Month: November 2002

Washington’s City Paper just put the following images on its cover: one of John Allen Muhammad, the Washington sniper-terrorist, and Prince William County prosecutor Paul Ebert, who’s in charge of the case. The headline? “Alleged Killer, Proven Killer.” Guess who’s the “proven killer”? And this in the city Muhammad terrorized. Every time you think parts of the left couldn’t get any more depraved, they go and do something like this.

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.

Another example of sectarian violence by religious extremists in Nigeria. A newspaper dared run a quote that ran afoul of the Islamofascists. So they rioted. Oh yes, and “jihad” means internal, peaceful struggle against temptation. That’s when it doesn’t mean stabbing, burning and dumping other human beings on the streets.
UPDATE: Now fifty are feared dead in the rioting.

What do you do when your emails are better than anything you could write yourself? Shamelessly pilfer them! A readers’ symposium on the whole question of gay-straight male interaction is posted here. From the showers to the bunkers, from women and straight men and gay men – in the military and outside it – the emails came pouring in. Peruse at will.

Could “Eagle” immigrants derail the Democrats? Why Fox News is simply better than CNN, regardless of issues of bias, and more. All on the Letters Page.

The Catholic church has been covering up the abuse of children in Britain as well. Here’s yet another harrowing story about a pedophile priest, protected by those who run the Church. This one is even more distressing because two of this monster’s victims – aged between 10 and 14 – were disabled. One was in a wheelchair and the other had cerebral palsy. This evil just beggars belief. But the men in charge, who knew of this and did nothing, remain protected by the Vatican. Of course they are. At this point, protecting and defending evil seems to be a Church priority. Anything but surrender ecclesiastical power.

THE REAL KURT COBAIN: “I like to make incisions into the belly of infants then fuck the incisions until the child dies.” This is in Kurt Cobain’s diaries. And there’s a lot where that came from. Yes, he was a heroin addict. Yes these are just sexual or other kinds of fantasies. But why did Newsweek bury this? I guess you don’t mess with the image of a cover-worthy pop-idol. That would be journalism.

WANNA SWITCH? A Canadian Mac parody. Loved it.

ANOTHER MOORE LIE? The Canadian government is investigating whether Michael Moore, the leftist hate-monger, fabricated part of his movie, “Bowling for Columbine.” In the movie, Moore buys ammunition from a Wal-Mart in Canada. He just walks in, plonks some cash down and gets bullets. The National Post reports:

David Austin, a spokesman for the Department of Justice, says, “You would have to show some ID … What is unfortunate is there is misinformation out there – not only for viewers who see the movie in Canada but the rest of the world – that it is relatively easy to buy ammunition in Canada, and that is not the case.”

So did Moore edit out that part? Or did Wal-Mart break the law? Moore won’t respond.

END THE BAN: Only W could do this. And he should. The Washington Post – now the most authoritative editorial board in the country – lays it on the line. The Daily Show had a more amusing take on the firing of gay Arab linguists in the military:

Kudos to top Army’s brass for intercepting this axis of fabulousness before it could do any real damage. Yes, we’re in a war on terror. Yes, intelligence is the key to winning this war. Yes, Arabic translating is the key to intelligence. But they’re gay. … They make kissy with their own kind. Is that really the kind of person you want with you in wartime translating situation? Would you really be comfortable side by side with a gay person hunkered down in a fox hole or cubicle, office park, really would you?

Yuk. Who cares about terrorism when we have our own scapegoats to hound?

CAMPUS ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: The Lebanon Daily Star reports on the comments of one Hisham Sharabi, a professor of Arab Culture at Georgetown University. He was speaking at Balamand University. His view: “Jews are getting ready to take control of us and the Americans have entered the region to possess the oil resources and redraw the geopolitical map of the Arab world … However, in the long run, neither the Jews nor Americans will be able to subdue us for we are not (Native Americans).” This anti-American Jew-hater is on the faculty of a major American university. One question: why?

