Category Archives: Politics

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom” and the View from Nowhere

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There was a moment in the second episode of The Newsroom where I really felt this series might pack a punch. Will McAvoy, the anchor of the evening news, is attending a brainstorming session led by his executive producer, MacKenzie, who rhetorically asks her assembled minions, “Are there really two sides to this story?” This wrinkles the fair brow of MacKenzie’s subordinate, Maggie, who asks, usefully, “What does that mean?” “The media’s biased towards fairness,” MacKenzie replies. To which Maggie rejoins, “How can you be biased toward fairness?”

You get the point: this is Aaron Sorkin’s world, after all. Clueless women exist so five-minute expositional monologues don’t have to. (Even if recitations of entire Wikipedia articles, delivered hostage-style directly into the camera, would arguably be more realistic and less condescending.) Unsurprisingly, Will – imagine a leaner, meaner Jed Bartlet with a penchant for swearing because he has a show on goddamn, motherfucking HBO – has something to say:

“Bias toward fairness means that if the entire Congressional Republican Caucus were to walk into the House and propose a resolution stating that the Earth was flat, the Times would lead with, ‘Democrats and Republicans Can’t Agree on Shape of Earth.’”

With that decisive and sardonic blurt, The Newsroom caught my full attention. Unfortunately, it lost me a couple seconds later, when Sorkin’s cutely clever dialogue once again devolved into petty pitter-patter and destroyed any chance at genuine social commentary. Nevertheless, Sorkin’s thinly disguised nod to what NYU professor and media critic Jay Rosen has dubbed “The View from Nowhere” is worth further analysis.

In that fleeting moment, Will McAvoy’s brief diversion away from his Keith Olbermann-like self-absorption and into something a little more like media criticism got me fired up. I felt similarly while watching the premiere episode when, during a characteristically grating shouting match, MacKenzie demands of Will, “Where does it say that a good news show can’t be popular?” and he replies, “Nielsen ratings.” (As banal as these ideas may sound to anyone not living under a rock for the past few years, hearing them said aloud on a mainstream TV series was a little akin to reading Anderson Cooper’s coming-out email the other day: everyone knew it already, but it just hadn’t been said yet.) Perhaps this really was the series I’d been hoping The Newsroom would turn out to be when I’d first heard about it a couple months ago: a full-throated evisceration of fluff and reportorial false modesty disguised as “objective” news.

I really should’ve known better. To anyone who’s watched at least an episode or two of The West Wing, it is immediately clear that Sorkin desperately wants to believe in something. Problematically, he often explores this desire vicariously via nattily-attired male characters who passionately exchange juvenile tropes and platitudes, usually while striding briskly down a hallway, dodging Xerox machines and the occasional stray secretary. You can tell Sorkin feels a little sheepish about this boyish optimism, because – at least in The Newsroom, where a fleeting moment of cynicism occasionally breaks through his otherwise cloudy self-assurance – the character on the receiving end of the inspirational mini-speech often responds with just the sort of sarcastic aside Sorkin guesses a cynic might use.

But even this hedging of bets can’t dull the sharp edge off his innate bullishness on life: inevitably, the cynic is won over in the end – of the scene or the episode, never mind the season. I distinctly remember the final minutes of one episode of The West Wing (early in season two, I believe) in which most of the major characters are drinking beers on a brownstone stoop late into the evening. Josh Lyman is telling a story whose moral ultimately boils down to “America, Fuck Yeah,” and each of his enraptured listeners, speaking in solemn, hushed tones, responds in turn, “God bless America.” (“God bless America.” “God bless America.”) Ladies and gentlemen, Aaron Sorkin. So yes, while The Newsroom’s two main characters verbally bludgeon each other in the age-old fight between integrity and popularity, Sorkin long ago waved the white flag. Nielsen ratings, you see.

I bring this up because, providentially or otherwise, around the same time I first watched the pilot episode of The Newsroom, I’d also begun reading, at a friend’s recommendation, Neil Postman’s classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Caveat: I’m still only a third of the way through the book, but that’s far enough along to help me start mentally tying a common thread that weaves together a mélange of seemingly disparate entities from Sorkinist idealism to Jay Rosen’s “View from Nowhere” to Ricky Gervais’ TV show Extras to New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane’s confusion to, yes, Anderson Cooper’s sexuality.

