Month: January 2005

“Their inclusion of the reference to ‘sexual identity” within their ‘tolerance pledge’ is not only unnecessary, but it crosses a moral line.” – James Dobson on the SpongeBob TV ad promoting tolerance of homosexuals.

“Today we contemplate the consequences of intolerance, as we recall all those … considered unfit for society – the Jews, the Slavonic peoples, the Roma people, the disabled, homosexuals, among others – (who) were marked for extermination.” – Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Holy See’s Permanent Observer to the United Nations, commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz.

Kudos to the academy for ignoring the execrable “Fahrenheit 9/11” and the pornographic “Passion.” Right-wing and left-wing ideologues will be disappointed. But what do they know about art?

TORTURE AND THE RIGHT: A cartoon sums up the situation.

By Jeff Jarvis and even the FCC. Just take a look at Jeff’s summary of the right-wing nannies’ complaints. Sheesh.

Military abuse and torture of detainees may be more widespread than the official reports have found. Why? Because many incidents haven’t been reported. One case, uncovered by the ACLU, actually involved a death in U.S. custody that wasn’t recorded at the time. When it surfaced, the case was closed for lack of evidence. If actual deaths are ignored, can you imagine how many Bybee-authorized torture cases we don’t know about? Here’s an example of a case where only minor punishments were meted out:

An officer in the 20th Field Artillery Battalion deployed in Taji, for example, was given an unspecified nonjudicial punishment and fined $2,500 after he admitted to threatening to kill an Iraqi, firing a pistol next to the man’s head, placing the man’s head in a barrel, and watching as members of his unit pummeled the man’s chest and face. One of those who administered the beating told investigators that the officer “had given us a talk about how some circumstances bring about extra force.” Another said the officer told them after it was over: “This night stays within” the unit. “We all gave a hooah” before parting, the soldier said. The document indicates that four soldiers received suspended nonjudicial punishments and small fines, while a decision on a fifth soldier was pending.

Hey, sometimes “military necessity” requires you to pummel a detainee. That’s what the president said, wasn’t it? In that memo distributed as part of the war-plan. And he’s promoted all the architects of that policy, right? And no Republicans are going to complain, are they? Torture is, after all, an integral part of the expansion of freedom across the globe. Hooah.

When Spencer Ackerman notices it, things must be looking up. More interesting data here. For all the criticism of ABC News, this in-depth study would not have happened without them.

British Muslims will not attend Holocaust commemmorations. The reason? Here’s the money quote from one Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain:

“We wrote to the Home Office three or four weeks ago. We said the issue of the Holocaust is not really the concern. But we have now expressed our unwillingness to attend the ceremony because it excludes ongoing genocide and human rights abuses around the world and in the occupied territories of Palestine.”

Just when you thought that the new Jew-hatred may not be so bad, you find the truth. Even the memory of Auschwitz cannot shame them into decency.

Theoconservative Joseph Bottum hails Bush’s Inaugural Speech as a Thomist classic. Money quote:

President Bush’s opponents should be afraid of this speech because it signals the emergence of a single coherent philosophy within the conservative movement. Natural-law reasoning about the national moral character gradually disappeared from America in the generations after the Founding Fathers, squeezed out between a triumphant emotive liberalism, on the one side, and a defensive emotive Evangelicalism, on the other. Preserved mostly by the Catholics, natural law made its return to public discourse primarily through the effort to find a nontheological ground for opposition to abortion. And now, three decades after Roe v. Wade, it is simply the way conservatives talk – about everything.

So those conservatives who favor different philosophical traditions have been put on notice. A particular theology now defines the conservative “movement.”

THE CIRCLE CLOSES: The somewhat hideous sight of Jewish cultural critics rhapsodizing about the brilliance of Mel Gibson’s pornographic “Passion” was perhaps merely the logical consequence of the degeneration of the American right. But this piece strikes me as a new nadir. Money quotes from Rabbi Daniel Lapin:

You’d have to be a recent immigrant from Outer Mongolia not to know of the role that people with Jewish names play in the coarsening of our culture. Almost every American knows this. It is just that most gentiles are too polite to mention it … The sad fact is that through Jewish actors, playwrights, and producers, the Berlin stage of Weimar Germany linked Jews and deviant sexuality in all its sordid manifestations just as surely as Broadway does today. Much of the filth in American entertainment today parallels that of Germany between the wars.

