Robert Wright

If there's one thing the media won't tolerate for long, it's an unchanging media narrative. So the current story of the presidential campaign -- Obama sits on a lead that is modest but increasingly comfortable, thanks to a hapless Romney and a hapless Romney campaign -- should be yielding any moment to something fresher.

The essential property of the new narrative is that it inject new drama into the race, which means it has to be in some sense pro-Romney. This can in turn mean finding previously unappreciated assets in Romney or his campaign, previously undetected vulnerabilities in the Obama campaign, etc. The big question is whether the new narrative then becomes self-fulfilling, altering the focus of coverage in a way that actually increases Romney's chances of a victory. And that depends on the narrative's exact ingredients. Here are some candidate memes:

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In my previous post I suggested that the God of ancient Israel -- known to Israelites as Yahweh -- lived for centuries in a polytheistic milieu and may well have had a goddess wife named Asherah.

This seeming departure from Jewish and Christian orthodoxy led one commenter (Selbo) to challenge me: "Hey, Robert Wright. Let's see how brave you are. Write a column asking similar questions about Islam."

As two astute commenters -- Juan_Der_Meant and Xclamation -- pointed out, in raising this question about the Jewish and Christian God, I was raising a question about the Islamic God. After all, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all trace their God to Abraham's revelation. As Xclamation put it, adherents of all three faiths "worship the same deity, regardless of whether He is called Yahweh, God or Allah."

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The recently revealed "evidence" that Jesus had a wife deserves those quotation marks. As various people have argued, a fragment of text written centuries after the crucifixion doesn't carry much weight as a biographical source. However, when it comes to the question of whether Jesus's father had a wife, the evidence is stronger. And I'm not talking about Joseph, but, rather, about Jesus's heavenly father--God.

I discussed this a few years ago in my book The Evolution of God. I argued (as had a number of scholars) that Israelite religion was for a long time polytheistic, and that full-fledged monotheism didn't arrive until the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE. And, of course, in many polytheistic religions, gods have mates. So might Yahweh have had one for a time?

There's reason to think so. Yahweh seems to have early on absorbed qualities of the Canaanite god El--perhaps via a kind of "merger" of two previously distinct gods that was not uncommon in the ancient world. (This could explain why the Hebrew word El means "god" and in fact is used that way in the Hebrew Bible.) And El, like any self-respecting head of a pantheon, had a mate. I wrote in my book:

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President Obama had been doing an admirable job in recent weeks of keeping the chances of war with Iran from rising, notably in rebuffing Bibi Netanyahu's efforts to get America to lower the threshold for a military attack. But on Friday the chances of war rose, and that's Obama's fault.

A government official said the U.S. will remove the "terrorist" label from the Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MEK, a group that got onto the list of terrorist organizations decades ago by, among other things, killing Americans. I've argued before that such a "delisting" of MEK would empower hardliners in Iran who want to block a negotiated solution of the nuclear issue. After all, not only is MEK devoted to overthrowing the Iranian government, and not only did it side with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war--MEK has recently, according to NBC News , served as Israel's proxy in murdering Iranian scientists. So America's delisting of MEK will be used by Iranian hardliners as evidence that America is too hostile to be a reliable negotiating partner--just as American hawks highlight evidence of Iranian hostility to argue that negotiations are futile.

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If you're wondering how screwed up America's counter-terrorism policy is but you don't have time to do a lot of reading on the subject, you're in luck. Just go to Foreign Policy and read Micah Zenko's fairly short and fairly brutal piece on John Brennan, President Obama's "closest advisor for intelligence and counterterrorism issues" and the man who has been described as Obama's "priest" when it comes to the question of whom to smite with drone strikes.

Zenko's article has all the surgical precision commonly associated with drone strikes.

Here, for example, is a quote from Brennan:

"Contrary to conventional wisdom, we see little evidence that [drone strikes] are generating widespread anti-American sentiment or recruits for AQAP [al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula]. In fact, we see the opposite: Our Yemeni partners are more eager to work with us.... In short, targeted strikes against the most senior and most dangerous AQAP terrorists are not the problem -- they are part of the solution."

And here is Zenko's commentary:

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Associated Press

"So we really don't have any option but to keep Iran from having a nuclear weapon," concludes one of the several priceless Mitt Romney foreign policy riffs that, thanks to Mother Jones, are now part of the world's cultural heritage.

