in your skull for the crude machine on your desk.

Data struggles with context. Human decisions are not discrete events. They are embedded in sequences and contexts. The human brain has evolved to account for this reality. People are really good at telling stories that weave together multiple causes and multiple contexts. Data analysis is pretty bad at narrative and emergent thinking, and it cannot match the explanatory suppleness of even a mediocre novel.

Data creates bigger haystacks. This is a point Nassim Taleb, the author of “Antifragile,” has made. As we acquire more data, we have the ability to find many, many more statistically significant correlations. Most of these correlations are spurious and deceive us when we’re trying to understand a situation. Falsity grows exponentially the more data we collect. The haystack gets bigger, but the needle we are looking for is still buried deep inside.

One of the features of the era of big data is the number of “significant” findings that don’t replicate the expansion, as Nate Silver would say, of noise to signal.

Big data has trouble with big problems. If you are trying to figure out which e-mail produces the most campaign contributions, you can do a randomized control experiment. But let’s say you are trying to stimulate an economy in a recession. You don’t have an alternate society to use as a control group. For example, we’ve had huge debates over the best economic stimulus, with mountains of data, and as far as I know not a single major player in this debate has been persuaded by data to switch sides.

Data favors memes over masterpieces. Data analysis can detect when large numbers of people take an instant liking to some cultural product. But many important (and profitable) products are hated initially because they are unfamiliar.

Data obscures values. I recently saw an academic book with the excellent title, “ ‘Raw Data’ Is an Oxymoron.” One of the points was that data is never raw; it’s always structured according to somebody’s predispositions and values. The end result looks disinterested, but, in reality, there are value choices all the way through, from construction to interpretation.

This is not to argue that big data isn’t a great tool. It’s just that, like any tool, it’s good at some things and not at others. As the Yale professor Edward Tufte has said, “The world is much more interesting than any one discipline.”

Now here’s Mr. Cohen’s screed:

“It is not going too far to say that American foreign policy has become completely subservient to tactical domestic political considerations.”

This stern verdict comes from Vali Nasr, who spent two years working for the Obama administration before becoming dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. In a book called “The Dispensable Nation,” to be published in April, Nasr delivers a devastating portrait of a first-term foreign policy that shunned the tough choices of real diplomacy, often descended into pettiness, and was controlled “by a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisers.”

Nasr, one of the most respected American authorities on the Middle East, served as senior adviser to Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan until his death in December 2010. From that vantage point, and later as a close observer, Nasr was led to the reluctant conclusion that the principal aim of Obama’s policies “is not to make strategic decisions but to satisfy public opinion.”

In this sense the first-term Obama foreign policy was successful: He was re-elected. Americans wanted extrication from the big wars and a smaller global footprint: Obama, with some back and forth, delivered. But the price was high and opportunities lost.

“The Dispensable Nation” constitutes important reading as John Kerry moves into his new job as secretary of state. It nails the drift away from the art of diplomacy — with its painful give-and-take — toward a U.S. foreign policy driven by the Pentagon, intelligence agencies and short-term political calculus. It holds the president to account for his zigzags from Kabul to Jerusalem.

It demonstrates the emasculation of the State Department: Vasr quotes Admiral Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, telling him of Hillary Clinton that, “It is incredible how little support she got from the White House. They want to control everything.” And it paints a persuasive picture of an American decline driven not so much by the inevitable rise of other powers as by “inconsistency” that has “cast doubt on our leadership.”

Nowhere was this inconsistency more evident than in Afghanistan. Obama doubled-down by committing tens of thousands more troops to show he was no wimp, only to set a date for a drawdown to show he was no warmonger. Marines died; few cared.

He appointed Holbrooke as his point man only to ensure that he “never received the authority to do diplomacy.” Obama’s message to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan was: “Ignore my special representative.” The White House campaign against Holbrooke was “a theater of the absurd,” Nasr writes. “Holbrooke was not included in Obama’s videoconferences with Karzai and was cut out of the presidential retinue when Obama went to Afghanistan.”

The White House seemed “more interested in bringing Holbrooke down than getting the policy right.” The pettiness was striking: “The White House kept a dossier on Holbrooke’s misdeeds and Clinton kept a folder on churlish attempts by the White House’s AfPak office to undermine Holbrooke.”

Diplomacy died. Serious negotiation with the Taliban and involving Iran in talks on Afghanistan’s future — bold steps that carried a domestic political price — were shunned. The use of trade as a bridge got scant attention. Nasr concludes on Afghanistan: “We are just washing our hands of it, hoping there will be a decent interval of calm — a reasonable distance between our departure and the catastrophe to follow.”

In Pakistan, too nuclear to ignore, the ultimate “frenemy,” Nasr observed policy veering between frustrated confrontation and half-hearted attempts to change the relationship through engagement. “The crucial reality was that the Taliban helped Pakistan face down India in the contest over Afghanistan,” Nasr writes. America was never able to change that equation. Aid poured in to secure those nukes and win hearts and minds: Drones drained away any gratitude. A proposed “strategic dialogue” went nowhere. “Pakistan is a failure of American policy, a failure of the sort that comes from the president handing foreign policy over to the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies.”

In Iran, Nasr demonstrates Obama’s deep ambivalence about any deal on the nuclear program. “Pressure,” he writes, “has become an end in itself.” The dual track of ever tougher sanctions combined with diplomatic outreach was “not even dual. It relied on one track, and that was pressure.” The reality was that, “Engagement was a cover for a coercive campaign of sabotage, economic pressure and cyberwarfare.”

Opportunities to begin real step-by-step diplomacy involving Iran giving up its low-enriched uranium in exchange for progressive sanctions relief were lost. What was Tehran to think when “the sum total of three major rounds of diplomatic negotiation was that America would give some bits and bobs of old aircraft in exchange for Iran’s nuclear program”?

On Israel-Palestine, as with Iran, Obama began with some fresh ideas only to retreat. He tried to stop Israeli settlement expansion. Then he gave up when the domestic price looked too high. The result has been drift.

“The Dispensable Nation” is a brave book. Its core message is: Diplomacy is tough and carries a price, but the price is higher when it is abandoned.

Yeah.  And C+ Augustus was SUCH a skilled diplomat…  Now, heaven help us, is Mr. Nocera’s cri du coeur for tar sands:

After much back and forth, James E. Hansen and I had agreed on a date to meet. Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is the scientist most closely associated with climate change activists like Bill McKibben, who has led the charge against the Keystone XL pipeline, and Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club. In Hansen’s view, the country needs to start moving away from fossil fuels now, before the damage becomes irreversible.

As regular readers know, I believe the Obama administration should approve the Keystone pipeline, which would transport oil mined and processed from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. Like it or not, fossil fuels are going to remain the world’s dominant energy source for the foreseeable future, and we are far better off getting our oil from Canada than, say, Venezuela. And the climate change effects of tar sands oil are, all in all, pretty small. I had the strong sense that Hansen hoped that once we met, I would begin to see the error of my ways.

The date we set was on Thursday, Feb. 14. The only glitch, he said, is that on the 13th, he was participating in an anti-Keystone demonstration in front of the White House led by his friend McKibben. The plan was they’d all try to get arrested. “It is conceivable that we will be spending the night of the 13th in the clink, in which case it is not clear when I will arrive on the 14th,” Hansen wrote in an e-mail. (He added, “Yes, I know, the merits of this continuing activity may be dubious, but Bill is working his butt off so hard that I can’t refuse.”) I postponed the meeting.

Suddenly, it appears, the Keystone XL pipeline, which President Obama temporarily blocked during his re-election campaign, is back in the news. The State of Nebraska, which had previously opposed the pipeline, recently dropped its opposition after TransCanada, the company hoping to build it, rerouted portions of it to avoid sensitive lands and aquifers. Canada, still miffed by Obama’s rejection of the pipeline last year, is threatening to sell the oil to China if the United States says no again.

In fact, this should be a no-brainer for the president, for all the reasons I stated earlier, and one more: the strategy of activists like McKibben, Brune and Hansen, who have made the Keystone pipeline their line in the sand, is utterly boneheaded.

Brune and McKibben have been very clear about what they hope to accomplish. Oil companies have invested upward of $100 billion to extract the unconventional oil in the sands. A pipeline is the only way to export it. The Keystone pipeline is Canada’s Plan A. Plan B is a pipeline to British Columbia, which would get the oil to China. If the president blocks Keystone, and the First Nation tribes continue their staunch opposition to the western pipeline, then Canada will have the second largest oil reserves in the world — and no place to sell it. The assumption of the activists is that by choking off the supply of new oil sources like the tar sands, the U.S. — and maybe the world — will be forced to transition more quickly to green energy.

Can you see how backward this logic is? As Adam Brandt, an energy expert at Stanford University, pointed out to me recently, so long as the demand is there, energy producers are going to search for new supplies of fossil fuel — many of them using unconventional means like tar sands extraction. “With growing global demand, the economic pressure to develop unconventional resources is enormous and not going away,” he said. “Can environmental groups expect to win a series of fights for decades to come, when the economic forces are aligned very strongly against them in each round?” The answer is obvious: no. The emphasis should be on demand, not supply. If the U.S. stopped consuming so much of the world’s oil, the economic need for the tar sands would evaporate.

On Monday, I finally spoke to Hansen. His knowledge and sincerity are easy to admire, even if his tactics are not. He told me he would like to see oil companies pay a fee, which would rise annually, based on carbon emissions. He said that such a tax could reduce emissions by 30 percent within 10 years. Well, maybe. But it would also likely make the expensive tar sands oil more viable. If you really want to eliminate expensive new fossil fuel sources, the best way is to lower the price of oil, which would render them uneconomical. But, of course, that wouldn’t exactly lower demand either.

In any case, McKibben, Hansen and others were arrested on Wednesday, as planned. They spent a few hours in jail and paid $100 fines. And that was it.

Until the next time, of course.

And now here’s Mr. Bruni:

There were reports over the weekend that cardinals might tweak the rules and begin the conclave to choose Pope Benedict XVI’s successor sooner than March 15, which had been the earliest date mentioned. That would be a blessing. Already in the American news media it’s all pope all the time, a tsunami of papal coverage, and until a new pope is named, the tide won’t quit. You’d be forgiven for concluding that he’ll actually have significant sway over Catholics in this country.

He won’t, not over the majority of them, not in any immediate sense. And it’s worth pausing, amid this hoopla, to remember that. In large parts of the Roman Catholic world, certainly in North America and Western Europe, most Catholics don’t feel any particular debt or duty to the self-appointed caretakers of their church. They don’t feel bound by the pope’s interpretation of doctrine or moral commands. And many regard him and other Vatican officials as totems, a royal family of dubious relevance, partly because these officials have often shown greater concern for the church’s reputation than for the needs, and wounds, of the people in the pews.

The blanket coverage of matters papal is deceptive, a function to some degree of habit and convenience. We in the media love the clear-cut drama of transitions. They’re easy to grasp and frame. And in the case of the Vatican, they come with majestic visual backdrops, colorfully costumed characters: a pageant extraordinaire. It looks splendid on the front page and even better on the nightly news.

We traffic in celebrities, and the pope qualifies as one. We also relish the narrative of any winner-take-all contest in which there are multiple hopefuls, murky dynamics and a familiar brand of suspense. This informs the way we approach presidential elections, focusing on the horse race. It explains all the cook-offs, the sing-offs, the analyses of the face-off between “Argo” and “Lincoln” for Best Picture. The papal selection process is in one sense “Top Chef” without the cooking. It’s the ecclesiastical Oscars. It fits a mold, regardless of import.

There’s import, certainly. The Roman Catholic Church is a worldwide organization with enormous financial resources; with a network of charities and agencies that provide crucial help to the downtrodden; and with parishes in which the prayerful nurture their relationship with God. And the pope is its C.E.O., ultimately responsible for where the money flows and for the placement and policing of its staff. The policing part matters, as the child sexual abuse crisis made agonizingly clear.

But the trend over the last half century has been for the prayerful in this country to feel less invested in that organization, less attached to its traditions. Polls chart a decline in churchgoing among American Catholics and a robust disobedience.

A 2011 survey published in the National Catholic Reporter showed that while 73 percent of American Catholics described their belief in Jesus’ resurrection as “very important” to them, only 30 percent described the teaching authority of the Vatican that way, and only 21 percent characterized an all-male, celibate priesthood in those terms. More than 60 percent supported the ordination of women as priests.

When it comes to divorce, premarital sex, abortion and more, Catholics routinely break with the church’s edicts. Pew polling last year found that more than half of American Catholics support same-sex marriage, which church leaders vociferously oppose. This particular renunciation of church teaching travels beyond the United States. Spain, Portugal and Argentina have legalized same-sex marriage; all have populations that are more than 75 percent Catholic, at least nominally.

A Gallup poll last year showed that 82 percent of American Catholics had no qualms about birth control. Church leaders do, and during the presidential campaign they railed against President Obama’s health care reform for mandating insurance coverage of contraception. He won the Catholic vote anyway.

Andrew Cuomo certainly doesn’t sweat the church’s ire the way his father did. Three decades ago Mario Cuomo felt the need for a major address at the University of Notre Dame to explain the discrepancy between his support for abortion rights and the church’s antiabortion position. Without any such handwringing, his son is plotting to shore up abortion rights in New York. Andrew Cuomo also lobbied for, and signed, New York’s gay marriage law. Divorced, he lives outside of wedlock with Sandra Lee. There’s been no Notre Dame soul-baring about any of this.

Does the pope fully appreciate this drift? Every Sunday, he looks from his window onto St. Peter’s Square and sees adoring, rapt masses. Everywhere he goes, traffic parts and cameras follow him. But here in America, the Catholics watching closely are fewer and fewer. They’re Christian. They’re caring. They’re moral. But they have minds and wills of their own, and no conclave will change that.

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.

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

Well, it would appear that The Pasty Little Putz has finally gone off the deep end.  The poor soul has obviously lost his mind.  In “Boehner, American Hero” he babbles that in a dysfunctional Washington, this is what success looks like.  Really.  He’s calling the orange weeper a hero.  Someone needs to do some sort of intervention with the Putz…  MoDo looks at “The Surreal World: Capitol Hill” and has a question:  Is C-Span’s V.P. more entertaining than HBO’s Veep?  Of course, she works in her standard hissing at the president for being detached and aloof…  The Moustache of Wisdom suggests we need “More Risk-Taking, Less Poll-Taking.”  He says we’ve had lots of deal-making in Washington lately, but hardly any displays of courage from anyone.  (Apparently The Putz hasn’t yet ‘splained to The Moustache that Weeping John is a hero.)  Mr. Kristof is still in Beijing.  In “Looking for a Jump-Start in China” he says China’s next top leader has the potential to be a game changer, and to nourish China’s rise with sweeping economic and political reforms.  Mr. Bruni addresses “How to Choose a College” and says when picking a school, you can focus on ranking, reputation, ivy. Or you can ask yourself where you’ll really be forced to grow.  Here’s the Putz:

Here are a few things that happened to John Boehner, ostensibly one of the most powerful men in Washington, during the past two weeks.

