Via Memeorandum, I discovered that Andrew Sullivan is recommending the equally clueless Juan Cole’s “Top Ten Myths about Iraq 2007”: I’ve learned to discount some of Cole’s gloom, but his current analysis is factually crammed with data and news that suggest what we are experiencing right now is not peace but a lull. Much of the evidence suggests a deepening of the sectarian divide, not a lessening, despite some local

Remember, intellectual sophistication and penetration is best indexed by the depth of perversity: The abstract of the paper, authored by doctoral candidate Tal Nitzan, notes that the paper shows that “the lack of organized military rape is an alternate way of realizing [particular] political goals.” The next sentence delineates the particular goals that are realized in this manner: “In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can be seen that the lack of military

The Chicago Tribune reports a bump on the road to excusing those who enter the United States illegally: Chicago’s immigrant rights movement was on the verge of making history, and Nicole Perez was ready to lend her voice when she was told, with an angry sneer, that she was not welcome. That was March 10, 2006. Perez and her lesbian partner, Xiomara Santana, had joined more than 100,000 demonstrators in the

The Internet’s most notorious sock-puppeteer left everybody some shiny new strawmen for Christmas: Mike Huckabee’s Christmas ad — like everything Huckabee does — provoked all sorts of vehement, angry, un-Christmas-like attacks from Republican pundits. The GOP establishment almost uniformly claimed that the edges of the bookshelf behind Huckabee formed the shape of a cross, which — along with Huckabee’s mention of the word “Christ” — rendered Huckabee guilty of making