Andrew Sullivan on the bizarre political alliances emerging over the NSA leaks scandal:

What has emerged in the past few days is a fascinating snapshot of a shifting political landscape. On the one side, we have a libertarian-civil liberties left alliance. On the other, a strange world where Bill Kristol and Joe Klein are on the same page. Personally, I think it’s a shame that this alliance has emerged over PRISM because it seems to me to be one of the less worrisome anti-terrorism policies. My general inclination is to back the liberaltarians on these questions, but I have never been a purist, appreciate the political balances required and wish this debate were not also wrapped in accusations of treason and heroism.

I’m with Sullivan on this – the traitor/hero debate is getting a little tiring given both sides are unwilling to move an inch and accept the other has a legitimate point. To me, Snowden did what he thought was right, and genuinely believed he was acting in the best interests of the citizenry. Those who believed he committed a crime are not wrong either – he technically did, and whether or not you agree with it, he broke laws designed to protect Americans. Of course the legitimacy of those laws are highly debatable, but they were passed by Congress and the White House is obliged to follow them.

There is a wider debate to be had over wiretapping and privacy, and sadly it is getting drowned out by hardening positions that make no room for compromise and are in many cases, driven by agenda. As Sullivan says:

I’m not shocked by PRISM. But if the president began to argue that he thinks it may be time to retire such and similar programs – and he already has – then he could leave a civil liberties legacy much better than the one that now seems likely. So while defending his past practice as justifiable, I have two words for those on the right and the left who want to unwind our overweening security state: Make him.

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The article I wrote on the back and forth between Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan on the definition of ‘terrorism’ sparked off an interesting debate on the Banter. Here are some of the comments from our readers (my thoughts below each comment):

js hooper writes:

Greenwald has become a spokesman for Islamic extremists and Al-Qaeda inspired terrorism.

1) 170 plus people get their limbs blown off in Boston and he immediately tries to exploit the tragedy and use it an opportunity to whine about drones.He then attacks Americans in the comment section who are outraged by his heartless Anti-American rhetoric.

2)Days later, he then proceeds to spread lies about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev being tortured and denied his rights.He also tries to play up the idea of Boston being a “Police State”

3) Two men brutally murder a defenseless soldier walking on a street in London…while yelling radical Islamic political rhetoric and threaten further violence if their demands aren’t met

4) the next day Greenwald decides to lecture people against calling them terrorists….and also sympathizes with their agenda

5) he also disgustingly attempts to legitimize their savagery by highlighting the fact that the man who was killed was in his words…”a soldier in a nation at war”
As if that makes him a legitimate target of Islamic terrorist aggression

Glenn Greenwald is a disgusting demagogue who is now the leading spokeman / apologist for Islamic terrorism in the Western Media. Whether the attacks are against the West or innocent Muslims in the middle east, it doesn’t matter to him. America, UK & Israel are always to blame.

I think this is far too harsh an assessment and labeling him as an apologist for Islamic terrorism is a pretty flagrant distortion of his position. Greenwald isn’t justifying the violence, he is explaining the causes of it – two completely different things. However, I do agree with js that  Greenwald often uses tragedies to promote his own agenda (drones/civil liberties etc), which can be pretty offensive.

dbtheonly  writes:

Aside from “Benghazi-gate”-esque “scandal” is there any advantage or disadvantage to labeling the London murders as “terrorism”? Is Fox suggesting that we bomb Nigeria? Is there some “rising tide of Color” argument I’ve been lucky enough to miss?

The “Blame America First” crowd has been around for a long time & the fact that they’d react in their typical way to these murders is no surprise.

I personally think your definition of terrorism goes too far. Terrorism is performed by non-governmental Organizations or persons. Governmental actions are aggression. When you define terrorism as broadly as you do; everything is terrorism. The word loses it’s value/punch/ (sorry, searching for word here) when it’s overused.

I hear the point, but I still maintain that government aggression can be labelled ‘terrorism’, particularly if its actions are designed to create terror. I think it is perfectly rational to call the murderers of Lee Rigby terrorists too given that’s what they were doing to – using terror for a political objective. Sure, the word might lose some of its value if it is used so widely, but it is at least an accurate description.

ronbo writes:

If I answer the question, “what is 1 + 1?” with the answer “2″ every time, author Ben, am I guilty of “he has said the same thing over, and over again…”?

