Month: September 2009

DiA reacts to the Vatican's statement on sex abuse:

Look, sex with underage boys is an area where you don't want to be displaying your connoisseurship and nitpicking about aesthetic distinctions. The Catholic church is one of the greatest cultural institutions of western civilisation, but the evidence increasingly tends towards the conclusion that it will be unable to adjust to modern social and sexual norms and values unless it scraps clerical celibacy. And it is impossible to imagine that happening in the foreseeable future. The church is starting to look like a massive institution that cannot survive in its current form, but that lacks the capacity to make the changes needed to avert disaster—like so many other institutions these days.

What's frustrating is that the issues which are undermining the Church are not that central to its core doctrines. Celibacy is a pragmatic issue, not one of eternal truth. Ditto women priests. To fixate on sex, as the Church now does, is also a trivial thing sub specie aeternitatis.

What matters is the commandment to love one another and God, to serve our fellows, to help the needy and practice the daily duty of forgiveness. This is so hard for so many of us. I fail all the time. And that is why so many of us need the church to guide and help us on this pilgrimage. To exclude and condemn and clench with white knuckles onto non-vital issues, such as stopping priests from ever having a real sexual and emotional relationship with another human being, or casting half of humanity out of church leadership, is, in my view, a warped perspective. 

But when these policies have also led directly to turning the church into an international syndicate for the protection of child molesters for decades, insisting that no discussion of them can take place is a form of psychosis.

Here’s a story that reveals just how inhumane the ban on marriage equality can be:

Janice Langbehn, Lisa Marie Pond and three of their four children planned a cruise in February 2007 to celebrate the couple’s 18 years together. But Pond suffered a massive stroke before the ship left port and was taken to Jackson Memorial Hospital. Hospital workers refused to let Langbehn into Pond’s hospital room – even after a power of attorney was faxed to the hospital — because they were not legally related…

Pond was pronounced dead of a brain aneurysm about 18 hours after being admitted to the trauma center. Langbehn said she was only allowed in to see her partner for a few minutes when a priest gave Pond the last rites.

“I never thought almost 20 years of love and family could be disregarded in an instant,” Langbehn said.

Langbehn sued the hospital. Yesterday, she lost, as the case was dismissed by federal court:

“Today’s ruling comes after the Public Health Trust of the Miami Dade County, the governing body of Jackson Memorial Hospital, filed a motion to dismiss the case. The court ruled that the hospital has neither an obligation to allow their patients’ visitors nor any obligation whatsoever to provide their patients’ families, healthcare surrogates, or visitors with access to patients in their trauma unit.”

David Link notes:

As a strictly legal matter, that may be true (the decision can still be appealed).  But as a moral matter, it is appalling.  Hospitals came into being because of human compassion for illness and suffering.  Whatever their legal obligations, preventing a woman from seeing her dying partner until the priest arrives to deliver Last Rites is a level of cruelty that should go down in the annals of depravity.  For the record, the hospital is Jackson Memorial (“One of America’s finest medical facilities”), a name that should also be recorded for posterity.

When people talk about marriage as some kind of abstract matter, an interesting debate to be had, an issue to be discussed, they forget the actual, brutal consequences of laws that teat gay families as non-families and gay people as sub-human.

We are at the mercy of others, even at the hour of our death.

Steve Coll explains how the Soviets did it:

In Afghanistan, after an initial and failed attempt to use special forces more aggressively to hit Islamist guerrillas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, the Soviets began to pull back into Afghanistan’s major cities and to “Afghan-ize” their military operations. As they prepared to withdraw, Soviet troops moved away from direct combat, particularly in the countryside, and instead concentrated on training and equipping the Afghan forces. They also provided supplies and expertise the Afghans lacked—air power, for example, and SCUD missiles. As I described in a previous post, this military strategy worked pretty well, and the Soviet city-fortresses withstood heavy assaults from the U.S.-financed mujaheddin even after Soviet troops left the country; they left only a thousand or two military and intelligence advisers behind.