First his own backbenchers blew up his attempt at a fiscal cliff negotiating maneuver. Then he had to step back and let Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell hammer out the details of the fiscal cliff deal, which he then had to shepherd through his own legislative body with more Democratic than Republican votes. The next day he was dressed down on national television by a grandstanding Chris Christie. The day after that, he survived an utterly incompetent revolt against his re-election as speaker of the House.

These tribulations have earned Boehner press coverage that’s sympathetic without being particularly respectful. It’s increasingly taken for granted that he’s an ineffective speaker who holds his position mostly because nobody else wants the job — an anti-Sam Rayburn, a survivor who’s liked but not feared. The only compliments he ever seems to earn are backhanded, rueful, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I.

Yet at the same time, Boehner has done his country a more important service over the last two years than almost any other politician in Washington.

That service hasn’t been the achievement of a grand bargain with the White House, which he has at times assiduously sought. Nor has it been the sweeping triumph over liberalism that certain right-wing activists expect him to somehow gain. Rather, it’s been a kind of disaster management — a sequence of bomb-defusal operations that have prevented our dysfunctional government from tipping into outright crisis.

Three realities have made these constant defusing operations necessary. First, there’s the grim economic and budgetary situation — a mix of slow growth and huge peacetime deficits that constrains policy makers in unprecedented ways. (It’s far, far easier to be a successful legislator when you’re negotiating over an expanding pie.) Second, there’s the combination of gridlocked government and ideological polarization, which simultaneously requires compromise while reducing the common ground available to would-be deal makers.

Such obstacles might be enough to frustrate even the legislative giants of the past. Pundits talk blithely about the good old days of bipartisanship, but there’s no real precedent in modern American history for a bipartisan bargain in which two bitterly divided sides both accept so many painful sacrifices.

The Republicans’ current position makes things harder still, because Boehner’s party has much more power in Washington than it has support in the nation as a whole. Republicans are a minority party nationally, but thanks to redistricting they control the House despite Democrats’ 2012 successes. This mismatch leaves the base spoiling for fights that can’t actually be won: House Republicans have just enough real power to raise conservative expectations but not nearly enough to bend a liberal president and a Democratic Senate to their will.

Boehner’s job, then, requires constantly pushing hard enough to persuade his caucus that he’s maximizing Republican leverage, while simultaneously looking for ways to make small, can-kicking deals at the last possible moment. Which he’s always found, by hook or by crook: there was no government shutdown in the spring of 2011, no debt default that summer, and the fiscal cliff was averted (at least temporarily) last week.

The fact that all these crises have been resolved at the 11th hour, amid persistent brinkmanship and repeated near-death moments for his speakership, isn’t a sign that he’s a failure. Instead, given the correlation of forces he’s dealing with, this is what success looks like. (For a glimpse of the alternative, just imagine rerunning the last two years with Newt Gingrich in the speaker’s chair.)

You might say that this is no way to run a government. I’d agree. But the nation’s polarization and his party’s dysfunction are beyond a speaker’s ability to undo. As Democrats learned across the 1970s and ’80s, the House is a poor base from which to rebuild a national party. Nobody blames Tip O’Neill or Jim Wright for failing to do what Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ultimately achieved. And anyone who thinks that Boehner would transform the Republican Party for the better by, say, resigning his leadership position and excoriating his colleagues should watch fewer Aaron Sorkin shows.

No, the way out of our predicament is through the ballot box, not the speaker’s office. Either Democrats need to consolidate their advantages and win back the House or Republicans need to find a way to start winning national elections again, at which point the current impasse will be broken and policy will tilt more clearly toward the left or right.

Until then, we’re stuck with the cycle of brinkmanship — another debt-ceiling debate, another shutdown possibility, the spending portion of the fiscal cliff.

It would probably be better to call the whole thing off and accept that the fiscal picture won’t change much in two years. But if we’re going to go through it again, I’m glad that the speaker who prevented dysfunction from producing disaster last time is around to try again.

He really should have his medications adjusted…  Here’s MoDo:

It was hard not to feel sorry for John Boehner, wounded, weepy, mercilessly flogged by Chris Christie. The miserable-looking Boehner was even scaring small children.

After squeaking out re-election as House speaker when crazed conservatives rebelled on Thursday, Boehner summoned gruff bonhomie as he presided at a ceremonial swearing-in for House members.

But some of the kids posing for pictures seemed a little alarmed at Boehner’s awkward pats, brusque small talk and barked orders when someone posed the wrong way.

The speaker opened his arms to help out Sean Duffy, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin who was juggling five small children and two stuffed animals. Duffy, who met his wife, Rachel, through MTV after they were on different seasons of “The Real World,” tried to hand over his young daughter, who recoiled.

“No?” the rejected speaker asked her, muttering sardonically, “You could be a member of our caucus.” He followed the girl as she rolled away on the floor, trying to tickle her and making Donald Duck quacking noises. That kind of thing may work on Michele Bachmann, but Miss Duffy was having none of it.

It was a day for old-pol shtick. And if Boehner was the nicotine-stained prince of darkness in the House, Joe Biden was the garrulous white knight over in the Senate. Fresh from his deal-making triumph with Mitch McConnell — no Tickle Monster, he — Biden presided over the Senate ceremonial swearing-in and lived up to his reputation for “bringing sexy back to the Medicare-eligible set,” as Politico once put it.

Every time Biden spied a member’s mom, he called out with utter delight, “Mom!” as though she were his own, enfolding the glowing woman in a tender embrace.

“Mom, I’ll see you in a little bit,” he flirted with the mother of Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania. “I hope I’ll sneak over and see you.” To the mother of Senator Deb Fischer, a new Republican from Nebraska, he cooed, “You’ve got beautiful eyes, Mom.”

The bouncy, irrepressible Biden also had better karma with kids, persuading one little boy to raise his hand to take the oath with his father, the new Connecticut senator, Chris Murphy. It turned into a YouTube moment so adorable it even melted the hearts of jaded journalists who usually prefer videos of Ukrainian pols fistfighting.

The prolix vice president had his off-kilter moments, of course. He made a risqué frisking joke to the husband of Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, and he gushed over a brunette accompanying Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey: “You are so pretty. God love you, holy mackerel.”

But it was hard not to fall for his daffy charm — a rare 86 minutes of feeling good about a Congress that has now officially entered Ionesco territory as the most absurd place on earth.

When the young daughter of Senator Ted Cruz, the new Tea Party hotshot from Texas, began crying, the vice president reassured her, noting that he was a Democrat but that “it’s O.K.”

When Tim Scott, the first black senator from South Carolina, came up with his muscular brother, a former football player, to pose, the 70-year-old Biden deadpanned, “Need any help with your pecs, let me know.”

The vice president has come in for his share of mockery by late-night comics. But fox-trotting in to save the day on the fiscal cliff as the “dancing partner” of McConnell, Biden seemed more like an indispensable partner to the detached president who loathes dealing with Congress — a capable, genial Captain Kirk balancing out Obama’s brilliant but rigid Spock.

As the presidential historian Michael Beschloss said on Twitter, “Biden did for the president on Capitol Hill what J.F.K. was always too wary to let the experienced L.B.J. do for him.”

A petition even popped up on the White House Web site suggesting that the Obama administration create a reality show around the vice president. C-Span ratings would go through the Capitol dome, giving Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s “Veep” a run for its money.

It was sweet justice for a man who was the victim of friendly fire from White House aides after he blurted out his support for gay marriage during the campaign while the president was still dithering, spurring Obama to do the right thing. From the beginning of their alliance in 2008, Biden felt passionately that he needed to interpret the dispassionate Obama for regular folk. It was an attitude that probably annoyed Obama, who does not like to feel dependent or beholden, having fought his way up in the world mostly under his own steam.

But when Obama let Biden take over the cliff talks, and when he noted with asperity that he would not debate Congress again over paying its bills, he dug into his revulsion at playing the game, his reluctance to even fake the flattering, schmoozing and ring-kissing needed to coax Congress into doing what he wants.

Even members of his own party have lost faith in his ability to use the White House as a social lubricant to get his agenda passed, or to use that big brain of his to become a more clever negotiator, rather than a scolding lecturer.

“His inability to engage the politicians here has been a real liability,” one Democratic lawmaker complained. It’s odd, given that he was renowned for making a group of egotists feel that they were being heeded at The Harvard Law Review.

The vice president was in the Senate for 36 years while the president merely breezed through. Obama radiates contempt at Congress for not being a bunch of high-minded, effective people, and for expecting him to clean up its mess. He thinks reasonable people should see things his way in a reasonable amount of time, and gets impatient when ideology, ego, identity politics and pork-project whining hold up progress.

Biden is a realist. He understands lawmakers’ limitations, motivations and needs. He leans right in and speaks — and speaks and speaks — their language. That’s who he is. And he believes, as creaky and unwieldy as the system is, that it still has integrity. More Rocky than Spocky, Biden can spread everything out on the table and negotiate his way through all of his former colleagues’ shortcomings, weaknesses, fears and frailties.

It’s actually fun for him, while Obama seems so often to be pulling back, aggrieved by the need to engage. The president and his staff seem clueless about what Republicans on the Hill are thinking. And Obama ignores those who urge him to be less insular and — like Jefferson, Lincoln, L.B.J. and Reagan — socialize more with political players, combining fairy dust, elbow grease, intimidation and seduction to get his way.

Joe Biden has a valuable skill: He knows how to stoop to conquer.

MoDo, you’re wrong in your first statement.  I would find it extremely difficult to feel sorry for Weeping John.  Next up is The Moustache of Wisdom:

The U.S. military trains its fighter pilots on a principle called the “OODA Loop.” It stands for observe, orient, decide, act. The idea is that if your OODA Loop is faster and more accurate than the other pilot’s, you’ll shoot his plane out of the sky. If the other pilot’s OODA Loop is better, he’ll shoot you down. Right now, our national OODA Loop is broken. We’re are doing something crazy — taking the country back and forth to the financial brink to produce suboptimal, midnight compromises without any overall plan for how this will lead to growth in the world in which we’re living. We’re doing the worst thing a country can do — cutting taxes and spending without a plan. Maybe you can grow without a plan. But if you want to ensure that every scarce dollar gets the biggest bang, you can’t cut without a plan. It’s deciding and acting without observing and orienting. It’s how fighter pilots get shot down.

President Obama, by his own admission, focused his campaign almost exclusively on the need to raise taxes on the wealthy, and the Republicans focused theirs on lowering them. But neither one offered the country what we need most: a description of what world we’re living in, what is new, and how we maximize our ability to compete and grow in this world — and then offering up a comprehensive, detailed plan of appropriate phased-in spending cuts, tax reforms and investments in research, infrastructure and early childhood education to create more good jobs and the workers to fill them.

What world are we living in? It’s a world in which we face three major challenges: responding to the merger of globalization and the information technology revolution, which is changing every job and workplace; dealing with our mounting debt and entitlement burdens, driven by steadily rising health care costs and unsustainable defined benefits; and, finally, developing energy sources that can grow the world economy without tipping it into disruptive climate change. (At one point last week, the Senate approved a $60.4 billion aid package to help New York and New Jersey recover from Hurricane Sandy. If fully implemented, that would mean we’d spend on one storm all the new tax revenue for next year that the House and Senate just agreed to in the fiscal-cliff negotiations.)

What each party should be saying is, “Given this world, here are the specific tax reforms, spending cuts, investments and policy innovations we need to grow our middle class, sustain our retirees and shrink inequality.” Instead, we have no leaders ready to trust the public with the truth, so both parties are shooting themselves in the foot and our future in the head. As Matt Miller, author of “The Tyranny of Dead Ideas” noted in The Washington Post, “Republicans haven’t identified anything remotely equal to the savings we need. And because many liberals haven’t thought through the long-term budget implications, or wrongly assume that taxes can rise indefinitely or that the Pentagon can be shrunk to something less than a triangle, they resist sensible steps to slow the growth of Social Security and Medicare, not realizing that this course will assure before long that there isn’t any new money to spend on, say, poor children.”

I expect nothing from the G.O.P. It’s lost and leaderless. I expect a lot from Obama, who knows what needs to be done and has said so in the past. I expect him to stop acting as a party leader and start acting like the president of the whole country. When I heard Obama say, after the election, that this time he was going to take his plan to the country, and not make the mistake again of just negotiating with Congress, I thought, “Great, I can’t wait to hear what he says.” But all he took to the country was a plan for increasing taxes on “millionaires and billionaires.” There was nothing comprehensive, nothing bold, no great journey for America and no risks for him. Really disappointing.

Maybe Obama has a strategy: First raise taxes on the wealthy, which gives him the credibility with his base to then make big spending cuts in the next round of negotiations. Could be. But raising taxes on the wealthy is easy. Now we’re at the hard part: comprehensive tax reform, entitlement cuts, radical cost-saving approaches to health care and new investments in our growth engines. This will require taking things away from people — to both save and invest. A lot of lobbies will fight it. The president will need to rally the center of the country and the business community to overcome them. He’ll have to change the polls, not just read the polls. He will have to take on his own base and the G.O.P.’s.

Obama has spent a lot of time lately bashing the rich to pay their “fair share.” You know what? There are definitely some Wall Street bankers and C.E.O.’s who deserve that bashing. But there are many successful Americans who got their wealth the old-fashioned way — by risk-taking, going into debt to start a business or pursue a dream. It’s time for the president to do some risk-taking — to stop just hammering the wealthy, which is so easy, and to start selling the country on a strategy to multiply them. We need to tax more millionaires, but we also need more millionaires and middle classes to tax. The president was elected to grow our national pie, not just re-divide it.

One of the commenters on this thing put in a link to The Thomas Friedman Op/Ed Generator.  Honest to God, you can’t tell the difference between what’s generated and a real column…  Next we have Mr. Kristof:

Here is my prediction about China: The new paramount leader, Xi Jinping, will spearhead a resurgence of economic reform, and probably some political easing as well. Mao’s body will be hauled out of Tiananmen Square on his watch, and Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning writer, will be released from prison.

These won’t happen immediately — Xi won’t even be named president until March — and I may be wrong entirely. But my hunch on this return to China, my old home, is that change is coming.

Here’s my case for Xi as a reformer.

