Archive
April 23, 2006 - April 29, 2006
Saturday, April 29, 200629 Apr 2006 03:15 pm Women's Soccer in IranYep, they have to wear headscarves in order to play. And that goes for Western visiting teams as well. 29 Apr 2006 03:07 pm Quote for the Day"I'm about as pro-US as they come, but I have to say I'm beginning to run out of patience - and hope," - Clive Davis, on his blog. 29 Apr 2006 02:34 pm Kristol on Colbert29 Apr 2006 02:25 pm Rumsfeld Authorized CrimeI'm not claiming this. The Army is. Marty Lederman explains:
Don't you love that phrase: "legal doctrines [that] could render specific conduct, otherwise criminal, not unlawful"? If president Clinton had used such terminology abut sex, can you imagine how the Republicans would have torn him apart? And yet George W. Bush has used it about criminal abuse of military detainees. 29 Apr 2006 02:09 pm Bush and the EconomySome have been saying that the president doesn't get enough credit for the strength in the economy. Since we're running unsustainable trade and budget deficits in order to keep the whole thing afloat, I'd say that's debatable. But doesn't the reasoning go the other way as well? If the economy is this strong and Bush still has only 32 percent support, what could happen if we hit the skids? I wonder how low he could go? 29 Apr 2006 02:01 pm The Marriage Rate Among GaysSo far, it's around 17 percent in Massachusetts, which may be distorted upward because of pent-up demand. Only time will give us more solid data. My own view is that we will only be able to guage the true rate once an entire generation of gay kids has grown up in the knowledge that one day, they too can get married like their parents. Only then will the psychological wounds inflicted on gay youth's self-esteem be healed enough to compare them with their heterosexual peers. Dale Carpenter speculates on what all this might mean, if anything, here. And he has some useful additional reporting on the end of gay culture here. 29 Apr 2006 01:56 pm Republicans Gone WildSometimes, I think Aaron Sorkin is writing the news these days. I missed this story on the road the last couple of days, but it's a rich one:
The alleged practices were funded by a defense contractor. I doubt the other legislators are Democrats. The story is getting longer and stronger legs. DeLay is gone; Limbaugh has struck a plea bargain in return for mandatory drug treatment; Cunningham may have been given escorts as a bribe ... in the Watergate hotel! Who needs a miniseries? 29 Apr 2006 01:33 pm Quote for the Day"Less than 24 hours after I testified before a grand jury investigating those murders (and the church burning that preceded them), the Klan initiated a campaign to 'ruin' me, a WASP lady with eight great-grandparents buried in Neshoba County, [Mississippi]" - Florence Latimer Mars, a Southern white woman who took great risks in the civil rights movement, when others in her place and class looked away. She died last Sunday. 29 Apr 2006 01:26 pm New Data on Iraq
They're grim. 100,000 families have so far been forced to flee their homes; U.S. fatalities were sharply up in April; 8,300 civilian Iraqis were murdered by terrorist insurgents in 2005. In terms of civilian deaths, adjusted for population size, Iraq endured something like twenty-five 9/11s last year. Let's put it another way: a territory controlled by U.S. forces accounted for 50 percent of deaths caused by terrorists on the planet last year. If that is a successful military occupation, then I'm not sure what failure would be. I guess I should ask Powerline. (Photo: Thaier al Sudani/Reuters.) Friday, April 28, 200628 Apr 2006 05:37 pm Smoking, Pot, and HealthHenry Miller hauls out the old "inhaling smoke is bad for you" line against medical marijuana. Has he ever heard of this? 28 Apr 2006 05:33 pm Romney's MormonismRoss Douthat thinks it's legitimate for people to decide to vote for or against a candidate because of their religious denomination. Money quote:
He has a point. I wonder if anyone will bring up Mormonism's relatively recent history of racial discrimination as well. The trouble is that once we have acquiesced to the notion that you don't need and shouldn't want a bright line between political life and religious life, these kinds of questions are inevitable. This one really is a slippery slope. Once you have accepted that large numbers of people voted for W solely on the basis of his evangelical protestantism, then how can you argue against people voting against him or anyone else on similar, purely sectarian grounds? Ross is right that the constitutional issue is separate: there's no legal bar on someone of any faith from becoming president. But there is a growing social consensus that religion matters in politics. The theocons have helped bring this about; the Christianists have pioneered it; the Catholic hierarchy in Rome is abetting it. Once public policy issues become religious and doctrinal issues, all this is on the table. But it is a dangerous and divisive world we are creating. It would be ironic if Romney, the theocon candidate for 2008, were a primary victim. Stupid poetic justice, as Homer would say. 28 Apr 2006 01:33 pm Courts With No LawThey make for exciting and unpredictable courtroom drama and testimony. In the Guantanamo Military Commissions "trials," you can invoke the Geneva Conventions one minute; and dispense with them the next. Hey, we're America. We may have invented the Geneva Conventions, but, under Bush, they only apply when Rummy feels like it. He's the Decider! Money quote from the ACLU's highly readable eye-witness blog on Rummy's "trials":
If you care about the fate of the American justice system, bookmark this blog. 28 Apr 2006 01:02 pm What Charles SaidDr K nails it today. What an absolutely pathetic spectacle in D.C. over gas prices. Almost all our leaders are giving off a rancid whiff of opportunism and stupidity - from Pelosi's dumb-ass populism to Bush's transparent politicking to the absurd notion that high gas prices are somehow all a result of evil corporations. In truth, these high gas prices are an obvious function of demand and supply, and, as such, they are one of the best things to happen in a long time. I hope they go much higher. Soon. If they don't, the government should force them higher with a big fat gas tax. Only higher oil prices will actually jump-start the new, greener technologies we all say we want (and our planet desperately needs). The government can help a little at the margins: lift ethanol tariffs from Brazil, drill in Alaska, insist on flex-fuel capacity in every American-made car. But for the rest, let the market show people that there are costs to things. This president has never let reality intrude on his conversations with the American public on energy, war, or much else for that matter; so maybe reality will have to speak for itself. Maybe the only way people will stop using SUVs is when they actually have to pay for their ecological destruction and energy inefficiency. One simple conclusion: conservative government really is dead, isn't it? A conservative government would simply say: we have no control over global oil prices; consumers reap what they sow; companies should be left alone; and if your wallet is empty because of all that gas in your SUV, you've learned a useful lesson in self-government. If only Margaret Thatcher were around to punctuate that lecture with a swipe of her handbag. 28 Apr 2006 12:21 pm Creeping ShariaIn Sweden, the new world struggle against fundamentalist politics continues. The largest Muslim group in Sweden is demanding complete separaration from liberal society, the inculcation of sexist legal norms, and the de facto partition of the country into a zone for the faithful and a zone for the infidels:
The government has issued a strong statement refusing any such thing. But as Muslim populations grow, and as many segments of them continue to fight against the basic safeguards for equality and freedom in the West, it seems to me that the government should go one step further. It should propose that those who do indeed wish to live under Sharia can do so - in a Muslim country. Offer the extremists a subsidy, and a plane ticket back to paradise. If people want to live in a theocracy, let them. But leave our freedoms alone. 28 Apr 2006 12:03 pm Saint of 9/11
The finished version of the documentary about Mychal Judge, the FDNY chaplain, "Saint of 9/11", was shown last night at the Tribeca Film Festival to a packed house. I truly hope that it will get wide distribution and that many will see it. I say this not simply because this saintly man was gay, because he would be barred from the priesthood under the current Pope, or because, in the mysterious way God works, Judge's sexual orientation actually became a way for him to minister more effectively to the marginalized, sick, poor and forgotten. I say it simply because we Catholics need to hear the stories of the good priests every now and again. We have absorbed so many tales of abuse and arrogance that our faith may be dented. But the good work of good priests continues, out of the headlines, in the pews and streets and living rooms of America. Mychal served everyone in the spirit of St Francis: carefree, open-eyed, laughing, humble. Some of