Ben, the answer is “2″. Always will be always has been. If you don’t want the absolute correct answer, don’t ask Greenwald. Greenwald is right and you have knotted your undies into a bunch IN PUBLIC! How embarrassing for you.

Ben, you can do better than bully and pick on the smart kid for giving the correct answer.

If I answer the question, “what is 1 + 1?” with the answer “2″ every time, author Ben, am I guilty of “he has said the same thing over, and over again…”?

Ben, the answer is “2″. Always will be always has been. If you don’t want the absolute correct answer, don’t ask Greenwald. Greenwald is right and you have knotted your undies into a bunch IN PUBLIC! How embarrassing for you.

Ben, you can do better than bully and pick on the smart kid for giving the correct answer.

I’m not sure how calling out a grown man with a long history of attack journalism can be labeled bullying, but in response to ronbo’s point: We are human beings, not robots, and being technically right about things doesn’t mean you become some sort of moral authority and guiding beacon for societal ethics. If a man was gruesomely murdered by his wife in an unprovoked attack, I could go on a rant about women’s suffrage, the misogynistic society we live in and inequality between the sexes as an explanation for her rage. I’d be technically right, but so what? Some poor guy had his brains blown out leaving behind devastated kids, brothers, sisters, parents and friends. Sexism, Islamophobia etc etc are certainly things to fight, but there are times and places to voice your opinions, and the immediate aftermath of a horrific tragedy isn’t one of them.

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The killing of British soldier Drummer Lee Rigby by two proclaimed Muslims has instigated an increasingly nasty intellectual battle over the definition of the word ‘Terrorism’. The debate is best encapsulated by  the back and forth between Andrew Sullivan (for calling the killers terrorists) and Glenn Greenwald (against).

In response to the killing, Greenwald penned a lengthy argument as to why the definition of terrorism is becoming meaningless, given it now only refers to violence committed by Muslims against the West. Greenwald asserted that given Western violence against Muslims is never labeled terrorism, it shouldn’t be used to label Muslim violence against the West. Sullivan, incensed by Greenwald’s refusal to label the killers terrorist, wrote an angry rebuttal to Greenwald’s piece, accusing him of being an apologist for terrorism and not  understanding the global conflict between the West and the Muslim world.

The debate has continued with Greenwald slamming Sullivan for being an imperialist apologist in his latest Guardian column, and accused him of smearing his position on the killing.

Both Sullivan and Greenwald’s arguments are flawed (at least in my opinion), but Sullivan’s characterization of the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan is almost farcical, making his rebuttal to Greenwald border on the meaningless. He writes:

Does Glenn really believe that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, however flawed, were deliberate attempts to kill Muslim civilians, in the way al Qaeda deliberately targets and kills Muslim civilians?

If he does, then I beg to differ. The reason we invaded Afghanistan was not because we decided to launch a war on Islam. It was because wealthy, Islamist, hypocritical bigots launched an unprovoked Jihadist mass murder of Western innocents from a cell based in a country run by a regime that specialized and specializes in the mass murder of other Muslims….And the war against Saddam, though a criminal enterprise and strategic catastrophe, nonetheless removed one of the most vicious mass murderers of Muslims on the planet.

First of all, Greenwald isn’t arguing that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were ‘deliberate attempts to kill Muslim civilians’. Greenwald has argued that they were illegal wars fought for oil and geopolitical power in the region. Unless Sullivan was attempting to deliberately distort Greenwald’s stance (which isn’t much of a stretch given Sullivan’s long history of emotionally manipulative writing), it is unclear why Sullivan would use this particular line.

His argument then goes from distortion to outright fantasy. The notion that the UK and US governments attacked Afghanistan and Iraq in response to an ‘unprovoked’ attack (9/11) is the stuff of Neo Con mythology, not history or fact. The attacks on 9/11 were a response to decades of US interventionism in the Middle East – a fairly mainstream concept noted by many prominent scholars and historians (and referred to as ‘blowback‘ in intelligence circles). Military and financial support for brutal dictatorships in the has not gone unnoticed by Muslims in the Middle East, and while this doesn’t justify the heinous use of violence, it helps explain that it is not born out of hatred for ‘our freedom and way of life’. Middle Eastern countries have legitimate grievances with the West, and no one should be labeled a terrorist apologist for pointing this out.