First, it’s in his genes. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was a pioneer of economic restructuring and publicly denounced the massacre of pro-democracy protesters in 1989. Xi’s mother chooses to live in Shenzhen, the most capitalist enclave in the country.

Xi is also one of the first Chinese leaders to send a child to the United States as an undergraduate. His daughter is a junior at Harvard, reflecting her parents’ emphasis on learning English and their admiration for American education.

It helps that the bar is low for Xi: he follows President Hu Jintao, who is widely regarded in China as a failure. Even government ministers complain that he squandered his 10 years as leader. Today there is pent-up demand for change.

President Hu, who always reads speeches from texts, is a robot who surrounds himself with robots. One such robot aide is Ling Jihua, whose 23-year-old son was driving a Ferrari one night last March with two half-naked women as passengers. The car crashed on a Beijing road, killing the young man and badly injuring the women, one of whom later died.

Ling feared a scandal and reportedly began a cover-up. He went to the morgue, according to the account I got from one Chinese official, and looked at the body — and then coldly denied that it was his son. He continued to work in the following weeks as if nothing had happened. The cover-up failed, and the episode underscored all that was wrong with the old leadership: the flaunting of dubious wealth, the abuse of power and the lack of any heart.

Xi is trying to send a message that he is different. His first act upon becoming Communist Party general secretary in November was to replicate a famous “southern tour” by Deng Xiaoping in 1992 that revived economic reforms. Xi and his team have also startled officials by telling them to stop reading empty speeches at meetings.

Another good sign: I hear that Wang Yang, a reformist who has been the party chief in Guangdong Province and is perhaps the single most capable leader in China today, will be named a vice premier in March.

The new leaders would probably prefer to accelerate economic change while minimizing political relaxation, but that is increasingly difficult as China develops an educated, worldly and self-confident middle class. Over the years, most of China’s neighbors — from Taiwan to Mongolia, South Korea to Thailand — have become more democratic, and now even Myanmar is joining the parade. How can mighty China be more backward than Myanmar?

For 25 years, I’ve regularly been visiting my wife’s ancestral village in the Taishan area of southern China. At first, the villagers were semiliterate and isolated, but now their world has been transformed. On this visit, we dropped by a farmhouse where a former peasant was using the Internet to trade stocks on his laptop. His daughter is in college, and he watches Hong Kong television on a big screen.

People like him are ever harder to control or manipulate, and they’re steamed at China’s worsening corruption. A couple of decades ago, a friend who is a son of a Politburo member was paid several hundred thousand dollars a year to lend his name to a Chinese company so that it could get cheap land from local governments. These days, the family members of leaders can rake in billions of dollars over time.

The 70 richest delegates to China’s National People’s Congress have a collective net worth of almost $90 billion, Bloomberg News reported. That’s more than 10 times the collective net worth of the entire American Congress.

Granted, there is evidence to counter my optimistic take. Most troubling, the authorities are cracking down on the Internet. That’s a great leap backward, but I am skeptical that it will be sustained. Right now a fascinating test case is unfolding: a senior propaganda official censored a New Year’s message in a major Guangdong newspaper, and now journalists are publicly demanding that he be fired. Stay tuned.

Xi is also more nationalistic than President Hu, and I worry that a confrontation with Japan over disputed islands could escalate out of control — in which case all bets are off.

Still, the pre-eminent story of our time is the rise of China. For the last decade it has been hobbled by the failed leadership of President Hu. I’m betting that in the coming 10 years of Xi’s reign, China will come alive again.

And last but not least here’s Mr. Bruni:

My niece Leslie is still more than nine months away from sending in a college application and more than 18 from stepping into her first college class, but already she’s swimming in numbers: the average SAT scores for one university’s student body; the percentage of applicants another school admits; how much money, on average, the graduates of yet another school tend to make once they’ve been in the work force awhile. This is the kind of information spotlighted in the articles and books that are supposed to guide her and her peers. These are the types of factoids that the adults around them often focus on.

Which school will bequeath the best network? Which diploma has the most cachet? Various relatives pitch Leslie on the virtues of their alma maters, and as surely as my niece swims in numbers, she drowns in advice. But much of it strikes me as shortsighted and incomplete, and I worry that she’ll be coaxed to make her choice in a way that disregards the inimitable opportunity that college presents, the full bounty and splendor of those potentially transformative years. I have the same worry about other secondary-school students who, like her, possess the economic and intellectual good fortune — and the hard-won transcripts — to entertain a wealth of alternatives, because I think we let them get too distracted by rankings, ratings, brands. We don’t point them toward assessments and dynamics that are arguably more meaningful.

Last week was the deadline to apply to many colleges and universities, though the admissions dance — the dreaming, scheming, waiting and worrying — has really become a year-round, nonstop phenomenon, starting well before the final stretch of high school. Leslie’s a junior and has already visited half a dozen campuses, to see how they feel.

And if she’s like most of my peers when I was her age, she’ll wind up picking one that gives her a sense of comfort, of safety. That’s what too many kids do. They perpetuate what they’re familiar with, gravitating to the same schools that their friends are or duplicating their parents’ paths. And there’s so much lost in that reflex, so much surrendered by that timidity.

If you’re among the lucky who can factor more than cost and proximity into where you decide to go, college is a ticket to an adventure beyond the parameters of what you’ve experienced so far. It’s a passport to the far side of what you already know. It’s a chance to be challenged, not coddled. To be provoked, not pacified.

Does brand matter? To a point. There are indeed future employers who see certain diplomas as seals of approval, as pre-screening of a sort, and there are many successful people who got that way by milking contacts made at storied universities. But there are just as many who prospered without the imprimatur of one of the hyper-exclusive schools near the top of the annual U.S. News & World Report list. And even if you’re confining yourself to those schools, you can and should ask questions about them that prospective freshmen frequently don’t.

How many of a college’s or university’s students are coming from other countries? Favor schools with higher percentages of foreigners, because as much of your education will happen outside as inside any lecture hall, and globalism is here and real. The dexterity with which you can navigate other cultures — your awareness of, and openness to, them — could be more valuable and happy-making than any knowledge gleaned from a book.

When it comes to the internationalism of a school, don’t assume the loftiest ones win the race. In one measure of this, Carnegie Mellon, Boston University and Brandeis came out ahead of Harvard, Stanford, Williams or Duke.

You might also take into account what percentage of a school’s students travel in the opposite direction and do some study abroad. That could be an indication of your future classmates’ daring or curiosity, and those classmates will presumably bring the fruits of their experiences back to campus. According to U.S. News & World Report, of the 41 schools that claim to have sent more than 50 percent of their students to a study-abroad program, only one, Dartmouth, is in the Ivy League.

I use the word “claim” deliberately and urge skepticism with rankings. They depend on honest reporting from schools, and in recent years both Claremont McKenna College and Emory University were forced to admit inflation in what they’d trumpeted about the test scores or other achievements of their students. Also, what does “study abroad” mean? A semester or a week, and in Mumbai or just Montreal? As it happens, more than half of the American college students who take an academic detour from the United States still head to Europe, and the most popular destination is Britain, according to the Institute of International Education. They’re not exactly honing new language skills there.

SO dig as deeply as you can into what the statistics that colleges showcase do and don’t assure. And treat your undergraduate education as a rare license, before you’re confined by the burdens of full-fledged adulthood and before the costs of experimentation rise, to be tugged outside your comfort zone. To be yanked, preferably. If you’ve spent little time in the thick of a busy city, contemplate a school in precisely such a place. If you know only the North, think about the South. Seek diversity, not just in terms of nationality, ethnicity and race, but also in terms of financial background, especially if your bearings have been resolutely and narrowly upper middle class. You’ll most likely encounter a different economic cross-section of classmates at one of the top state universities than you will at a small private college. Doesn’t that have merit, and shouldn’t that be weighed?

And if your interests and circumstances don’t demand an immediate concentration on one field of study, go somewhere that’ll force you to stretch in multiple directions. (A core curriculum isn’t a bad thing at all.) The world is in constant flux, life is a sequence of surprises, and I can think of no better talents to pick up in college than fearlessness, nimbleness and the ability to roll with change, adapt to newness and improvise.

I have 11 nieces and nephews in all. There are 10 younger than Leslie. I hope all of them have the options that she seems to, and I hope they ask themselves not which school is the surest route to riches but which will give them the richest experiences to draw from, which will broaden their frames of reference. College can shrink your universe, or college can expand it. I vote for the latter.

The Pasty Little Putz, Dowd, Friedman and Kristof

The Pasty Little Putz is being particularly vile today.  In “Bloomberg, LaPierre and the Void” he has a question:  Where are the alternatives to centrist arrogance and right-wing folly?  Apparently it’s arrogant to suggest that giving everyone an assault weapon might not be a grand idea.  He’s an unspeakable little piece of shit.  In “From Apocalypse to Dystopia”  MoDo says the N.R.A. solves the puzzle on gun violence: it’s the media’s fault.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “Send in the Clowns,” says if Republicans continue to be led by a base that denies global warming after Sandy and refuses to ban assault weapons after Sandy Hook, then the party has no future.  Mr. Kristof’s byline is from Bahrain International Airport.  In “When Bahrain Said: Get Lost” he says Bahrain, our ally, is so determined to keep its repression from making headlines that it keeps American journalists, including yours truly, out of the country.  Here’s the dreadful POS from the Putz:

For a week after the Newtown shooting, the conversation was dominated by the self-righteous certainties of the American center-left. In print and on the airwaves, the chorus was nearly universal: the only possible response to Adam Lanza’s rampage was an immediate crusade for gun control, the necessary firearm restrictions were all self-evident, and anyone who doubted their efficacy had the blood of children on his hands.

The leading gun control chorister was Michael Bloomberg, and this was fitting, because on a range of issues New York’s mayor has become the de facto spokesman for the self-consciously centrist liberalism of the Acela Corridor elite. Like so many members of that class, Bloomberg combines immense talent with immense provincialism: his view of American politics is basically the famous New Yorker cover showing Manhattan’s West Side overshadowing the world, and his bedrock assumption is that the liberal paternalism with which New York is governed can and should be a model for the nation as a whole.

It’s an assumption that cries out to be challenged by a thoughtful center-right. If you look at the specific proposals being offered by Bloomberg and others, some just look like reruns of assault weapon regulations that had no obvious effect the last time they were tried. Others still might have an impact on gun violence, but only at a cost: the popular idea of cracking down hard on illegal handguns, for instance, would probably involve “stop and frisk” on a huge scale, and might throw more young men in prison at a time when our incarceration rates are already too high.

But instead of a kind of skepticism and sifting from conservatives, after a week of liberal self-righteousness the spotlight passed instead to … Wayne LaPierre. And no Stephen Colbert parody of conservatism could match the National Rifle Association spokesman’s performance on Friday morning.

It wasn’t so much that LaPierre’s performance made no concession whatsoever on gun restrictions or gun safety — that was to be expected. It was that he launched into a rambling diatribe against an absurdly wide array of targets, blaming everything from media sensationalism to “gun-free schools” signs to ’90s-vintage nihilism like “Natural Born Killers” for the Newtown tragedy. Then he proposed, as an alternative to the liberal heavy-handedness of gun control, something equally heavy-handed — a cop in every school, to be paid for by that right-wing old reliable, cuts to foreign aid.

Unfortunately for our country, the Bloomberg versus LaPierre contrast is basically all of American politics today. Our society is divided between an ascendant center-left that’s far too confident in its own rigor and righteousness and a conservatism that’s marched into an ideological cul-de-sac and is currently battering its head against the wall.

The entire Obama era has been shaped by this conflict, and not for the good. On issue after issue, debate after debate, there is a near-unified establishment view of what the government should do, and then a furious right-wing reaction to this consensus that offers no real policy alternative at all.

The establishment view is interventionist, corporatist and culturally liberal. It thinks that issues like health care and climate change and immigration are best worked out through comprehensive bills drawn up by enlightened officials working hand in glove with business interests. It regards sexual liberty as sacrosanct, and other liberties — from the freedoms of churches to the rights of gun owners — as negotiable at best. It thinks that the elite should pay slightly higher taxes, and everyone else should give up guns, SUVs and Big Gulps and live more like, well, Manhattanites. It allows the president an entirely free hand overseas, and takes the Bush-Obama continuities in foreign policy for granted.

The right-wing view is embittered, paranoid and confused. It opposes anything the establishment supports but doesn’t know what it wants to do instead. (Defund government or protect Medicare? Break up the banks or deregulate them? Send more troops to Libya or don’t get involved? Protect our liberties or put our schools on lockdown?) Sometimes the right’s “just say no” approach holds the establishment at bay — as on climate change and immigration, to date. But sometimes, as the House Republicans are demonstrating in the budget showdown, it makes the eventual defeat that much more sweeping.

What’s missing, meanwhile, are real alternatives — not only conservative, but left-wing as well. On national security, the left has essentially disappeared, sitting on its hands while President Obama embraces powers every bit as imperial as those his predecessor claimed. On economic issues, the Occupy Wall Street movement passed on the chance to actually advance an anticorporate agenda in favor of consciousness raising and theoretical self-gratification.

As for a conservatism with a serious program, and a real understanding of the challenges facing America today — well, hopefully it will surface by the 2016 presidential campaign. Till then, it’s the hubris of Bloomberg versus the humbug of LaPierre. Merry Christmas, America.

Here’s a huge plate of salted weasel dicks for you, Putzy.  Merry Christmas.  If you’re lucky you won’t choke on them.  Now here’s MoDo:

We’re a little overwrought now.

The N.R.A. understands that. It’s as patient with us as a husband with a tremulous pregnant wife prone to crying jags.

This is just a passing meltdown. We’ll get ourselves back under control soon and things will return to normal.

For decades, when the public has grown more sympathetic to gun control after an attempted assassination or a spike in gun murders or a harrowing school shooting, Wayne LaPierre and his fellow N.R.A. officials have hunkered down to wait for the “emotional period” or “hysteria,” as they call it, to pass.

They rule in the back rooms on Capitol Hill and rein in panicked senators and congressmen who fret that they should support some measly legislation to pretend they are not pawns of the gun lobby.

They defend anyone owning anything with a trigger, reiterating that military-style semiautomatics are just uglier hunting guns.

While there were more heartbreaking funerals in Newtown, Conn., with long hearses carrying small bodies, LaPierre stepped to the microphone in Washington on Friday to present the latest variation of his Orwellian creed: Guns don’t kill people. Media kill people.

“Rather than face their own moral failings,” he said in high dudgeon, “the media demonize gun owners, amplify their cries for more laws, and fill the national media with misinformation and dishonest thinking that only delay meaningful action, and all but guarantee that the next atrocity is only a news cycle away.”

So it’s our fault.