Let’s start with Postman. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, he distinguishes between what he dubs “television’s junk” on the one hand versus what self-serving journalists might call “serious television” on the other. “I raise no objection to television’s junk. The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it,” he reassures us, but then warns, “Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.”

The question, then, is which category can most accurately lay claim to The Newsroom. I think I could venture an uneducated guess as to Postman’s take: whichever category doesn’t include the Lincoln-Douglas debates, for starters; whichever one does include TV shows about TV shows about the news, as a follow-up. Clearly, Sorkin and Postman wouldn’t see eye to eye on this (nor on anything else, most likely). On the one hand, Sorkin can easily be dismissed. No creator prefers to think of his invention as “television’s junk.”

On the other hand, a TV series that launches an honest attempt to take on the absurdities of its own medium warrants respect if executed correctly. I don’t watch a lot of television, but in terms of creating a legitimate space for introspection and self-reflection, it’s hard for me to come up with a better example than British comedian Ricky Gervais’ hit show Extras.

The first season, while hilarious, isn’t particularly notable on a deeper level, but it’s the second (and final) season that really turns the corner into a full-frontal assault on television entertainment. There must be no sweeter irony than pillorying BBC TV executives as slavish devotees of the almighty bottom line on a show financed and aired by that very same company. This was form making sweet, sweet love to content.

If, as Postman (himself paraphrasing Marshall McLuhan) postulates, “the medium is the metaphor,” then Gervais seemed to grasp this lesson perfectly. Season two is a six-episode marathon portraying the slow, tortuous disintegration of an aspiring artiste into a self-loathing puppet spouting catchphrases in a desperate, cloying attempt to placate his overlords and stave off the fast-approaching death of his TV celebrity. It’s a remarkably pathetic descent, rendered all the more so by the oddly moving spectacle of Gervais’ character clumsily pirouetting through increasingly incoherent rationalizations so as to shield himself from the reality of his self-annihilation.

And then, just like that, after twelve episodes and one Christmas special, Ricky Gervais and his brainchild, Extras, bowed out, almost assuredly leaving money on the table. Nothing more needed to be said. To do otherwise would have been to jeopardize the credibility of his critique and, paradoxically, would have turned his real-life series into a self-parody, life imitating art. No, then. Leave the sequels to pirates and superheroes.

It is against this mental backdrop of mine that Aaron Sorkin was unlucky enough to submit his latest entry. Reciting trite clichés in steady vocal crescendos makes for entertaining television. It may even make for great television. But great television – even the best thing on TV, Postman reminds us – is the junk. TV Sorkin-land occupies the world just a few ladder rungs above the tundra of laugh tracks and catchphrases, ambitious enough to fancy itself serious but oblivious beyond measure to its startling irrelevance. I can envision, sometime in 2020, a season nine where a thoroughly sincere Will McAvoy rails against the frivolous pursuit of Nielsen ratings and advertising dollars, and I can envision myself, years before, having thrown my remote control through the wall.

Even a show like Extras is probably not what Postman had in mind when he discussed the things “[a culture] claims as significant.” Indeed, his keen eye was trained on the news desk, the anchor’s chair, the endlessly scrolling ticker. This was then, and still is now, the domain of “Very Serious People” (to borrow Paul Krugman’s phrase). And yet television news today is dominated by uber-partisan hatchet men on the one side and self-described “neutral” journalists on the other. The former star in shows like CNN’s ill-fated Crossfire, while the latter’s considerable terror of accidentally importing facts into fully contrived controversies leads them to abandon the task altogether and question, instead, whether the presidential candidates prefer iPhones to BlackBerries.

This is exactly what Postman had feared in his worst dystopian nightmare. Invoking the dichotomously grim futures envisioned in 1984 and Brave New World, Postman wrote: “Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.”

