U.S. gaining ground in Afghanistan battle; Bush resists taking Saudi-Egyptian bait; Riordan, Condit, Pickering look doomed; Bush abandons free trade principles, risks rift with Europe; Communist-supporting, homophobic minister dies.
NIGHTMARE TIME: For the first time since September 11, I’ve been having nightmares. I can’t get out of my head the knowledge that Islamo-fascists and their allies may well have the wherewithal to detonate a dirty nuclear bomb in a major city in the near future. I live blocks away from one likely target. So do hundreds of thousands of others. If the terrorists succeed, they could render Washington or Manhattan uninhabitable for decades. They could make the White House and the Capitol off-limits to human beings for a century. And our defense against this? Extremely limited. I’m taken to task sometimes for being impatient with those who keep questioning the need for this war, the necessity to move against the axis of evil that wants to destroy us. What I don’t understand is how they can be so complacent. Don’t they see the greatest danger this republic has ever faced is now in front of us? Don’t they understand that neutralizing Iraq is not some kind of interesting proposal in an unnecessary war – but the bare minimum to prevent a holocaust in the very heart of this country’s democracy? I’m not given to panic, but I can see nowhere any hard evidence that debunks the possibility of this scenario. In fact, the more you think about the amount of nuclear material out there that’s unaccounted for, the inevitable limits of prevention in an open society, and the evil fanaticism of our enemy, the more terrifying our predicament really is. I think this is 1940. I think this is just beginning. I share James Lileks’ superb commentary yesterday on his wonderful blog:
I had that feeling all day – felt like October. Made you realize that it’s been October every day since October. And it’s going to be October for some time, right up until the day it’s September again.
Are you ready?
THE VATICAN’S ROT: I bumped into another gay Catholic tonight – Notre Dame graduate, weekly church-goer, concerned and dedicated layman. He told me he couldn’t go to church any more. The way in which the Vatican’s chief spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, tried to pin the Church’s pedophile corruption on good gay priests last Sunday was just too much for him. “They’ve declared war on us. All of us,” he said to me. “If we stay, we simply condone the bigotry and ingratitude. I don’t know where to go, but I cannot stay any more.” I’m beginning to believe he’s right – this is a watershed moment. For a quarter of a century, gay Catholics and gay priests have clung to the reed of the 1976 doctrine that homosexuality as a condition is not sinful, and that homosexuals are persons with dignity who belong in the Church. Now Navarro-Valls, a member of the Opus Dei sect that now dominates the Church hierarchy while the pope declines into aged irrelevance, has abandoned that doctrine. Gays cannot be ordained, he says. Worse, their ordinations are invalid. He’s almost daring gay priests to quit. You know how many American priests would be left? Perhaps half of the current number. And a hierarchy that subjected children in its care to serial molestation now tries to change the subject by impugning its own innocent gay priests. This gambit by the hierarchy shows the “objective disorder” at the heart of their ideology. As Margery Eagan puts it in Tuesday’s Boston Herald,
While church leadership dumped from Boston parishes Catholic gays who refused to renounce their “sin,” as we all know now it has not even acknowledged what scholars and parishioners – and their children – have noticed for years: that scores of Catholic priests – many of its very, very finest priests, in fact – are gay. But the big gay elephant sits there in the middle of the rectory table. We pretend we don’t see it. The culture of silence prevails.
Eagen is no anti-Catholic liberal and neither is her paper. And nor am I. She just sees corruption and bigotry when it stares her in the face. She also shows how the Vatican’s stupendous hypocrisy over its own gay priests is connected with the pedophile corruption. Good gay priests may have been afraid to name pedophiles for fear they would be smeared as well. It turns out their fears were justified. It seems to me that after the Vatican’s declaration of war on its gay clergy last weekend that gay priests have a simple duty. They need to come out in large numbers to their parishioners and to the press. They need to dare the Vatican to fire them. They need to stop the defensiveness of the past, stand up for their moral integrity, and expose the rot at the heart of the Church. And lay Catholics need to support them against the hierarchy every inch of the way. How dare the Church impugn innocents while it shelters the guilty? And how can decent American Catholics not rise up against the hierarchy for it?
ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: A truly ugly incident in a Congressional primary in Illinois. I’d find it hard to vote for Rahm Emanuel under most circumstances but given the bigotry unleashed by an ally of his opponent, I’d do so in a heart-beat. Ugly.
HOPING FOR RECESSION: Another pundit praying for higher unemployment, lower growth, and collapsing demand is Robert “Crazy Bob” Kuttner. He only likes booms when Democrats are in power. Here’s a classic of the genre. I should remind readers that Kuttner wrote the epic version of this type of piece back at the dawn of the 1990s, when he wrote a forecast of the coming decade’s economic fortunes for The New Republic. The piece was entitled, “The Abyss.”
ASHCROFT UNPLUGGED: Now his underlings have to sing for their supper?
LIBERAL MEDIA BIAS WATCH: Frank Rich recently described the notion of liberal media bias, as documented by Bernie Goldberg, as “ludicrous.” That’s the kind of remark one simply cannot find an adequate response to. So I defer to a young and fearless blogger, Patrick Ruffini. He did a quick statistical analysis of the use of the term “right-wing” in a couple of major papers. He concludes:
Since 1996, the Washington Post has used this loaded term more than twice as frequently as “left-wing.” References to “right-wing” increased in even-numbered election years when the political stakes were higher – 73.2% of the “-wing” references compared to 67.5% in non-electio
n years. This disparity was even more palpable at the New York Times, where 80.2% of the left-right mentions on the national news pages since 1996 have spotlighted the right. The research also found that the more loaded and derogatory the phrase, the more likely it was to be associated with the political right. The term “conservative” outpolled “liberal” by 66-34% in New York Times news page mentions, while the aforementioned “right-wing” clocked in at 80% in a similar measure. However, the term “right-wing extremist” was used at least six times as frequently than “left-wing extremist” (at 87.4% since ’96 in the Times).
These are not mild discrepancies. They’re huge discrepancies. Ruffini then tries another experiment. How do these papers characterize famous conservative, Jesse Helms, and famous liberal, Ted Kennedy? Drum-roll, please:
At the New York Times, 28.1% of the stories mentioning Jesse Helms also mentioned the word “conservative” while only 11.3% of the stories with Ted Kennedy in them mentioned the word “liberal.” At the politically savvier WaPo, both figures were higher, but there was still a disparity: 30.6% for Helms, 18.8% for Kennedy.
Liberal bias? Ludicrous!
UN SUCCESS-STORY D’UN BLOGGEUR: Le Monde puffs yours truly, among others. Oh the ignominy.
SCORE ONE FOR BRIT: Nice catch by Brit Hume today. All that Congressional whining about a “secret government,” about not being informed, and so on turns out to be so much hooey. That old pork-pig, Robert Byrd, even turned down a briefing on the issue last fall. And it was flagged in the papers at the time as well. Of course the real story is: when we’re under such a threat that the government sets up an underground bunker, don’t you think our representatives could think of something better to say than that they’re miffed they weren’t in on it?
The Dish 