LaPierre, who literally trembles when the omnipotent gun lobby is under siege, went ballistic painting a threatening picture of the dystopia that awaits if we don’t protect our schools from guns by putting guns in schools.

“The truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters,” he said. “People that are so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can ever possibly comprehend them. They walk among us every single day, and does anybody really believe that the next Adam Lanza isn’t planning his attack on a school he’s already identified at this very moment?”

How many more copycat killers, he asked ominously, are waiting in the wings for their moment of fame?

On the day that 6-year-old Olivia Engel, who was going to play an angel in her church’s Nativity play, was buried, LaPierre heinously cloaked his refusal to consider any remedies to gun violence — not even better background checks — as tender concern for the 20 “little kids” shot in cold blood.

He kicked around the old whipping boy, violent video games, even though plenty of his four million members no doubt play violent video games. And he repeated his old saw: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Guns don’t kill people. Guns save people.

The press conference, where the press was not allowed to ask questions, played like an insane parody: a tightly wound lobbyist who earns a million or so a year by refusing to make the slightest concession on gun safety, despite repeated slaughters by deranged shooters with jaw-droppingly easy access to firearms.

LaPierre makes Charlton Heston look like Michael Moore. The N.R.A. vice president, who once called federal agents “jackbooted government thugs,” insists the solution to gun violence is putting police officers, or “armed good guys,” in every one of the nation’s 98,817 K-12 schools.

His logic is spurious. Hunters can have their guns without leaving Americans so vulnerable to being hunted by demented souls with assault rifles that can fire 45 rounds per minute.

And consider that in 1999 an armed sheriff’s deputy policing Columbine High School exchanged fire with the shooters, and still they killed 12 other students and a teacher. Mayor Michael Bloomberg accused LaPierre of “a shameful evasion.”

It’s hard to believe that the N.R.A. needed to go dark for a week after the Newtown shootings to cook up such a chuckleheaded arms race. And LaPierre made a worse case against himself than the media ever could. It’s shocking that the N.R.A. can’t even fake it better.

It didn’t try to mask its obdurate stance by putting forth a less harsh official — a woman who’s a mother and a hunter, for instance. Maybe it could have prompted a serious discussion about armed guards at schools if it had a less crazed presentation and less of an absolute vision that “guns are cool,” as David Keene, its president, says.

The 63-year-old LaPierre and the 67-year-old Keene, a cantankerous former Bob Dole adviser whose son went to prison for shooting at another driver in a road-rage fit, seemed as out-of-touch as Mitt Romney’s campaign and the rest of the white, macho Republican Party.

President Obama, who should have been alarmed that his re-election inspired a boom in gun sales, seems daunted at the prospect of taking on gun lovers, having handed the matter off to Joe Biden to study. The president seems to be setting the table for defeat. If only he had the visceral outrage of a Bloomberg. Who knows what could happen?

Yeah, MoDo, we know that you can’t stand it that President Obama doesn’t get all het up and weepy.  Get over it.  Next up is The Moustache of Wisdom:

When thinking about the state of the Republican Party, I defer to a point that the Democratic consultant James Carville made the other day: “When I hear people talking about the troubled state of today’s Republican Party, it calls to mind something Lester Maddox said one time back when he was governor of Georgia. He said the problem with Georgia prisons was ‘the quality of the inmates.’ The problem with the Republican Party is the quality of the people who vote in their primaries and caucuses. Everybody says they need a better candidate, or they need a better message but — in my opinion — the Republicans have an inmate problem.” The political obsessions of the Republican base — from denying global warming to defending assault weapons to opposing any tax increases under any conditions, to resisting any immigration reform — are making it impossible to be a Republican moderate, said Carville. And without more Republican moderates, there is no way to strike the kind of centrist bargains that have been at the heart of American progress — that got us where we are and are essential for where we need to go.

Republican politicians today have a choice: either change your base by educating and leading G.O.P. voters back to the center-right from the far right, or start a new party that is more inclusive, focused on smaller but smarter government and market-based, fact-based solutions to our biggest problems.

But if Republicans continue to be led around by, and live in fear of, a base that denies global warming after Hurricane Sandy and refuses to ban assault weapons after Sandy Hook — a base that would rather see every American’s taxes rise rather than increase taxes on millionaires — the party has no future. It can’t win with a base that is at war with math, physics, human biology, economics and common-sense gun laws all at the same time.

Do you know how troubled this party is? Two weeks ago, the former G.O.P. Senate majority leader Bob Dole, a great American, went to the Senate floor in his wheelchair to show his support for Senate ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of People With Disabilities. Nevertheless, the bill failed to win the two-thirds needed for ratification, because only eight Republicans dared to join Democrats in support of the treaty, which was negotiated and signed by George W. Bush! It essentially requires other countries to improve to our level of protection for the disabled, without requiring us to change any laws. It has already been ratified by 126 countries. But it failed in the Senate because Rick Santorum managed to convince the G.O.P. base that the treaty would threaten U.S. “sovereignty.” Santorum stopped just short of warning that space aliens would take over our country if we ratified the treaty.

Because they control the House, this radical Republican base is now holding us all back. President Obama was moving to the center in these budget negotiations. He reduced his demand for higher tax revenues to $1.2 trillion from $1.6 trillion; he upped the level at which Americans who would be hit with higher taxes to those earning $400,000 a year from $250,000; and he made his own base holler by offering to cut long-term spending by lowering the inflation adjustment index for Social Security. It seemed that with a little more Republican compromise, Obama would have met them in the middle, and we could have had a grand bargain that would put the country on a sounder fiscal trajectory and signal to the markets, the world and ourselves that we can still do big hard things together. That will have to wait. Now the best hope is some mini-, crisis-averting, Band-Aid.

The G.O.P. today needs its own D.L.C. The Democratic Leadership Council was founded by a group of Democratic governors and activists, led by Bill Clinton, in 1985 to lead the party back to the center from a failing leftward course that had resulted in it being repeatedly shut out of the presidency, except after Watergate. I asked Clinton’s pollster, Stan Greenberg, what Republicans could learn from the Clinton/D.L.C. experience.

“There is a lot of pain,” said Greenberg. “You can’t change the party without pain. You can’t just make some head-fakes to Hispanics.” The D.L.C., he noted, started by building an organization over 10 years and by running more centrist Democrats “in the primaries.” It didn’t just wait to pivot to the center in the general election. It fought for and educated the Democrat base in the primaries, by D.L.C. candidates running in support of free trade, Nafta and welfare reform. “With Clinton, we won the primaries in a way that defined us, so that he could run in the general election as the candidate of broad appeal.” That fractured the party and produced Ralph Nader, which cost Al Gore the 2000 election. But after losing that election, said Greenberg, the Democrats came together around a moderate-left core and did not engage “in dysfunctional primaries.”

Republicans need to go through a similar process of building new institutions and coalitions to support candidates who can move the party back to the center-right. Today, all their institutions, from think tanks to Fox TV, said Greenberg, “are reinforcing the trends that are marginalizing their party.”

Unfortunately, we don’t have a decade to wait for a G.O.P. D.L.C. Some leaders in that party need to stand up for sane compromises right now.

Last but not least here’s Mr. Kristof:

Bahrain, one of America’s more repressive allies, tries to keep many journalists and human rights monitors out. I recently tried to slip in anyway.

The jig was up at the Bahrain airport when an immigration officer typed my name into his computer and then snapped to attention. “Go back over there and sit down,” he said, looking at me in horror and keeping my passport. “We’ll call you.”

The Sunni monarchy in Bahrain doesn’t want witnesses as it tightens its chokehold over a largely Shiite population. Almost every evening, there are clashes between the police and protesters, with both sides growing more enraged and violent.

Around 100 people have been killed since Arab Spring protests began in Bahrain in February 2011. I was in Bahrain then as troops opened fire without warning on unarmed protesters who were chanting “peaceful, peaceful.”

The oppression has sometimes been nothing short of savage. Police clubbed a distinguished surgeon, Sadiq al-Ekri, into a coma — because he tried to provide medical aid to injured protesters. By all accounts, torture has been common.

In the larger scheme of things, Bahrain is a tiny country and maybe doesn’t matter much to the United States. What nags at me is that this is a close American ally — assaulting people in some cases with American equipment — yet the Obama administration mostly averts its eyes. This is a case not just of brutal repression, but also of American hypocrisy.

After that initial crackdown in 2011, the king commissioned a blunt outside report, and the Obama administration hoped that the country would ease up under the more open-minded crown prince. That hope is collapsing, and Bahrain is now clamping down more tightly.

“The human rights situation in Bahrain has markedly deteriorated over recent months, with repressive practices increasingly entrenched,” Amnesty International noted in a recent report on Bahrain. It concluded: “the reform process has been shelved and repression unleashed.”

The crackdown has, in turn, hardened the opposition, which increasingly turns to Molotov cocktails, rocks and other weapons to confront the authorities. Moderates on both sides are being marginalized.

This is a tragic turn for Bahrain, which traditionally was a lovely oasis of prosperity, moderation and toleration. Astonishingly, the country’s ambassador to Washington is actually a woman from Bahrain’s tiny Jewish community.

But the king, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, can blame himself for the escalation of violence. He has imprisoned leading advocates of peaceful resistance, like Nabeel Rajab, the globally respected president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. My take is that the regime intentionally jails peaceful moderates so as to leave the protest movement in the hands of young men who discredit it by throwing firebombs — and thus create a justification for repression.

On my last visit to Bahrain, I profiled Zainab al-Khawaja, a dynamic young woman with perfect English who studied Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and tries to apply their methods. She is exactly the kind of opposition leader Bahrain needs, firing off Twitter messages rather than rocks, but in an e-mail to me a month ago she lamented: “It’s becoming very hard to even tweet about violations in Bahrain.”

She was prescient: Now she has been imprisoned as well.

“The reason the regime goes after them is because people like Zainab and Nabeel represent a force that they cannot deal with,” said Maryam al-Khawaja, Zainab’s sister, who is now in exile. “They stand firm despite the violence. They continue to protest, and they refuse to use violence. This encourages others to do the same. It’s easier for the regime when protesters use things like Molotov cocktails.”

The Obama administration initially spoke out against the crackdown but has since been “inconsistent and muted,” notes Brian Dooley of Human Rights First. “This has been horribly frustrating for human rights activists in Bahrain hoping that the U.S. would support their push for democracy,” he added.

President Obama pulls his punches partly because the United States bases the Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain and partly because Saudi Arabia insistently backs the repression in Bahrain. The security considerations are real, but, to me, this feels like an echo of Egypt: the United States curries favor with a dictator and ignores public yearning for change. The upshot is extremism, instability and anti-Americanism.

At the airport, an immigration officer eventually approached and told me: “Your name is on a list. You cannot be admitted.” There’s no negotiating with a blacklist, and early the next morning I was deported to Dubai.

Government officials treated me respectfully, and I never felt in danger. It’s different if you’re Bahraini. On the day I arrived, police arrested perhaps the last Bahraini human rights activist still at large, Said Yousif al-Muhafdah, after he posted a photo on Twitter of a protester whom police had shot with shotgun pellets. Muhafdah is charged with “disseminating false information through Twitter.” The downward spiral continues.

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.

The Pasty Little Putz, Dowd, Friedman and Bruni

Oh, dear Lord…  The Pasty Little Putz thinks he has the solution to the nation’s ills.  In “More Babies, Please” he babbles that America has had a demographic advantage, but that is no longer a sure thing.  Apparently it’s “decadent” to be childless, so we’re all supposed to get out there and BREED.  (As an aside, Mr. Putzy is an outspoken rabid convert to Roman Catholicism, and we all know their position on contraception.  He and his wife married in 2007 and didn’t produce a child until 2011.  So I guess they were chaste for 4 years…)  MoDo is using her column to create a mash-up of one of her odes to film and her loathing of Hillary Clinton, Obama and Susan Rice.  She has a question in “Spellbound By Blondes, Hot and Icy:”  What would Alfred Hitchcock make of Carrie Mathison and Hillary Clinton?  She really needs to take 6 or 7 Valium.  The Moustache of Wisdom is in Syria.  In “Letter From Syria” he says a walk along the Orontes River reveals the crosscurrents of the civil war.  In “Dear President Clinton” Mr. Bruni says to make amends for DOMA, Bill Clinton should be a much bigger part of the country’s march toward same-sex marriage.  Here, FSM help us, is the Putz:

In the eternally recurring debates about whether some rival great power will knock the United States off its global perch, there has always been one excellent reason to bet on a second American century: We have more babies than the competition.

It’s a near-universal law that modernity reduces fertility. But compared with the swiftly aging nations of East Asia and Western Europe, the American birthrate has proved consistently resilient, hovering around the level required to keep a population stable or growing over the long run.

America’s demographic edge has a variety of sources: our famous religiosity, our vast interior and wide-open spaces (and the four-bedroom detached houses they make possible), our willingness to welcome immigrants (who tend to have higher birthrates than the native-born).

And it clearly is an edge. Today’s babies are tomorrow’s taxpayers and workers and entrepreneurs, and relatively youthful populations speed economic growth and keep spending commitments affordable. Thanks to our relative demographic dynamism, the America of 50 years hence may not only have more workers per retiree than countries like Japan and Germany, but also have more than emerging powers like China and Brazil.

If, that is, our dynamism persists. But that’s no longer a sure thing. American fertility plunged with the stock market in 2008, and it hasn’t recovered. Last week, the Pew Research Center reported that U.S. birthrates hit the lowest rate ever recorded in 2011, with just 63 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age. (The rate was 71 per 1,000 in 1990.) For the first time in recent memory, Americans are having fewer babies than the French or British.

The plunge might be temporary. American fertility plummeted during the Great Depression, and more recent downturns have produced modest dips as well. This time, the birthrate has fallen fastest among foreign-born Americans, and particularly among Hispanics, who saw huge amounts of wealth evaporate with the housing bust. Many people may simply be postponing childbearing until better times return, and a few years of swift growth could produce a miniature baby boom.

But deeper forces than the financial crisis may keep American fertility rates depressed. Foreign-born birthrates will probably gradually recover from their current nadir, but with fertility in decline across Mexico and Latin America, it isn’t clear that the United States can continue to rely heavily on immigrant birthrates to help drive population growth.

Among the native-born working class, meanwhile, there was a retreat from child rearing even before the Great Recession hit. For Americans without college degrees, economic instability and a shortage of marriageable men seem to be furthering two trends in tandem: more women are having children out of wedlock, and fewer are raising families at all.