Also, Afghanistan, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11. Repeating the facts gets rather tiring, but for those who have forgotten; the attackers on 9/11 originated overwhelmingly from Saudi Arabia, and the others from Egypt, Lebanon and UAE. While US/UK attacks on Afghanistan may have been a response to 9/11, it was 1. illegal, and 2. a distraction from the pursuit of the actual perpetrators. And if Sullivan is really arguing that the war in Iraq was a result of the benevolence of the Bush Administration and their love of freedom, there isn’t much point engaging him in debate, as this is so completely ridiculous it doesn’t warrant a serious response.

Greenwald’s point that Muslim violence towards the West is no worse than Western violence towards Muslim countries surely isn’t a radical idea. As he writes:

Labeling the violent acts of those Muslim Others as “terrorism” – but never our own – is a key weapon used to propagate this worldview [that Islam is a uniquely violent force]. The same is true of the tactic that depicts their violence against us as senseless, primitive, savage and without rational cause, while glorifying our own violence against them as noble, high-minded, benevolent and civilized (we slaughter them with shiny, high-tech drones, cluster bombs, jet fighters and cruise missiles, while they use meat cleavers and razor blades). These are the core propagandistic premises used to sustain the central narrative on which the War on Terror has depended from the start (and, by the way, have been the core premises of imperialism for centuries)

Sullivan’s attack on Greenwald isn’t completely without merit however. Within hours of the horrific act in London, Greenwald launched into the same narrative he has used in virtually every other article he has published over the last 10 years. While his pieces are well substantiated, he has said the same thing over, and over again regardless of the situation. You can be assured that moments after another act of terror against the West, Greenwald will be on his laptop penning a lengthy screed against American imperialism, drone policy and the expansion of the security state. He may technically be right, but the timing and tone is relentlessly combative and insensitive. In that regard, I think Greenwald’s work is often rendered useless given it is almost guaranteed to fall on deaf ears. Had Greenwald come out with a non-political piece expressing sorrow and anger about the London killing, then waited a few days to put it in perspective, he may have found a more receptive audience for his analysis.

When someone gets beheaded in the street in broad daylight, what exactly is the point in coming out against it being called ‘terrorism’ within hours of it happening? I’m sure Greenwald isn’t completely unfeeling, but his writing is often more about him  being right and getting his point across than anything else.

It is my opinion that terrorism can be applied to both Western aggression in the Middle East and acts of horrific violence committed by Islamic fundamentalists against Westerners. It is a loaded word with menacing connotations, but then invading people’s countries illegally and chopping people’s heads off in the middle of the street probably warrants it.

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Walmart impression by Brendan O’Connor

Andrew Sullivan remarks on artwork by Brendan O’Connor depicting the banality of giant superstores like Walmart and Target that encourage mindless consumerism:

If I go to Hell, I will not have my ankles licked by fire. And I will not be lit from below. I will be subjected to giant, constant, overhead fluorescent lighting – what Michael Cunningham once called less lighting than the “banishment of all darkness.” All darkness must be banished to promote and encourage the purchase of things. This is what a huge amount of our culture now rests upon: the purchase of things. I guess you have to banish the literal darkness to disguise the shallow yet impenetrable darkness our shopping civilization represents.

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Yesterday morning I was making my usual rounds through the blogs when I habitually clicked over to Andrew Sullivan’s site, as I do every day because I dig the insight, variety and brevity of Sullivan’s writing even though I don’t always agree with him.

As I scrolled down through several of Sullivan’s posts there was something about The Simpsons, a Hathos Alert, a post about George Washington and Barack Obama, and then it hit me — a sucker-punch of revulsion, anger and mild nausea at what had, without warning or invitation, appeared on my screen. It was a photograph of three people in what appeared to be a back alley in Iraq during the war: two very sad-looking men, one of whom was carrying a child who could’ve been a boy or a girl and appeared to have been two or three years old. The child was wrapped in a bloody white sheet and he or she was clearly dead, as indicated by the morning sunlight showing through a large, grisly head wound.