How does Fidel Castro live in the land of Communist equality? For the first time, in a stolen videotape from a girlfriend of his son, we have a clue. The video has been running on Univision:

Monday’s episode showed Mr Castro dressed casually before a banquet, inspecting the elaborate dinnerware on the dinner table, his grandchildren playing with relatives and Antonio zooming along the patio on an electric scooter. It pictures the spacious compound and carefully landscaped garden and reveals that many of the family are wearing designer clothes. The house is decorated with wooden chests and Cuban handicrafts. A large-screen television monitors foreign news channels.

Read “Animal Farm” lately?

RICE ON RACE: “The fact of the matter is, race matters in America. It has, it always has … It is not that I mind being associated with the group. I am African-American and proud of it. I wouldn’t have it any other way. And it has shaped who I am and it will continue to shape who I am. I do not believe it has limited who I am or what I can become. And that’s because I had parents who, while telling me what it meant to be African-American and exposing me to that, also allowed me to develop as an individual to be who I wanted to be.” – Condi Rice, quoted in Derrick Z. Jackson’s column in the Boston Globe today.

When the New York Times editor and publisher decide to get out of their Manhattan liberal cocoon and face their critics, where do they go? Berkeley. The only place in the solar system where they think the Times is biased to the right.

“The legacy of Harry Potter in popular culture remains to be seen – those who’d burn the books as demonic are encouraged to get library cards pronto – but at present, despite its sophomoric awkwardness, the film of Chamber of Secrets is a welcome delivery of childlike wonder for a planet of ever-increasing ugliness. We’ve accidentally allowed a retarded monkey to rule America, but otherwise it’s not such a whimsical place. Perhaps works like this can help set that to rights.” – Gregory Weinkauf, Dallas Observer. What must it feel like to lose an election to a retarded monkey?

AHNOLD THE EAGLE: Schwarzenegger is surely the Eagle candidate par excellence. He claims that he’s very socially liberal, backs legalized abortion, some gun control measures and gay adoption. But he’s a foreign policy hawk and a small government conservative. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the real Kennedy comeback was via an Austrian steroidal import?

ARE YOU HOT? A new sign of where television is headed: a TV version of the online “Am I Hot or Not?”. One suggestion to the producers. Can you add a gay man and a lesbian to your panels of judges? It would enliven the show, add new perspectives, and help show straight men, for example, that it’s not so terrifying to be viewed as a sexually attractive human being by another guy. (By the way: I’ve been overwhelmed with some eye-opening emails on gays-and-straights in the military. I’m putting together a piece tying them together. I hope to post it soon. Thanks for your candor.)

THE YOUNG AND WAR: I’ve been impressed by George W. Bush’s support among the young. Maybe it’s not as anomalous as I thought. Here’s a study by blogger Jim Miller that shows how the young were consistently more supportive of the Vietnam War than their elders – throughout the conflict.

LEFTWING DEPRAVITY WATCH: Ted Rall does it again.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “The nation is faced with ‘a fascist takeover of the American government,’ Stahl says. The Bush administration is colluding with corporations to use the war to hold its grip on power, Stahl says. ‘It’s a way to keep the citizenry repressed,’ he says.” – professor Frank Stahl of the University of Oregon, quoted in the Eugene Weekly. Stahl, by the way, won one of the coveted “leftist genius” awards from the MacArthur Foundation.

