Year: 2005

The president is now asking Americans to conserve gas? I wonder what’s next. Will he ask his own government to balance its budget? Not so long ago, the vice-president derided conservation as a matter of “personal vanity.” Now it’s a national duty? Once again, you see how incoherent this presidency has become. If a government wants to conserve a particular product, it does not need to make rhetorical pleas for people not to use it. It can adjust its own policies to make us more fuel-efficient and less dependent on foreign oil, especially from the Persian Gulf. The Bush administration has, alas, never made this a priority. I think they’re right to drill in ANWR and encourage new energy development in the U.S. and they’ve been better on fuel standards than their critics will concede. But the obvious complement to this – conservation and sane energy taxes – remains unthinkable to them. Simply put: We need to increase the cost of gas to force the auto industry to move to newer, better fuels and consumers to make wiser choices. A phased in gas tax of a dollar on the gallon is a tax that most sane economists support, helps wean us off foreign oil, helps the environment, and defunds the terror-masters. Bush should have proposed it as an anti-terror message after 9/11. Pathetic pleas now to stop driving on Sundays and the like are no substitute for something that actually might solve the basic problem. Look: I’m a low tax kind of guy. I support Bush’s tax cuts on most areas (I exclude the estate tax, because it rewards inheritance rather than work). But this is an area that, in every substantive regard, is a win-win. Except that politically, it’s lose-lose. The test of leadership is whether a person can persuade people that an unpopular measure is still better for everyone in the long run. Has Bush ever done such a thing? Or even tried to?

The NYT “kinda-corrects” the Geraldo untruth:

The TV Watch column on Sept. 5 discussed broadcast journalists’ undisguised outrage at the failings of Hurricane Katrina rescue efforts. It said reporters had helped stranded victims because no police officers or rescue workers were around, and added, “Fox’s Geraldo Rivera did his rivals one better: yesterday, he nudged an Air Force rescue worker out of the way so his camera crew could tape him as he helped lift an older woman in a wheelchair to safety.”
The editors understood the “nudge” comment as the television critic’s figurative reference to Mr. Rivera’s flamboyant intervention. Mr. Rivera complained, but after reviewing a tape of his broadcast, The Times declined to publish a correction.
Numerous readers, however – now including Byron Calame, the newspaper’s public editor, who also scrutinized the tape – read the comment as a factual assertion. The Times acknowledges that no nudge was visible on the broadcast.

They’re still implying that a nudge might have occurred off camera; and they do not repudiate their previous refusal to post a correction. But it’s the best we’ll get; and it’s something. I wonder how tortured the correction will be for Krugman.

You notice a couple of things about the two NYT op-eds that have appeared on the subject of the proposed ban on chaste gay seminarians in the Catholic church. The difference between Amy Welborn’s description of the new policy on her own website as “insane” and her milque-toast defense of the new policy in the NYT just speaks to the limits of someone’s ability to tell the full truth when the spotlight is really on her. But John Allen’s piece is merely bizarre. The Vatican’s defense of their reversal of the classic policy of “hate the sin, love the sinner” to “ban all gays, regardless of their conduct” now comes to this: we won’t really enforce it. Of course, they’ve already conceded that by saying that they wouldn’t bar any already-ordained gay priests (the only logic here is prudential; if they actually enforced their new policy, they could lose up to a third of their current employees).

A GERMAN POPE: But Allen goes further by attributing the new nakedly homophobic policy to Italian cultural norms. I’m sorry but when the Italian Paul VI ran the Church, we had a ground-breaking document rebutting the notion that homosexuality in itself is a sin. The last Italian pope, Pope John Paul I, had, in his previous career, spoken very positively about gay men and relationships. The force behind this new discrimination is not Italian: it is from a German pope whose history shows he has a very clear idea of what he means by authority and how he means to enforce it. I may have missed one of those fatwas from Ratzinger’s Congregation that was intended not to be enforced, but it certainly hasn’t been his style. The new policy is backed by a group of hard-right Catholic American intellectuals who are very, very close to Benedict’s ear. The policy may well not be able to be enforced because a) many seminaries and religious orders in the U.S. will simply refuse to go along; b) many gay seminarians will dissemble their way in (those may well be the least adjusted gay seminarians and the most likely to be unethical in their future actual conduct); and c) the church cannot practically afford to lose more candidates for the priesthood. But the idea that the policy is designed not to be enforced is, well, weird. Even if true, it amounts simply to a rhetorical statement that gays are somehow inherently morally inferior to straights, whatever they do and however they act. Doesn’t that make the policy even worse? That it is not actually intended to address an actual perceived “problem” and to solve it, but as a kind of homophobic mood-setter for the Church’s cultural climate?

Hitch calls it like it is. I’m sorry, but I can respect criticism of the conduct of this war. In fact, I find it hard to respect those who refuse to subject the conduct of this war to constructive criticism. But I cannot respect the organizations and agenda that pollute such legitimate criticism, or their fellow-travelers. Anyone who attends rallies organized by International ANSWER deserves no quarter and no hearing. And the notion that abruptly abandoning the beleaguered Iraqi people to the tender mercy of Jihadists is somehow “progressive” boggles the mind. As Hitch observed of the motley crew in Washington last weekend: “Was there a single placard saying, “No to Jihad”? Of course not. Or a single placard saying, “Yes to Kurdish self-determination” or “We support Afghan women’s struggle”? Don’t make me laugh.”

“Your post on the children’s book with scary liberals under beds reminded me of a column by G. K. Chesterton from the Illustrated London News (June 15, 1912 in the Ignatius Press Collected Works edition). He tells of a “Socialist Sunday School” and of a friend seeing “a string of small, thin children, with small, thin voices, singing in a shrill but lifeless manner the following words:

When the Revolution comes,
When the Revolution comes,
When the Revolution comes,
The Social Revolution.”

