Month: February 2007

They are unapologetic about impugning the motives of lawyers representing terror suspects detained at Gitmo for years without any way of adjudicating their guilt or innocence. Here is how Levin describes the situation:

There is nothing unethical about Stimson’s comments. In fact, he was serving a public interest by shining a light on those law firms that are representing the enemy.

How does he know that every suspect in Gitmo is, in fact, "the enemy." Scores have been released with no charges; many have been detained far from any battlefield and offered up by bounty hunters; many have been deemed innocent even by the Bush administration; others have been detained on evidence procured solely through torturing one other suspect. Steyn also simply says that allowing terror suspects to become criminal defendants means losing the war. Ok, then give them POW status. But the limbo they are in – neither prisoners of war nor protected by the rule of law – is a mess and a disgrace. It has undermined our case, and thereby the war. Reading Steyn’s and Levin’s defenses of the indefensible is a good insight into exactly how uninformed and ignorant parts of the degenerate right have become.

What are you waiting for, Glenn?

Grand Rapids, Michigan, 3 pm.

The slugfest continues. Joe Klein responds to his critics here. Arianna wacks him over the head with her pumps here.

Fitzgerald is forcing one almost to pity Scooter Libby:

[Libby] said that at a July 7 lunch with former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, he didn’t remember them discussing Plame or her CIA role, but he did remember talk about the Miami Dolphins, a football team they both cheered for, and Fleischer’s future plans to start a consulting business.

Fitzgerald pressed Libby: "Isn’t it a fact that you told Mr. Fleischer at this lunch" that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA "and that this was hush-hush, on the q.t?"

"I don’t recall that," Libby said, his voice turning quiet muted. "Yes sir, in that period I have no recollection."

Good grief. But the interesting aspect of the trial so far, to my mind, is how central Dick Cheney is to the charge of perjury. Fitzgerald’s record is of picking off underlings in order to get at the big prize. I have a feeling he has his sights set on Cheney. I hope he succeeds in exposing the most dangerous and incompetent vice-president in American history.

(Photo of Libby: Mark Wilson/Getty.)

The Southern Poverty Law Center has just put out a study of the most extreme fringes of American Catholicism. It isn’t pretty:

Few Americans defended Mel Gibson’s drunken rant about the evils of the Jews. But radical traditionalist Catholics did. A three-year investigation of this subculture by the Intelligence Report has found that these Catholic extremists, including the Gibsons, may well represent the largest population of anti-Semites in the United States. Organized into a network of more than a dozen organizations, scores of websites and several extremist churches and monasteries, radical traditionalists in the U.S. are preaching anti-Semitism to as many as 100,000 followers. A few, such as the lawyer for Terri Schiavo’s family, Christopher Ferrara, are even movers and shakers in important right-wing Republican circles.

You can read the whole thing here.

Clive Davis praises ex-England forward, Andy Ripley, who has some brutal things to say about what has happened to professional sports in the last couple of decades.

A reader writes:

If I am ever grasping for a concrete, unimpeachable criticism of you, I will always have this: "He wore briefs in Equus."

I am delighted by your dialogue regarding atheism and religious belief. I think my greatest problem with most religions – Christianity in particular (because it’s closest to me) – is the belief that God somehow is capable of/is interested in/exists on a level of decision-making and action-taking. It robs so much beauty from MY idea of God, which is a simpler, vaster, and more immediate energy binding the world. We cannot understand it, and making the attempt is immediately reductive. I believe our only imperative is to keep this energy moving, to help our fellows, our planet, everything living – even by (gasp!) raising taxes from time to time, if need be.

I hate this notion of God as "the Decider" because it lets so many people off the hook, setting them on a smug Slip-n-Slide into corruption. Why should we preserve our beautiful planet when Dad’s going to come down and Hoover us up to Heaven some day soon? Why should we be good to one another when all we have to do is follow God’s "laws" as we conveniently choose to interpret them?

I have no idea what religious category I fall into. I petulantly label myself "atheist" because such a roundly despised group must be good company. In practice, though, I’m not. Nor am I agnostic, because I do have a strong sense of spirituality that is my own. As certainly as you’ve never lived without belief in God, I have never lived without this idea of a gorgeous force binding us together. I believe we are nothing but energy and matter, but what energy we are! What matter!

God is not soothing because he boxes us in with laws, freeing us from decision-making and moral grappling. God is soothing in his warm, basic tremendousness, and our imperative is to work together and keep God as vibrant as possible. To allow suffering – to allow the movement of this energy to slow and cease – is to deny God. By following this imperative, a humane morality asserts itself.

To reduce God to our mean level of consciousness strikes me an insult – and that, to me, is the mark of most religious practice. When anyone thinks they know God, they’re lost.

A reader writes:

Without getting into the Harris-Sullivan debate, a short comment on a more critical issue that’s come up: Church hats. Your correspondent in "Tip of the Hat" writes:

"Yes, your faith is a lot like the church lady and her hat. Both of you are being very disingenuous when you claim to your questioners that you have no idea where they come from. The providence of that hat is no deep mystery. It was bought in a shop. It was acquired for reasons of vanity and adornment and to make the owner feel better than others." 

He – and you can tell it’s a he, can’t you? and a squinchy-hearted dried-up little peckerwood, at that – he obviously knows very little about church ladies, hats, performance art or women. Do the hats have to do with vanity and adornment and pride and maybe a bit of oneupsmanship? You bet they do. And they are magnificent. Check out the book "Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats". These women are queens. And they know it. If you can’t see God in this beauty, this dignity, this humanity, this art, you’re dead.

Mickey Kaus accuses Joe Klein of having it both ways on the Iraq war. I’d say that’s better than having no coherent position on the war at all, except fathomless bitchiness toward anyone who ever had the balls to take a stand. But that’s Mickey – circling the drain of his own irrelevance. And bitchily attacking anyone who’s trying honestly to do better.