Finally, there’s been a broader cultural shift away from a child-centric understanding of romance and marriage. In 1990, 65 percent of Americans told Pew that children were “very important” to a successful marriage; in 2007, just before the current baby bust, only 41 percent agreed. (That trend goes a long way toward explaining why gay marriage, which formally severs wedlock from sex differences and procreation, has gone from a nonstarter to a no-brainer for so many people.)

Government’s power over fertility rates is limited, but not nonexistent. America has no real family policy to speak of at the moment, and the evidence from countries like Sweden and France suggests that reducing the ever-rising cost of having kids can help fertility rates rebound. Whether this means a more family-friendly tax code, a push for more flexible work hours, or an effort to reduce the cost of college, there’s clearly room for creative policy to make some difference.

More broadly, a more secure economic foundation beneath working-class Americans would presumably help promote childbearing as well. Stable families are crucial to prosperity and mobility, but the reverse is also true, and policies that made it easier to climb the economic ladder would make it easier to raise a family as well.

Beneath these policy debates, though, lie cultural forces that no legislator can really hope to change. The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.

Such decadence need not be permanent, but neither can it be undone by political willpower alone. It can only be reversed by the slow accumulation of individual choices, which is how all social and cultural recoveries are ultimately made.

He’s just unbelievable…  Now hold onto your hats, because here’s MoDo’s rant:

Alfred Hitchcock was a bit of a sadist.

Certainly, the master of the dark side had “a murderous fascination with blondes,” as the British Film Institute once noted in a tribute.

And now comes Hollywood’s murderous fascination with Hitchcock’s murderous fascination.

HBO’s “The Girl” depicts the making of “The Birds” and “Marnie,” with Toby Jones playing Hitch and Sienna Miller playing Tippi Hedren, fighting off rapacious birds and rapacious director at the same time.

In theaters, “Hitchcock,” with Anthony Hopkins as the auteur and Helen Mirren as his wife and collaborator, Alma Reville, depicts the making of “Psycho,” with Scarlett Johansson taking Janet Leigh’s place in the shower to be stabbed by that crazed mama’s boy Norman Bates. (The long-suffering Alma at one point erupts at her husband about his glittering fixation, snapping that she is “not one of the contract blondes you badger and torment with your oh-so specific direction.”)

Next spring, A&E will run “Bates Motel,” a prequel series to “Psycho,” featuring a young, creepy Norman, with Vera Farmiga as his (blond) mother.

Why the fresh fascination with the man with the famous profile? Perhaps the more Hollywood churns out rancid movies, the more it appreciates Hitch, who never got an Oscar. (“They take sadistic pleasure in denying me that one little moment,” Hopkins’s Hitchcock says.)

When he was asked about plot construction, the martini-dry director would echo the advice of the 19th-century playwright Victorien Sardou: “Torture the women!” And the Brit would slyly observe: “Blondes make the best victims.”

Hitchcock’s fetish for “Nordic” women, as he called them, started in his 1927 silent film “The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog,” about a Jack-the-Ripper-style lunatic. He had his brunet lead actress don a blond wig, and he made all the serial killer’s victims blondes.

As Donald Spoto wrote in his book “Spellbound by Beauty,” Hitch preferred blondes because he saw them as “easier and more dramatic to photograph in monochrome, and he considered their ‘coolness’ and elegance appropriate contrasts to the kind of passion he wanted to reveal beneath the surface.”

Hitch’s blondes came in two shades: the ones, like Leigh in “Psycho” and Kim Novak in “Vertigo,” who were sexy and duplicitous victims doomed to die in spine-tingling ways, and those, like Ingrid Bergman in “Spellbound” and “Notorious,” Grace Kelly in “To Catch a Thief” and “Rear Window,” and Eva Marie Saint in “North by Northwest,” who were sexy and sneaky survivors.

It’s illuminating to consider Hitchcock’s obsession with luminous blondes because Americans are obsessed with a pair of them at the moment.

One is Carrie Mathison, the bipolar C.I.A. agent on “Homeland,” played by Claire Danes. “Homeland” exerts the same hypnotic pull as “The Godfather” or “The Sopranos,” a violent, sexual netherworld with casual immorality but its own code of honor.

In the upcoming Kathryn Bigelow-Mark Boal movie “Zero Dark Thirty,” about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, Jessica Chastain portrays a driven C.I.A. analyst named Maya. Like Carrie, Maya is a tough, attractive woman, haunted by 9/11 and determined to protect America from terrorists. Despite her gingery beauty, her sex is largely irrelevant. Maya is monomaniacally consumed with capturing Bin Laden, not hooking up with agents or sources.

Carrie, on the other hand, has braided her love life and work life so completely, it’s impossible to tell whether she’s working for love, or loving for work — or if it even matters, given how incandescently crazy and brilliant she is.

Carrie is not a Hitchcock blonde. Rather than icy, she’s red hot, prone to frequent meltdowns. She’s frantic that she’s not being heeded, and rightly so: her hunches are unerring. She can be duplicitous but lacks the cool veneer she needs to always fool her terrorist asset/love interest, Nicholas Brody. Her expressive face reflects every thought. She doesn’t care about fashion, and seems to have only one go-to black sequined top to wear when she wants to relieve stress by going to a jazz bar to pick up guys.

Maybe America’s other blond obsession, however, could qualify as a Hitchcock leading lady. Hillary Clinton is quick-witted and cool, and we never know exactly what she’s plotting as speculation froths about 2016.

While Republicans continue their full-cry pursuit of Susan Rice, the actual secretary of state has eluded blame, even though Benghazi is her responsibility. The assault happened on Hillary’s watch, at her consulate, with her ambassador. Given that we figured out a while ago that the Arab Spring could be perilous as well as promising, why hadn’t the State Department developed new norms for security in that part of the world? After 200 years of expecting host countries to protect our diplomats, Hillary et al. didn’t make the adjustment when countries were dissolving.

In the best tradition of “The Lady Vanishes,” Hillary sagely dodged the Sunday talk shows that September morning. She knew it would get messy, given that those killed included an ambassador who had written in his diary about being on a Qaeda hit list and two former Navy Seals who worked for the C.I.A.

Some have charged that G.O.P. senators are picking on Rice because she’s a black woman. But a black woman has already been secretary of state. It’s more likely that the Republicans lambasting Rice (some neocons much prefer her interventionism to John Kerry’s brand of diplomacy) see torpedoing her as an antidote to their recent routing, a chance to convey that they still have juice against a president who has the whip hand in fiscal cliff negotiations.

They regard Rice as the staffer she was before she ascended to the United Nations — too political, not big enough for the lofty post of secretary of state.

On Thursday, a day after meeting with Rice, Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee told Chris Matthews that he liked her but “I’ve always sensed her to be more of a political operative.”

There are suspicions in political circles that negative press about Rice might also be coming from Clintonworld, where some still resent her. Rice was an assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration but defected to Obama’s 2008 campaign, accusing Hillary of getting “critical judgments” about Iraq and Iran wrong.

It took Hillary a month to defend Rice on Benghazi, and it took until Wednesday — more than two months after the attacks on Rice began — for Hillary to utter the tepid endorsement: “Susan Rice has done a great job as our ambassador to the United Nations.”

Washington mandarins marvel at the cool blonde of Foggy Bottom and wonder whether she’s enjoying watching Rice walk the plank. As one put it, comparing the smooth Hillary and the rough-elbowed Rice: “Hillary’s smart enough to know not to jump on board a damaged vessel. It’s a good contrast between a woman who knows how to navigate the power structure of Washington and someone who’s not quite there.”

A blonde who’s a canny survivor, cool under pressure. Hitchcock would approve.

Add a handful of Xanax to those Valium, MoDo, and wash them down with a double martini.  Now here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

The scene is almost biblical. You step down through tall reeds, cross the Orontes River from Turkey in a small rowboat and are received by a local contingent of the Free Syrian Army, outside the Syrian town of Darkush. One of them shows you the picture on his cellphone of a Syrian girl who was just taken across the river to Turkey with what turned out to be fatal wounds from a Syrian Army helicopter attack on her village. The helicopters, the rebel soldiers say, dropped barrels with nails and explosives on her house. Meanwhile, over here in the mud are three fresh graves with bodies that just floated down the river. Some days it’s just an arm or leg that washes up. Although this is “liberated” territory, in the background you can hear the low drumbeat of shells slamming into some town over the hills. I ask the rebel local commander, Muatasim Bila Abul Fida, how he thinks all of this will play out. His answer strikes me as very honest. “Without the help of Iran and Hezbollah, he would be gone by now,” he says of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. But even after he goes, there will be a great sorting out. “It will take five or six years,” he adds, because the Islamist parties “want Shariah, and we want democracy.”

In my visit along the Turkey-Syria border, I am struck at how so many different people want so many different things for Syria. It is unnerving. A Christian businessman from Aleppo tells me that if a real election were held in Syria today, the besieged President Assad would still win “with 75 percent of the vote,” because most Syrians crave the order that he provided and are exhausted by war. But a few hours earlier at an impressively run Syrian refugee camp set up by Turkey outside the Turkish border town of Antakya, I interviewed young Syrian Sunni Muslim men who had fled from the Assad family’s largely Alawite stronghold of Latakiya, just down the coast. They spoke about the deep unfairness of the Syrian system and how Alawites were getting an unfair share of the pie. “When we first protested to demand reforms, the regime did not do anything,” said Yahya Afacesa, “and then we started to shout and demand freedom, and the regime attacked us. So there was no way to fight the regime peacefully.”

He and his colleagues insisted, though, that the problem in Syria was the Assad family, not the Alawite sect, a Shiite offshoot from which the Assads hail and which dominates the regime. These are secular young men, and they still took pride in Syria’s multisectarian identity and harmony, which, it should be remembered, has deep historical roots in this region. Indeed, before visiting them, I met with the Chamber of Commerce of Antakya. The chamber’s president proudly displays outside his office a poster of more than 20 different churches, mosques and even a synagogue still operating in his town, which is just a few miles from the Syrian border. I repeat: There are cultural roots for pluralism in this region that a new Syrian government could still fall back on — but there’s also the opposite.

A case in point: In Antakya I met two Turkish logistics experts. They spoke about the “Arab foreign legion” of Islamist fighters from as far away as Chechnya and Libya who have come through their town and crossed the Orontes to join the battle in Syria. They scoffed at the idea that Syria will emerge as a democracy from a war in which its main arms suppliers are the Islamic-oriented monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The main Saudi and Qatari desire is that Syria shift from being an Iranian-Shiite-dominated country to a Sunni-dominated one. Democracy per se is not their priority.

One of the two Turkish experts has another business in Qatar. To get permission to work and operate in Qatar, he explained, he needs a local Qatari to sponsor his work permit. “If you have a work permit and you want to leave the country, you need your sponsor to give you written permission,” he noted. “If your sponsor dies, his son inherits that right.” His Qatari sponsor’s son is very young. Yet, “if he says I cannot leave, I cannot leave. I do business [in Qatar] but I have no rights at all. … We joke that we are ‘modern slaves’ there. And this country is trying to bring democracy to Syria?”

These stories illuminate for me the enormous number of crosscurrents and mixed motives driving this revolution. Without a strong, galvanizing Syrian leader with a compelling unifying vision, backed by the international community, getting rid of Assad will not bring order to Syria. And disorder in Syria will not have the same consequences as disorder in other countries in the region.

Syria is the keystone of the Middle East. If and how it cracks apart could recast this entire region. The borders of Syria have been fixed ever since the British and French colonial powers carved up the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. If Assad is toppled and you have state collapse here, Syria’s civil war could go regional and challenge all the old borders — as the Shiites of Lebanon seek to link up more with the Alawite/Shiites of Syria, the Kurds in Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey try to link up with each other and create an independent Kurdistan, and the Sunnis of Iraq, Jordan and Syria draw closer to oppose the Shiites of Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

We could be entering a new age of Middle East border-drawing — the do-it-yourself version — where the borders of the Middle East get redrawn, not by colonial outsiders from the top down but by the Middle Easterners themselves, from the bottom up.

Last but not least here’s Mr. Bruni’s letter to President Clinton:

What a year you’ve had, the kind that really burnishes a legend. At the Democratic National Convention, on the campaign trail, in speeches aplenty and during interviews galore, you spoke eloquently about what this country should value, and you spoke unequivocally about where it should head. Such a bounty of convictions, such a harvest of words, except for one that’s long overdue: Sorry.

Where’s your apology for signing the Defense of Marriage Act?

And why, amid all the battles you’ve joined, and with all the energy you’ve been able to muster, haven’t you made a more vigorous case for same-sex marriage, especially in light of your history on this issue?

You fret about your legacy, as any president would. For turning a blind eye to the butchery in Rwanda, you struggled through a mea culpa of sorts, and after Barack Obama seemed to lavish higher praise on Ronald Reagan than on you, you seethed.

Well, DOMA, which says that the federal government recognizes only marriages of a man and a woman, is one of the uglier blemishes on your record, an act of indisputable discrimination that codified unequal treatment of gay men and lesbians and, in doing so, validated the views of Americans who see us as lesser people. If our most committed, heartfelt relationships don’t measure up, then neither do we. If how we love is suspect, then so is who we are. No two ways to interpret that. No other conclusion to be drawn.

In 1996, with an overblown worry about your re-election and a desire not to seem too liberal, you put your name to that execrable decree. And you’ve never wholly owned up to that, never made adequate amends. It’s past time, and it’s almost time for Hillary, who is about to step down as secretary of state, to catch up with other cabinet members and President Obama and make her presumed support for same-sex marriage explicit, which she has never done.

Her role as the nation’s senior diplomat discourages her from wading into domestic political matters: that’s the tradition and etiquette. But the gag order will soon be lifted, and I could make the case that it’s irrelevant anyway; that marriage equality is a matter of human rights, not politics; and that she’s powerful and beloved enough to have said whatever she wanted, at least once Obama finally laid down his marker.

In any case she, like you, has been largely on the sidelines during this vital chapter in our country’s march toward greater social justice. What a shame, given that no two people have been larger in the Democratic Party over the last quarter-century and given the party’s deserved pride in its embrace of same-sex marriage now. The two of you should be a more integral part of that pride. You should be at the very epicenter of this. It’s strange and it’s sad that you’re not.

DOMA is a nasty bit of business, in practical as well as symbolic terms. It denies federal pension, health care and medical leave benefits — among many other protections and considerations — to same-sex couples who have been legally married in the growing number of states that permit it. In the eyes of the Internal Revenue Service, those couples are singles and when one dies, the survivor has to pay estate taxes, for example, that heterosexual widows and widowers don’t.

This disparate treatment has rightly come under legal challenge, and many federal courts have now ruled that it violates the Constitution’s equal-protection clause. The Supreme Court late last week weighed which, if any, of these cases to take. An announcement is expected soon. With any luck, the nation’s highest court will dismantle DOMA, a decision that wouldn’t create marriage equality coast to coast but would change the tenor of debate in states considering the legalization of same-sex marriage.

