Month: January 2006

About the best television I’ve seen in forever. Last night, Larry King interviewed James Frey, author of factually-challenged best-selling “memoir”, “A Million Little Pieces.” First off, you have the spectacle of a public person insisting that he did too do lots of crack and spend months in jail and so on and so forth. Then you have a website that usually exposes the lurid pasts of public people actually exonerating the guy, and depicting him as a nice middle-class boy, struggling with addiction. Then it dawns on you that all this will only help sales of the book. Then Larry King brings up the Jerzy Kosinski controversy as an analogy, Frey demurs, and then Larry reminds Frey that Kosiniski was so ashamed he killed himself. Then Frey’s mom shows up, and we watch mortified as this woman is asked to pick between her love for her son and his obvious deceptions. And then, just when you think it can’t get any weirder … God descends. Oprah’s on the phone, and claims she was ringing for ages but couldn’t get through. Weirder? The nation falls silent as God speaks. She doesn’t exactly defend the fraudulently packaged book, she blames the publishers and then somehow manages to bring you almost to the point of thinking that a book that does so much good need not be trashed for basic misrepresentation. For Oprah, the therapy trumps the integrity. Or there’s a deeper integrity to the guy’s recovery that should trump concerns about his obvious misleading of the reader. At this point, you are as gob-smacked as Anderson Cooper. And then he brings up his mother. And with images of Gloria Vanderbilt floating in my head, we find ourselves watching Project Runway. Bravo.

– posted by Andrew.

Iran appears to be on the verge of nuclear capacity. John Keegan sums up the situation admirably here. Sorry to ruin your morning.

THE NYT’S EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE: Ouch.

THE NSA AND THE LAW: Critical legal analysis of warrant-less wire-tapping of American citizens can be found here.

ONE OF A KIND: Apparently, I don’t look like any celebrities known to the web. Phew.

YGLESIAS AWARD NOMINEE: “It is true that any Washington influence peddler is going to spread cash and favors as widely as possible, and 210 members of Congress have received Abramoff-connected dollars. But this is, in its essence, a Republican scandal, and any attempt to portray it otherwise is a misdirection.” – Rich Lowry, National Review.

CONDOMS AS GUNS: The latest Catholic analogy.

– posted by Andrew.

“I am at a loss to know how creationism has got mixed up with conservatism. I have always thought of conservatives as the cold-eyed people, unafraid to face awkward facts, respectful of rigorous intellectual disciplines, and decently curious, but never dogmatic, on points of metaphysics. Conservatism thus understood is, in my view, the ideal outlook for free citizens of a free society. Contrariwise, pseudoscientific fads, metaphysical dogmas like “dialectical materialism,” magical explanations for natural phenomena, and slipshod word-games about “agency” and “design” posing as science, arise most commonly in obscurantist despotisms. The old USSR was addled with such things, Lysenkoism being only the best known. You may say that an obscurantist despotism can be conservative in its own way, and you may have a terminological point; but that’s not the style of conservatism I favor.” – John Derbyshire, NRO, in an exchange with Tom Bethell.

Once again, I find myself in complete agreement with the old codger. How can that be? Once you get past his prejudices, which he proudly displays, Derbyshire is actually a recognizable old-style conservative. His description of the conservative temperament and attitude toward reality is absolutely something I share and, as he puts it, absolutely consonant with deep religious faith. I can see now what will be a main line of criticism of my book: that its understanding of conservatism is an English one, not American. Maybe that’s the origin of my detente with the Derb. But if our shared conservatism draws inspiration from English tradition and history, it is also a philosophical argument, available for universal inspection and debate. The point is not whether such a skeptical, empirical, practical, limited government conservatism can survive in today’s America. The point is whether it offers an attractive politics for the West in modernity. I agree with Derb that it is the ideal outlook for free citizens of a free society. I also believe it is the best politics for maintaining our freedom in modernity. Which is why fundamentalists of all kinds – Muslim and Christian – feel so threatened by it.

– posted by Andrew.

Here’s a document from some evangelical leaders specifically attacking the notion that the current state of Israel is Biblically mandated. These leaders differ from the increasingly popular and now mainstream fundamentalist notion of the End-Time, the Rapture, and the role that a unified and expansionary Israel will play in such a moment. Evangelical protestantism is not monolithic, but the dispensationalists are clearly gaining ground, as the astonishing success of the “Left Behind” books shows. I should add that dispensationalism is a relatively recent development. Like much that now passes for ancient truth (like the Catholic church’s insistence on the human person present in the zygote), its origins are actually very modern. In this new and modern brand of absolutist faith, the more extreme Christian fundamentalists are similar to many Islamic fundamentalists.

– posted by Andrew.

London’s most famous mullah unplugged. According to the prosecutor,

“In the course of one lecture [Abu Hamza] accused the Jews of being blasphemous, traitors and dirty. This, because of the treachery, because of their blasphemy and filth, was why Hitler was sent into the world.”

And people question why some of us insist on calling these monsters Islamo-fascists. The answer: because we speak English.

– posted by Andrew.

“This is in response to your emailer yesterday. I’m a (theologically) liberal Unitarian serving as an enlisted man in the military. I’ve had a number of religious discussions that included a number of dyed-in-the-wool fundamentalists and I’ve never been insulted/dismissed the way your correspondent was. Of course, that may be because I manage to explain my views respectfully without coming off like a condescending, pedantic ass. I think this unknown sailor was probably responding less to that individual’s theology than to what a jerk he was being. Unfortunately, I get the sense that their exchange was representative of too much of the interfaith ‘dialogue’ that goes on.”

If he has to break the law he signed, he will. The consequences of presidents doing this to clear legislative intent are profound. I have no doubt that, for all his platitudes yesterday, the fundamental reason Alito was nominated was to remove one check from the president’s assumption of new and permanent powers. In an issue like the McCain Amendment, Roberts and Alito will back the president against the veto-proof vote of the Congress. That’s why they’re there.

– posted by Andrew.

Not so much any more.