By 1985, when Amusing Ourselves to Death was first published, Postman was convinced Huxley’s vision had carried the day. What he might not have anticipated at the time was the retrogressive effect TV news would exert even on its older counterparts. (Or maybe he did: again, I’m only one-third finished.) It’s no longer just CNN throwing out more election-night holograms while FOX and MSNBC exchange clumps of angry spittle. The disease has spread backwards, infecting the previously immune printed press.

Among its victims is none other than the Grey Lady herself, the New York Times. Its public editor, Arthur Brisbane, recently ignited an Internet firestorm with his sincerely-titled column, “Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?” The online response was rapid, voluminous, and overwhelmingly of one mind: thankfully, virtually everyone was incredulous that the question even had to be asked. Brisbane’s query was a classic embodiment of Jay Rosen’s “View from Nowhere:” assuming, sans verification, that every story has two equally valid sides. As The Newsroom’s MacKenzie rightly noted, some stories have five sides. Some have one. But simply serving as the court stenographer, which was bad enough in the pre-Internet era, isn’t being fair anymore. It’s being lazy. Mostly, it’s being scared.

To the Times’ credit, Brisbane is its public editor, meaning he operates independently of all other staff. But a brief skimming of an average day’s news coverage makes it immediately obvious that the problem is widespread. To use one infamous example from relatively recent history, the paper’s longtime refusal to use the word “torture” to describe waterboarding spawned so much criticism that a satirical web app calling itself the “New York Times Torture Euphemism Generator” sprung up: one could refresh the page to yield various phrases like “enhanced physical audits” and “elevated nipple scrutiny.” Ironically, the Times’ then-public editor’s official explanation for its linguistic aversion to “torture” inadvertently reinforced its critics’ justified perception as to the paper’s insistence on perpetuating false equivalencies: “The Times is displeasing some who think ‘brutal’ is just a timid euphemism for torture and their opponents who think ‘brutal’ is too loaded.” (Because waterboarding isn’t brutal if it’s done fewer than 183 times per person. Look it up.)

It is perhaps more interesting to imagine Neil Postman’s take on the Internet as it exists today. As early as 1995, in an interview with Charlene Hunter Gault on PBS’ NewsHour, Postman expressed his alarm at the then-novel idea of an “information superhighway:” “I often wonder if this doesn’t signify the end of any meaningful community life.” (In a twist he could easily appreciate, this very interview stands today as a testament to a bygone era, one in which in-depth discussions of theoretical import could be shown on national TV and people would actually watch.) He conceded the interactive nature of the Internet, which contrasted it from the passivity of watching television, but feared – accurately – that it would nevertheless lead to a surge in tribalism (foreshadowing Cass Sunstein’s “information cocoons”) and actually divide the global community while claiming to unite it. De-contextualization – the commodification of information as a standalone product, utterly divorced from personal or even local significance – was a primary concern of Postman’s. And that’s where we jump to Anderson Cooper’s sexuality.

Anderson Cooper visited Wolfson Children's Hos...

As a preemptive disclaimer, I happen to like Cooper more than just about anyone else doing news on TV today. (Not counting Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who together represent a nearly perfect antidote to Postman’s disgust for trivialities masquerading as something culturally significant: Stewart and Colbert are cultural signifiers masquerading as triviality.) But this doesn’t alter the fact that the recent “news” of his homosexuality embodied the worst of everything about the entertainment conglomerate approach to TV news.

Cooper is, quite literally, a TV celebrity. He’s famous solely by virtue of his position as someone who appears regularly on TV. It’s notable to what extent that trajectory alone – from TV presence to fame, and not the other way around – so profoundly contrasts itself with the print press. How many people would recognize Bill Keller walking down the street? How about Jill Abramson? The medium of television made Anderson Cooper who he is, and so it is only fitting that his self-outing should light up the television and computer screens of people all over the world in return. That Anderson Cooper’s sexuality bears no personal significance for any of these people is completely missed in the rush to retell and re-tweet the “breaking news.”