his greatest friends were alcoholics saved from street corners, a mother who lost her daughter on TWA Flight 800, a disabled former cop whom he wheeled across Ireland in an attempt to persuade the people there of God's healing power of forgiveness. Mychal never had a checking account; he never had a mortgage. He spoke of how "fantastic" it was to understand that an omnipotent God has not yet invented tomorrow, and so we can set about our lives each day in the wonder of not-knowing. Whom shall God send us? How will we be asked to serve? Which person we ignored yesterday will God be asking us to minister to today? He had such a great sense of mystery and a resolute astonishing faith in the power of God's love to redeem everything - and not in some distant eschatological future but now. He was also a big, brusque Irishman, a recovering alcoholic, and a priest of the old school who loved and knew and cared for the great American Catholic family. That's why he stayed closeted among his beloved firefighters. He knew, sadly, that it would place a barrer between him and some of them. His service came first, and he died doing it. For me, his ministry to people with AIDS in the very early days means the most. We forget how terrifying HIV was in the early and mid 1980s, how patients would be quarantined in dark rooms, abandoned by their families, with their meals rolled into their rooms on trolleys. From the beginning, Mychal did as Jesus did and walked right in and kissed these frightened souls on the lips. If they recoiled from the sight of a priest - gay men at that time saw the church as an alien, hostile entity - he would persist in silence. He would simply bring holy oils, take a chair to the bottom of their hospital beds, and massage their bony, cold, pain-racked feet. He seemed to express no anger, just a kind of suspended joy in the moment, a joy he found resuscitated by the fact of the resurrection and the intercession of Our Lady. I wish I had met him. What a role model. But through this film, we do meet him, and see the face of God again, and laugh, and sigh. Thursday, April 27, 200627 Apr 2006 10:06 pm Allen's Race ProblemRyan Lizza's afore-mentioned piece on the senator from Virginia is now online. 27 Apr 2006 09:51 pm The Cost of Ports SecurityA reader writes:
I think Americans are more than ready for an honest debate about the true costs of real border protection. And the true costs of staying as we are. 27 Apr 2006 09:39 pm The War on IllegalsThere are some unpretty consequences for some of the anti-immigrant rhetoric being tossed around these days. In an incident eerily reminiscent of the Jim Crow past, a Hispanic youth is all but lynched for trying to kiss a white girl. It has all the elements of racist rage, including the sodomitic rape. Plus ca change ... 27 Apr 2006 05:19 pm From Israel, With Hope
Michael Totten is blogging his way through the Middle East. When he gets to Israel, he gets culture shock.
As often, it's an interesting, complex analysis from Michael. And, as his photo above suggests, a not entirely bleak one. 27 Apr 2006 05:05 pm The Hillary ProblemSenator Clinton's polling data keeps getting worse as her money advantage keeps growing. If I were a Democrat, I'd be worried. 27 Apr 2006 04:52 pm Port SecurityWhy on earth can we not have 100 percent screening for goods imported into this country? Hong Kong has proven it's possible. Sure the costs exist and are not negligible; but so too do the economic costs of another 9/11 or worse. Kevin Drum asks the right question here. 27 Apr 2006 02:25 pm "Baby Got Book"A Christian dating hip-hop video. Or something like that. 27 Apr 2006 02:08 pm Pro-Life Pro-ChoicersA member of the "party of death" writes:
Er, yes it is. The trouble is: the word 'conservative' has been hijacked by religious extremists. I find the attempt of the government to police a woman's body in the first stages of pregnancy to be a deeply unconservative idea. I find the absolutist stance of those who say a zygote is as morally significant as an infant lacking in the moderation and common sense that has long been the hallmark of conservatism. I abhor abortion as a moral matter and can never condone it. But in the balancing of goods, I'd keep it legal in the first trimester, strongly restrict later abortions, while doing all I can to facilitate care, adoption options and support for pregnant mothers. I'd also aggressively encourage contraception, the morning-after pill, and the institution of marriage as bulwarks against unwanted pregnancy. And all of this makes me part of a "party of death" because I don't agree with banning all abortion by law? Ponnuru has his fig-leaf on the partisan point. When he says "party", he can say he doesn't mean political party. Sure. But somehow only the Democrats appear in the subtitle. And Ponnuru is integral to the GOP machine. Limbaugh and Coulter do the rest. Hey, it sells. 27 Apr 2006 01:51 pm Drugs for Apnea?One of those evil pharmaceutical companies is at it again: developing medicines that can improve health and save lives. 27 Apr 2006 01:34 pm If I Had a CarI'd put on the following bumper-sticker, noticed by a friend of mine:
$23 trillion of it. In five years. 27 Apr 2006 01:17 pm Bush Knifes DeLayOuch. 27 Apr 2006 01:06 pm Untergang 2003
A long, detailed and fascinating insight into the Saddam dictatorship in Iraq has just been published in Foreign Affairs magazine. The swift decapitation of his brutal regime gave historians an unusual chance to get primary materials and records and testimony to explore what was going on in his deranged mind as the invasion happened - and much else. The report was commissioned by the U.S. Joint Forces Command. It rests on thousands of interviews and hundreds of pages of documents. It's an important counter-weight to "Cobra II." There's much in it that's revelatory. Among the more important points, it seems to me, are a) Saddam really was hoping that Russia and France would prevent his toppling, because of their business interests; b) he lived in a world of denial and terror where the existence of WMD stockpiles was firmly believed within his own government; c) he created the Saddam Fedayeen, the al Quds Army, and the Baath Party militia to control Kurdish and Shiite unrest, and only later deflected them into the insurgency that is still raging. But for me, the most important fact is the following:
It was only a matter of time before Iraq deployed Islamist terror against the West. Those who sincerely marched against war in London in 2002 and 2003 were unwittingly marching to keep in power a regime planning to bomb and terrrorize them. (Photo: James Nachtwey for Time.) 27 Apr 2006 12:41 pm 22 PercentThat's the approval rating for the Republican-led Congress. The public is too kind. 27 Apr 2006 12:28 pm IncomingThe New Republic's forthcoming cover-story, by Ryan Lizza, will reveal something new about Republican senator and potential GOP presidential candidate George Allen. His interest in the Confederate flag goes back much further than he has ever admitted. In fact, he is wearing a Confederate flag pin in his Palos Verdes, California high school yearbook. The piece will come online today, but no link yet. Developing ... 27 Apr 2006 12:17 pm Abused PriestsThey are the forgotten victims of the Catholic Church hierarchy's history of condoning and covering up child and teen sexual abuse by priests. But many, many younger priests or seminarians have been abused and raped by other priests, and the hierarchy, as ever, ignored them or intimidated them into silence until very recently. It's hard to fathom the life-long pain of rape, but this one priest, as reported in today's Washington Post, entered 35 years of depression, flashbacks and isolation. No one listened. No one wanted to know. How he managed to serve God in that time only God can know. That he recently found the courage to talk about it must be some small blessing. That he can no longer serve the very bishops complicit in such a system is understandable. That the hierarchy should seek once again to humiliate him is simply despicable. Wednesday, April 26, 200626 Apr 2006 09:28 pm How Dumb Is Pelosi?Almost fathomlessly so. Check out these sentences analyzing the high price of gas:
Where does one start? Perhaps one shouldn't. But every time reasonable people despair of this incompetent, incoherent administration, they turn around and listen to a piece of transparent economic and demagoguic idiocy like this from the Democrats ... and despair some more. 26 Apr 2006 09:16 pm Ramesh Coulter?I haven't yet read Ramesh Ponnuru's book, "The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life." Ponnuru is a highly intelligent and reasonable writer, although his
