Month: July 2008

Ambers is tired of all the outrage.

“The thing is, he’s not buffoonish in any way. He’s not a comical figure,” – Mike Barry, who started writing political jokes for Johnny Carson’s monologues in the waning days of the Johnson administration and has lambasted every presidential candidate since, most recently for Mr. Letterman.

Provo, Utah, 2 pm.

Does it make sense? Juan Cole doesn’t think so. Kevin Drum is unsure. It does seem that Pakistan is where the real threat is.

Freddie laments:

The new atheism has made its challenge, then. And here is my answer. I don’t believe in God, in any meaningful way. I am not a Christian or a Muslim or a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Jew, or whatever else you will. In questions of public policy I feel religion has no place, and rational discourse has to rule. I don’t want religious artifacts in the public square, I don’t want creationism taught in public schools, and I don’t want any religion privileged in any way by government. I am, in most every way that matters, a natural ally of atheism.

But atheism has expelled me. It has expelled me because it has in its heart contempt and loathing and fear of the other. So I reject it. I don’t reject all atheists; many atheists are uninterested in ridiculing the religious– they simply want to be left in peace, and not have religion forced on them or on the law. That, to me, is a principled atheism, and one I am happy to coexist with. But this new atheism, this anti-theism, has only contempt at its heart, and I reject it as thoroughly as it has rejected me.

(Hat Tip: Alan Jacobs)

Funny, if a little cruel. But if McCain really wants to get the hang of this Internet thing, he should listen to Max and Gabe:

Here’s what PZ Myers said about the Danish cartoons:

Muslims represent a poor and oppressed underclass, and those cartoons represent a ruling establishment intentionally taunting them and basically flipping them off. They have cause to be furious!

I’ve seen the cartoons, and they are crude and uninteresting—they are more about perpetuating stereotypes of Muslims as bomb-throwing terrorists than seriously illuminating a problem. They lack artistic or social or even comedic merit, and are only presented as an insult to inflame a poor minority. I don’t have any sympathy for a newspaper carrying out an exercise in pointless provocation.

(Hat tip: Rod Dreher)

Weigel reports on this past weekend’s Ron Paul revolution march:

What could it be if not a reunion? The Ron Paul campaign for president was over. Yes, a few people passed out palm cards planning out a strategy to get their man nominated at this year’s GOP convention. On the front of the cards were pictures of Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Harrison and Warren Harding and the question, "What do these men have in common?" On the back was the answer: They had arrived at their conventions as dark horses and won their party’s presidential nominations anyway. "Abraham Lincoln had NO delegates," the card pointed out—I decided against saying that, under those rules the GOP might as well nominate Rudy Giuliani.

We won’t be counted, since, according to the federal government, we don’t exist.

Badtux chastises his fellow liberals:

Obama is who he has always been — a right-centrist pragmatist. There ain’t a damned thing that’s changed about him, and Obamabots and other liberals who are getting all huffy and upset about his supposed "flip-flops" need to take the blinders off their eyes and look around and see what’s been there all along. That’s Obama, folks. He ain’t the Second Coming of Eugene Debs, and never has been.