Month: February 2007

Another connection for Dinesh D’Souza’s dream of uniting Islamists and Christianists in a global campaign against secularism and liberalism.

If you’ve never watched rugby played at its best, then you’ve never watched the All Blacks. Here’s a YouTube of some of their best tries. I’m afraid that American football doesn’t even come close.

There are parallels.

Romney sees an opening against McCain:

McCain believes the president’s interrogation of terrorist detainees was a violation of the Geneva Accords. "I disagree with him," Romney said.

I wonder if support for torture becomes a litmus test for Republican candidates in the future. The religious right might insist.

It could remake politics. My new column in the Sunday Times is now up.

Here’s an email that’s been making the rounds. I contacted its alleged author to verify and it checks out. It’s about a recent incident in Afghanistan that provides one encouraging moment in the GWOT:

You may have heard about a suicide car bomb attack in Kabul last Thursday. It was at one of our FOB’s (Forward Observation Bases) about 27 miles from here.  But the real story is why know one was killed. We employ several thousand Afghans on our various bases. Not to mention the economy that is fed by the money these locals are making. Some are laborers and builders but some are skilled workers. We even have one Afghan that just became OSHA qualified, the first ever. Some are skilled HVAC workers. 

Anyway, there is this one Afghan that we call Rambo. We have actually given him a couple of sets of the new ACU uniforms (the new Army digital camouflage) with the name tag RAMBO on it. His entire family was killed by the Taliban and his home was where our base currently resides. So this guy had really nowhere else to go. He has reached such a level of trust with US Forces that his job is to stand at the front gate and basically be the first screening. Since he can’t have weapon he found a big red pipe. So he stands there at the front gate in his US Army ACU uniform with his red pipe. If a vehicle approaches the gate too fast or fails to stop he slams his pipe down on their hood. Then once the gate is lifted the vehicle moves on the 2nd gate where the US Army MPs are. So he’s like the first line of defense. 

Last Tuesday, January 16th at 0930 hrs a Toyota Corolla packed with explosives and some Jack Ass that thinks he has 72 Virgins waiting for him approached the gate. When he saw Rambo he must have recognized him and known the gig was up.  But he needed to get to that 2nd gate to detonate and take American lives. So he slams his foot on the gas which almost causes the metal gate to go up but mostly catches on the now broken windshield. Rambo fearlessly ran to the vehicle reached thru the window and jerked the suicide bomber out of the vehicle before he could detonate and commenced to putting some red pipe to his heathen ass.  He detained the guy until the MP got there. 

The vehicle only exploded when they tried to push it off base with a robot but no-one was hurt. I’m still waiting for someone to give this guy a medal or something. Nothing less than instant US citizenship or something. A hat was passed around and a lot of money was given to him in thanks by both soldiers and civilians that are working over here. I guess I just wanted to share this because I want people to know that it’s working over here. They have tasted freedom. This makes it worth it to me.

He calls the Republicans who oppose "Plus Up" "anti-troops." Here’s what passes for the argument:

They are (understandably) unhappy with how Bush has prosecuted the war over the last couple of years, under the guidance of Rumsfeld, Abizaid, and Casey. So they now are supporting a resolution that precisely embodies the Rumsfeld-Abizaid-Casey approach: no new strategy, no more troops, and continuing pressure to turn things over to the Iraqis as quickly as possible. These senators dislike the status quo in Iraq – and are supporting a resolution that condemns Bush’s attempt to change the status quo.

But the timing of all this matters, surely. It may be the senators’ principled, good faith judgment that Iraq is now, thanks to Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Casey, in a spiraling civil war – a war that U.S. soldiers have no business being drgged into and that they can do almost nothing to stop. A day after the most horrifying massacre yet in Baghdad, the senators don’t seem so nuts, do they? Adding a pathetic number of troops to do Maliki’s job in those parts of Baghdad not controlled by the Mahdi Army is not a status-quo changer, whatever Bill Kristol’s fantasies. And saying so is not "anti-troops". It’s just calling it like it is.

A reader sends this insight into the worldview of some Christianists, in this case the now-discredited pastor, Ted Haggard:

Free-market economics is a ‘truth’ Ted [Haggard] says he learned in his first job in professional Christendom, as a Bible smuggler in Eastern Europe. Globalization, he believes, is merely a vehicle for the spread of Christianity. He means Protestantism in particular; Catholics, he said, "constantly look back." He went on:

"And the nations dominated by Catholicism look back. They don’t tend to create our greatest entrepreneurs, inventors, research and development. Typically, Catholic nations aren’t shooting people into space. Protestantism, though, always looks to the future. A typical kid raised in Protestantism dreams about the future. A typical kid raised in Catholicism values and relishes the past, the saints, the history. That is one of the changes that is happening in America. In America the descendants of the Protestants, the Puritan descendants, we want to create a better future, and our speakers say that sort of thing. But with the influx of people from Mexico, they don’t tend to be the ones that go to universities and become our research-and-development people. And so in that way I see a little clash of civilizations."

So the Catholics are out, and the battle boils down to evangelicals versus Islam. "My fear," he says, "is that my children will grow up in an Islamic state." And that is why he believes spiritual war requires a virile, worldly counterpart. "I teach a strong ideology of the use of power," he says, "of military might, as a public service." He is for preemptive war, because he believes the Bible’s exhortations against sin set for us a preemptive paradigm, and he is for ferocious war, because "the Bible’s bloody. There’s a lot about blood."

Killing for Christ. Just ask Stephen Cambone’s right-hand man, General Boykin.

(Photo of Ted Haggard: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty.)

A former skeptic shifts toward the solid empirical judgment that anthropogenic global warming is real.

Yes, the IPCC report was depressing. But also galvanizing. In that spirit, here’s a poem from one of the most inspired religious environmentalists, the nineteenth century English Catholic poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Its title is "God’s Grandeur."

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.   
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;   
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;            
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;   
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell:
the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.   

And for all this, nature is never spent;   
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;         
And though the last lights off the black West went   
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent   
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.