Month: June 2005

I was onto something.

Neil Cavuto seems to have conducted this interview with knee-pads on. But my favorite piece of slobbering sycophancy is the following attempt to get at why the president’s campaign for social security reform has not won much public support. Over to the man who makes Larry King look like an interrogator at Bagram:

CAVUTO: But in the meantime, the news channels then hear what you’re saying, and then later on, we have this Michael Jackson update. I mean, his trial and his ongoing saga has gripped the nation for the past four-and-a-half, five months as you’ve been on this campaign.

CAVUTO: I know this is a little outlandish, Mr. President…

BUSH: No, that’s all right, Neil.

CAVUTO: Do you think that the focus on Michael Jackson has hurt you?

Good grief.

The big downside of the Democrats’ winning the next presidential election is that they will have to raise taxes. A lot. Matt Yglesias is honest enough to say he has no idea how they’re going to get away with it.

It takes another blow from the do-gooders.

PISSING IN THE WIND: Maybe I should get this off my chest. I don’t believe the military’s account of how a Koran got splattered by a guard’s urine. The reason is not that I have completely lost trust in the military’s credibility (although I have a lot less faith than I did a couple of years ago, and that goes for Pat Tilman’s parents as well). It’s that the story, in its face, seems like something obviously made up. We are supposed to believe that a guard was relieving himself outside near the open window of a cell. His pee was allegedly carried by a gust of wind, which somehow managed to guide the pee around and into an open window, where the Koran and a detainee were unfortunately placed. I mean: come off it. They have no latrines? There are ground-level open windows for prisoners? Our military is so high-tech that their pee can now turn corners? Maybe someone out there can help me understand this story better. Have I missed something? Or is this as laughable on its face as it appears to be?

It turns out that the Alger-Hiss-loving lefty, Victor Navasky, has been running the Columbia Journalism Review for a year already! Nick Lemann was instrumental in hiring the almost comically old left dinosaur as a “distinguished journalist” to supervise the publication. It remains, of course, strictly unbiased, if a lot less transparent than, say, blogs. Mediacrity has the details. Now can you imagine the fuss if they had hired Bill Buckley? And kept it on the DL for so long?

You can’t beat Lileks on reviewing the Sith thingy. Money quote:

Re: Naboo Senator gestation periods. Apparently they don’t show for six months, then swell up like infected tonsils in the last week. They’re also able to give birth with their legs clamped together, to judge from the device they clamped over Padme in the sickbay…
Not enough Wookies. And I don’t see them as the kind of guys who’d use a bowcaster, frankly; they seem more like shotgun types. You would not want to fight an army of a pissed off Wookies with shotguns. I bet they drink, too. They’re probably always drunk all the time, which is why their language seems so incoherent; for all we know they’re not saying anything at all, just yelling. Because they’re all hammered.

I say they’re stoned.

Where to start in thinking about the Michael Jackson case? I guess I’d rather not think about it at all. It seems to me we have two reasonable doubts: on the one hand, the characters behind the charges are so sleazy and their stories so easy to pick apart that Jackson should be acquitted; on the other, no grown man in his 40s regularly sleeping with teens can be entirely altruistic. I didn’t sit through the trial and I don’t know which doubt will prevail. And, to be perfectly honest, I just don’t know what I think Jackson might have done to the boys and teens in his care. It’s perfectly possible, of course, that both doubts are correct: that Jackson’s accusers are low-lifes and they are telling the truth. The case leaves me finally with a sense of intense sadness: about how this wreck of a human being, weaned on the poison of fame and money, came to believe that reality was as plastic as his own porcelain skin. And now reality hardens into a verdict.

CONGRATS TO KRISTOF: I’m looking forward to the dinner tonight for the Mike Kelly award given to Nick Kristof for his consistent attempt to bring to light the horror of Darfur and the West’s refusal to do much about it. Kristof’s writing can be a little earnest for my taste at times, but his essential decency and integrity as a writer and human being shine through everything he puts on paper. I’ve known him from a distance ever since we were together at Magdalen, Oxford, at the same time two decades ago; and my admiration has only grown since. Its only shadow is the recognition that this blog hasn’t done as much as it should have to highlight Darfur. I guess I didn’t have much to add to what Nick and others have been saying and urging. But I can still admire. In some small way, I hope the award serves the broader cause; and I’m absolutely sure Mike Kelly would have been a fellow advocate.