After you signed DOMA — which, it must be said, a large majority of Democrats in Congress also supported — your defensiveness often trumped any suggestion of regret. As recently as 2008 you claimed that it’s a rewrite of history “to imply that somehow this was anti-gay.” You dodged the subject in your 2004 memoir, “My Life,” whose 957 pages didn’t include any mention of DOMA, as Frank Rich noted in New York magazine last February.

In 2009 you at last said that DOMA should be wiped off the books and you endorsed same-sex marriage, getting out ahead of many Democrats who still had elections to worry about and weren’t yet seeing, in polls, as much public support for same-sex marriage as they wanted to see. But your comments since then have been sparse and succinct: no more than a written statement in favor of the 2011 bill to legalize same-sex marriage in New York, your home since you left the White House, and a recorded phone message urging North Carolinians last spring not to adopt a ban on same-sex marriage in their state Constitution, which they did anyway.

At the convention in Charlotte three months ago, in remarks that sprawled over 48 minutes, you seemed to find room for just about everything but same-sex marriage. President Obama mentioned the issue in his speech. So did Michelle Obama in hers. But nothing from you, and no particular advocacy or fund-raising for the marriage-equality referendums that were on the ballot on Nov. 6 and were considered such a crucial moment for the cause. You presented a mum, behind-the-curve contrast to the next generation of Democratic standard-bearers like Andrew Cuomo, the New York governor, and Martin O’Malley, the Maryland governor, whose pleas for marriage equality underscore a new reality: no Democrat, not even Hillary, will be able to make a credible bid for the party’s presidential nomination without supporting it.

A leader can’t be expected to champion every big issue. He or she picks and chooses. But your shortage of words about same-sex marriage this year is noteworthy in the context of how expansively you talked about so many other topics, how omnipresent you were: the cover of Time, the cover of Esquire, CNBC, the Golf Channel.

It’s even more noteworthy because you have a wrong to right here. I say that in sorrow more than anger, and with gratitude for all you accomplished during your presidency, a successful one. You had a zest for politicking that the current president doesn’t, enormous powers of persuasion and an instinct for the center. Maybe DOMA was the center in 1996. It isn’t anymore.

On Hillary’s watch, the State Department has been more progressive in its treatment of L.G.B.T. employees than before, a development in sync with her proclamation in Geneva late last year that “gay rights are human rights” and that those rights are a priority in American diplomacy. She addressed many of those employees on Wednesday, at an event marking the 20th anniversary of an organization called Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies, and she implored her audience “to leave this celebration thinking about what more each and every one of you can do” to promote better, fairer treatment of gay people.

Well, she can do more. So can you, President Clinton.

I was sloppy at the start. What I and many others want most from you isn’t really an apology. It’s full membership — and, better yet, leadership — in a movement that’s headed inexorably in the right direction, with or without you.

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

The Pasty Little Putz has come up with an unspeakable piece of crap called “President in Shining Armor” in which he drools that the Obama campaign has been making a weirdly paternalistic pitch to women.  Apparently it’s “weirdly paternalistic” to say rape is rape.  He also mentions “an imaginary Republican plot to ban contraception.”  Imaginary, my ass.  MoDo has extruded something called “Of Mad Men, Mad Women and Meat Loaf” in which she babbles that as Election Day looms, Barry strives for hipness as Mitt embraces fuddy-duddy.  It’s amazing — MoDo has a relative for every occasion, similar to how The Moustache of Wisdom runs into those cab drivers.  Speaking of The Moustache of Wisdom, today he explains “Why I Am Pro-Life.”  He says if you respect the sanctity of life, then it shouldn’t be limited solely to the issue of abortion.  Finally.  Maybe one day some columnist somewhere will call the current crop of Republican “pro life” candidates what they REALLY are — forced birth proponents.  Mr. Kristof has a question:  “Want a Real Reason to Be Outraged?”  He says American politicians say some outrageous things about rape. But our policies toward rape victims can be even more insensitive.  Mr. Bruni tells us about “Obama’s Squandered Advantages” and says despite the troubled economy, President Obama should be ahead of Mitt Romney. So why isn’t he? Of course, there’s no mention in here of anything that the President has done, mind you…  Just carping and whining.  Here’s the unspeakable crap from the Putz:

Far in the future, long after today’s partisan passions have cooled, some enterprising women’s studies doctoral student will be able to write a fascinating dissertation on the rhetoric and iconography surrounding gender in Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign.

Such a dissertation might start with the Obama campaign’s striking “Life of Julia” slide show, which portrayed an American woman protected from toddler-hood by the “steps President Obama has taken,” and menaced at every turn by Mitt Romney’s reactionary policies.

From there, it could touch on the campaign’s unusual suggestion that Obama supporters use their wedding registries to solicit donations to the president’s re-election effort. It might linger over the White House’s elevation of Sandra Fluke, a progressive activist and Georgetown University law student, as a kind of martyr for free contraception after she was insulted by Rush Limbaugh. And it would probably conclude with the Obama campaign’s release last week of a winking video from “Girls” creator Lena Dunham, urging young women to make sure their “first time” is with a “great guy” like President Obama. (Their first time voting — what do you think she meant?)

To today’s Obama supporters, these forays — like the campaign’s broader “war on women” framing, and its recent attempts to make the election a referendum on abortion in cases of rape — just emphasize that the president is on the side of female empowerment, sexual, professional and otherwise.

But given the way Obama’s once-enormous edge among female voters has shrunk in many polls, tomorrow’s feminists may look back on his campaign’s pitch to women and see a different theme emerge: a weirdly paternalistic form of social liberalism, in which women are forever single girls and the president is their father, lover, fiancé and paladin all rolled into one. (Our future dissertation author may note with bemusement, for instance, that Dunham’s ad mirrors a similar advertisement cut for … Vladimir Putin.)

This paternalistic pitch assumes that liberalism’s traditional edge with women is built mostly on social issues, and that Democrats — especially male Democrats — win when they run as protectors of the sexual revolution, standing between their female constituents and the Todd Akins of the Republican Party.

But that conceit is probably wrong. The gap between men and women on issues like abortion is overstated, and the female preference for Democrats predates Roe v. Wade. In a recent blog post, Christina Wolbrecht of the University of Notre Dame calls the gender gap “a recurrent, if not consistent, feature of presidential elections throughout the postwar era,” which probably dates to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign.

Not coincidentally, that was a year when Republican economic rhetoric took on a particularly individualistic cast. If there’s a deep driver of the gender gap, it’s usually views about spending and the role of government. Men are more likely to be libertarian, women are more likely to be communitarian, and this creates what Wolbrecht calls a natural “divergence in preferences for social welfare policies.”

This helps explain why, among recent elections, the gender gap yawned widest in 1996 — not an election with many culture-war flash points, but a year when Bill Clinton relentlessly tied Bob Dole to the Congressional Republicans’ attempted cuts to domestic spending and entitlements.

It also helps explain why Romney made ground with women after his performance in the first presidential debate — when he mostly pivoted toward the center on economic issues, and emphasized solidarity and community rather than “you built that!” individualism.

None of this means that the Obama White House’s social issues appeals don’t resonate with many female voters. But they’re most successful as a form of narrowcasting — a pitch to a particular group of women, often younger and left-leaning and unmarried, rather than to the female population as a whole.

Which is why it once seemed safe to assume that Obama’s social issues strategy was a way of solidifying his base, and a warm-up act for the fall campaign. He would extol Planned Parenthood and hail Sandra Fluke all summer, the theory went, and turn Clintonian and talk mostly about entitlements and economic security after his convention.

Instead, the idea of Obama as a kind of knight protector for America’s Julias and Lenas and Sandras, waging a lonely counteroffensive in the war on women, has basically become the White House’s concluding pitch not only to his base, but to female undecided voters as well.

An imaginary Republican plot to ban contraception, the illusory threat that Mitt Romney would ban abortion in cases of rape, a wave of faux-chivalric outrage over Romney’s line about “binders full of women” — in a tight-as-a-tick, economy-centric election, this is the message that Obama is relying on to push him back over the top.

Perhaps it will actually work. Perhaps the Electoral College will save the president. But I’ll just say this: It’s awfully hard to imagine Hillary Clinton closing out a campaign this way.

Here’s a heaping plate of salted weasel dicks, Putzy.  Hope you enjoy them.  Now here’s MoDo and her oh-so-convenient relative:

My sister, who was a secretary in the “Mad Men” era, is not worried that Republicans want to drag us back to being secretaries in the “Mad Men” era, as Tina Fey suggests.

Peggy is that most sought-after creature, an undecided woman who is a swing voter. She started as a blond concrete block in President Obama’s female firewall, but like many other women, is now pondering divorcing him for the man who looks and darn well talks like a ’50s sitcom dad.

She does not believe the economy is getting better, and she trusts Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan not to do anything radical on women’s reproductive rights or Medicare. She rejects my contention that Republicans in Congress would force them to; they see Mitt as an empty suit who would happily sign their far-right bills as long as he got Air Force One.

Our mom, a strict Catholic, taught us that it was immoral for a woman to be expected to carry a rapist’s baby for nine months. (Don’t even mention that rapists can assert parental rights in 31 states.)

But compassion is scant among the Puritan tribe of Republicans running now. As The Huffington Post reports, at least a dozen G.O.P. Senate candidates oppose abortion for rape victims. The party platform calls for a constitutional amendment with no exceptions for rape, incest or the mother’s life.

Representative Todd Akin, running against Senator Claire McCaskill in Missouri, differentiated between rape and “legitimate rape,” implying that women would fake rape to get abortions, and suggested that women have a magic way not to get pregnant from rape.

Representative Joe Walsh, running for re-election in Illinois, contended that “with advances in science and technology, ‘health of the mother’ has become a tool for abortions of any time or for any reason.” Appalled obstetricians ticked off a litany of life-threatening situations.

Last week, Richard Mourdock, a Senate candidate in Indiana, said in a debate that “even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

Mitt was certainly no profile in courage after Mourdock’s comment blew up. He didn’t take back his endorsement. He hid from reporters on his plane, and even dodged his usual custom of giving a reporter a birthday hug. Instead, he broadcast a birthday message to her on the intercom from the safety of first class.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that many women support Romney, even though he has somersaulted on reproductive rights and his running mate sponsored a bill with Akin giving fertilized eggs the “legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood.” Just as it shouldn’t be surprising that Romney has the support of a huge swath of blue-collar white men, even though he’s on a mission to make the 1 percent 100 percent able to indulge in car elevators.

Republicans are geniuses at getting people to vote against their own self-interest. Hispanics, however, do not seem inclined to vote against their self-interest on immigration laws, and Obama is counting on that to buoy him.

After the draining W. years — when grumpy old men foolishly refought grumpy old wars — Barack Obama was going to sweep us to modernity.

But, as the Republican strategist Alex Castellanos notes, “He gets to Washington and calls Larry Summers.” The only hope and change Obama could conjure this time was changing the period on his campaign slogan — “Forward.” — to an exclamation point. Romney was right when he spoke at a rally in Iowa on Friday and said the president had made the election “about small, shiny objects.”

Mitt may have peaked too soon. Now he is left counting on what advisers call “the silent majority.” Obama’s support among white voters has dived, and news reports call this the most racially polarized race since 1988. John Sununu, shockingly still a Romney surrogate, offered another flash of thinly veiled racism when he suggested that Colin Powell endorsed the president because they both were black, a comment he recanted. Sarah Palin said Obama was guilty of “shuck and jive” on Benghazi.

The high-minded Obama is trying to be hip, trash-talking Mitt in Rolling Stone, going on MTV to chitchat about hip-hop, joking with Jay Leno about his childhood in Kenya with Donald Trump. His campaign has a new ad with Lena Dunham, the creator of “Girls,” slyly comparing your first vote to “your first time.” The ad agitated some conservatives — one used Twitter to align Dunham and Obama with Satan — but was harmless. Ronald Reagan had a racier version 32 years ago.

Mitt hopes Americans are ready for some rules — and binders. He is baked in the fuddy-duddy dad image from the era when white men ruled and the little women toiled over a hot stove. On Thursday, Ann Romney made his annual birthday treat, meatloaf cakes, on Rachael Ray’s show while the candidate collected the endorsement of Meat Loaf, another blast from the past who balked at the notion that the cold war was over.

Mitt may have my sister. But he still needs Ohio.

MoDo’s sister would seem to be as mentally unstable as MoDo is getting.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

Hard-line conservatives have gone to new extremes lately in opposing abortion. Last week, Richard Mourdock, the Tea Party-backed Republican Senate candidate in Indiana, declared during a debate that he was against abortion even in the event of rape because after much thought he “came to realize that life is that gift from God. And even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” That came on the heels of the Tea Party-backed Republican Representative Joe Walsh of Illinois saying after a recent debate that he opposed abortion even in cases where the life of the mother is in danger, because “with modern technology and science, you can’t find one instance” in which a woman would not survive without an abortion. “Health of the mother has become a tool for abortions anytime, for any reason,” Walsh said. That came in the wake of the Senate hopeful in Missouri, Representative Todd Akin, remarking that pregnancy as a result of “legitimate rape” is rare because “the female body has ways to try and shut that whole thing down.”

These were not slips of the tongue. These are the authentic voices of an ever-more-assertive far-right Republican base that is intent on using uncompromising positions on abortion to not only unseat more centrist Republicans — Mourdock defeated the moderate Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana in the primary — but to overturn the mainstream consensus in America on this issue. That consensus says that those who choose to oppose abortion in their own lives for reasons of faith or philosophy should be respected, but those women who want to make a different personal choice over what happens with their own bodies should be respected, and have the legal protection to do so, as well.

But judging from the unscientific — borderline crazy — statements opposing abortion that we’re hearing lately, there is reason to believe that this delicate balance could be threatened if Mitt Romney and Representative Paul Ryan, and their even more extreme allies, get elected. So to those who want to protect a woman’s right to control what happens with her own body, let me offer just one piece of advice: to name something is to own it. If you can name an issue, you can own the issue. And we must stop letting Republicans name themselves “pro-life” and Democrats as “pro-choice.” It is a huge distortion.

In my world, you don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and be against common-sense gun control — like banning public access to the kind of semiautomatic assault rifle, designed for warfare, that was used recently in a Colorado theater. You don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and want to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency, which ensures clean air and clean water, prevents childhood asthma, preserves biodiversity and combats climate change that could disrupt every life on the planet. You don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and oppose programs like Head Start that provide basic education, health and nutrition for the most disadvantaged children. You can call yourself a “pro-conception-to-birth, indifferent-to-life conservative.” I will never refer to someone who pickets Planned Parenthood but lobbies against common-sense gun laws as “pro-life.”