Sullivan included this horrifying photograph in a post (WARNING! Death porn!) that served as a tenth anniversary “maxima culpa” for having supported the Iraq invasion and occupation so vocally throughout much of the previous decade. In other words, Sullivan is still (and should be) coping with his own guilty conscience, and so those of us who didn’t support the war and were in fact hectored as unpatriotic for opposing it were forced to look at this terrible photograph. And as much as I want to, nothing will allow me to un-see it. I will, for the rest of my days, carry the kneejerk manifestation of a stranger’s guilty conscience inside my physical body. And I viscerally resent it.

It’s death porn. I’m not necessarily describing fantasy or theatrical scenes of fictitious death, I’m talking about graphic, real life images of dying and dead humans or animals, displayed for the sole purpose of shocking unsuspecting viewers.

It’s nothing new or inventive. As a student of Civil War history, I’ve seen the first war casualty photos, captured on the battlefields of Antietam and Gettysburg by Alexander Gardner. I’m familiar with the death porn videos of the 1980s — the Faces of Death series — and its various website copycats, even though I honestly haven’t watched any of them. I deliberately didn’t watch the Daniel Pearl execution, knowing from the descriptions how mind-blowingly grotesque it was.

These are just several examples, and I’m sure you can probably name others, but there’s an important distinction here. Most death porn photos and videos carry some sort of firewall, a warning or click-through, before actually seeing them. You have to decide to see Gardner’s battlefield corpse photographs or to visit one of the various death video sites. There’s a barrier between your eyes and the morbidity: a choice.

At 41 years old, I’ve seen a lot of heinous things and I’ve reached an age when I’d prefer to be a little more picky when it comes to which additional heinous things are implanted in the memory cortex of my brain. That’s not to say that I’ll shy away from a violent movie or TV series, or that I’ll avoid my Civil War texts. I simply don’t like being unexpectedly blindsided like I was by Sullivan yesterday, or on the other occasions when he’s stooped this tactic, or by The Huffington Post last week, for that matter, when it displayed a Brady Bunch style grid of death porn photographs at the top of the front page. In that case, it was a series of photos of dead children who had evidently been killed in American drone strikes.

And this leads me to a more salient point here. Forcing people to unwittingly view death porn images could be the cheapest, most hamfisted form of persuasion. It’s the last resort of the speechless — of activists and writers who are simply incapable of forming a stirring argument using words and (non-death porn) images. If you’re completely incapable of making a strong case against war or drones or whatever your pet issue might be without infecting your readers’ brains with death porn, then get off the stage. You have no business participating in the discourse. By using these images as a shockingly unexpected cudgel, you show total contempt for your readers, regardless of whether they agree with what you’re trying to do.

However, if you just can’t help yourself and you really, really have to post such photography and videos, have some decency and post it with a warning or within a permalink instead of in a place where it’s involuntarily viewed. This goes especially for Facebook friends (or former friends) who think it’s powerful activism to post photos of tortured animals in my feed. Not only is it a one-way ticket to being un-friended, but it only serves to repulse both the people who agree, and especially those who disagree. I’m a strong supporter of animal rights, and I’ve seen many of the animal abuse videos released by PETA and the others, but I’ve only done so by choosing to click on a link — not by force, either by a photograph or even a thumbnail on a video. That’s a crucial distinction. Again: choice.

Tell me, the next time you see anti-choice zealots protesting outside of a school or a doctor’s office, waving placards with blown-up photos of aborted fetuses, does the death porn convince you to support their cause, or does it repulse you?

I can’t really muster any sympathy for Sullivan or Ezra Klein or Jonathan Chait, even though I applaud their respective epiphanies and their subsequent honesty about their mistakes. These are writers I like and otherwise respect, but who fucked up and supported the biggest and bloodiest foreign policy blunder in American history short of the Vietnam War. But Andrew, please stop bludgeoning me with your own self-flagellation. Your penitence shouldn’t be my punishment.

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Andrew Sullivan decries Israel’s self harming policies that he believes will eventually lead to its demise:

Without diplomacy toward a two-state solution, we are looking at a lifetime of constant Israeli warfare against all of its neighbors, deeper isolation in the region (with Turkey and Egypt already fast moving away) and growing international pariah status as Greater Israel becomes more fundamentalist and less democratic. And at some point, as America’s energy revolution leaves us less and less exposed to Middle East oil, and as the national interest becomes more attuned to events in Asia and the Pacific, and as the occupation turns Israel into the South Africa of the 21st Century, the Jewish state will become a self-evident burden for America, spawning terror and conflict and anti-Americanism as far as the eye can see. If all Israel can count on then are America’s Christianists and the current GOP, if they continue to spurn American attempts to unwind the conflict by undoing the settlements, then Israelis should be genuinely afraid for their future. I sure am.