I personally disagree with that conclusion (for reasons spelled out here), but I recognize that there are smart and thoughtful people who accept it, and there are serious arguments to be made on its behalf. However, the argument that Mitt Romney made on its behalf is comical--or as close to comical as something can be while underscoring the fact that your country may soon be led by a man totally unprepared for the job.

Here, as Romney explained it at the now-famous assemblage of donors in Boca Raton, is the reason we have to worry about a nuclear Iran:

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What are the sources of simmering hostility toward America that helped fuel these demonstrations?

As the Muslim protests subside, more and more people have come to realize that what seems to have sparked them--one of the worst YouTube videos ever, which is saying something--isn't what they were mainly about.

But what were they about? Here theories differ, and some of the best theories haven't been getting much attention, because they're not on the talking-points agendas of Democrats or Republicans--which means they won't be occupying much airtime on network or cable TV during an election campaign.

Ross Douthat, writing in Sunday's New York Times, embraces a theory that's true insofar as it goes: these protests often got a boost from local political jostling. For example, in Egypt the struggle "between the Muslim Brotherhood and its more-Islamist-than-thou rivals" is what led those rivals (Salafis) to call protestors onto the streets.

Fine, but since people aren't sheep (though they sometimes do a good imitation), we have to ask why the protestors responded to such calls in Egypt and elsewhere--and why sometimes the crowds swelled.

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Here is the narrative that pretty much everyone was buying into 36 hours ago: Crude anti-Islam film made by Israeli-American and funded by Jews leads to Muslim protests that boil over, causing four American deaths in Libya.

Here is what now seems to be the case: the anti-Islam film wasn't made by an Israeli-American, wasn't funded by Jews, and probably had nothing to do with the American deaths, which seem to have resulted from a long-planned attack by a specific terrorist group, not spontaneous mob violence.

In retrospect, the original narrative should have aroused immediate suspicion. If, for example, this lethal attack on an American consulate in a Muslim country was really spontaneous, isn't it quite a coincidence that it happened on 9/11?

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I virtually never just post a video and say "Watch this." But, well, watch this. It's eminent journalist Joe Klein on Morning Joe today, and it easily justifies enduring the 30-second ad that precedes it. Klein not only speaks with uncommon frankness about Bibi Netanyahu's recent behavior--he also goes on to say several sensible things about Iran and the idea of attacking it.

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

If you want some background on the recent tension-bordering-on-open-conflict between Netanyahu and President Obama, here's my thumbnail summary.

Photo: Reuters

Here are two headlines from today: 'US-Israel divisions over Iran boil over' (AP); 'U.S.-Israel tensions on Iran are boiling over' ( JTA). This may lead you to ask (if you're the type who likes to keep metaphors intact), "What is the underlying source of heat?"

This question can be broken down into five sub-questions:

[1] Is it true, as Bibi Netanyahu says, that the point of contention is the unwillingness of the U.S. to set a "red line"--i.e., a line that, if crossed by Iran, would bring U.S. military action?

Not really. Obama has already laid down a red line. He did so pretty clearly on this very web site, in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in March: "As president of the United States, I don't bluff... I think both the Iranian and the Israeli governments recognize that when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say." In other words, if Iran tries to build a nuclear weapon--something that would require, for starters, the very conspicuous breaking of UN monitoring seals at its nuclear facilities--Obama will resort to military force to stop it.

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If Osama bin Laden were alive today to survey the field of battle, he might not feel his movement was so defeated.

If in 2001, a few hours after the 9/11 attacks, you had described to Osama bin Laden the world that would exist exactly 11 years later, how would he have reacted?

There's one aspect of the current world we know he would frown on--the part about his bones lying at the bottom of the sea. And he'd probably be disappointed that there have been almost no successful radical Islamist terrorist attacks on American soil since the one he engineered.

Still, there's a lot for him to like, and it's far from clear that America is decisively winning the war he started 11 years ago today.

Consider:

[1] America launched two wars in response to 9/11, and both have boomeranged, providing enough jihadist propaganda to help fuel what successful and near-successful attacks on American soil there have been. And both countries we invaded remain in turmoil to this day, providing arenas where al Qaeda and other radical Muslim groups can find purpose and build franchises. What's more, the turmoil in one of these countries has helped destabilize Pakistan, raising the specter of nuclear weapons falling into dangerous hands.

