Month: November 2006

 A reader writes:

It has been said of you that you hate well. While your latest post is not hateful, it has the threatening swagger of a certain type of teenage boy. Your penchant for personalized bile comes across anytime you discuss B16. It’s not Hitchens-like, but it is showing signs of going in that vector.

Another comments:

Your comments under the pic of the Pope and his assistant are beyond the pale. Only someone gay or gay-friendly would make such remarks.There’s not only no evidence to suggest that the Pope is anything but chaste and celibate, it’s such bad taste to even bring it up.

My position on the priesthood is what the Church’s used to be: if you’re a good priest and keep your vows, it’s irrelevant whether you’re gay or straight. The gender of the people you’re not having sex with is a non-issue. But this is not Benedict’s position. He was the one who altered the church’s policy from one that simply insisted on priestly celibacy, gay or straight, to one that specifically excludes even celibate gay men from the priesthood, regardless of their skills or gifts or vocation. I’m just following Benedict’s rules. It’s a little hard for him to complain if they boomerang back on him.

(Photo: Vatican Press Pool/Catholic Press Photo.)

Remember when Bush promised more fiscal responsibility in his re-election campaign? Federal spending grew by 9 percent in FY 2006, compared with consumer price inflation of 1.3 percent. The president sure knows how to expand government’s power, reach and incompetence. And his attack on conservatism grows deeper.

East Grinstead, England (my home town), 3 pm.

A TPM reader gives some perspective on the war criminal we have as president:

I served in the Air Force from 1982 to 1988. I was an airborne linguist and, as such, was required to go through survival school at Fairchild Air Force Base near Spokane. This was a school that officers and enlisted men alike were required to attend…anyone who might end up in a hostile situation or behind enemy lines–or a POW. That was in January of 1984. Part of survival school was training in interrogation resistance and how to handle oneself in the event of capture by enemy forces.

What does that have to do with Meese’s remarks, you might ask? Simply this: Our trainers were careful to instruct us on the Geneva Conventions and which interrogation techniques were covered and which were illegal. I have a very clear memory of what they said about waterboarding. As I recall, water boarding was classified as torture and was a violation of the Geneva Conventions. They told us about the technique for the simple reason that the North Vietnamese used it on American Forces. They wanted us to know about that technique in case we were ever captured by "scumbags who didn’t respect the Geneva Conventions." There were no demonstrations; it was considered too traumatic.

I’m not making this up. The military trainers at our Survival School had nothing but contempt for techniques like this, and we were taught that they were international criminal offenses… And every last one of us who has completed this training knows that waterboarding is torture, pure and simple.

Not under Bush it isn’t.

The new HHS appointee for family planning authored this (PDF) power-point on how too much sex causes brain damage. He believes that even married couples should not use contraception. If you want to know where theo-conservatism goes next, the war on contraception is clearly a major priority; and Keroack is the kind of guy the Christianists want controlling your sex life.

A reader comments:

OK, in hindsight it’s dreadful: a bunch of suburban kids lip-syncing high-pitched hair metal w/o make make-up and garish bouffants. But you know what, by the standards of the genre, and the age of the band, they were pretty good. The production quality, while also cheesy looking back, was good as well.

He clearly was a damn interesting guy. And anyone w/ the courage to wail like that on camera would obviously have no fear when it comes to putting the smack down on some terrorists in a time of need.

Yep. Bingham for me represents not just an openly gay hero. But the kind of hero modern America still serves up: culturally open, tolerant, fun, at ease with modern life, and yet also quite prepared to fight to the death in defense of Western freedom. He represents a lot that the curent right-wing doesn’t seem to understand: just because blue and purple America loves modernity doesn’t mean it is somehow decadent, unpatriotic or too weak to resist Islamist murderers. 9/11 showed that all of America, apart from its far left fringe, was prepared to fight. That legacy of unity, so bitterly squandered by Karl Rove, can and must be summoned up again. But not by this president; and not yet by his party.

(Photo of Mark Bingham, far right, and his Steelers rugby team-mates.)

America isn’t his only victim. Sacha Baron-Cohen went back to his alma mater, Cambridge University in England, as Borat. Enjoy another country being ridiculed:

"One might reasonably argue that a very good way to protect marriage is to remain faithful to one’s spouse, but in politics that sort of behavior won’t raise money for the interest groups or votes for the Republicans. In this case, "family values" wasn’t about Sherwood’s personal example, but his record of keeping homosexuals from marrying. Wouldn’t it do more for the family to strengthen heterosexual marriage before telling others how to live their lives? Why have we seen so many politicians (and some clergy) who talk about "family values" turn out to be the worst practitioners of them?

With a change in focus, more people might want to hear why conservative Christians are faithful and, having heard, perhaps embrace that faithfulness. The culture might then reflect real "family values" from the bottom up, possibly even touching politicians in Washington," – Cal Thomas, getting it right.

Thomas has long warned, by the way, of politicizing faith and morals. This isn’t a new position of his. Check out his book of a while back. But it’s great to see some conservative voices restating a conservative case: Christianity is best expressed by personal example, not political agendas. And a Christianity that becomes indistinguishable from partisan politics has lost its soul.

"Why would [Rick] Warren marry the moral equivalency of his pulpit – a sacred place of honor in evangelical tradition – to the inhumane, sick, and sinister evil that [Barack] Obama has worked for as a legislator?

According to press reports, it is because of a mutual respect that each feels towards the other over the AIDS/HIV pandemic on the African continent. That rationale however is not only dishonest, but not even logical given the two distinct positions that the men come to on the matter. Because of this supposed shared concern, Warren is ready to turn over the spiritual mantle to a man who represents the views of Satan at worst or progressive anti-God liberals at best in most of his public positions on the greatest moral tests of our time," – Kevin McCullough on Townhall.com, whose executive editor is Hugh Hewitt.

Check out his ads.