Two headlines from the Washington Post today:
“Gore: Bush Loses Terror Focus
2000 Rival Says Focus on Iraq Aided GOP but Not Nation”“U.S. Identifies Captured Al Qaeda Official
Suspected Head of USS Cole Bombing Caught Earlier This Month”
Still got that winning touch, hasn’t he?
A MODEST PROPOSAL: So Harvard is going to re-invite the anti-Semitic poet, Tom Paulin, so he can exercize his right to free speech, (while the Law School considers a new code to prevent its own students from speaking freely). And Wellesley, after much trauma, is going to invite anti-Semitic poet, Amiri Baraka, to speak there as well. (The compromise at Wellesley: Baraka won’t be getting an honorarium.) Here’s a suggestion: why don’t the Ivy League colleges pool their resources and organize a special conference entirely for Jew-haters and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists? All in the cause of free speech, you understand.
THE BBC SPINS FOR HAMAS: Here’s the key paragraph from the BBC’s news story on the latest Hamas terrorist attck, killing many children in a bus bombing:
Hamas, whose immediate aim is to secure an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, has claimed responsibility for the majority of attacks against Israeli targets since the Palestinian uprising against occupation began two years ago.
“Immediate aim?” Since when has Hamas made such fine distinctions? Hamas has one aim: the destruction of the state of Israel, the murder of all Jews, and the establishment of an Islamo-fascist state in Palestine. Why would the BBC seek to soften this reality in the wake of another horrifying attack? Stupid question, I suppose.
HAIRIER THAN THOU: When I first saw the headline, I feared Jonah Goldberg had been at the Jagermeister again. Mercifully, he’s innocent. But this story about a duel over hairy bottoms strikes me as a new low in Maxim culture. Or maybe it’s just the beginning of a new reality television show.
A DUBIOUS ZOGBY POLL: The Human Rights Campaign, the leading gay rights group, has just sponsored a poll to find out how gays voted in the last election. I don’t buy the results. The headline number – the percentage of voters who are gay – seems plausible. At 5 percent of the electorate, it’s at the high range of previous studies, but not excessively so. The breakdown of voting, though, seems highly implausible. HRC, which, despite a few token Republicans on its board, is essentially an extension of the Democratic Party establishment, puts the gay GOP vote this year at a mere 19 percent. This would be an astonishing reversal of recent trends. Every VNS exit poll of the last ten years or so has shown gays’ support for Republican Congressional candidates to be somewhere in the region of 25 to 35 percent. In 2000, it was at its highest – 35 percent – and no election in the 1990s saw a decline in gay GOP support. So why a decline of almost 50 percent in one election? Add to this the fact that clearly there was a GOP swing this time around, and the 19 percent is preposterous on its face. The methodology is probably at fault; the sample size is a mere 412 people – far far fewer than the samples culled from exit polls. I don’t think HRC or Zogby would rig the results. But this poll strikes me as essentially worthless. I wonder how much money HRC poured into it.
ISLAM MEANS PEACE II: Now they’re gunning down missionaries helping pregnant women.
THE CHURCH’S MORAL AUTHORITY: Remind me why I should give a damn what Cardinal Law says about the morality of war against Iraq. Or why I should take him seriously when he says my relationship is an intrinsic evil. Loving another man is forbidden; but abusing children can be overlooked. The Guardian’s Hugo Young put it well:
There are many ironies and contradictions in its position. For most Catholics none will strike with such exquisite and even risible pain as the spectacle of an institution, the Vatican, that has done so much damage over so many years by telling people, on pain of mortal sin, how they should lead their sexual lives, itself now demanding that the sexual perversion of priests should be forgiven and forgotten.
Young forgets. There’s one Catholic morality for the clergy; and another for everyone else.
EMINEM, REALIST: Forget Richard Goldstein’s sad rants. Here’s an article that actually makes some sense to me, in linking Eminem’s success to a broader cultural trend. Crispin Sartwell calls it the “new realism.” He has a point:
That’s what Eminem’s whole career has been: an absolute commitment to parade his demons and his flaws publicly, an absolute determination to say what no one else will say, to tell his own truth.
This entails that what he says is, at times, horrible. And we see his bigotries as well as his creativity, his stupidities and blindness as well as his intense intelligence and courage. Eminem is wrong about homosexuality and wrong about women (though so right about race). But that very wrongness is part of what makes him true, because he says it.
I predict that we have seen almost the last of Britney Spears and Al Gore, and are in for some real moments.
I think that gets at something in the culture right now. We’re tired of phoniness. Eminem, South Park, the blogosphere: they’re real, man.
The Dish 