Sugar excerpt of the day from Bret Stephens (hat tip: Professor Bainbridge):
Fellow conservatives, please stop obsessing about what other adults
might be doing in their bedrooms, so long as it's lawful and consensual
and doesn't impinge in some obvious way on you. This obsession is
socially uncouth, politically counterproductive and, too often,
unwittingly revealing.
Also, if gay people wish to lead conventionally bourgeois lives by
getting married, that may be lunacy on their part but it's a credit to
our values. Channeling passions that cannot be repressed toward socially
productive ends is the genius of the American way. The alternative is
the tapped foot and the wide stance.
Also, please tone down the abortion extremism. Supporting so-called
partial-birth abortions, as too many liberals do, is abortion extremism.
But so is opposing abortion in cases of rape and incest, to say nothing
of the life of the mother. Democrats did better with a president who
wanted abortion to be "safe, legal and rare"; Republicans would have
done better by adopting outgoing Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels's call for a
"truce" on social issues.
By the way, what's so awful about Spanish? It's a fine European
language with an outstanding literary tradition—Cervantes, Borges, Paz,
Vargas Llosa—and it would do you no harm to learn it. Bilingualism is an
intellectual virtue, not a deviant sexual practice.
Which reminds me: Can we, as the GOP base, demand an IQ exam as well
as a test of basic knowledge from our congressional and presidential
candidates? This is not a flippant suggestion: There were at least five
Senate seats in this election cycle that might have been occupied by a
Republican come January had not the invincible stupidity of the
candidate stood in the way.
Stupid question: does it pay to be smart and to act smart in American politics? I don't think that it does for the ultimate test remains likeness and the willingness to refuse to listen to reason because of Americanness/manliness.