Month: August 2006

No community-theater linguists allowed – but you can now become a new recruit at the age of 42.

Bill Clinton is no fool. He knows who the real Democratic front-runner is, and it isn’t his wife.

Was Dick Cheney’s version of his shooting Harry Whittington a complete fabrication? Here’s an on-site investigation. The persuasive claim of the video: Harry Whittington was shot at close range, between 15 and 18 feet, not the 90 claimed by Dick Cheney and the Secret Service. Make your own mind up.

A reader writes:

I am remiss at not writing long ago to thank you for continuing your "window" offerings.
I am a moderate democrat, and a grandmother whose only grandson, a Marine, will soon be on his way back to Iraq. I tend to agree with you on most issues, and I hope I will live long enough to see gay marriage a reality, and a significant decline in Christianist influence.
I read your blog daily, and consider you one of the voices of reason amid all the noise. I feel sad and anxious about the state of our world. When my grandson goes back to Iraq, I face another 7 months of holding my breath, and waiting for that dreaded knock on the door.
As I read your blog, every one of those window views that pops up gives me a brief moment of peace. Thank you.

Thank me? Thank the readers of this blog. In an insane world, small glimpses of normal life – the life the media rarely covers – can be curiously calming.

An unexpected guest dropped by yesterday afternoon. I live twenty yards away from this baby sea-lion who wandered onto the beach for what the animal control people described as a rest. He chilled for a while, and then plopped back into the bay.

A reader writes:

Today you wrote:

"It’s amazing that a president who claims to see the world in black and white, and good and evil, sees the question of torture as one full of gray."

It’s not amazing, it’s human nature. 

We’ve always seen the evil other people do in clear terms of black-and-white, and our own evil is always lost in a fog of gray. We grant ourselves vast swaths of nuance, while demanding clarity from others. Our enemies’ motives are always clear and wrong, our own always justified and right.

It‚Äô’s a story as old as time. You’ll find it told in the Illiad, in the Bible, in Shakespeare and Dickens, in Mark Twain and Sinclair Lewis. Heck, you’ll find it in "The Sopranos" and any sitcom.

To find this amazing you’d have to believe we are really different from our forebearers, that our own apple fell across the street from the tree. The human condition didn’t change because we have better technology, technology just distracts us from ourselves more efficiently.

But it is also possible to make the effort to resist this inevitable distortion of human nature. What is amazing about the Christianists is not that they fail at this effort; but that they do not even try.

It’s from a major political campaign speech:

"America’s armed forces need better equipment, better training and better pay … A generation shaped by Vietnam must remember the lessons of Vietnam: When America uses force in the world, the cause must be just, the goal must be clear, and the victory must be overwhelming … I don’t have enemies to fight. I have no stake in the bitter arguments of the last few years. I want to change the tone of Washington to one of civility and respect … We’re learning to protect the natural world around us. We will continue this progress, and we will not turn back … to lead this nation to a responsibility era, that president himself must be responsible. So when I put my hand on the Bible, I will swear to … uphold the laws of our land … I will not attack a part of this country because I want to lead the whole of it …"

Yep, you guessed right.

So now the Pentagon confirms what most of us have known for a while: Iraq is in the middle of a sectarian, civil war, and it could get much much worse. Now, remind me: what did Rumsfeld tell the Congress only six months ago? Here’s a useful reminder. Three words: Fire Rumsfeld Now.

Plan B on "The View." Or "life begins at penetration". More here.

Hugh Hewitt, it appears, cannot take responsibility just like the man he idolizes, George W. Bush. Check out this piece of artless subject-changing. Hewitt vouched for the good intentions of Mel Gibson in making "The Passion of the Christ," denied its rank anti-Semitism, and is one of those trying to fuse the primal zeal of Christianist fundamentalism with the Republican party. And his ploy in writing about Gibson is to accuse others of losing perspective and not focusing on the evils of Hezbollah, or Castro, or a violent anti-Semite in Seattle. We all have our priorities, and Hewitt has every right to his. But you learn something about someone unable or unwilling to confess a serious error of judgment in the past. I’m not surprised. The man is a partisan fanatic. Like his beloved president, any admission of error sends his Manichean worldview careening. And so he changes the subject. He has to.

Among the theocons, Cal Thomas manages to turn the Gibson incident into a column decrying Hollywood’s bigotry against …

"Catholics and conservative Protestants, political conservatives, Republicans and pro-lifers."

Yes, that was what this was about, wasn’t it? David Horowitz, a man who has sadly capitulated to the logic of "no enemies to the right" also sees the Gibson episode as revealing of bigotry towards … conservatives:

"[A] lot of the people who are jumping all over Mel Gibson see him as some kind of a conservative or as a Christian. There’s a lot of hatred of Christians in this country."

The fanatical attachment to ideology regardless of the facts at hand is something Horowitz once learned on the extreme left. It didn’t take much for him to take it with him to the extreme right.