On Second Thought

President Obama and advisors monitoring the Abottabad operation in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011.

About killing Osama bin Laden:  I am still not sorry the son of a bitch is dead. In fact, we have a saying down south here that applies richly to Bin Laden: killing is too good for him. At the very least, a long, slow rot in prison would have been even more deserved, from a certain point of view.   Rudolf Hess got such a punishment for doing a whole lot less.

However, as more details and circumstances have come to light, and I really hate to say this fellas, it is sounding more and more like a knuckle-headed Bush/Cheney operation than something I might have expected our very smart, very sharp President - and the also smart, sharp team around him, such as Hillary and Biden, etc. - to have countenanced.

Specifically, I find myself wondering now:

1. Was it really necessary to blow the bastard away in front of his wife wives and children? I mean, come on guys - is that the American way, really?

2. There are some mumbling efforts to justify the killing that turn on the testimony of our forces that Bin Laden was unarmed but somehow "resisting" when confronted. Um, but this strikes me as a silly misuse of language at best, and a dangerously Bush-Cheney-like manipulation at worst. I mean really, guys - if a screaming somebody with a weapon busted down your bedroom door at 1 a.m. on a moonless night, what would you do? Any human being, crook or straight, would have "resisted" - no? So that's not a justification for anything that might need justifying, but a propaganda trick. Typical of the last Administration, but not worthy of us, I don't think.

3. Was there really absolutely no freaking way to grab the son of a bitch alive and bring him before an international court of justice? Really? Well, he was undercover, holed up deep inside Pakistan . . . yeah, so we couldn't put the screws on the Pakis big time and extradite him?

4. It is a deep but persistent flaw in human nature to idolize dead criminals, no matter how many women and children they killed or how much they stole or who they hurt: e.g., Napoleon, Jesse James, D. B. Cooper, etc., etc., etc. Even without a body, now he becomes the stuff of legend - even among people (not Americans) who suffered on account of what all he did.

5. I know about the Muslim burial rules and all, but even so - in this one very, very special instance, instead of being so quick to observe the niceties of religion, couldn't we have held onto the body for a few days to allow an international team of doctors, diplomats, and journalists to thoroughly examine and verify that the corpse was indeed Bin Laden's? I just heard on the radio a few minutes ago that the White House has changed tack - again! - and has decided to release those gruesome photos of the dead Bin Laden.  (Must have heard wrong.)  But the myth, the legend has already started - the horse is already out of the barn.

So all in all, as strongly as I feel that justice was indeed served to a cold-blooded, merciless killer of thousands of innocents - still, who thought all this through? Did anyone?

Or is Dick Cheney still running the show, from an undisclosed location?  I'm just sayin'. . . .


P.S. - The President will visit Ground Zero this afternoon, meet survivors and responders, and lay a wreath.  Headlines are already referring to it as "milking" the assassination.   I don't think that's what he's doing but you see how it looks in certain quarters.

Jeezus, fellas, sometimes I just get really, really tired of thinking about the world and all the brutality and assininity of it, ya know what I mean?

I Have a Dream

As we celebrate the founding of our nation and all that the American idea has meant for us and for humanity, young and old, male and female, black and white, straight and gay, it is a good time to read and reflect on Dr. King's famous speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, that so beautifully enunciates the essential principles of our national life:

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Continued after the jump . . .

On Maine, Marriage, and Democracy

Okay, your Head Trucker got on a tear here tonight and couldn't stop.  I'm posting most of it after the jump to save space on this page, but maybe somebody will read it and let me know what you think.

I'm a little pooped tonight but hope I can string these quotes into a coherent post here.  It's important to understand were we are, where we've been, and where we're going.  And by we, I mean not only gays but all Americans.

Sullivan, quoting David Link, points out the victories this week we should not overlook.

Tuesday was a great day for gay rights everywhere but Maine:

We won voter approval of (1) domestic partnerships in Washington; (2) an anti-discrimination ordinance in Kalamazoo; (3) an openly gay city council president in Detroit; and (4) an openly lesbian mayoral candidate in Houston. That seems to say something about the state of anti-gay prejudice in this country.

