In the lead this week is Congressman Pete Stark, D-Calif., who opined to the Alameda Times-Star that the entire Bush budget is “the embodiment of the anti-Christ…. [it] goes against all the teachings of Christ. It turns its back on the poor, it turns its back on education and health care for young children. At the holiest week of the year, to release this budget that flies in the face of all of Christ’s teachings is infamy.” Who said the religious right was doing all the political damage to religion?
DERBYSHIRE, CONTINUED: More emails defending Derbyshire. It’s amazing what you can come up with when you try. Simply saying he wouldn’t ever read Proust because he was a Jewish homosexual was not bigoted, some readers argue. It’s just a sign of how much reverence Derbyshire had for his Jewish friend. One reader even opined that he and his friends use the term ‘faggot’ quite frequently in private discourse, but in affectionate ways. And they make sure no homosexuals are present when they do. Such sensitivity. But back to Derbyshire. How about this in the same column? “At the same time, there are aspects of distinctly Jewish ways of thinking that I dislike very much. The world-perfecting idealism, for example, that is rooted in the most fundamental premises of Judaism, has, it seems to me, done great harm in the modern age.” Now what do you think he means by this? As one astute reader pointed out, “How many people out there associate Judaism with some sort of destructive idealism? Is that the junction where people start to say that communism/socialism is some sort of godless mutation of Judaism, and therefore Eastern European Jewish intellectuals who’d forgotten about God are actually the ones responsible for the destruction of their own people?” I think my correspondent is onto something. Who else is still arguing in this day and age that communism was somehow a Jewish inspiration? Indeed, who but the Nazis and their odious fellow-travelers ever really did? It’s worth pointing out that there’s a legitimate argument to be made against the hideous p.c. pursuit of phony bigotry. I think I’ve got my credentials on that one. But that doesn’t mean that good old anti-Semitism, racism and hatred of homosexuals isn’t still out there – trawling for respectability in the pages of National Review.
The Dish 