How did the US get into a situation that destroyed the last global empire? I know why, of course. That was where al Qaeda was based when 19 men with not even a single bomb were able to murder thousands in America. We went there to prevent another. I supported it fanatically. But all these years later, I can't help wondering if it was a giant trap. If someone had told me that the US would occupy Afghanistan for eight years and launch a huge counter-terrorism operation across the globe and still not have captured Osama bin Laden, and watched as al Qaeda built a new base in liberated Iraq (since cornered at enormous expense) and Pakistan (still very much alive), and elsewhere around the globe, I would have been incredulous. Yes, I know  that al Qaeda is weaker than it once was – partly because of the dedication of Western intelligence, partly by military power, partly by their own record of murdering Muslims – but the costs and benefits seem increasingly out of whack.

Yes, I should have – we all should have – seen this in advance. But I cannot believe a democracy after 9/11 would ever have tolerated doing nothing or something so minimal it would have seemed utterly insufficient.

Which leaves us where we are. Afghanistan, like Iran, presents an excruciating set of choices, which is why I find the caution and deliberation of the current administration a welcome change of pace (although, to be fair, Bush was fast moving in this direction in his second term). But any review must include the basic question: are we engaging in a rational deployment of resources? Did 9/11 psychologically mold us to over-estimate the real toll of terrorism on the West's actual interests? If terrorism claims a minuscule number of Western lives in comparison with, say, smoking, have we been conned into a global war that could actually cripple the West rather than protect it? Or would a self-interested retreat provoke a more dangerous attack in due course?

I don't know the answer to this question. But I do believe it needs to be asked. Or we will have learned very little from the war we so righteously began and have waged at such expense as the West's fiscal footing gives way underneath.

(Photo: David Furst/AFP/Getty.)

A Safire classic:

The first to suggest a nominee is Joseph Felcone, an antiquarian bookseller in Princeton N.J.. In his most recent catalogue of books for sale, he lists under the headline “The First Blogger?” a book by Plinius Caecilius Secundus, Gaius, better known to all of us as Pliny the Younger, a consul of the Roman empire. The book (a 1518 edition of which, lightly dampstained on a few leaves, is offered for 1400 depreciating U.S. smackers) is titled “Epistolarum libri X. Panegyricus”. We all recognize “epistle” as a letter; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, panegyricus is a “public eulogy”.

Thus, young Pliny’s book, one of nine he published between A.D. 99 and 109, would be titled if published today: “Letters in Praise of Great Friends”. The bookseller notes that this Roman consul commented “on political events, social life in Rome and the provinces, and the domestic events of the day. Some letters are paeans of praise for particular friends, whereas others are requests for support of his own agenda…Unlike many of the existing letters of Cicero, Pliny’s letters were intended for public consumption, and are well-crafted from a literary perspective.”

Is this not the definition of the pre-blogger, especially one touting a particular candidate for office or seeking support for his own altruistic ideas or nefarious schemes?

Palin's unpublished book is already third on Amazon. But her attempt to get rich on the lecture circuit (outside the Fox-Limbaugh GOP base) is trickier.

Josh Marshall has the full text of the piece published by Newsmax and now yanked. It's a staggerinng sign of what happens when no-one in a major political party is prepared to stand up to extremism:

Obama Risks a Domestic Military Intervention

By: John L. Perry

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America's military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the "Obama problem." Don't dismiss it as unrealistic.

America isn't the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn't mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it. So, view the following through military eyes:

# Officers swear to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Unlike enlisted personnel, they do not swear to "obey the orders of the president of the United States."

# Top military officers can see the Constitution they are sworn to defend being trampled as American institutions and enterprises are nationalized.

# They can see that Americans are increasingly alarmed that this nation, under President Barack Obama, may not even be recognizable as America by the 2012 election, in which he will surely seek continuation in office.

# They can see that the economy — ravaged by deficits, taxes, unemployment, and impending inflation — is financially reliant on foreign lender governments.

# They can see this president waging undeclared war on the intelligence community, without whose rigorous and independent functions the armed services are rendered blind in an ever-more hostile world overseas and at home.

# They can see the dismantling of defenses against missiles targeted at this nation by avowed enemies, even as America's troop strength is allowed to sag.

# They can see the horror of major warfare erupting simultaneously in two, and possibly three, far-flung theaters before America can react in time.

# They can see the nation's safety and their own military establishments and honor placed in jeopardy as never before.

So, if you are one of those observant military professionals, what do you do?

Wait until this president bungles into losing the war in Afghanistan, and Pakistan's arsenal of nuclear bombs falls into the hands of militant Islam?