This may look like a tempest in a teapot, except that human attention spans are finite containers. Spending time talking about Anderson Cooper’s sexuality necessarily detracts from the available time and mental effort required to understand something else that might have infinitely more personal relevance. Worse yet, it conditions us to start categorizing stories like these as “news.” Not only is information out of context now an acceptable subject of extended discussion, but the type of wonky dissection of media critiques that Postman had launched into with Gault in 1995 now seems strangely quaint, a relic of a simpler, more boring time. The financial troubles of many of our historical newspapers signal the emergence of a culture that’s moved on from the world of facts and figures and swept straight into a sea of colors and noise and lights. And tickers. Endlessly scrolling tickers.

Will McAvoy wasn’t wrong to locate the media’s failure in its inability to favor facts over a dubious balancing act that ignores the central issues. But Sorkin was wrong, for implicitly positioning The Newsroom as intellectually significant when, so far at least, it’s really nothing more than a very conventional sitcom. Nothing more than junk television. Which just might make it the best thing on TV.

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The best and the worst of America

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On the one hand, a Brooklyn judge took a one-man stand against the rampant racial profiling that results in large numbers of minorities being charged for drinking in public:

It was not sufficient, the judge wrote, that a police officer had smelled the contents of Mr. Figueroa’s cup and detected beer. Nor was it enough that Mr. Figueroa had told the police officer that, yes, the liquid was indeed beer.

In dismissing Mr. Figueroa’s case, Judge Dear wrote that the police should be required to adhere to a higher standard of certainty that the drink’s alcohol content exceeded 0.5 percent, the threshold under the city’s open-container law, before issuing a court summons. One way to do that, he suggested, would be for the New York Police Department to have a laboratory test conducted.

Judge Dear made it clear that he hoped his interpretation of the city’s public drinking law would persuade the Police Department to reconsider its enforcement of the ordinance. In his experience, he wrote, the department singled out blacks and Hispanics when issuing public drinking summonses.

“As hard as I try, I cannot recall ever arraigning a white defendant for such a violation,” wrote Judge Dear, a former city councilman who was elected to a judgeship in 2007.

Judge Dear wrote that he had his staff review a month’s worth of past public-drinking summonses issued in Brooklyn, and found that 85 percent of the summonses were issued to blacks and Latinos, while only 4 percent were issued to whites. According to census data, Brooklyn’s population is about 36 percent white.

Elsewhere, the United States spread its tentacles ever farther in a futile attempt to win its perpetual war on terror (“We are at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia”):

An ocean away from the United States, travelers flying out of the international airport here on the west coast of Ireland are confronting one of the newest lines of defense in the war on terrorism: the United States border.

In a section of this airport carved out for the Department of Homeland Security, passengers are screened for explosives and cleared to enter the United States by American Customs and Border Protection officers before boarding. When they land, the passengers walk straight off the plane into the terminal without going through border checks.

At other foreign airports, including those in Madrid, Panama City and Tokyo, American officers advise the local authorities. American programs in other cities expedite travel for passengers regarded as low-risk.

The programs reflect the Obama administration’s ambitious effort to tighten security in the face of repeated attempts by Al Qaeda and other terrorists to blow up planes headed to the United States from foreign airports.

The thinking is simple: By placing officers in foreign countries and effectively pushing the United States border thousands of miles beyond the country’s shores, Americans have more control over screening and security. And it is far better to sort out who is on a flight before it takes off than after a catastrophe occurs.

“It’s a really big deal — it would be like us saying you can have foreign law enforcement operating in a U.S. facility with all the privileges given to law enforcement, but we are going to do it on your territory and on our rules,” the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, said on a flight back to the United States from the Middle East, where she negotiated with leaders in Israel and Jordan about joint airport security programs. “So you flip it around, and you realize it is a big deal for a country to agree to that. It is also an expensive proposition.”

Emphasis mine. The ability of Napolitano to state the above, without even a smidgen of intentional irony, reveals more about the stupidity and incompetence of American counterterrorism efforts than just about anything else. But remember: they hate us for our freedoms.

