Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 125

The Best Of The Dish Today

So we find out that the intelligence community was quite clear over a year ago that the idea of arming Syria’s “moderate rebels” was unworkable:

“One of the things that Obama wanted to know was: Did this ever work?” said one former senior administration official who participated in the debate and spoke anonymously because he was discussing a classified report. The C.I.A. report, he said, “was pretty dour in its conclusions.” … The C.I.A. review, according to several former American officials familiar with its conclusions, found that the agency’s aid to insurgencies had generally failed in instances when no Americans worked on the ground with the foreign forces in the conflict zones, as is the administration’s plan for training Syrian rebels.

Did this stop the program of arming the rebels? Of course not! Even when the CIA itself argues against such a crazy idea, the underlying pro-intervention paradigm holds. Always. Something bad happens anywhere in the world and Washington is addicted to its own fantasy of being able to fix it. Obama went ahead anyway – but with apparent reluctance. That could not be said of Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, John McCain and David Petraeus, the unreconstructed liberal/neocon hegemonists, who were passionately in favor of a proxy war that even the CIA opposed.

That’s worth knowing as we face the grim prospect of a future Clinton administration. PM Carpenter nails it:

We are left with the distressing question of why (probably) the next president of the United States advised the current president of the United Stated to intervene on behalf of Syrian rebels either in the absence of the CIA’s imminent conclusions (Mrs. Clinton left the secretary of state’s office in early 2013) or indeed in the “dour” presence of those conclusions. If all the CIA’s findings hadn’t yet come in by the time of Hillary’s departure, then she was offering somewhat blind advice. And if the findings were in, then she was offering advice in contravention of what intelligence officials were warning.

Remind you of any other U.S. president?

Hint: he was in favor of the same war Hillary was in 2003. And she didn’t even read the full intelligence report back then either.

Meanwhile, the Sunni insurgency continued to make progress as the Iraqi military – created and trained with $26 billion of US tax-payer’s money – continues with its hapless incompetence, corruption and cowardice. But, hey, we can train another army at even more expense, and it will turn the tide. At some point you wonder whether there are any sane people in the White House – or just the president who appears to have had his spine and his vocal chords simultaneously removed.

Today, we continued our coverage of the pastoral earthquake in Rome, with your thoughts and mine on the inevitable freak-out by the theocons; the mid-terms loomed and we noted how the charted likelihood of a Republican victory in the House looks like a middle finger to the entire country; Nate Silver embraced the conservatism of doubt; plus: the anti-selfie; and a new TV show, Jane The Virgin, that actually portrays the religious as something much more than caricatures.

The most popular post of the day was Yes, This Is A Pastoral Revolution, followed by Obama’s Gay Education.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 21 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts are for sale here – including our new “Know Dope” t-shirts, ahead of Election Day – full details here.

A final email for the day:

I’m another long-time holdout who finally subscribed. I’m glad I finally did – I’ve been a reader for many years and learned a great deal from you and your readers, for which I am grateful.

BTW, I was in the Dish once, in “The View From Your Recession” series. I was the corporate headhunter who dropped out and moved to Peru. I met my wife there, and our son was conceived and born there as well. Now that the economy has recovered in my industry (construction), we’re all back in the States, and I’m back at my old job! Business is better than ever, in fact.

Know hope. And see you in the morning.

The Plight Of The Yazidis Still Isn’t Over

George Packer checks in with his Yazidi contact “Karim” in northern Iraq, who reports that his community remains on the brink of a humanitarian disaster two months after a much-heralded rescue effort:

Yesterday, I spoke on the phone with Karim. He’s still at the top of Mt. Sinjar, living in a military camp with around a hundred fighters, the majority of them Kurdish, the rest Yazidis. They sleep in United Nations tents and eat canned food brought in by humanitarian airdrops. There is no real way out except by airlift—in the past ten or twelve days, according to Karim, ISIS has pushed Yazidi fighters out of villages north and west of Mt. Sinjar, and they now surround the mountain. Karim told me that there are still about a thousand civilians around the mountain, also living in tents. The humanitarian airdrops are not enough, food is running low, and the past few nights have been cold with the approach of winter. The Yazidi resistance fighters want an international ground force to liberate Sinjar—something that they are unlikely to get.

