Anyone have good ideas for turkey leftovers?

Also, since this weekend is about being thankful, it's important to remember that not everyone has the luxury of leftovers. So if anyone has a charity they think others should know about, please, comment below.

One of my favorite organizations is City Harvest -- they collect food from restaurants around New York City and feed people.

Fascinating article in today's Times on denial, and the integral part it plays in our social behavior. It doesn't mention specifically how it works in politics, but reading through, the parallels to today's political climate, especially around Bush, his believers, and the war, seem striking.

It is a mistake to underestimate the power of simple attention. People can be acutely aware of what they pay attention to and remarkably blind to what they do not, psychologists have found. In real life, to be sure, casual denials of bad behavior require more than simple mental gymnastics, but inattention is a basic first ingredient.

It's easy to deny what we don't see, and, when it comes to the war in Iraq, as well as many other issues, we simply don't see. Or, in some cases, we see what the government wants us to see. Embedded reporters, a reliance on government sources, smart-bomb video clips -- these are techniques of distraction, not attention.

Next, we see, but we tend to look away:

The second ingredient, or second level, is passive acknowledgment, when infractions are too persistent to go unnoticed. People have adapted a multitude of ways to handle such problems indirectly...The acknowledgment is passive for good reasons: an open confrontation, with a loved one or oneself, risks a major rupture or life change that could be more dire than the offense.

Here is, I think, the crisis of denial facing the Republican party. With the disaster in Iraq, with public opinion against the war, against Bush, with the cost of the war in the trillions, Republicans (and some Democrats) still hang on, still will not vote against their Party and the President. To do so, perhaps, would be a "major rupture," the acknowledgment of their mistakes.

Most fascinating is the way denial plays into people that we "idealize":

Nowhere do people use denial skills to greater effect than with a spouse or partner....people often idealize their partners, overestimating their strengths and playing down their flaws...[S]tudies have found that partners who idealize each other in this way are more likely to stay together and to report being satisfied in the relationship than those who do not.

The word idealize seems significant, because it applies to the cult-like following that Bush has fostered within his ranks. Here, for example, is Francis Townsend, from her resignation letter to the President:

In 1937, the playwright Maxwell Anderson wrote of President George Washington: There are some men who lift the age they inhabit, til all men walk on higher ground in their lifetime.

Mr. President, you are such a man.

Denial? Yes. Creepy, even.

But denial isn't just about Bush Republicans. This next finding goes a long way to explain even many Democrats' attitude about Bush and the Iraq war:

Faced with the high odor of real perfidy, people unwilling to risk a break skew their perception of reality much more purposefully. One common way to do this is to recast clear moral breaches as foul-ups, stumbles or lapses in competence — because those are more tolerable...

See, it's not that the war wasn't a good idea, it's just that it was managed incompetently.

Denial, it seems, works very well as a rationalization technique.