Chesterton continues: ‘You would naturally suppose that the Anti-Socialists…would hold such pedantry to public scorn…’See what sort of people these Socialists are! how cut off from humanity and humour! They don’t know what a child is; they don’t know what a school is; and they certainly don’t know what a revolution is, or they wouldn’t mix up such incongruous things together.’ But do the Anti-Socialists say this or anything like it?…I saw in the paper yesterday that they had established a serious official organization called ‘The Children’s Anti-Socialist League’. What an age of infanticide! Fancy a little girl of six being either a Socialist or an Anti-Socialist! She might as well give us her views on Bimetallism while she is about it.’
I don’t think Chesterton was ever accused of lacking a sense of humor.”

Meanwhile … here’s another kiddy book about a cat who’s a … Republican.

Here’s an email that makes me feel great:

“I saw you on CNN sometime ago and you were talking about your sleep apnea and the fact that you sleep with a CPAP machine. I had no idea what that was.
When you described your symptoms for the first time in my life I could relate to it… took me a little time to go to the Sleeping Disorder Clinic but I did last month. The results were HORRIBLE – the worst they had ever seen. I was extremely surprised. I also had triple surgery 2 weeks ago, nose, throat and pallet. Painful recovery but worth it.
After I started to use the machine the change was immediate, the very next day I was “THAT GUY”, happy, calm, rested, my anxiety disappeared, it was like magic.
I’m 32 and I never thought I was going to hit my 50’s because I always felt a knot in my stomach and EVERYTHING would set me off. I sabotaged every aspect of my life, career, family and emotionally.
After Therapy, Meditation, Self Help Books and feeling guilty about everything I’ve done with my life, apparently all I needed was a good night’s sleep.
I’m the happiest I have ever been in my life, it’s hard to describe it, the only problem that I have right now is not knowing what I really like in life and what I don’t. It’s like waking up a stranger in your own body. It will be a fun ride from now on. Maybe in 10 years I’ll write a book about my 32 years in HELL.
Thanks for helping me find out what I had. If it wasn’t for you it would have taken me longer to connect the dots.”

By the way, I’m still happily plugged in each night: 2,311 hours of CPAP sleep and counting. If you think you might have sleep apnea, or your sleeping partner thinks you do, see a doctor. I can’t stress enough what a difference it can make.

Drudge pulls out the rhetorical stops for Cindy. (This is just to prove to JPod that I do indeed have a sense of humor.)

Keep them coming. We have three new entries:

“Drawing is taking a line for a walk.” – Paul Klee:

“Architecture is frozen music.” – Goethe

“Poetry is the music of what’s happening.” -Seamus Heaney.

A reader takes issue with my Larkin quote:

When it comes to jazz, is there a better one-line description than (New Yorker) jazz critic Whitney Balliett’s famous observation that jazz is “the sound of surprise”? I don’t think so. Larkin’s description falls a bit short because he describes how jazz works, i.e., what jazz does. Balliett, however, describes what jazz is.

IT’S NOT SATIRE FOR ADULTS: The debate over “Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed” continues. I am accused of being one the most humorless people on earth. By John Podhoretz. But it isn’t satire. It’s indoctrination. (Yes, lefty idiots ruin their case by posting fake parodies of the illustrations, but lefty idiots have been makng Sean Hannity’s job easy for years now.) From the blurb:

This news-making book is a fun way for parents to teach young children the valuable lessons of conservatism. Written in simple text, readers can follow along with Tommy and Lou as they open a lemonade stand to earn money for a swing set. But when liberals start demanding that Tommy and Lou pay half their money in taxes, take down their picture of Jesus, and serve broccoli with every glass of lemonade, the young brothers experience the downside to living in Liberaland.

Chairman Mao, anyone? It has caricatures of Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy. It has a Democratic donkey under the bed, posing as a member of the press. Jonah thinks the left does the same thing. I’m sure there are examples out there, but they are generally fuzzy tracts about saving the earth or explaining why over a hundred thousand kids have two parents of the same gender. I haven’t yet seen or heard of any 4 – 8 year old kiddies’ books which caricature George W. Bush, Dick Cheney or Bill Frist, or get into the details of tax policy or the liberal media. This is also not a fringe book. It’s #44 on Amazon! In a word, it’s creepy, in the way all ideological fanaticism is creepy. From one Amazon reviewer:

Our children need to know that there are those in our country who desire to limit our freedom, such as our freedom of religion, our freedom from governmental control, and the freedom of our markets. The extreme, elitist, liberal minority in the U.S. starts foisting its agenda on our children from kindergarten. But, with more educational materials like this book, perhaps we can teach our kids to truly be free thinkers and help them to recognize the elitist liberal bias in all its forms.

So the culture war is now in Kindergarten. The author, by the way, is not a humorist:

Katharine DeBrecht is a mother of three. A freelance newspaper reporter who previously worked in Washington, D.C., she is a member of the South Carolina Federation of Republican Women and served as that state’s co-captain of “Security Moms for Bush.” Ms. DeBrecht graduated cum laude from Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, where she studied political science and history.

Whatever else this kind of ideological indoctrination is about, the notion that it is promoting freedom of thought is risible.

The latest horrifying torture revelations give his proposed anti-torture legislation a push. This is a real war within Republicanism right now: the decency and honor of John McCain and Lindsey Graham versus the incompetence and brutality of Cheney and Rumsfeld. And in army captain Ian Fishback, we have a real American hero. In his words: “We are America. Our actions should be held to a higher standard. I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is ‘America.'” That’s the real voice of the U.S. military. And it abhors the brutality this administration has sanctioned and covered up.

How many were killed in the Superdome? Apparently: one.