I agree with David that public opinion is now decisively inclusive of gay people - on every issue but civil marriage. But even on that last issue, we are now essentially neck and neck in California and Maine, the last two states to have referendums on the matter, and we are over 50 percent in Washington state for domestic partnerships that are identical to civil marriage on a state level, but without the m-word.

 Conservative blogger Rod Dreher, though, says we are barking up the wrong tree:

Unless I'm missing something, in the 31 states in which voters had a say on whether or not gay marriage was going to be the law of the land, they all rejected it. Every single state. Even California, the national bellwether state on liberalizing social trends. Even Maine, in the most liberal region of the country.

You can come up with all kinds of theories about why this is, blaming the voters for being bigots, accuse the churches of playing dirty, whatever. The plain fact is, every single time it's been put to a popular vote (as opposed to allowing a tiny number of elites to vote on it), gay marriage has been a loser. . . .

If the pro-SSM left can't convince people of the rightness of their cause, they're perfectly prepared to see their views imposed from on high. Honestly, folks, I understand the case for same-sex marriage, though I don't agree with it, but look, if you're reduced to having to tell the public that they have no right to be consulted about the radical redefinition of a bedrock social and cultural institution, then you have a big, big problem.

Ah, but here is the crux of the matter.  As someone who grew up in the segregated South and remembers it vividly, I can tell you positively that the vast majority of Southerners forty years ago right now, probably 90-something percent in most places, would most certainly have considered segregation a "bedrock social and cultural institution" that absolutely had to be preserved.  The races had to be kept separate.  History, custom, law, and even scripture all showed the necessity of it.   Tamper with that, and the whole structure of society would collapse into anarchy and barbarism and racial warfare.  Seriously.

And besides, after all the fancy talk was done, it always, always, always came down to this remark, and with my own ears I heard it said many a time among the grown-ups:  Yes, but would you want one of them to marry your sister?  End of discussion.  Nothing could follow that unthinkable, utterly repugnant thought.  (Notice how often throughout history the great questions of the day come down to sex in the end.)

Read more of this post after the jump . . . .

Truth, Justice, and the American Way?

A couple of days ago, the Obama administration told a federal judge that it would release photographs of abuse of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq, as asked by the American Civil Liberties Union in a 2003 Freedom of Information Act request. ABC News reports that Dr. Mark M. Lowenthal, a former Assistant Director at the Central Intelligence Agency during the Bush administration, calls the ACLU's actions "prurient" and "reprehensible."

Lowenthal said the president's moves in the last week have left many in the CIA dispirited, based on "the undercurrent I've been getting from colleagues still in the building, or colleagues who have left not that long ago."

"We ask these people to do extremely dangerous things, things they've been ordered to do by legal authorities, with the understanding that they will get top cover if something goes wrong," Lowenthal says. "They don't believe they have that cover anymore." Releasing the photographs "will make it much worse," he said.

Even though President Obama has announced that the Justice Department will not prosecute CIA officers who were operating within the four corners of what they'd been told was the law, Lowenthal says members of the CIA are worried. "They feel exposed already, and this is going to increase drumbeat for an investigation or a commission" to explore detainee treatment during the Bush years, he said. "It's going to make it much harder to resist, and they fear they're then going to be thrown over."

Which is a good development, to my way of thinking. Lower-level officers and employees of the United States Government should think twice about carrying out illegal and immoral orders, no matter what Administration is in power; in fact, they should refuse to follow such orders.

The Nuremberg trials and the Tokyo War Crimes trials established the principle that "I was only following orders" is not at all a sufficient defense when it comes to violations of fundamental human rights and basic decency: this country along with its World War II allies prosecuted and punished a great many German and Japanese leaders and their subordinates for carrying out such orders.

Just imagine how different, how very different, the story of the Nazi regime would be if masses of German government employees as well as German soldiers had refused to follow the inhuman policies of the Nazi government.

Imagine how very, very different the world would be if everyone believed more strongly in "love your neighbor as yourself" rather than "my country, right or wrong."