“Pro-life” can mean only one thing: “respect for the sanctity of life.” And there is no way that respect for the sanctity life can mean we are obligated to protect every fertilized egg in a woman’s ovary, no matter how that egg got fertilized, but we are not obligated to protect every living person from being shot with a concealed automatic weapon. I have no respect for someone who relies on voodoo science to declare that a woman’s body can distinguish a “legitimate” rape, but then declares — when 99 percent of all climate scientists conclude that climate change poses a danger to the sanctity of all life on the planet — that global warming is just a hoax.

The term “pro-life” should be a shorthand for respect for the sanctity of life. But I will not let that label apply to people for whom sanctity for life begins at conception and ends at birth. What about the rest of life? Respect for the sanctity of life, if you believe that it begins at conception, cannot end at birth. That radical narrowing of our concern for the sanctity of life is leading to terrible distortions in our society.

Respect for life has to include respect for how that life is lived, enhanced and protected — not only at the moment of conception but afterward, in the course of that life. That’s why, for me, the most “pro-life” politician in America is New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. While he supports a woman’s right to choose, he has also used his position to promote a whole set of policies that enhance everyone’s quality of life — from his ban on smoking in bars and city parks to reduce cancer, to his ban on the sale in New York City of giant sugary drinks to combat obesity and diabetes, to his requirement for posting calorie counts on menus in chain restaurants, to his push to reinstate the expired federal ban on assault weapons and other forms of common-sense gun control, to his support for early childhood education, to his support for mitigating disruptive climate change.

Now that is what I call “pro-life.”

Next up is Mr. Kristof:

The silliness began when Todd Akin claimed during his Senate campaign in Missouri that in the case of “legitimate rape,” women “shut that whole thing down” to prevent pregnancy. Then, a few days ago, Richard Mourdock of Indiana seemed to blame God for such pregnancies, saying this was “something God intended to happen.” I think God should sue him for defamation.

But our political system jumps all over verbal stupidity, while giving a pass to stupid policies. If we’re offended by insensitive words about rape, for example, shouldn’t we be incomparably more upset that rape kits are routinely left untested in the United States? And wouldn’t it be nice if Democrats, instead of just firing sound bites, tackled these underlying issues?

A bit of background: A rape kit is the evidence, including swabs with DNA, taken at a hospital from a woman’s (or man’s) body after a rape. Testing that DNA costs $1,200 or more. Partly to save money, those rape kits often sit untested for years on the shelves of police storage rooms, particularly if the victim didn’t come outfitted with a halo.

By most accounts, hundreds of thousands of these untested kits are stacked up around the country. In Illinois, 80 percent of rape kits were going untested as of 2010, Human Rights Watch reported at the time — embarrassing the state to begin a push to test all rape kits.

In Michigan, the Wayne County prosecutor, Kym Worthy, said she was shocked to discover more than 11,000 rape kits lying around untested — some dating to the 1980s. Worthy said that her office is now going through the backlog and testing those that are running into statute of limitations deadlines.

So far, of 153 kits tested, 21 match evidence in a criminal database and may involve serial rapists. But Worthy, who herself was raped while she was in law school, says the broader problem is indifference to sex crimes.

“Sexual assault is the stepchild of the law enforcement system,” she said. “When rape victims come into the criminal justice system, they are often treated poorly. They may be talked out of pursuing the case.”

The bottom line, Worthy said, is that “sexual assault is not taken as seriously as other crimes.” That — more than any offensive words — is the real scandal.

Kamala Harris, the attorney general of California, eliminated the rape kit backlog in state crime labs after she took office. “If you don’t test it, you’ve got a victim who is absolutely petrified, and you’ve got a rapist who thinks he got away with it,” she said. “There could be nothing worse as a continuing threat to public safety.”

The lackadaisical attitude toward much sexual violence is seen in another astonishing fact: Sometimes, women or their health insurance companies must pay to have their rape kits collected.

“No other forensic evidence collection is treated in this way,” said Sarah Tofte of the Joyful Heart Foundation, which has focused attention on the rape kit backlog. If her home is broken into, she notes, the police won’t bill her or her homeowner’s insurance company “for the cost of dusting for fingerprints.”

Yet another indication of cavalier attitudes: In 31 states, if a rape leads to a baby, the rapist can get visitation rights. That doesn’t happen often, but the issue does come up. In Massachusetts, a convicted rapist is suing for access to the child he fathered when he raped a 14-year-old girl.

One way to start turning around this backward approach to sex crimes would be to support the Sexual Assault Forensic Evidence Registry (Safer) Act, a bipartisan bill in Congress that would help local jurisdictions count and test their rape kits.

According to data from the Department of Justice, one person in the United States is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes. A slight majority of rapes are never reported to the police, and others are never solved. For every 100 rapes, only three lead to any jail time for the rapist, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network.

There has been plenty of outrage this year, justifiably, at the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts and Penn State for averting their eyes from sexual abuse of children. Yet America as a whole typically does the same thing when it comes to the trafficking of teenage girls by pimps, which amounts to rape many times a day. The police often treat those girls as criminals, rather than victims, even as the pimps get away.

These problems are not insoluble, and we are seeing progress. Some prosecutors are going after pimps in a serious way, and according to surveys, sexual assault has fallen by 60 percent over the last couple of decades. Even the furor over the comments by Senate candidates shows that times are changing.

So, sure, let’s pounce on politicians who say outrageous things. But even more, let’s push to end outrageous policies. Routine testing of rape kits would be a good start.

Last but not least, let’s get to Mr. Bruni’s fine whine:

After “a couple of Cadillacs,” a summer belly-flop abroad, a dismissive swipe at 47 percent of the population and a convention best remembered for Clint Eastwood’s chat with a chair, Mitt Romney is seemingly tied with President Obama. He has a real chance. It’s a remarkable turn of events, given how many errors he’s made and how ill suited he is to this particular juncture in the American story. And to size up the situation honestly is to consider one conclusion as seriously as any other:

Obama isn’t quite the candidate, or politician, he’s cracked up to be. The One is a fraction of his reputed self.

Yes, I know: the economy. It’s supposedly the source of most of his woes, the great weight he lugs around, a nearly fatal handicap. And the fact that he’s doing as well as he is affirms the sway of his personality and sense of his policies, at least according to his most fervent admirers.

I don’t buy it. For starters, a great many Americans understand that he doesn’t bear primary responsibility for the high rate of unemployment and the drops in home prices and incomes. A CNN/ORC poll last month showed that 54 percent of likely voters placed the blame chiefly on George W. Bush and Republicans.

Additionally, 68 percent indicated some optimism about economic conditions, which they said would be “somewhat good” or “very good” in a year. There’s room in those numbers for Obama to pull well ahead of a rival as profoundly flawed as Romney. Yet he hasn’t.

Race isn’t a sufficient explanation. It has flared in subtle and unsubtle ways during this campaign, but if a majority of Americans were too biased to vote for a black man, Obama wouldn’t have beaten John McCain by nearly 200 electoral votes last time around. In fact Obama’s 52.9 percent of the popular vote was a bigger number than all but three other Democrats in American history have reached.

And “super PACs” aren’t doing Obama in. Things could change in this final stretch, but until now, he hasn’t been buried under the avalanche of Republican ads that, six months ago, Democrats were terrified about. Obama and his supporters have in fact run more commercials, which seem to have reached a larger audience in some key battlegrounds, than Romney & Co. have.

Obama has enjoyed other advantages as well. He didn’t go through a contested primary, and as Matt Bai recently observed in The Times’s Sunday magazine, all three of the incumbent presidents who lost their re-election bids over the last 36 years were weakened by primary challengers. Romney, meanwhile, endured an ugly primary that tugged him to the right of most swing voters and teed him up for the shape-shifting he has attempted — and been justly dinged for — over the last month.

Romney is further tarnished by association with a Republican Party that seems to be accommodating more and clumsier extremists, whose statements — like the one that Richard Mourdock, a Senate candidate from Indiana, made about abortion and rape — cause him recurring grief. That’s not to mention the party’s grandstanding windbags, two of whom — Donald Trump and John Sununu, a co-chairman of Romney’s campaign — were in full and demented flower over the last few days.

The country’s changing demographics favor Obama, as he acknowledged to The Des Moines Register last week, saying that the Latino vote could seal his victory. Incumbency has its benefits, too. Earlier this year, he sidestepped a bickering, paralyzed Congress and pleased many Latino voters with an executive order that will probably spare hundreds of thousands of young immigrants deportation for at least two years.

But Obama’s greatest gift has been Romney himself, whose wealth, his tin-eared allusions to it, his offshore accounts and his unreleased tax returns are an especially awkward fit for a moment of increased anxiety about income inequality.

A “Saturday Night Live” skit from before the debates summarized this archly.

“Our campaign has a secret weapon,” says Obama.

The camera cuts to Romney at a rally. “I understand the hardships facing ordinary Americans,” he says. “One of my horses failed to medal at the Olympics.”

Back to Obama, who croons “Let’s Stay Together.”

And then to Romney, who warbles “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” declaring the song “pretty groovy.”

Obama smiles: “The man is a Christmas miracle.”

The miracle ended at the first debate, in Denver, and the problem with that face-off went beyond Obama’s sleepwalking to the kinds of subsequent debates it forced on him. To shake off what happened, he had to turn truculent, and while that technically “won” him his second and third meetings with Romney, he lost something in the bargain. He undercut his high-minded, big-vision brand, whole stanzas of doggerel intruding on the poetry.

His “bayonets” line was clever all right, and plenty fair in its way, but it had a schoolyard nastiness to it, the same nastiness in one of his campaign’s most prominent ads, which showcases Romney’s off-key rendition of “America the Beautiful.” I wonder how that line, that ad and the overall atmospherics register with voters in the middle, some of whom are no doubt asking themselves where “hope and change” went and hid.

The main cause for this contest’s closeness is arguably Obama — and the ways in which he has disappointed, confused and alienated some of the voters who warmed and even thrilled to him four years ago. During his first term, he at times misjudged and mishandled his Republican opposition. As a communicator, he repeatedly failed to sell his policies clearly and forcefully enough.

His tone is markedly changed from 2008, a tactical decision that may not be the right one. And his moments of genuine oratorical transcendence are interspersed, as they’ve always been, with spells of detachment, defensiveness, disgruntlement. Denver wasn’t the first or only time that he seemed put out by the madness of the political merry-go-round, even though it’s a whirl he himself elected.

I still think he’ll win this thing, and I think he’ll win it because he’s a seriously intelligent, thoughtful leader more in tune and in touch with Americans’ lives than his sheltered opponent is. He still has poetry in him, and he still has fight. But this campaign has illuminated nothing so brightly as the limits of his magic, along with shortcomings that he would carry with him into a second term (should he get one) and would be wise to address.

Poor, poor Mr. Bruni.  He didn’t get his unicorn covered in fairy dust…

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

The Pasty Little Putz has “Sympathy for the Undecided,” and he gurgles that there are reasons that even a highly informed voter could still be on the fence.  He’s invented a new mythical beast:  The “highly informed, highly engaged, yet still conflicted voter.”  I defy the Putz to find one such person.  Just one.  I think we’re more likely to see herds of wyverns rioting in Times Square…  MoDo has issues (doesn’t she ALWAYS have issues?) and says “Pampered Princes Fling Gorilla Dust.”  She hisses that even cloaked in humor, the barbs of Mitt Romney and Barry Obama drip with disdain.  Apparently “gorilla dust” is something that Ross Perot mentioned once.  Who remembers that sort of crap?  The Moustache of Wisdom has a question about “Obama’s Best Kept Secrets”:  Why aren’t we hearing more about the major reforms in schools and cars?  Well, Tommy, how much have YOU told us about them?  Mr. Kristof says “Cuddle Your Kid!”  He wants Romney and Obama to listen up: rats and a girl named Kewauna may hold secrets about what the country needs.  Mr. Bruni, in “Taxing My Patience,” says with trickle-down aviation and other happy talk, Marco Rubio distills the avoidance of hard truths.  Here’s that hopeless schmuck The Putz:

In public, the American political class makes idols of undecided voters. We put them in focus groups, we let them pose questions during debates, we interview them and pitch ads to them and fold them into elaborate theories about “soccer moms” and “Reagan Democrats.” Officially, their existence justifies everything that pundits and pollsters and consultants get paid to say and do.

In private, though — and, O.K., sometimes publicly as well — political insiders tend to discuss undecideds with a mix of exasperation, condescension and contempt. Especially at this point in the presidential season, after months of debates and ads and op-eds have made the case that “the choice is clear” in “the most important election of our lifetimes,” it can be hard to imagine how anyone with an ounce of savvy can still be on the fence.

Some of this frustration is justified. As anyone who’s watched a cable-news focus group can attest, many undecided voters do tend to be ill-informed bandwagon jumpers with little coherence or consistency to their worldview.

If you live and breathe politics, chances are that you care deeply about a particular issue — abortion or the environment, foreign policy or health care. But when the liberal writer Chris Hayes, now an MSNBC host, canvassed undecided voters for John Kerry in 2004, he noticed that “more often than not, when I asked … what issues they would pay attention to as they made up their minds, I was met with a blank stare, as if I’d just asked them to name their favorite prime number.”

As we enter this campaign’s last two weeks, though, it’s worth putting in a sympathetic word for a rarer species: the highly informed, highly engaged, yet still conflicted voter.

Whatever partisans on both sides may insist, there are good reasons that a high-information voter with views somewhere near the American median might still regard this November’s decision as a harder-than-average call.

That’s because on one of the biggest issues the campaigns are arguing about — the question of how to bring our spending in line with our revenues — the median voter is probably pretty happy with the status quo. Conservatives think we tax too much and liberals think we spend too little, but the present combination of relatively low middle-class taxes and relatively generous entitlement spending is one that most Americans would happily maintain in perpetuity.

Unfortunately, the status quo can’t actually continue: the combination of the baby boomers’ retirement and rising health care costs means something has to give. But to a voter who doesn’t bring strong ideological priors to the table, neither party’s vision for how to manage this transition probably looks like a sure bet.

The White House is arguing that we can limit health care spending largely by bureaucratic fiat, by empowering experts to change the way doctors and hospitals spend and treat and charge. But we’ve tried variations on centralized cost control for years — “Medicare Whac-A-Mole,” Reason magazine’s Peter Suderman has called it — without reaping anything like the promised benefits.