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Obama 2012, brought to you by the New York Times

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The paper of record is really hitting its stride in its not-so-subtle Obama reelection campaigning. The latest:

“As a photographer, you know when you have a unique moment. But I didn’t realize the extent to which this one would take on a life of its own,” Mr. Souza said. “That one became an instant favorite of the staff. I think people are struck by the fact that the president of the United States was willing to bend down and let a little boy feel his head.”

David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s longtime adviser, has a copy framed in his Chicago office. He said of Jacob, “Really, what he was saying is, ‘Gee, you’re just like me.’ And it doesn’t take a big leap to think that child could be thinking, ‘Maybe I could be here someday.’ This can be such a cynical business, and then there are moments like that that just remind you that it’s worth it.”

A copy of the photo hangs in the Philadelphia family’s living room with several others taken that day. Mr. Philadelphia, now in Afghanistan for the State Department, said: “It’s important for black children to see a black man as president. You can believe that any position is possible to achieve if you see a black person in it.”

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Also, there are other things going on elsewhere

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Such as in Egypt, where a rather monumental event took place yesterday: the Arab world’s first-ever live, televised presidential debate.

Two weeks before the scheduled May 23 start of the election to choose the first president since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood campaigning as a liberal Islamist, faced Amr Moussa, a popular former diplomat campaigning as the stable alternative to an “experiment” in Islamist rule.

Mr. Moussa, 75 and a more confident debater, was far more aggressive than Mr. Aboul Fotouh, 60. But neither candidate delivered a knockout punch as the debate turned repeatedly to the polarizing question of the status of Islam in governance.

Big moment for Egypt and Egyptians, and it’s worth noting how much more seriously they probably take their debates than we do with our reality-TV-show Republican primary debates.

I also must submit the following as perhaps the least inspiring debate line of all time:

Both candidates were also asked about the “virginity tests” that soldiers forced on detained female protesters. “I call on each of our daughters who suffered such an insult or other insults, to immediately file a report about it,” Mr. Aboul Fotouh said.

In both candidates’ defense, this would still put their women’s rights stances on roughly equal footing with those of Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell.

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Obama pivots to newer faces in foreign policy

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From Politico:

Goodbye David Brooks, hello Peter Beinart.

Shortly after announcing his newfound support for the legalization of gay marriage yesterday, President Barack Obama walked into an off-the-record foreign policy meeting with nine editors and columnists to discuss Afghanistan, Israel, NATO and the forthcoming G8 Summit at Camp David, sources present at the meeting tell me.

The nine: The New Yorker’s David Remnick and Jane Mayer, Time Magazine’s Joe Klein, Newsweek’s Peter Beinart, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, The New York Times’s Carla Robbins, The Wall Street Journal’s Gerald Seib, The Los Angeles Times’s Doyle McManus, and David Ignatius of the Washington Post.

While some of these writers — most notably Ignatius, one of the most respected and influential columnists in Washington’s foreign policy circles today — are familiar faces at the White House, the group as a whole marks a notable shift away from the Tom Friedmans and the David Brooks toward younger voices and fresh perspectives.

Notable here are the number of people who’ve faced pretty severe criticism of their own critical statements on Israel: Remnick, Beinart, and Klein, for example. This meeting probably doesn’t signal anything overly substantive, but the inclusion of Beinart is especially intriguing in light of the firestorm his excellent book, The Crisis of Zionism (which I just finished reading several weeks ago), spawned in the media.

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More on same-sex marriage and Romney’s high school “pranks”

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I’m having trouble embedding Daily Show videos, so just take a look at this link to see Jon Stewart saying pretty much exactly what I’d mentioned — but in a much funnier and more sarcastic way —  about how far we’ve come in our national conversation.

Secondly, it turns out that the military did not spontaneously combust or cease to exist or explode into a million pieces due to the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” after all:

WASHINGTON, May 10, 2012 – A new report shows the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law is being implemented successfully in the military, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said during a news conference today.

The repeal of the law banning gay and lesbian people from open military service took effect Sept. 20, 2011. The secretary said he received the report on repeal implementation yesterday, and it shows repeal is going “very well” and according to the department’s plans.