As to who should be investigated and charged with war crimes now, in this country, well, that remains to be seen; I think the country, or at least the great flag-waving mass of ordinary people who don't want to believe anything truly evil has been done in their name, is just now starting to wake up to the fact that the schoolbook picture of America as a cartoon-colored fantasyland where nobody in government ever tells a lie or does anything wrong - is utterly false.

What I say is, let all the facts be uncovered and published, and then let the truth fall where it belongs. Andrew Sullivan:

It's the elite that doesn't want accountability. Because it's their asses on the line.

And:

There is a difference between good faith mistakes and a criminal conspiracy to violate and make a mockery of the rule of law. That's why a real investigation of all of it - including the alleged results - needs to take place and take its time. Give it two years to report, to allow emotions and tempers to cool. Then and only then make a decision on prosecution, so that there is no scintilla of haste or heat.

To close one's eyes and ears to the shocking, unpleasant, revolting, and highly inconvenient truth is to be a willing partner in all those crimes - a false patriotism that loves a pretty lie better than it loves one's country.

But "when I was a child, I thought as a child, and spoke as a child"; yet "now is the time to put away childish things."

It's hard, very hard, to tear one's self away from that pretty grade-school image of America; just as it is very hard to grow up and realize that your own mother and father are, after all, only human, and do make mistakes - sometimes very serious ones. Dysfunctional families are the ones who have lots of secrets, who tell long-running lies to outsiders and to one another in order to keep up appearances, who neglect the truth behind the facade they show to the world, who don't deal with the real problems at the heart of things.

Likewise, I would suggest that a true patriot is the one who educates himself to see past the rosy, false, Disneyesque myths about his country to see it as it really is - and then works to make right what is wrong, and to lift up what is fallen: "that government of the people, by the people, and for the people should not perish from the earth."

Listen to the words, not just the music, of this song - about an abusive family - or a dysfunctional nation?

The Torture Nation

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping upon a human face - forever.

--George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Andrew Sullivan - who has long been an outspoken critic of the previous Administration's torture policies - is writing an excellent series of blog posts right now on the torture memos that have just been released to the public. You can read them here; and also the recently leaked International Red Cross report here.

If you haven't read Andrew's posts - like this one, and this one - you should.

If you've never read Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, you should. Click here for the entire book online.

If you think all that the Bush regime did can't happen again - can't happen here - can't happen to you: think again, bub.

Sullivan:

If you want to know how democracies die, read these memos. Read how gifted professionals in the CIA were able to convince experienced doctors that what they were doing was ethical and legal. Read how American psychologists were able to find justifications for the imposition of psychological torture, and were able to analyze its effects without ever stopping and asking: what on earth are we doing?

Read how no one is even close to debating "ticking time bomb" scenarios as they strap people to boards and drown them until they break. Then read how they adjusted the waterboarding, for fear it was too much, for fear that they were actually in danger of suffocating their captives, and then read how they found self-described loopholes in the law to tell themselves that what the US had once prosecuted as torture could not possibly be torture because we're doing it, and we're different from the Viet Cong. We're doing torture right and for the right reasons and with the right motive. Many of the people who did this are mild, kind, courteous, family men and women, who somehow were able to defend slamming human beings against walls in the daytime while watching the Charlie Rose show over a glass of wine at night. We've seen this syndrome before, in other places and at other times. Yes: it can happen here. And imagine how this already functioning torture machine would have operated in the wake of another attack under a president Romney or Giuliani.

It is this professionalism and bureaucratic mastery that chills in the end. Not the brutality of "the program," but the modernity and banality of the apparatus around it. As Orwell predicted, the English language had to disappear first. The president referred to waterboarding prisoners as "asking them questions." Bringing prisoners' temperatures down to hypothermia levels was simply an "alternative set of procedures." The entire process is "enhanced interrogation." Even the press has to find a way to call it merely "harsh", a term now changed to "brutal" in the NYT, even though nothing we found out yesterday was more brutal than anything we knew about before.

Mukasey and Hayden complain that the president has tied the hands of future presidents in this. Yes, he has. What Obama understands is that what is truly vital is that this dark and shameful period not become a workable precedent. It must be repudiated at the very heart of the American political system, and removed like the cancer it is.