They are slowly preparing for national suicide – both in how they operate within the land they control and beyond it. Obama has tried to save them. But you cannot save those who refuse to save themselves.

The South Africa comparison is hard for many people to swallow, but it is an accurate one. The behavior of the Jewish state is in some ways worse than the apartheid government was in South Africa. As Yitzhak Laor wrote in Haaretz:

The system preserving this apartheid is more ruthless than that seen in South Africa, where the black were a labor force and could therefore also make a living. It is equipped with the lie of being “temporary.” Occasionally, Israel’s indifference comes up with allegations against the Palestinians.

Abba Eban captured the allegation by coining a phrase repeated by the doves of all parties, who never really went to battle over Israel’s future and allowed the “settlement project” to spread. After all, occupation makes Israelis richer. Why oppose it?

The World Bank recently warned Israel that its continued occupation and control of the Palestinian economy is having a devastating effect, particularly given Israel is rapidly expanding into some of Palestine’s most fertile land.  As the Independent reports:

Palestinian investment is almost totally barred in Area C, even though Palestinians could reap substantial revenues if they were permitted to develop it, the bank said. Israeli industrial settlements in the West Bank are said to produce £185m worth of goods for export to Europe.

This of course, is outright theft. Israel has no right to this land, and to rob Palestinians of precious natural resources is to destroy what is left of their already bleak future. But as Sullivan points out, this overt colonization and continued violence unleashed upon dissent only isolates Israel further, and at some point their situation will become untenable. South Africa was forced to give up apartheid when a mixture of economic changes, international pressure and serious domestic upheaval conspired to make the racist government unsustainable. And so too will Israel’s when events out of its control culminate, and it finally realizes it can no longer behave with impunity.

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I’m not sure what was more nerve wracking last night, the debate between Obama and Romney, or Andrew Sullivan’s mental state. Having taken the first debate rather badly, Sullivan had been close to the edge, writing off Obama’s chance at re-election and readying himself for the end of the world. It looks like Obama’s stellar performance last night has brought The Daily Beast blogger back from the brink, telling Chris Matthews in a phone call last night that he was ‘Bloody elated’ after watching Romney take a thorough shellacking:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Andrew Sullivan has this gem from Bill Clinton’s debate with George Bush Sr, where the then governor of Arkansas draws a direct contrast between the economic theories of the Republicans and the Democrats. It is painful to watch Bush try to empathize with an audience member’s experience of the recession as it quickly becomes clear that he simply could not. Clinton connects immediately and is able to relate the misery of economic uncertainty to his own experience in Arkansas. The difference Clinton portrayed so brilliantly was the backgrounds and philosophies of the two men. Bush grew up with immense privilege and spent his political life furthering the interests of people like himself. Clinton grew up in an abusive household without privilege and dedicated his career to protecting the least well off.

President Obama needs to do something similar to this tonight, and it really shouldn’t be too difficult given his opponent. Romney is a rich kid multimillionaire who stated explicitly that he thinks 47% of the American population are social parasites. If Obama, the product of a single parent family and a former community organizer can’t draw a massive, massive contrast between himself and Romney then it’s pretty much over for the President.

If anyone knows anyone who can get this clip to the President before tonight, please do it.

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With the polls indicating that the election is becoming increasingly close, it’s probably time that everyone re-assesses just how important televised Presidential debates are – at least in this election. Proof? Just look at what happened to Obama’s numbers after the first debate two weeks ago – his numbers literally fell off a cliff:

The numbers really are stunning. For Obama to lose such a sizable advantage literally over night means there is a very, very serious problem and he will have to put on the performance of a lifetime to ensure a meaningful reversal. Joe Biden’s performance last week was excellent, but Vice Presidential debates don’t generally make a huge impact on the outcome of elections. Biden gave Obama a bump back in the right direction, but the real decider will come down to the debates between Obama and Romney.