[2] Though during the early Obama years America regained some esteem in Muslim countries--esteem that had been eroded partly by those wars--Muslim opinion of America has been dropping lately, something that would please bin Laden. Between 2009 and 2012, in the five Muslim countries included in the Pew Global Attitudes Project, America's favorability rating dropped, on average, from 25 percent to 15 percent. Why? For one thing, while it's true that President Obama has gotten our troops out of Iraq and seems to be getting them out of Afghanistan, it's also true that:

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Have you ever, while taking off or landing in an airliner, felt any great confidence that everyone on the flight had actually turned off their cell phones, as instructed? No, right? And have you ever been on an airliner that crashed? I'm guessing not. Doesn't that make you wonder how dangerous it really is for people to leave their cell phones on during takeoff and landing?

And it's not as if your flights are the only data points. Every day, thousands of airliners containing active cell phones take off and land--and nothing bad ever happens.

Of course, this argument against what may be the most gratuitously annoying airport security measure is conjectural, since I've never actually surveyed my fellow passengers to see how many had their cell phones on. But, happily, two psychologists have now taken the conjecture out of the argument. I give you Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, writing in the Wall Street Journal's Weekend Review*:

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Buried in New York Times polling guru Nate Silver's latest blog post is a chart that should have Mitt Romney ordering out for some Xanax. The chart depicts Silver's statistical inferences from several multi-day tracking polls that include Thursday and Friday, the final day of the Democratic convention and the day after--in other words, the two days after Bill Clinton's barnburner of a speech. I'll explain below why I'd add one grain of salt to Silver's inferences, but first, here they are, in this chart's final column, which depicts the estimated swing in Obama's favor since Clinton's speech:

My two reasons for mild skepticism:

[1] I support Obama, and I'm a pessimist. OK, I admit that this reason isn't a paragon of rigor. So on to the second reason:

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Earlier this week, in questioning the significance of a "scientists find internet-addiction gene" story, I conceded that the scientific study in question did find something interesting: A gene that seems to be (very modestly) correlated with internet addiction also plays a role in nicotine addiction.

Maybe this nicotine connection is what prompted the German scientist who was the lead author of the study to declare that, thanks to his work, we now know that "internet addiction is not a figment of our imagination." After all, if a gene involved in a manifestly chemical addiction, like nicotine addiction, is also involved in something people doubt is literally an addiction, then that should remove the doubt, no?

No. Whether heavy internet use deserves to be called an addiction or just a hard-to-break habit is a question about a behavior pattern and its attendant psychological states. To answer it we ask such things as how strong the cravings for the internet are, what lengths a person will go to in order to satisfy them, and so on. But even if we decide, after answering such questions, that a given person's internet dependence amounts only to a habit, and doesn't warrant the "addiction" label, it still makes sense that genes which mediate chemical addictions--nicotine, cocaine, whatever--would be involved.

To see what I mean by this is to see that, yes, a susceptibility to internet addiction (or heavy internet habituation, or whatever you want to call it) is "in the genes" -- but it's in lots and lots of genes, and it's in the genes of all of us.

The reason for this, naturally enough, lies in the process that created our species. Human beings are biochemical machines "designed" by natural selection to, among other things, form habits. In particular, we're designed to form habits that helped our ancestors survive and get genes into the next generation -- such habits as eating meat or fruit or having sex with auspicious mates or impressing people or even gathering tactically useful information about people (i.e., gossip). The habit-forming machinery involves the release of reward chemicals, such as dopamine, that make us feel good upon attaining these goals--upon eating fatty food, sweet food, having sex, hearing people laugh at our jokes or marvel at our exploits, hearing good gossip, etc.

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Just a few quick and disjointed thoughts about President Obama's acceptance speech:

1) It feels strange -- and refreshing! -- to hear the Democratic candidate plausibly and effectively belittle the Republican candidate's national security credentials. (The line about Romney's gaffe in England was mean, but not quite too mean. And the line about Romney's vestigial Russophobia was apt.)

2) I agree with people who found early parts of the speech too state-of-the-uniony. With an economy in this condition, a laundry list of accomplishments doesn't carry much weight. And undecided voters aren't looking for a bunch of micro-initiatives that have no obvious relevance to their lives.

3) The populist riffs were effective but, for my money, too brief; undecided voters are looking for evidence that Obama's on their side in a way that Mitt Romney is not. I know previous convention speakers had worked this territory over pretty well, but many Americans who watched this speech had seen little if any of that. I thought we could have used more.