The question of prosecution remains. It's a painful decision. My view is that those who pay the legal price should be, first and foremost, those who authorized this at the highest levels. My view is also that it is a travesty that the Abu Ghraib reservists were prosecuted, and yet far, far more culpable people are claiming it would be too divisive to prosecute them. My view is that no one is above the law, and that when a society based on law prosecutes the powerless and excuses the powerful, it is corroding its own soul.

If all this doesn't nauseate you and make you mad as hell - just what kind of person are you, anyway? Where is your humanity? Where is your soul?

Video: pictures of torture committed by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib, 2004. Strictly NSFW. Very gruesome, and very real. That's what I'm talking about: your tax dollars at work.

We Are the Ones . . .

Andrew Sullivan quotes the brilliant conservative columnist George Will:

Just eight years ago, Proposition 22 was passed, 61.4 to 38.6 percent. The much narrower victory of Proposition 8 suggests that minds are moving toward toleration of same-sex marriage. If advocates of that have the patience required by democratic persuasion, California's ongoing conversation may end as they hope. If, however, the conversation is truncated, as Brown urges, by judicial fiat, the argument will become as embittered as the argument about abortion has been by judicial highhandedness.

Sullivan goes on to say:

I'm emotionally conflicted on this. As someone who has spent much of my adult life making the case for gay equality and for civil marriage as the sine qua non of such equality, I'd love marriage to be real in California for all Californians. But intellectually, I'm not conflicted. I'm with George. . . .

But as a political matter - and this is a political struggle - I hope the court decides to allow Prop 8 to stand. I do not want civil equality imposed by judicial fiat in the most populous state in America - in the face of a close initiative vote. It would be a horribly pyrrhic victory. It would taint this movement's power and message and moral standing. . . .

The court did its duty and its 2008 ruling is part of civil rights history. It need not force this now, and shouldn't. Let's put this to a referendum again. And let's do the hard work to win.

What I say: I agree, fellas. In the long run, it will be much, much better for us to win this particular fight in California at the polls, in a free and fair vote.

That way, nobody can ever say it wasn't a democratic decision. Nobody can fuck with it then. And nobody can fuck with our right to equal respect and dignity.

But what are we - you and you and you and me - willing to do to gain that victory, and the others to come in Congress and across the nation? WE are the ones we've been waiting for . . . . And isn't that what democracy is all about, huh?

That Horrible Day

A tribute to the memory of those who died, sung by Alan Jackson.

Even here, far out on the prairie in Texas, the utter horror of what was happening stunned the senses like a brick between the eyes. I was off work that day, sleeping late, when my partner woke me. "Something terrible has happened in New York, we've been attacked . . . " he said, or words to that effect. I bounded out of bed and into the computer room; we had no cable or satellite TV, so the only news we could get came in fitful, jerky images over our dial-up connection. The connection seemed slower than ever, as we jumped from one from news site to another, trying to piece together exactly what was happening. He'd been alerted by a call from his mother who said that someone on TV was saying 50,000 people were dead. In the first couple of hours, trying to squeeze the facts out of that little 15-inch monitor, it seemed all too possible.

Who? Why? What else was coming? A bulletin on the radio: all air traffic was grounded across the country, but six more planes were still unaccounted for. God only knew where they might be heading. At last, I thought, I know how people must have felt when the news of Pearl Harbor broke across an unsuspecting land. Only this attack was not on some remote island in the faraway ocean: it was New York and Washington, for God's sake. Unbelievable.

Unbelievable. The word kept echoing through my head all that long afternoon as I watched the news at the house of my partner's parents. The planes hitting the towers, clips endlessly repeated; sickening, stomach-turning stuff, but none of us could look away. The vast, sky-filling clouds of smoke and ash, the towers falling, the crowds of people walking, walking. The grim reporters, shocked and fearful like everyone else but struggling to keep a professional face on. The somber updates, new facts, new rumors, new images from someone's Kodak or videocam.

Unbelieveable was the only word that fit; the proof glaring at us from the TV screen, yet the mind recoiled, unable or unwilling to go along with the very, very bad joke. This can't be happening. It doesn't seem real. It's like a horror movie. We said these things out loud to one another, but the incredible, impossible reality stupefied us all: a bitter, numbing liquor.