“It’s not impacting on morale. It’s not impacting on unit cohesion. It is not impacting on readiness,” he said.

Panetta said he credits military leaders for effective repeal planning.

“Very frankly, my view is that the military has kind of moved beyond it,” he said. “It’s become part and parcel of what they’ve accepted within the military.”

During the same conference, Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he has not seen “any negative effect on good order and discipline” resulting from the repeal.

In response to a reporter’s question of what the military had been afraid of in allowing open service, the chairman said, “We didn’t know.”

Meanwhile, Jonathan Chait at New York expresses some caution (which is different than entirely ignoring it) as to Mitt Romney’s bullying high-school self:

The best way to assess a candidate is not to plumb his youth for clues to his character but to look at his positions and public record. The problem is that this is a harder exercise with Romney than almost any other national politician. He has had to run in such divergent atmospheres, and has thus had to present himself in such wildly different ways at different times, that his record becomes almost useless. There is hardly a stance Romney has taken that he has not negated at one point or another. This makes the fraught task of trying to pin down his true character more urgent, though not any easier.

My cautious, provisional take is that this portrait of the youthful Romney does suggest a man who grew up taking for granted the comforts of wealth and prestige. I don’t blame him for accepting the anti-gay assumptions of his era. The story does give the sense of a man who lacks a natural sense of compassion for the weak. His prankery seems to have invariably singled out the vulnerable — the gay classmate, the nearly blind teacher, the nervous day student racing back to campus. It’s entirely possible to grow out of that youthful mentality — to learn to step out of your own perspective, to develop an appreciation for the difficulties faced by those not born with Romney’s many blessings. I’m just not sure he ever has.

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Mitt Romney: high-school gay bully?

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You’ve probably heard about this by now:

Mitt Romney Steve Pearce event 057

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. — Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

I am conflicted about this. One of my least favorite things about contemporary American politics is how irrelevant and pathetic the public discourse has become, and how thoroughly disconnected from the everyday reality of people’s lives the online and TV chatter is. (This frustration is rather nicely captured — although I don’t necessarily endorse the Chris Christie-esque tone of the example he uses — by this piece.)

On the other hand, this 47-year-old story has an odd resonance today, given the struggle for gay rights and the very prominent and ongoing issue of the bullying of gays in schools throughout the United States. It seems to show a whole new and very ugly side to Mitt Romney, taking away what was perhaps his last remaining unequivocal positive: being a “good guy.”

And yet this all seems so primitive at the same time. (The timing is suspicious as well — this appeared in the Post the day after Obama’s announcement on same-sex marriage? Seems bizarre, to say the least.) I mean, this literally happened almost a half-century ago. I constantly rail against the idiocy and irrelevance of criticizing presidential candidates for whichever drugs they did as college kids or how much they drank at social events or who they dated or what pretentious literary criticism they wrote to their female admirers as young, heady academics.

So, as horrifying as this incident assuredly must have been for John Lauber, I’m inclined to give Mitt Romney a break on this one. We’re not dealing with 1965 Romney today. Hell, as we’ve clearly seen, the Romney of today doesn’t even bear any resemblance on major issues to the Romney of just a few years ago, never mind 47 years ago.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that my views on Mitt Romney’s gay bullying are still “evolving.”

UPDATE (5/11/2012 1:48 AM Paris time):

Dish blogger (and prominent same-sex marriage activist) Andrew Sullivan comes to this somewhat similar conclusion:

Should we judge a man today by what he did all those years ago?

Not entirely. He has apologized. But there is surely something here: the notion that being privileged and conformist requires actual punishment of the marginalized and under-privileged; that you pick on younger, weaker boys, not older ones; and that you psychologically traumatize the victim by permanently marking his body.

And this matters because today these attacks on gay kids drive many to suicide, others to despair; they wreck lives and self-esteem. It matters that we know that one candidate for president was an anti-gay bully in high school, targeting a weak and defenseless kid and humiliating and traumatizing him. Today, he does the same thing in a larger, more abstract way: targeting a small minority as a way to advance his own power. It gives me the chills.

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