PERRY AGAIN: I missed some context about Texas governor Rick Perry’s comment that gay Texan couples who want to form stable relationships should go to another state. He was actually responding to a question about gay war veterans. Insult to injury. What do you call a gay man who risks his life to serve his country? A faggot.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God.” – Abraham Lincoln, Gen. Orders No. 100, art. 15 (1863).

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Speaking to “love’s ragged edge,” our synagogue-run pre-school just elected a gay dad to be president of the parents assistance league (PAL). He’s a former cruise director and has the most amazing money-making ideas. Plus, he gets along with just about everybody. And Thank God for Jeffrey. He has a lot more commitment to helping out at the school than pretty much any other mom, here. Plus, he has a sense of humor–you can roll your eyes at the guy when someone makes a particularly stupid remark, and he gets it. My twins and his older daughter graduated together today (seriously, they have graduation ceremonies for five-year-olds), and it was so sweet to see his mum here from Manchester, an elderly woman who was clearly proud to watch this momentous (to first-time parents) occasion. And you know what I thought? Thank God I live in a world where this woman gets to have grandchildren. Why should she be deprived of the basic human experience just because some on the loony right don’t know when to mind their own business. My parents are delighted by/obsessed with my kids, and this woman, who obviously raised an incredibly decent and charming son, deserves all the naches (yiddish for happiness) she can get. I’m sorry, but the people who would deny others the pleasures/bounty life has to offer are just hateful. They can’t deal with a rapidly changing world (I’m talking technology, science, globalization) and so they’re taking it out on the easiest targets. Imagine if they tried this crap with any other minority group? This is why I could never vote Republican. For the sake of a few votes, the party has not only been coopted by, but is helping bolster a very frightened bunch of losers. Why do you think people in the South didn’t want to give blacks equal rights? Because they were threatened. Well, I think gays just represent everything about the modern world that threatens the socially conservative right.”

Norm Geras reflects on our mutual friend’s complicated views of people with religious faith. Beautiful money quote:

Asked in the Blasphemy Debate whether he had ever felt any ‘spirituality’ himself, Hitch replied – indirectly – that he had met religious people morally superior to and braver than himself: people who in terrible countries and dangerous situations had done witness for the rights of others, been self-sacrificing. ‘When they say that religion is their motivation,’ he added, ‘I’m obliged to respect it’. Precisely. This is why I wrote above that I cannot take at face value his statement about not being able to stand anyone who believes in God. More importantly, this is for me a definitive, a crushing, rebuttal of those who treat religion with contempt. One can, one should, argue about its truth content and its rational basis or, as I think, lack of one; because that is our duty with respect to all beliefs. But I have read now about hundreds of people impelled by their religious faith to acts of great and courageous humanity, and we who have never done that owe them respect and more than respect, we owe them the celebration of what they did; for such people are the glory of humankind.
The religious, I will end by saying, do not for their part have any monopoly here, either. That is the way the world is, a bit complicated.

Yes it is, isn’t it?

THE RAGGED EDGE: “There have been homosexually-oriented people in every society we know of, in every time. They are as much a part of the natural human landscape as anyone else. We’re not talking about denying the basketball-challenged from playing basketball. We’re talking about denying human beings close, loving, physical relationships on account of something over which they have no control. We’re talking about denying them families. Happily, the “zeitgeist” is ahead of alleged Christians on this one. We’re accepting and loving these families, going to PTA meetings with them, having their kids over to play. We’re supporting them in fidelity as we support all our friends. When Brad next door freaked out and ran off for 24 hours, the neighborhood reacted protectively of Jeff, and held Brad to account. (“You nut, what do you think you’re doing?!?”) When Gabriel, Jo-Ann and Karen’s kid, needs a ride, we car pool. We go to parties at their house. They come to dinners at ours. Pope Benedict doesn’t like it. It frightens him. Luckily he lives in the Vatican, and doesn’t need to confront the ragged edge of love. Love always has a ragged edge.” – “Nancy,” on Amy Wellborn’s blog.

That’s plural. Ed Kilgore explains why.

Intrade predicts conviction on the intoxication of a minor charge but the punters are less sure about molestation.

FIGHTING BACK: The next step in the battle to retain medical marijuana: Congress. Meanwhile, Rhode Island’s senate backed medical pot yesterday in a vote of 34 to 2.