Hours later, the nightmare still rolling across the screen in living color, someone thought of gasoline and shortages. I had a hundred-mile round-trip commute to drive the next day, so I knew I'd better go fill up while there was still gas to be had in our tiny town. No one knew if there would be any gasoline at all tomorrow, or what it might cost. Lots of others had the same thought; for probably the first time in that little whistlestop town, there were long lines at every gas station, drivers waiting patiently but determinedly to get what they could while they could. The line was slightly shorter at the premium pump, so I took my place there.

Later, my partner's father chided me for paying $1.87 a gallon to fill my tank, a very high price at the time; I reposted, better to pay that today than five dollars a gallon tomorrow. No one knew what would happen next; and I well recall that the sense of impending danger, imminent attack persisted in my mind for about the next six weeks before it slowly faded away. Not that I thought anyone, even a crazed terrorist, would bother with our remote village; but what about all the other big cities in the country?

Dallas was a two-hour drive away; the President was from Texas; who knew what twisted reasoning might make Big D the next target? And with what weapon? For weeks afterwards, driving across the bucolic Texas landscape to and from work, whenever my rearview mirror faced in the direction of the Metroplex, I would glance up at it, half-expecting, wondering, Would I see the mushroom cloud from this distance?

Then too, there was the feeling of utter helplessness; from so very far away, nothing at all to do of any practical, immediate help. Our hamlet was too small even to have a blood donation place, though great crowds of people lined up for hours in the Metroplex to give blood. All I could do was phone in a donation to the Red Cross; a hundred bucks, quite a little chunk for me at that time, finances being tight, but I did what I could. Had we been attacked by a particular country, as in WWII, I think Texans would have joined the colors en masse. But now in this strange, new time, the century barely begun, who was there to fight? An invisible, unknowable enemy, striking from nowhere at all.

To be sure, I saw a few bellicose displays, like the stern-faced young men driving a husky pickup with R E V E N G E spelled out across the front bumper. And, less warlike, overnight every other car on the highway sported an American flag in the window. Mine was no exception; I printed a small copy on my computer and taped it to the back windshield. Our local newspaper devoted the entire back page to a full-color print of Old Glory, which my partner and I dutifully cut out and pasted on the glass of our front door, like many another family. But with no enemy to fight, rage soon petered out and congealed into self-interest. Young men born long after Vietnam confessed their fear of being drafted and sent far away from home, their lives interrupted, perhaps lost; I heard of no one volunteering to join the armed services from our town.

Time has allayed the fears and wrapped the horrors of that day in the tissue paper of memory, blurred but not forgotten. Peace to all who mourn the ones they loved, lost without warning, without a chance, without a goodbye. When I got home at the end of that long day of horror, from the front porch I looked up in awe at one of the most breathtaking sunsets I have ever seen: rows on rows of lacy clouds filling the western sky, their serried ranks a Magnificat in brilliant pink and gold.

How strange, I thought: clouds of death and destruction in the east, yet in the west, glory; a benediction.

No American can but wish that everyone who participated in those monstrous attacks should be brought to justice and suffer the fullest penalty of the law. Some have, some have not. Whatever else Bush has or has not done, it must be said to his lasting credit that he did a superb job as the nation's Chief Mourner and comforter in those first dark hours and days, going from site to site, talking to the crowds and the individuals, hugging them, weeping with them, consoling them. That much, he did excellently.

But where is Osama? Seven years later, a period of time longer than the United States was engaged in World War I and World War II combined, why does no one seem to have any idea of where he is? With all our vast resources, technology, military might, and wealth, why has he not been brought to justice?

Why do neither our elected representatives, nor the press, nor the presidential candidates ever seem to ask this question? Did I miss a memo or bulletin somewhere? Or is there just something very, very wrong with this picture?

Why, after all these years, have we still not caught up with the man whom our President said was responsible for the crime of 9/11--the man who admitted, boasted about his guilt at least once on tape, as I recall--a crime not just against this country, but against all humanity?

Why is he still at large?

Why indeed?

Just Back Off

My mother always said, "Two wrongs don't make a right."