A few hours before we spoke, Karim said, five Yazidi girls arrived at the mountaintop camp. The youngest was nine, the oldest twenty. They had walked several dozen miles from their town to the south of the mountain. They carried nothing with them and were barefoot. The girls said that they had been held prisoner for weeks by ISIS fighters, and were badly beaten, according to Karim. Other Yazidi girls and women have been distributed in slave markets to ISIS fighters, and when I asked Karim if the girls had also been raped, he told me, “I couldn’t bear to ask that question, to be honest.”

Ralf Hoppe interviews a Yazidi woman who was kidnapped by ISIS but managed to escape after nine days in captivity:

Their captors beat them, sometimes several times in a single day, for no apparent reason. There was a man with a beard who used an electric cable, while two others preferred wooden switches. Sometimes they were also punched and kicked, and they were repeatedly sexually abused.

Nadia doesn’t give a literal account of these rapes. It is virtually impossible for her to talk about them, and it contravenes the conventions of her culture. She merely says: “We were taken individually to another room, to one of the men.” Then she lowers her head, in silence, awash with shame. “What else could we do?” she says after a while, now speaking very quietly. She says the men were merciless. Some women threw themselves at their tormentors’ feet, kissed their knees and hands, and — eyes filled with tears — pleaded for mercy. It was no use. The men remained unmoved. It only entertained them.

The jihadists are claiming a theological justification for enslaving the Yazidis in their English-language propaganda newsletter Dabiq:

The Islamic State newsletter, released online at the weekend, also contains an article by John Cantlie, a British journalist being held hostage, in which he says he fears he will soon be killed like his four fellow hostages, James Foley, Steven Sotloff, David Haines and Alan Henning. But most of it is devoted to theological justifications for Islamic State behaviour, citing early clerics and the practices of the Prophet Mohammed and his Companions during the early years of Islamic expansion.

“The enslaved Yazidi families are now sold by the Islamic State soldiers as the mushrikin were sold by the Companions before them,” the article, entitled “The Revival of Slavery before the Hour”, says. It says that “well-known” rules are observed, including not separating mothers from their children – something which may account for the number of teenage girls being used in this way, according to their families. It says that 20 per cent of women are being taken in this way, in accordance with rules demanding a fifth of property captured in war to be handed over as tax.

Face Of The Day

Russian President Vladimir Putin walks in the park at the estate of the Romantic writer Mikhail Lermontov in Tarkhany, Russia on October 15, 2014. Putin is on a one-day visit to the Penza Oblast region. By Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images.

Where Is The Studs Terkel Of Fiction?

Nikil Saval, author of Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, wonders why so few contemporary novelists deal with the substance of work:

[I]f there is a politics of the white-collar novel in the United States, it is this: office fiction is deliberately and narrowly construed as being about manners, sociability, gossip, the micro-struggles for rank and status – in other words, “office politics” – rather than about the work that is done in offices. There are major exceptions to this rule:

the genre of the police procedural and the legal or medical thriller often make naturalistic drama out of the details of professional methods. So, too, do recent novels about finance. But well into the current era of the office novel – with books like Ed Park’s Personal Days (2008) and Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End (2007) – novelists place a premium on satirizing how shockingly little employees manage to get done in a day. At the center of their novels is the sheer emptiness of work—the fact not only that little gets done, but that one only remembers little about the little that does get done. …

The late David Foster Wallace blazed a lonely and unfinished path with The Pale King, with its sublime portrait of the tedious labor of IRS employees. Wallace seemed to want to redeem a publicly maligned bureaucracy, in much the way that the sheer bulk of his heavily worn research testified to the unexampled heroism of the writer, who could make literature out of boring materials. If a new politics and a new novel of work still remains to be found, it might be found here: in the still submerged mass of what we do and how we feel about it.