The Republicans are arguing for a more competition-driven approach, which would allow private insurers to compete for Medicare dollars, and hopefully bid down the cost of coverage. There are studies and pilot programs that suggest this kind of structural change might lower costs. But there isn’t a large-scale example that conservatives can point to as the template for the United States to follow. For a voter with a skeptic’s eye rather than a believer’s faith, the Romney-Ryan plan could easily seem like a leap in the dark.

That same skeptic’s eye would also tell our hypothetical undecided that neither side is being entirely honest about the costs of its approach. The Democrats are pretending that taxing the rich can pay for almost everything. The Republicans are pretending that neither today’s taxpayers nor today’s seniors need bear any of the burden. The high-information swing voters are basically left to decide which dishonesty is worse, and which unacknowledged cuts or tax hikes they’d rather risk having to bear.

Finally, the more our hypothetical voter knows about how Washington works, the more obvious it becomes that all of this will be hashed out over years of negotiated back-and-forth — because no legislation passed with a razor-thin majority can endure unchanged for decades, and any enduring settlement will have to leave both sides a little unsatisfied.

If you want to think well of swing voters, and imagine them as wise Athenians rather than a Colosseum-going mob, you could see the improving odds for what once seemed like an unlikely 2012 outcome — a Romney victory in which Democrats hold the Senate — as a nod to the necessity for bipartisanship, and an attempt to make a significant change in Washington while also forcing both parties back to the negotiating table.

And if you want to go on thinking poorly of the undecideds — well, I’m sure that some of the post-debate focus groups this week can help with that.

Now here’s MoDo’s snot slinging hissy fit:

Even at a dinner dedicated to the Happy Warrior, the president seemed like the Unhappy Warrior.

Barack Obama was elegant in white tie and got off some good gibes at the annual Al Smith charity banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan on Thursday.

But his smile sometimes looked forced as he was goaded by Mitt Romney, whose comic barbs were just as aggressive as his last debate performance.

“President Obama and I are each very lucky to have one person who is always in our corner, someone who we can lean on, and someone who is a comforting presence,” Romney said. “Without whom, we wouldn’t be able to go another day. I have my beautiful wife Ann, he has Bill Clinton.”

It was funny, and it drew blood.

Tremors from the asymmetrical first debate are still reshaping the race and buoying Romney. It has been said that Obama didn’t show up for that contest, but the reverse is true: the real Obama did show up, indulging in flashes of petulance, self-pity and passivity at a treacherous moment for himself, other Democratic candidates and all the people working their hearts out — and emptying their wallets out — for him.

Will it mean that Obama ends up being the one-term Democratic tunnel between the first black president, as Bill Clinton has been dubbed, and the first female president — the organic arugula in a messy, meaty Clinton sandwich?

Much was made of the alpha tone of the second presidential debate. But it was more like a parody of alpha, a couple of pampered, manicured Harvard princes kicking up “gorilla dust,” as Ross Perot calls it. In a truly commanding performance, you don’t jab fingers, invade space, bark interruptions.

Obama put aside his disdain for jousts and woke up from the “nice, long nap I had in the first debate,” as he wryly said at Thursday’s dinner. But he was overcompensating for the first debacle, and he still didn’t have a vision or memorable zingers or a knockout punch for a rival who hides in plain sight.

Obama’s contempt for Romney gleamed through as Mitt got all O.C.D. with Candy Crowley about the rules, and rambled on about his weird retro worldview, where women in binders have to bound home to make dinner, where the problem of too-easy access to assault weapons could be helped if, gosh, we just tell “our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting married to someone.”

As Massachusetts governor, Romney signed a ban on certain assault weapons. But now he has “Romnesia,” as Obama bitingly calls it, so Mitt is always distancing himself from himself.

In some ways, the two rivals are alike: cold, deliberative fish, self-regarding elitists with upbringings out of the norm and trouble connecting at times, as when Obama echoed Jon Stewart’s word “optimal” on “The Daily Show” and sounded aloof about the tragedy in Libya: “If four Americans get killed, it’s not optimal.” The mother of one of those Americans, Sean Smith, told The Daily Mail of London, “It’s insensitive to say my son is not very optimal; he is also very dead.”

These candidates are, in some respects, natural antagonists. Their rancor seems especially intense, fueled by jagged ads and a long period of mud-wrestling on the head of a pin.

Barry scorns Mitt as a guy who had it all handed to him and now feels comfortable taking it away from everybody else.

Like the Bushes, the Romneys, another famous Republican political dynasty that grows more conservative with each generation, promote the myth that they are self-made men.

“The danger arises when a family myth intersects with a governing vision, when the stories a presidential candidate tells himself shape the policies he favors for everyone else,” Noam Scheiber writes in The New Republic, adding that the Romneys can’t fathom that if federal programs are slashed for the less privileged, those people can’t use family connections to help obstacles melt away.

The president joked at the Al Smith dinner about how both candidates had “unusual” middle names — Mitt and Hussein — noting mock-wistfully, or maybe really wistfully, “I wish I could use my middle name.”

The line summed up Obama’s incredible odyssey, how many barriers he had to leap over with no rich daddy, no daddy at all, to rise to the pinnacle. President Cool hates the fact that the uncool scion is making him descend from the lofty heights of governing and engage in crass politics.

Romney can only do offense, not defense. He expects to be catered to as the smartest guy in the room, and he clearly loathes being patronized by Obama. But some who have worked with Mitt say his teeth-baring is an act, overlaying indifference. Romney, they say, is all about crunching the data, regarding Obama coldly as an impediment to his dream of becoming the first Mormon president.

“Mitt does not express great love, and he does not express hate,” said one Republican strategist who knows him well. “Ledger sheets don’t hate.”

Now that MoDo’s finally hissed her last hiss today we can proceed on to Mr. Kristof:

As the presidential candidates debate how to strengthen America, maybe they can learn from rats.

A McGill University neurologist, Michael Meaney, noticed that some of the mother rats he worked with spent a great deal of time licking and grooming their babies. Other rat moms were much less cuddly.

This natural variation had long-term consequences. Meaney’s team found that when the rats grew up, those that had been licked and groomed did better at finding their way through mazes.

They were more social and curious. They even lived longer.

Meaney’s team dissected adult rats and found that licking led to differences in brain anatomy, so that rats that had been licked more were better able to control stress responses.

So, could the human version of licking and grooming — hugging and kissing babies, and reading to them — fortify our offspring and even our society as well?

One University of Minnesota study that began in the 1970s followed 267 children of first-time low-income mothers for nearly four decades. It found that whether a child received supportive parenting in the first few years of life was at least as good a predictor as I.Q. of whether he or she would graduate from high school.

This may illuminate one way that poverty replicates itself from generation to generation. Children in poor households grow up under constant stress, disproportionately raised by young, single mothers also under tremendous stress, and the result may be brain architecture that makes it harder for the children to thrive at school or succeed in the work force.

Yet the cycle can be broken, and the implication is that the most cost-effective way to address poverty isn’t necessarily housing vouchers or welfare initiatives or prison-building. Rather, it may be early childhood education and parenting programs.

Scholars like James Heckman of the University of Chicago and Dr. Jack Shonkoff of Harvard have pioneered this field, and decades of fascinating research is now wonderfully assembled in Paul Tough’s important new book, “How Children Succeed.” Long may this book dwell on the best-seller lists!

As Tough suggests, the evidence is mounting that conservatives are right about some fundamental issues relating to poverty. For starters, we can’t talk just about welfare or tax policy but must also consider culture and character.

“There is no antipoverty tool we can provide for disadvantaged young people that will be more valuable,” Tough writes, than grit, resilience, perseverance and optimism.

Yet conservatives sometimes mistakenly see that as the end of the conversation.

“This science suggests a very different reality,” Tough writes. “It says that the character strengths that matter so much to young people’s success are not innate; they don’t appear in us magically, as a result of good luck or good genes. And they are not simply a choice. They are rooted in brain chemistry, and they are molded, in measurable and predictable ways, by the environment in which kids grow up. That means the rest of us — society as a whole — can do an enormous amount to influence their development.”

Here’s an example: the Nurse-Family Partnership, one of my favorite groups fighting poverty in America. It sends nurses on regular visits to at-risk first-time moms, from pregnancy until the child turns 2. The nurses warn about alcohol or drug abuse and encourage habits of attentive parenting, like reading to the child. The results are stunning: at age 15, these children are less than half as likely to have been arrested as kids from similar circumstances who were not enrolled.

Maybe we’re beginning to crack the code of how to chip away at so many of America’s domestic problems. Tough cites evidence that while toxic stress or unsupportive parenting damages the prefrontal cortex in infancy, this damage can often be undone at least through adolescence.

He tells the story of Kewauna Lerma, a girl from Chicago who started high school with a C- average and an arrest. Then a group called OneGoal, which has emerged out of this wave of research, began to work with Kewauna and nurtured her ambitions and talents.

President Obama and Mitt Romney, listen up: Kewauna’s story underscores that strengthening our nation means investing not only in warships but also in America’s children.

On a practice ACT standardized test, Kewauna scored in the bottom 1 percentile. Yet she began to focus on schoolwork, and her grades and test results soared. In her senior year of high school, she didn’t have a grade lower than an A-.

She made it to college, where her toughest class was biology and the professor used words that Kewauna didn’t understand. So she sat in the front row and after class asked the professor what each word meant. Kewauna was short on money, and once when she ran out of cash she didn’t eat for two days. But in biology, she earned an A+.

Last but not least, here’s Mr. Bruni:

On the morning of the second presidential debate, Marco Rubio gave a performance every bit as riveting as the ones the candidates turned in less than 12 hours later.

He was visiting Bloomberg View in Manhattan, where he sat down with political journalists for a freewheeling hourlong conversation. I’d never met him and was eager to, given the belief of many Republicans that he has a big future in the party, and in politics.

I was impressed first and foremost by the assurance with which he spoke, projecting a wisdom and an authority beyond his 41 years.

But I was even more struck by something else: the dispiriting, infuriating way in which he deployed that assurance and what that said about our sorry politics today. Instead of conducting a blunt, honest examination of the hard choices and necessary compromises that confront our country, he presented the sorts of rosy assumptions and slippery generalizations that have characterized too much of this election.

With our debt soaring, our population aging and our infrastructure crumbling, we stand at a troubling crossroads. And yet politicians sell us low-tax, no-pain fantasies. They traffic in vagueness and treat us like toddlers.

On Tuesday morning Rubio certainly did. When the conversation turned from immigration, on which he was eloquent, to taxes, he followed Mitt Romney’s lead and became maddeningly evasive, indicating support for Romney’s half-formed proposal of across-the-board cuts in marginal rates that somehow won’t diminish federal revenue.

Before we go deeper into that proposal, a question: when did we become so spectacularly tax-phobic? Who appointed Grover Norquist our national revenue muse?

At a time when our taxes are, in a historical sense, relatively low, our leaders vie for favor not by conjuring more sweeping and profound visions of the future but by leaning on the prosaic, default promise that they’ll leave more money in our pockets than the other guys will.

President Obama admits that he’d like taxes raised on households making more than $250,000. But he casts those increases as an insurance policy against any significant hikes on everyone else, and puts an emphasis on them far out of bounds with their potential impact. The implication is that extra taxation on the rich alone can solve many of our budget problems. That’s savvy marketing, smart politics and utter bunk.

But Romney’s bunk, like his pension, is bigger. Or at least seems to be. We can’t know for sure, because he won’t give us details. He says that his proposed 20 percent cut in marginal rates won’t sap the Treasury because of all the tax loopholes he’ll close, but then he won’t name which loopholes.

His vagueness serves a dual purpose. It prevents voters from panicking about a lost deduction and analysts from checking his math. There’s no math to check.

Under pressure for at least a few specifics, he at one point furnished an actual number, $17,000, which he mentioned as a hypothetical cap on aggregate deductions. But it was apparently hypothetical in the extreme, because at the first debate, talking about such a cap, he said, “Make up a number.” He floated $25,000, then $50,000. There’s more than a little bit of daylight between those two figures.

In the second debate, he said, “I’ll pick a number: $25,000.” And I’ll pick a color: yellow. I mean, as long as we’re just picking things at random. Besides which, yellow is the hue of cowardice.

Rubio, in his meeting with journalists last week, didn’t get into deduction caps. But he did get into specific deductions, only to name ones he would not want eliminated.

“The home interest deduction is troubling, because it really helps the middle class,” he said. As for any rollback of deductions for philanthropy, he said: “Do you really want to hurt charitable giving in a country when you’re saying you want to rely less on government and more on private institutions?”

He even expressed reservations about fiddling with the oft-disparaged deduction for private jets. It may sound reasonable, he conceded, to ask, “Why does a billionaire need a tax deduction on a plane he just bought?”

“But if you talk to the folks that build that plane,” he continued, “they’ll tell you, ‘Well, it helps us hire 5,000 people.’ ” Trickle-down economics includes trickle-down aviation.

“I’m not prepared to go through the tax code and say, ‘This is what I’d go after,’ because it’s a false choice,” he declared, explaining his belief that the federal government would reap more revenue by keeping taxes as low as possible, because that would spur growth. “Only through growth,” he summed up, “can you generate the revenue to bring the debt under control.”

There are several problems with this happy talk. One is that many economists dispute any such tidy correlation between tax cuts and quick, consequential growth.

Another problem is that growth on the scale he’s suggesting isn’t really a plan or policy. If it were that controllable, we’d be growing like a punch-drunk weed, quarter after merry quarter. It’s a goal. A hope.

But the biggest problem is that growth is the one putative solution that asks nothing of us: no trade-offs, no sacrifices. It perpetuates the seductive and irresponsible illusion that we can get our house in fiscal order without any terrible inconvenience after all.

Rubio’s attachment to something-for-nothing salesmanship was confirmed when he was asked about Medicare. He started out with two refreshingly frank admissions, saying that “there’s a growing realization that Medicare as it’s currently structured is unsustainable in the long term” and that “my generation is going to have to accept that our Medicare is going to look different.”

But then he insisted that his generation would still have the option of a Medicare program just like the current one, in addition to private-insurance alternatives. Apart from acknowledging that wealthy older Americans in the future would have to contribute more to their health care than they do now, he painted a win-win picture of undiminished aid and undiluted services.

It was a master class in wishful thinking, and I pick on it not because it was unusual, but because it distilled so many politicians’ refusal to have adult conversations with us, to assume that we’re grown-ups who can do some math and face some disappointment.

And I think Rubio in particular got under my skin because he has real charisma and obvious talent. If he hitched them to a mature grappling with our challenges, we might actually get somewhere.

But he’s a Republican and has to pander to the knuckle-walking no-nothings of the tea party faction of a party that’s gone completely off the deep end, so we won’t get anywhere.