Here’s an e-mail worth treasuring for a long time. I received it late Sunday night after the elections in Iraq: “Andrew, you should have been here today. Today, the insurgents lost. Regardless of what happens tomorrow or the next day, or the day after that, today, the insurgents lost. Tonight, the bombs and the mortars, and the gunshots which still echo in the streets, sound different. Men and women, whose children, whose mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, have been murdered by madmen, took a few simple, but very difficult steps, out of their homes and into polling stations. There will be debates about turnout, and legitimacy, and occupation, and every other conceivable thing, but everyone who is here right now, knows something extraordinary happened today. Today, the insurgents lost.”

Whatever happens now, this will remain true.

Quote of the Week

“Granted, these are only allegations. But there are a lot of them – enough to fill this whole page, never mind this column. That is too many to dismiss as unfounded. Too many to shrug off as the deeds of a few rogues on the night shift. And too many to make excuses for in the name of political or ideological loyalty. As regular readers know, I write as a war hawk. I strongly support the mission in Iraq. I voted for President Bush. I believe the struggle against Islamist totalitarianism is the most urgent conflict of our time. But none of that justifies the administration’s apparent willingness to countenance – under at least some circumstances – the indecent abuse of prisoners in military custody.” -Jeff Jacoby, in the Boston Globe. Thanks, Jeff. Maybe the private conservative horror at torture may now become more public and vocal.

Philip Johnson and Susan Sontag

Art critic Mark Stevens had an interesting and tough assessment of the late architect Philip Johnson in the New York Times last week. Fair and revealing – especially about Johnson’s flirtation and endorsement of fascism (which he later renounced). Now can you imagine a similar piece appearing about Susan Sontag’s flirtation and endorsement of communism, her racist claims about white people, and her constant attraction to murderous tyrants, such as Fidel Castro or the acolytes of Osama bin Laden? None of this detracts from her considerable skills as a critic. But it puts her work in the context of a disfiguring, ideological defense of tyranny. Yes, she renounced much of it. But so did Johnson.

Why the Right Won’t Concede Error

Here’s an e-mail that says that the right’s failure to acknowledge specific errors in Iraq is directly connected to the left’s visceral hostility to President Bush:

“I am utterly convinced to the point of certainty that the ‘failure of the people on the right to see the serious problems in the way we’ve administered the occupation’ was based on not wanting to give into the left’s countless methods to undermine the success of a George Bush-led anything. They will take a contrarian position no matter what the topic. They will lie and distort their own past stated positions, The ends justify the means, and all.

“The same people who claim to have been for the Afghanistan action in order to justify their exceptional opposition to the Iraq action were, for the most part, against Afghanistan. They lie with ease; they don’t want us to win anything; they want America to be publicly chastened, especially by our European intellectual ‘superiors.’ Conceding anything to this crowd, right or wrong, feels like it will lead to giving them something they don’t deserve, the higher ground, and, worse, carte blanche to take us back to a pre-911 ostrich-like security strategy. We know things aren’t going perfect. But we never expected that standard in the first place.”

That may well be empirically true. But it’s depressing, nonetheless.

Poseur Alert

“[Johnny] Carson gave up his show over twelve years ago, and for all the velocity and instant forgetfulness of American culture, he’s being mourned as if he had still been on the air. Part of his currency is the lingering electronic bedroom intimacy of that face. Part of it is that television caters to our pleasure; that is to say, to our appetite for pleasure, which is ruled by our id, which – as Freud said – exists in an eternal present. Popular culture is our eternal present, our illusion of deathlessness. Its constant recycling has about it the tinge of a religious thirst for the eternal. We don’t really mourn the death of a pop-culture icon. We use his extinction to resurrect his life. In America, the death of an American star is really the occasion for a garrulous, obsessive, round-the-clock denial of death.”- Lee Siegel, blathering on, in The New Republic.

Mr. Sullivan writes for www.andrewsullivan.com.