A Poem For Wednesday

“Prayer” by Ellen Bass:

Once I wore a dress liquid as vodka.

My lover watched me ascend

from the subway

like I was an underground spring

breaking through.

I want to stop wanting to be wanted like that.

I’m tired of the song the rain sings in June,

the chorus of hope, the ravenous green,

the earth, her ornate crown of trees

spiking up from her loamy head.

There are things I wanted, like everyone.

But to this angel of wishes I’ve worshipped

so long, I ask now to admit

the world as it is.

(From Like a Beggar. © 2014 by Ellen Bass. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press. Photo by Chauncey Davis)

The View From Your Window

Puerto Penasco, Mexico, 2.45 pm

Is Federalism Catching On?

Maybe:

[T]he percentage of Americans who believe that state or local government should make the major decisions on drug policy has increased from 39% in 1973 to 61% in 2013. On health care, it has risen from 40% to 62%; on environmental protection, it has gone from 36% to 56%. On prison reform, the proportion supporting state and local primacy has increased from 43% to 68%.

In both 1973 and 2013, substantial majorities favored federal primacy on national defense, Social Security, and cancer research. But in the last two cases, the minority preferring state or local control has substantially increased. Similarly, in both 1973 and 2013, large majorities favored state or local control of education, transportation, housing, and welfare policy. But on all four issues, those anti-federal government majorities have grown substantially.

A Funny Show That Takes Religion Seriously

Todd VanDerWerff praises Jane The Virgin for sympathetically depicting characters who don’t spout Hollywood’s default “mushy progressivism”:

The central character, played by the remarkable Gina Rodriguez, is Latina. Much of the show’s dialogue is in Spanish. The family is by no means well-off. And, ultimately, the main character’s religious beliefs — and how they inform her personal politics — are deeply important to the show’s conception of her.

Put simply, this is a show about a virgin by choice (driven by only slightly masked religious beliefs) who is accidentally artificially inseminated, then chooses to keep the baby, because having an abortion is just the sort of thing she would never consider. The show doesn’t really make a big deal about this, but it all happens, all the same. Jane the Virgin is a show about people who are pro-life — written and produced by the much-demonized “Hollywood liberals,” no less — that doesn’t turn preachy or attempt to make much of Jane’s choice. It simply is.

Alyssa calls Jane The Virgin “the exceptionally rare television show to portray religious people not as rubes or bigots, but as smart, compassionate and conflicted.” Margaret Lyons loves the show:

Jane the Virgin is a shining example of how much a show can get away with as long as it takes its characters seriously. The show buys into the idea of Jane, of Jane’s concerns, Jane’s strengths, Jane’s sensibilities. This is the world Jane lives in, and this is the way she feels about it. It sounds so easy! But you don’t need to look at too many other shows to realize this isn’t easy, or at least isn’t common.

Jane is based on the Venezuelan telenovela Juana la Virgen, and it feels at times a little like Pushing Daisies: There’s a whimsical narrator; things feel very fated; we know exactly whom to root for and how much. The show credibly addresses Jane’s option to have an abortion and doesn’t rely only on religiosity to explain why she decides against it. Despite the show’s melodrama, everyone has a backstory, too; the inflated emotions of the show could just kind of float away were they not anchored by authentic, sometimes painful, true ideas. Jane’s grandma isn’t just some Bible-thumper — she’s speaking from experience when she talks about how hard it is to raise children. Jane’s mother didn’t stop having romantic fantasies and personal dreams when she became a mom; she just had to funnel that energy in a different direction. Even in soap-opera crazy-bananas pregnant-virgin world, characters can and ought to contain multitudes.

Kate Kulzick is also impressed:

It’s refreshing to see an unabashedly good person at the center of an hour-long series. Jane is considerate, thoughtful, intelligent, and hard-working. She puts others before herself without a second thought, and yet it never feels like she’s a doormat. This should be a star-making turn for Rodriguez, who handles Jane’s broadly comedic moments as confidently as she does her quietly dramatic ones, and her performance in the role is enough of a reason to tune in by itself.