Conservative writers have now made fortunes calling their partisan opponents traitors, godless, and now pro-death. Their rhetoric increasingly equates being a Christian with being a Republican. I never thought someone as civilized and intelligent as Ponnuru would sink to this kind of rhetoric. But it tells you something about the state of conservatism that he has. 26 Apr 2006 08:39 pm Torture, Bush and the Drug WarSome bloggers have misunderstood my post yesterday on the use of torture in a Tennessee drug-war case and its connection to Bush administration policies. Of course I don't blame Bush for what rogue cops in Tennessee are doing. I was merely making a more general, and conventional, point that the president does indeed set a moral standard for the country. George W. Bush himself made this argument in his first election campaign when he ran against the legacy of Bill Clinton. Bush's moral standard is that imprisoning suspects without trial, stripping them of due process, and abusing and torturing them is morally defensible. That defining down of our moral and legal compass matters. Radley Balko elaborates the point here. 26 Apr 2006 06:55 pm Quote for the Day"George Orwell's point regarding language was that society cannot face political issues unless it calls things what they are; the purpose of political euphemism, Orwell wrote, is to prevent clear thought. People living here without visas are illegal immigrants and people jailed without charge are prisoners. Politicians might be addicted to fudging words but the media, at least, should call things what they are," - Gregg Easterbrook, back blogging. 26 Apr 2006 06:36 pm Yglesias Award Nominee"My love for the SECDEF has nothing to do with Rummy being on my side. He is not when it comes to troop strength or military restructuring. I'm with Colin Powell in those debates. You don't win wars on the cheap, you don't cut troop strength and you don't leave an opening for the enemy by giving the generals less than they ask for. The hell with fair fights. We should demand "shock and awe" as a military strategy, not a campaign slogan. Oh yeah. And one final thought for my anti-war friends. Running off Rumsfeld will only prove what hawks like me have been saying from the beginning of this war: that we need more trained killers in Iraq, not less. That we need more instruments of death in Iraq, not less. And that our Secretary of Defense's biggest mistake in Iraq was not failing to make peace, but failing to make war in the most ruthlessly efficient way possible. Hmmm. Maybe we need a new leader at the Pentagon after all," - Joe Scarborough, in a column called "Rummy the Dove". 26 Apr 2006 02:43 pm Americans on ImmigrantsA new poll shows how fair-minded most people in this country are. And why the xenophobia being stirred up on the far right is a very dangerous weapon for the GOP. 26 Apr 2006 02:33 pm In Defense of RummyA reader remonstrates:
Some good points. Iraq was always going to be extremely tough. We under-estimated the appalling damage Saddam had already wrought on Iraqi civil society (which makes removing him even more morally defensible). However brilliantly we conducted the war and occupation, the deep ethnic divisions would have emerged, and the psychic wounds of the past revived. A patient in a fever doesn't always mean he's nearing death; it may even be a symptom of recovery. (I might add that Rummy is someone I have known personally for years, and always liked immensely. But such personal attachments have to be set aside in assessing national policy.) But what I cannot forgive, as Cobra II elaborates, is how many mistakes were predicted by the military, and many alternatives to failure offered, only to be continuously, almost pathologically, rejected out of hand by Rumsfeld. On the question of troop levels, Rumsfeld was criminally reckless, as he was in arrogantly dismissing the rioting and looting and terror such inadequate policing unleashed. He was warned; he had plenty of opportunities to reverse course; but his own fanatical attachment to his own transformational theories overwhelmed all reason, all empirical evidence, all advice from the ground, and so many in the CIA, State Department and military. To persist in deliberate error out of pride and zeal, as he has done, is to prefer dogma to reality. When lives are at stake, and the whole future of democracy in the Middle East, that's unforgivable. But for me at least, Rumsfeld's deep involvement in the new military detention policies supercedes everything else. He has not just failed; he has dishonored his country's reputation. He has offered to resign twice. What more does Bush need? 26 Apr 2006 02:10 pm Stephanopoulos on Snow
The apparatchik-turned-pundit hails the pundit-turned-apparatchik:
It seems to me that this gets things the wrong way round. What Bush needs to do is bring in actual senior staff people who understand and want to reverse his profligate fiscal policy, his incoherent energy policy, and his shambolic war-management. What Bush has - typically - done is get a spokesman, who doesn't set policy, to appeal to alienated conservatives. It is literal window-dressing. Unless, of course, more is going on than meets the eye. Here's hoping that's true. (Photo: Fox News). 26 Apr 2006 01:59 pm America and the WorldI've been skimming a new book in the mail, and it looks like it's worth closer inspection. It's called "America Against the World," and it's a mainly empirical, psephological take on how other countries view America and why America is different from so many other places. It's a complicated piece of work, but it reminds me why, twenty-one years ago, six weeks after arriving here, I wrote to tell my But the data also reveal a stunning unraveling of global good feelings toward the U.S. in the past few years. Anyone who has been abroad lately will testify. My trip in London was mainly filled with social engagements with British Tories: probably the most sympathetic sub-group America has in Europe (with the exception of the Poles). They all seem terribly discouraged by the trends in the U.S. and completely befuddled by the conduct of the war. Many Europeans were never going to give the U.S.the benefit of the doubt. But we seem to have lost the few who would. In 1999 - 2000, 83 percent of Brits had a favorable opinion of the U.S. That's now 55 percent. Among the Germans, the percentage has dropped from 78 percent to 41. Among Turks, 52 to 23. But buried in the stats, there are also some glimmers of hope. According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, there's been a revival in the last two years in a few places. The biggest surge in pro-U.S. sentiment is in Jordan and Morocco. Moroccans had a 77 percent pro-American rating in 2000. That collapsed to 27 in 2004 but perked up to 49 again in 2005. Jordan, after a similar slump, has just gone from 5 percent pro-American in 2003 to 21 percent last year. Even the French have become more pro-American in the last year. Maybe we are at a turning point. And if we can hang on in Iraq, and show some results, we can begin to achieve what we were hoping for when we began to fight back against Islamism. So much has been lost; but that gives us all the more to win back. Or is my instinctual optimism clouding my judgment? Tuesday, April 25, 200625 Apr 2006 11:37 pm Bush in a Snow DriftI've always had perfectly pleasant dealings with Tony Snow, and respect his commitment to genuine conservatism and to fighting the war on Islamist terror. I also agree with him that this president has "lost control of the federal budget and cannot resist the temptation to stop raiding the public fisc." I agree that "George W. Bush and his colleagues have become not merely the custodians of the largest government in the history of humankind, but also exponents of its vigorous expansion." I agree with him that "when it comes to federal spending, George W. Bush is the boy who can’t say no." I agree with Tony that "on the policy side, Bush has become a classical dime-store Democrat." I agree with him that
But I'm not going to stand in front of the press and defend this record now, am I? The first question Snow may get if he takes the job is about his own splendid eviscerations of this president's rank betrayal of fiscal conservatism and limited government in the past. Good luck, Tony. You'll need it. (Hat tip: ThinkProgress.) 25 Apr 2006 08:33 pm Yglesias Award Nominee"[T]he biggest challenge facing Democrats right now is that they are perceived as standing for nothing. If they are not willing to step into the breach and stand against torture until someone tells them it's polling well, it's a terrifyingly apt critique," - Jane Hamsher, firedoglake. 25 Apr 2006 07:45 pm Sistani and the HolocaustThe great hope for Shiite moderation in Iraq, Ayatollah Sistani, has a representative in the U.S.: one Fadhel Al-Sahlani. He's both a Holocaust-skeptic and someone who believes that Israel should not exist. Just noticing the actual content of Muslim moderation in Iraq. 25 Apr 2006 07:21 pm Torture and the War on DrugsThis story, reported by Radley Balko, has to be read to be believed. Money quote:
The only reason this has been proved is because the victim's wife secretly recorded the torture session. Listen if you can bear it. The five cops are now mercifully in jail, but only for, at most, seven years. I guess when the president has endorsed torture by the CIA, it's hard to put low-level cop-torturers in jail for life. Radley believes this kind of atrocity is more common than we might believe. I have no way to know. What I do know is that when the government launches an ill-defined "war" on a "thing", rather than an explicit foreign enemy, and when you have an administration as profoundly hostile to American liberty as this one is, all sorts of abuses will necessarily follow. And they have. 25 Apr 2006 04:51 pm The Left AwakensMost people in America are unaware of the Euston Manifesto. It's an important British-based statement of left and liberal principles in the new era of fundamentalism. Last week, I had dinner in London with Johann Hari and Nick Cohen, two supporters of the project. Norm Geras, an inspiration to many, was a guiding force behind it. In some ways, it's very compatible with Peter Beinart's call for the Democrats to revive their anti-fascist roots, and to fight Islamism with the tenacity of Truman and integrity of Orwell. There is much in the manifesto to celebrate. But here's one passage that struck home to me:
On Iraq, the signers make the critical, inescapable point:
Those of us who are to the right of these thinkers - on domestic policy, at least - should not corral all of those to our left into the Michael Moore camp. Many liberals are on our side against Islamist threats, and we must support them. Equally, we have to make sure that our criticism of Bush and his dreadful, criminal defense secretary does not mean a capitulation to the anti-Americanism, moral relativism and defeatism of the cut-and-run left. We must fight that tendency as relentlessly as we must fight Christianism and Islamism. But a new coalition is forming - against all these isms. For freedom. For the West. 25 Apr 2006 03:44 pm "I'm With Stupid"One great British comic duo, "Little Britain"'s David Walliams and Matt Lucas, parodies another great British pop duo, the Pet Shop Boys. Since I worship both, I loved the video that you can view here. If you've never heard of either, it might be a little opaque. If you know either, it's Very Fundamental, Actually. 25 Apr 2006 02:56 pm Quote for the Day"The true defeatists today are not those who call for recognizing the facts on the ground in Iraq. The true defeatists are those who believe America is so weak that it must sacrifice its principles to the pursuit of illusory power. The true pessimists today are not those who know that America can handle the truth about the Administration's boastful claim of 'Mission Accomplished' in Iraq. The true pessimists are those who cannot accept that America's power and prestige depend on our credibility at home and around the world. The true pessimists are those who do not understand that fidelity to our principles is as critical to national security as our military power itself. And the most dangerous defeatists, the most dispiriting pessimists, are those who invoke September 11th to argue that our traditional values are a luxury we can no longer afford," - John Kerry, last Saturday, uttering the words he never found when it mattered. I guess the 2004 focus-groups told him to stay silent. But better late then never. 25 Apr 2006 02:50 pm Leave Them Alone?A reader dissents:
Well, I hope so. For my part, I'll be attending the premiere of the documentary, "Saint of 9/11," about that remarkable American and Catholic, Mychal Judge, the fire-fighter's chaplain who died serving his flock. I saw a rough cut a while back, and if it's even better than it was, it's an astonishingly powerful movie. Ian McKellan narrates it. But Judge is the focus - or, rather, the great and humble faith that made this man a son of God. 25 Apr 2006 02:14 pm Very Pink FlamingoesAs Karl Rove prepares another rhetorical bashing of gay couples for the summer (it's been a two-year ritual since 1996, with diminishing electoral returns), the world carries on. Part of that world is the ubiquity of gay adoption, a socially beneficial activity that is also replicated throughout the animal world. The latest example comes from the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust at Slimbridge, England. Two pink flamingoes (apparently unaware of my Ptown co-resident, John Waters) have been busy raising three generations of flamingo chicks, in a committed relationship lasting five years now. I do not, of course, endorse their adoption methods. But no one disputes their parenting skills. Money quote:
Memo to Robbie George: there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. 25 Apr 2006 01:24 pm Leave Them Alone