WHAT CONSERVATIVES MISS TODAY: My Bradley lecture, given earlier this month, has just been transcribed by the American Enterprise Institute. It’s posted here. It’s about the relevance of Michael Oakeshott to contemporary conservatism. A couple of caveats: especially in the question and answer section, this is obviously not a vetted scholarly text. My only notes – apart from quotes – were scribbled on a postcard. I hope to nail it down and turn it into a real essay this winter. Until then, please treat the lecture as an extemporaneous work-in-progress. And forgive occasional grammatical (and other) errors. Here’s a pull-quote:

What I think modern conservatives sometimes miss in their legitimate calls for morality and the need for human beings as personalities and as people to live up to certain moral norms is also the joy of character, or personality, of the things that make us love another person. We don’t always love another person because he or she is virtuous. We sometimes love another person because of their faults. We love them because of their idiosyncracies. And yet it takes, often, until the memorial service before we actually acknowledge this particular reality. And Oakeshott saw that love of humanity in all its difference as one of the critical projects of a liberal political order. He looked around at people and saw them as things to be cherished, in contrast to those who would look at human beings and see them as something to be corrected or corralled or instructed or uplifted or informed.
This is the real conservative definition of diversity … the joyous variety of humankind, the beautiful difference that exists in our culture and the ability to cherish difference without being panicked by the possibility of inequality.

MOORE’S LIES: A Spinsanity take-down of Michael Moore that’s well worth absorbing. The usually sober authors describe Moore as someone who “uses lies, distortions, and nonsensical arguments to mask cheap attacks and promote his own political agenda.” Not exactly news, of course.

WHAT WOULD JESUS DRIVE? I asked for it. One reader posited that Jesus favored a certain Eastern bloc auto. As in John 8:11, where Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn Yugo.” Others found evidence of Old Testament bias in favor of an old Hudson Hornet: “I will send Hornets before you,” God promised in Exodus 23:28. Then there was this effort:

Moses drove an Acura which he kept in excellent condition, since when he died, “his sight was unimpaired and his Vigor had not abated.” It is clear that Pharaoh did not keep his Dodge in the garage during bad weather, for after his famous dreams, “in the morning his Spirit was troubled.” Dodges were very popular among the entire populace in ancient Egypt, since when Moses asked the Israelites to pack into their car and leave Egypt, “they would not listen to Moses because of their broken Spirit.” The Dodge continued to be the car of the upper class right through turn of the century Jerusalem, when the priests and scribes “conspired to arrest Jesus by Stealth.” The apostles could not afford Dodges, however, and had to make due with Hyundais, as evidenced by the fact that Peter was identified as a follower of Jesus when the bystanders said to him, “Certainly you are also one of them, for your Accent betrays you.” God himself likes to give Mazdas as gifts, proof of which is that in Numbers 31, “Moses gave the Tribute, the offerring for the Lord, to Eleazar the priest, as the Lord had commanded.” For his own wheels, God drives a Plymouth when he wages war, as the prophet Zechariah proclaimed, “Then the Lord will appear over them, and his Arrow will go forth like lightning.” But there can be no doubt that when God is in the mood for a nice leisurely drive, nothing but a Rolls Royce Silver Dawn will suffice, which makes him the envy of world leaders as Isaiah makes quite clear when he says of the Lord, “Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your Dawn.”

No more. Please.

Here’s a suggestion:

One theory is that Jesus would tool around in an old Plymouth because “the Bible says God drove Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden in a Fury.” But in Psalm 83, the Almighty clearly owns a Pontiac and a Geo. The passage urges the Lord to “pursue your enemies with your Tempest and terrify them with your Storm.” Perhaps God favors Dodge pickup trucks, because Moses’ followers are warned not to go up a mountain “until the Ram’s horn sounds a long blast.” Some scholars insist that Jesus drove a Honda but didn’t like to talk about it. As proof, they cite a verse in St. John’s gospel where Christ tells the crowd. “For I did not speak of my own Accord…” Meanwhile, Moses rode an old British motorcycle, as evidenced by a Bible passage declaring that “the roar of Moses’ Triumph is heard in the hills.” Joshua drove a Triumph sports car with a hole in its muffler: “Joshua’s Triumph was heard throughout the land.” And, following the Master’s lead, the Apostles car pooled in a Honda… “The Apostles were in one Accord.”

More bad puns on this theme are hereby eagerly solicited.