Hers isn’t the only strong performance. Navedo and Coll play off each other well and have an easy rapport with Rodriguez, giving the Villanueva family instant chemistry and a comfortable, lived-in quality that makes it easy to imagine their years together before the pilot’s instigating event.

Time caught up with the show’s star:

The actress says Jane the Virgin was love at first script. “To read a story about a young girl where her ethnicity wasn’t at the forefront, where her dual identity was so integrated in life that it didn’t feel like a separate conversation, was such a breath of fresh air,” Rodriguez says. The Chicago-born daughter of Puerto Rican parents says she has turned down high-profile roles when she needed the money because she thought the characters were too stereotypical. “I have fought so hard to not take roles,” Rodriguez says. “I had to fight [myself] like, ‘Gina, you can’t pay rent. Are you really going to say no?’”

Sick With Uncertainty

Lizzie Stark, author of Pandora’s DNA: Tracing the Breast Cancer Genes Through History, Science, and One Family Tree, discusses the maddening ambiguity that comes with having a BRCA mutation:

As a woman positive for a BRCA mutation, I bear this uncertainty doubly, both because I am frequently screened for cancer and am therefore more likely to receive ambiguous results, but also because the BRCA test itself is a sort of screening for pre-cancer. I may not have any precancerous lesions inside me, but I have been told that I have a potentially life-threatening mutation inside every cell of my body. After my genetic results came back, I no longer felt like the physically healthy twenty-seven-year-old newlywed that I was. Instead I became someone who went to the doctor more than ten times a year, like a good patient, to make sure I wasn’t sick yet. I lived in a state of betweenness, in a no-man’s-land straddling the worlds of sick and healthy.

The Polls Might Be Wrong

But it’s impossible to know which party will benefit. Silver explains:

In a number of elections, including 2012’s, Senate polls had a systematic bias toward one party. But the direction of the bias has been inconsistent, favoring Democrats in some years and Republicans in others. The chart here depicts the average partisan bias in Senate polls of likely voters conducted in the final three weeks of campaigns since 1990. (For raw data from 1998 onward, see here; for 1990 through 1996, see here). A year indicated as having a Republican bias means the GOP underperformed its polls. A year shown as having a Democratic bias means the Democrats underperformed theirs instead.

In 2012, Senate polls had a Republican bias of about 3.5 percentage points. That means in a state where the polling average showed the Republican ahead by a point, the Democrat would be expected to prevail by 2.5 points instead. If there’s the same bias in the polls this year, Democrats would be very likely to keep the Senate.

But as I mentioned, this bias has flipped back and forth.

Waldman rejects the notion that Democrats are unskewing polls this election cycle:

What Democrats are doing is arguing that whatever the polls now say, they’ve got a great turnout operation this year, and that’ll make a big difference come election day. Or they’re expressing the hope that in a couple of key races, voters will eventually wise up and understand the radicalism of the Republican candidate. But that’s very different from arguing that the polls are systematically skewed against them. One is about expressing optimism and keeping your side motivated, while the other is a delusional denial of reality.

The NYT’s model now gives the GOP a 73 percent chance of taking the Senate. Leonhardt puts this percentage in context by listing situations that occur “between 25 and 30 percent of the time”:

■ The odds of rolling a 9, 10, 11 or 12 with two dice

■ The chances that a blackjack casino dealer busts

■ The percentage of calendar years since World War II that the Standard & Poor’s 500 has declined

■ The share of days in which it rains in Kansas City (as it did Monday, postponing a baseball playoff game)

■ The frequency with which a 25-year-old woman is shorter than 5 feet 3 inches

■ The frequency with which a 25-year-old man is 5-11 or taller

■ The odds that a National Football League defense prevents a first down on third-and-one.

He insists that, if the GOP’s odds stay roughly the same through election day, “it won’t be right if the Republicans win any more than it will be wrong if the Democrats keep control. “