And yet, I will not see this movie, whatever its merits. The trauma is still too close. That day is still etched in me, as in all of us. It was a specific, unique trauma for those heroes on the plane; but it was also an emotional devastation for anyone who loves this country. Do we want to revisit their and our own traumas as entertainment? Perhaps this is cowardice, then, that I feel; and seeing it again would stiffen my spine against terror, and remind me of what we still owe the victims and the heroes of that day. But the years since, and the atrocities still committed by the Jihadists, have not diminished my or, I suspect, many other people's desire to fight our enemy with vigor and precision. My spine hasn't softened against al Qaeda. If anything, I want to defeat what they represent more now than ever. So why the resistance to seeing it? Perhaps it's a religious impulse. In some ways, I regard the acts of those men and women to be an almost sacred moment in the history of America and of freedom. And sometimes, the sacred is best respected through silence. Sometimes, the greatest deeds, like the most monstrous acts, are best left unrepresented. They stand alone. They demand to be left alone. One day, commemmorate. But do not so swiftly represent. Shakespeare often left the greatest moments in his plays off-stage. They have more power there. Monday, April 24, 200624 Apr 2006 09:00 pm Another OneAnother former general calls on Rumsfeld to resign - on Fox News, for added piquancy. On the plane back from England, I tuck into Cobra II. I'd put it off, thinking it would be important but tedious homework. In fact, it's a really riveting, readable narrative of the Iraq war, its origins and its unfolding. Gordon and Trainor actually do what Bob Woodward is reputed to do (and doesn't). They give you an inside account of matters of state that is fair and devastating. I haven't finished yet, but already the evidence is simply overwhelming that this (in my view) noble, important and necessary war was ruined almost single-handedly by one arrogant, overweening de facto saboteur. That man is Donald Rumsfeld. It's actually hard to fathom how one single man could have done so much irreparable damage to his country's cause and standing; and how no one was able to stop him. He makes McNamara look inspired. This is not to exonerate Bush and Cheney, who enabled and enable him. And it's not to argue that the military shouldn't always ultimately defer to civilian leadership. But when that leadership has been this incompetent, this bull-headed, this reckless and malevolent and petty, the generals have a patriotic duty to speak out. Until this man is removed, we can have no confidence in the conduct of the war; and no confidence in the president as commander-in-chief. It's really as simple as that.
April 23, 2006 - April 29, 2006
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Intimations Pursued: The Voice of Practice in the Conversation of Michael Oakeshott 
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religious fundamentalism alarms me, and I've no doubt he has some interesting things to say. I may even agree with some of it. But this much I can say: the title of the book is reprehensible. To call half the country "a party of death" and to assign that label to one's partisan political opponents is not, whatever else it is, an invitation to dialogue. It's demagoguic abuse. It's worthy of Ann Coulter (who, tellingly, has a blurb on the cover). It is one thing to argue that you are pro-life, to use the positive aspects of language to persuade. It is another to assert that people who differ from you are somehow "pro-death," (especially when they may merely be differing with you on the moral status of a zygote or the intricacies of end-of-life care). To smear an entire political party, and equate only one party with something as fundamental as life, is a new low in the descent of intellectual conservatism from Russell Kirk to Sean Hannity. 
parents: no offense, but I've found a home. Two key characteristics that distinguish Americans are religious belief and the notion that the individual is responsible for his own destiny. Suddenly, after secular, class-based England, I didn't feel so isolated. 
"Carlos and Fernando have been together now for five years and seem perfectly happy together. Both of them take on the male roles during the courtship ritual which involves preening, strutting and waving their heads vigorously from side to side with their necks at full stretch. Their parental instincts are also very strong prompting them to raid the nests of other couples in the flock. They have been known to fight the heterosexual birds and there is usually a 'handbags at dawn' moment where they will fight with another couple before stealing their egg. They are both large adult males so as a partnership they are quite formidable and are afforded more respect from the other birds. They are also very good parents and behave just as the heterosexual birds do when rearing their young."
I caught the trailer of 
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