4) I thought he worked too hard to salvage the "hope and change" meme. (He reportedly said "hope" 15 times!) It felt strained and made him sound defensive and even, in a weird way, vain. Sure, people need to be persuaded that America is on the right track, and that he's the guy who can sustain the momentum. But there were other ways to make that case (some of which, to be sure, he deployed). I guess I can see how he thought he had to directly confront the Republicans' ridicule of his 2008 leitmotif, but sometimes discretion is the better part of valor.

5) He was, as I'd suspected he'd be, a victim of Bill Clinton's success. Tough act to follow. For that matter, even Joe Biden, with his irrepressible and sometimes awkward authenticity, is a tough act to follow. After Biden, smooth can seem too smooth.

All told, I'd give Obama's speech a B+ and the convention as a whole an A-. Now on to Friday morning's jobs numbers...

The Romney campaign, always eager to lighten the load of overworked journalists, has helpfully assembled a list of quotations about the Democratic convention's famous Wednesday-afternoon Jerusalem fiasco. The quotes tend toward the negative:

"Democrats fumble major Israel issue." --CBS New York

"Widely seen in pro-Israel circles as an embarrassment for the Obama campaign and a battle that needlessly rekindled mistrust of the administration by pro-Israel groups." --Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post

"An embarrassing moment for the party that is certain to be used in Republican television ads over the next two months." --Jon Ward and Joshua Hersh, The Huffington Post

After the list had been posted, Commentary added its two cents, saying the Democrats will "take hits" from "Israel supporters whose eyes have been opened to the nature of the Democratic Party" and that this "fiasco might do tremendous damage to Jewish support for Democrats."

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"German scientists find 'internet-addiction gene'," said a headline on a German news site last week. Another site reported that scientists have "nailed down the gene responsible for internet addiction."

Is it true? No, but its falseness is interesting for what it says both about the nature of our addictions and about how scientific researchers sometimes help journalists sensationalize research.

Here's what the German scientists found: People who reported heavy dependence on the internet--including feelings of unhappiness when denied access to it--were more likely to have a certain gene than comparable people who weren't so internet-dependent.

One thing that would be nice to know, before we decide how excited to get about this result, is: How much more likely? Do 90 percent of internet addicts have this gene whereas only 15 percent of non-addicts have it? Or is the difference much less dramatic than that?

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Meir Javedanfar, an Israeli academic who was born in Iran (and who teaches a course about Iranian politics), makes a point in the short clip below that I think is insufficiently appreciated: Mitt Romney, in advocating a more confrontational approach to Russia and China, is embracing a foreign policy that would undermine Israel's interests.

Javendar also alludes to the flip side of this coin: the Russia policies of President Obama that have been depicted as appeasement by Republican hawks have been pro-Israel in the sense that they've helped secure Russian cooperation in sanctions against Iran.

You can watch the whole conversation (an episode of the BhTV show Foreign Entanglements) here.

Couldn't the GOP presidential candidate do better than spout abstractions?

Mitt Romney delivered some effective lines in his acceptance speech Thursday night. But "effective" isn't the same as "non-stupid". For example:

Romney said President Obama had begun his presidency with "an apology tour. America, he said, had dictated to other nations. No Mr. President, America has freed other nations from dictators."

It's true: In the last decade alone America has twice intervened forcefully to free nations from dictators--in Iraq and in Libya. But since the Libyan intervention came at the direction of President Obama, I don't think he needs any reminders that things like this have happened. And when you compare that episode to the Iraq intervention--which came on a Republican president's watch, and which Obama opposed--it's kind of amazing that Romney brought up this subject at all.

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I just spent a week about as off the grid as you can get. No internet, no cell phone coverage, no electricity, no running water, no walls, no roofs. I was in a wilderness area in Ontario, on a canoe trip with a few friends.

I'd like to report that the experience left me refreshed and replenished, but at the moment the adjectives that come to mind are tired and sore. It turns out that "canoe trip" is an ambiguous phrase. Does it mean you'll spend lots of time traveling in a canoe, something that's exhausting only when the wind is against you? Or does it mean you'll spend lots of time traveling with a canoe balanced upside down on your shoulders, walking along uneven, even treacherous, terrain for stretches that sometimes go on for more than half a mile?

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