The panic felt after the first debate has subsided a little, but there are creeping doubts that Obama can raise his game enough to thwart Romney’s resurgence. It is widely known that the President is not a fan of the debate format and there is a danger that he will revert to type (professorial, long winded and too polite). This isn’t to say it’s all over for Obama should he not completely dominate Romney tomorrow as some corners of the blogosphere seem to think (Andrew Sullivan is busy preparing himself for the apocalypse). Elections are fought on the ground as well as the airwaves, and Obama has a formidable army of volunteers that will be deployed to drive the vote out. Nevertheless, Obama’s crashing numbers were a sign of just how vital the largely superficial spectacle can be, so understanding its importance should certainly not be underestimated.

The pressure is on, and Obama is surely aware of his need to perform. Historically, he rises to the occasion and finds a way to win. Let’s see if he can revert to type, because his Presidency depends on it.

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This was Andrew Sullivan’s reaction to the bad poll numbers that came in yesterday:

Sullivan is a self confessed drama queen, but this really is taking it too far. He writes:

Look: I’m trying to rally some morale, but I’ve never seen a candidate this late in the game, so far ahead, just throw in the towel in the way Obama did last week – throw away almost every single advantage he had with voters and manage to enable his opponent to seem as if he cares about the middle class as much as Obama does. How do you erase that imprinted first image from public consciousness: a president incapable of making a single argument or even a halfway decent closing statement?……Maybe if Romney can turn this whole campaign around in 90 minutes, Obama can now do the same. But I doubt it. A sitting president does not recover from being obliterated on substance, style and likability in the first debate and get much of a chance to come back. He has, at a critical moment, deeply depressed his base and his supporters and independents are flocking to Romney in droves.

I’m not sure whether Sullivan really does think Obama has blown the entire election because he looked bored at the debate, or he’s sending a plea for help directly to Obama to get his act together. The President is known to read Andrew Sullivan’s blog, so there’s a good chance Sullivan is being over dramatic in order to get his attention.

However, I don’t think this type of public panic from Sullivan is helpful. Sure, Obama looked pretty bad in the debate and Romney looked pretty good, but so what? It was one debate on one night with one week of decent polling numbers for Romney. It’s way too early to assess the long term effect of the debate, the good jobs numbers that came out on Monday and Romney’s brand new persona he’s rolled out 4 weeks before voters go to the booths.

The more panic that is spread the more excited the Republicans get and the better the chance they have of winning. Sullivan may think he’s being helpful here, but he’s only adding to the chaos of an enormously complicated process that requires level headedness and strategy rather than wild swinging instinctiveness.

I certainly think that the poll numbers should alarm the Obama campaign, and a strong performance from Joe Biden in his debate against Paul Ryan this Thursday is an absolute necessity. But Obama has most certainly not thrown ‘the entire election away’ as Sullivan believes he may have.

Nate Silver, who is generally regard as the authority on polls and how to interpret them warns against taking one or two polls from a specific day too seriously:

It’s one thing to give a poll a lot of weight, and another to become so enthralled with it that you dismiss all other evidence. If you can trust yourself to take the polls in stride, then I would encourage you to do so. If your impression of the race is changing radically every few minutes, however, then you’re best off looking at the forecasts and projections that we and our competitors publish, along with Vegas betting lines and prediction markets.

I worked as a boxing journalist for several years so understand exactly how accurate Vegas betting lines are when it comes to picking fights. To correctly pick a fight, you have to be able to match intricate styles, have a detailed understanding of the history of the fighter, the trainer he has, the type of training camp he’s had, who he has been sparring with, what weight the fight is taking place at, the size and brand of the glove, the size of the ring, the location etc etc. It is an intricate art that requires an understanding of many different and seemingly unrelated events that can often interplay and change the odds of a fight. It is sometimes incredibly difficult task, but Vegas odds are almost entirely correct. And if they can accurately assess odds in a sport as unpredictable as boxing, a Presidential election is pretty easy to figure out. The information available to Vegas bookies is astonishing – they have multiple national and local polls, decades of history, inside info on candidates, their team, their strategy, detailed demographics by age, race, gender etc etc. And as it stands, Obama is still the favorite.

Maybe it’s time for Andrew to take a break from the 24/7 Presidential election blogging cycle. It looks like it’s getting a bit much for him.

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