Yes, the man knows these were the exact sentiments expressed by Adolf Hitler. He even quotes the Fuhrer. He simply believes that Hitler had a point. When Jews peddle filth, they’re asking for it. Jonathan Rowe caught this. The piece of entartete Kunst that Lapin is repelled by? “Meet the Fockers.” I kid you not.

“George Bush’s second inaugural extravaganza was every bit as repugnant as I had expected, a vulgar orgy of triumphalism probably unmatched since Napoleon crowned himself emperor of the French in Notre Dame in 1804. The little Corsican corporal had a few decent victories to his escutcheon. Lodi, Marengo, that sort of thing. Not so this strutting Texan mountebank, with his chimpanzee smirk and his born-again banalities delivered in that constipated syntax that sounds the way cold cheeseburgers look, and his grinning plastic wife, and his scheming junta of neo-con spivs, shamans, flatterers and armchair warmongers, and his sinuous evasions and his brazen lies, and his sleight of hand theft from the American poor, and his rape of the environment, and his lethal conviction that the world must submit to his Pax Americana or be bombed into charcoal.” – Mike Carlton, Sydney Morning Herald.

DOWDIFICATION WATCH: She’s up to her old tricks again. Greg Djerejian is on the case.

MADDEN WAS THE FIRST PICK: ABC’s first choice to appear in that now-infamous skit, in which Terrell Owens was hit on by Nicolette Sheridan in a towel, was John Madden, aging – and white – announcer. If Madden had indeed been in the skot, I bet it wouldn’t have provoked such outrage. Why? Because we wouldn’t have seen a sexual encounter between a powerful black man and a sexy white woman. Almost thirty years after Loving vs Virginia, inter-racial sex is still taboo in many parts of this country.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “You quote the speech at Mecca as part of a case for optimism about Islamic terrorism, and ask why it has not received more coverage. It has not received coverage because it is completely irrelevant to the issue of “Islamic terrorism”, if by that one means anything to do with 9/11, the Bali bombing, Zarqawi in Iraq, or anything else that might threaten the interests of western democracies. This Imam, in this pulpit, is a mouthpiece for the Saudi Royal family. They are trying to suppress the growing unrest in Saudi Arabia, some of which has taken the form of violence and terrorism. The Saudi regime is appallingly repressive and undemocratic, and is widely cited around the world as proof of Bush’s hypocrisy in claiming to be in favor of “freedom” and against “tyranny”. The fact is, the terrorists in Saudi Arabia are trying to dethrone a group of tyrants, i.e. the Saudi Royal family, that the U.S. has spent decades trying to keep in their thrones. Now the tyrants’ mouthpiece, i.e. the Grand Imam, says that *this* terrorism is bad, because it threatens the Saudi tyranny. That will not stop the Imam and his associates from spreading anti-western and anti-democratic messages all around Islam, and even encouraging further anti-western terrorism. To read his speech as some indication of a cooling-off in radical Islam’s infatuation with terrorism would be naive in the extreme.” More feedback on the Letters Page.

John Pike has a great comparison.

A DOLLAR CRASH? Dan Drezner parses a recent Financial Times headline. Check his comments section too. I have to say the FT is now such an Anti-American paper, I’m beginning to wonder if its financial reporting isn’t part of the bias.

National Review’s beloved John Derbyshire believes that Charles Graner’s ten-year sentence for serially beating up inmates to unconsciousness, overseeing rapes, forcing inmates to simulate sex acts, and all the other horrors I detailed this weekend in the New York Times, is “totally outrageous.” He favors a 30-day smack on the wrist. That kind of sentence amounts to an endorsement of Abu Ghraib. But then Derbyshire, at the time, wanted to join in. “Kick one for me.” Remember that NRO sees itself as a repository of “moral values.” One of those values, for one of its contributors, is a defense of Charles Graner.