The arrogance, ignorance, and intolerance of the Republican party are manifest, revolting, and unworthy of our highest American ideals. As the last eight years have shown, the GOP is patently unfit to govern, tottering into a morally corrupt senescence; and before many more years have passed, it will, millions of us earnestly hope, be replaced by a more honest, ethical, and responsible conservatism than the ugly monstrosity it now is.

Yet having said all that, I have to say I'm getting pretty nauseated by the character assassination going on with Palin and her family. Done by the media and by bloggers and by gleeful, petty-minded posters.

I utterly despise her politics, her self-proclaimed "valley trash" ignorance of basic civics ("I'm waiting for someone to tell me, just what does the vice-president do all day?"), and her smug, smarmy contempt for the rule of law and the cornerstone of a free and democratic society, the human right to a fair trial and due process: "he's worried someone won't read them their rights."

Yeah, Sarah, even a suspected terrorist deserves his day in open court. It's called innocent until proven guilty. Because no government can be trusted to jail all the right people for all the right reasons all the time. Because a government, a regime, that holds itself above the law is an absolute monarchy, a dictatorship. Because a government that treats its enemies highhandedly today will subject its own populace to the same treatment tomorrow. Power tends to corrupt, Lord Acton said, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.

There must be no lettres de cachet, no court of Star Chamber in this country; my God--Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Franklin, Paine, would all be spinning in their graves at the very thought. Has Sarah ever read the Declaration of Independence? The Founders led a revolution against their king because, among other things,

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers. . . .

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government . . . .

But I digress. Sarah doesn't get it, won't get it: Clint Eastwood in drag ("Hang 'Em High").

Nor do the vast majority of Republicans get it either, I'm afraid. The triumph of hysteria over reason.

But now fellow Democrats, it's one thing to put Palin's political views and political ignorance under the microscope, and subject her to the most intense scrutiny; she asked for it by accepting the veep slot, and that's just fine. Like Truman said, you can't stand the heat, get outta the kitchen.

But it's quite another thing to dissect, or rather, vivisect the kids, flay them alive in the public square, roast them alive over hot coals with Inquisitors fanning the flames and salivating at the sight. Makes me want to puke. They're just kids, for God's sake. I'm with Obama:

Let me be as clear as possible: I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people's families are off limits, and people's children are especially off limits.

This shouldn't be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin's performance as governor, or her potential performance as a vice president.

And so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. You know my mother had me when she was 18, and how a family deals with issues and, you know, teenage children, that shouldn't be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that's off limits.

All this crap about the kids has no relevance to her political abilities. Or lack thereof. It's just the nastiest kind of voyeuristic political porn.

What family in America in 2008--and by definition I include the siblings, the in-laws, the cousins, the young and the old--what family today does not have in its closet a drunk-driving ticket, an unwed teen pregnancy, a wild child with a drug problem?

Let's not be so goddamn self-righteous; liberals play that stupid game just like fundies do. But it's ugly, ugly, ugly. It sucks, big time.

Suppose some hardball reporters sidled up to your friends and acquaintances with a fistful of cash and a tape recorder, hmmm? Just how would you feel, reading the headlines all about you tomorrow morning?

The kids are just as human as you and me, and they didn't ask for this. Let them work out their own lives, and deal with their messes in peace like you did and I did; God knows it's hard enough in private life.

Just back off, everybody. Stick with the real story, Palin's politics; that's more than enough to sink her and her party five fathoms deep, and the sooner the better.

The Democratic Convention in Three Minutes

Link to Time magazine video: http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1485842900/bctid1760455467

There is no political party that has a monopoly on truth and goodness; no human being who can single-handedly right all the wrongs of the world. But omg, when I look at this capsule summary of the Dems' convention, it sure feels like home to me. Cool water in a parched, arid land. A big, loud, proud family all together at the table . . . where everybody has a place. Where everybody belongs.

Unlike that other convention, so notable for an unbroken sea of straight, white, tight faces.

And even though this show, like all shows, has an admixture of conscious theatricality . . . omg, how can anyone who truly believes in "liberty and justice for all" not feel the fresh breeze of dawn blowing across his face? A quickening of the pulse, a catch in the throat . . . an inspiration.