Wait until Israel is forced to launch air strikes on Iran's nuclear-bomb plants, and the Middle East explodes, destabilizing or subjugating the Free World?

What happens if the generals Obama sent to win the Afghan war are told by this president (who now says, "I'm not interested in victory") that they will be denied troops they must have to win? Do they follow orders they cannot carry out, consistent with their oath of duty? Do they resign en masse?

Or do they soldier on, hoping the 2010 congressional elections will reverse the situation? Do they dare gamble the national survival on such political whims?

Anyone who imagines that those thoughts are not weighing heavily on the intellect and conscience of America's military leadership is lost in a fool's fog.

Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a "family intervention," with some form of limited, shared responsibility?

Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.

Military intervention is what Obama's exponentially accelerating agenda for "fundamental change" toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama's radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

Unthinkable? Then think up an alternative, non-violent solution to the Obama problem. Just don't shrug and say, "We can always worry about that later."

In the 2008 election, that was the wistful, self-indulgent, indifferent reliance on abnegation of personal responsibility that has sunk the nation into this morass.

A reader writes:

Full disclosure: I'm an atheist — as in, not a theist — so take this as you will. 

I enjoy reading your discussions and contretemps with readers about religion. As an atheist I'm in a minority, I know it, and while I've got my issues with religion in the main I'm also not blind to the fact that many religious people and institutions (Western and non-Western) have served humanity well.  I'm not going to bash here.  But I am going to call you out on "The Darwinist."

Please.

I've only ever known that phrase as a disparaging appellation used by religious fundamentalists to attack those who agree with the theory of Natural Selection. This is a tired ad hominem meant to mark "non-believers" as idolaters who worship Charles Darwin, a mere man, and his heretical idea, a mere theory.  I'm not suggesting that you or your readers are dishonest or intentionally arguing dishonestly, but this is loaded Scopes Monkey Trial language that tilts the conversation unfairly.

It's hard to take a passage like this seriously when it's used to argue against "The Darwinist:"

"So to argue over the precise timing of Adam and Eve "eating an apple," as your one correspondent did, is nothing short of bizarre — its genuinely a world of discourse thousands of years out of date. You know this, of course. But its striking how many of your presumably secular or at agnostic correspondents imagine a religious response to evil and suffering only through the terms set by fundamentalists. They counter a stilted argument proffered by fundamentalist theology then go on as if their work is done. This not only is pretty cheap intellectually, but incredibly impoverishing for our public discourse. The best word for it, I think, is ignorant. "

"The Darwinist" is from a discourse a hundred years out of date, a term set by fundamentalists, and also pretty cheap intellectually, as is "The Jew", "The Homosexual", "The Negro", and so on.

Let's play fair.

I'm sorry but this is so touchy it's pathetic. I'm a Darwinist, for Pete's sake, in as much as I find that great man's genius to be a highpoint of human civilization and insight. No pejorative was implied or asserted. Yes, it's shorthand, but shorthand is not the same as terms such as "the negro" when deployed in a disparaging sense. (And I use the word "homosexual" myself as a neutral term.) More to the point, my reader used several terms for those with whom he disagrees: "secular or agnostic", "non-theist,"  "scientist", "atheist". The word "Darwinist" was used once in a phrase I thought provocative enough to make the title.

Good Lord, the touchiness on this subject. Get over yourself.

Chris Orr relays:

Today, Martin Scorsese and David Lynch also added their names to those of sixty-odd other cinematic luminaries who've signed a petition calling for Polanski's immediate release. But the award for complete lack of self-awareness has to go to another new signee who placed his moral capital in such matters on the table today as well: Woody Allen.

It’s necessary to recall that the nomination of Sarah Palin to be vice-president of the United States was a farce. As the Republican State Senate President of Alaska, Lyda Green, noted on August 30, 2008:

“She’s not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president? Look at what she’s done to this state. What would she do to the nation?”

Unlike the reckless McCain campaign, Green knew Palin and was from her hometown. The campaign subsequently proved her right. We discovered that Palin knew nothing even about energy policy and was incapable of keeping her stories straight on any number of matters, large and small. She was a cynical tool of cynical people, marketed entirely as an identity politics candidate to appeal to white conservative red staters. In a party where the number of serious figures actually trying to address policy questions can be counted on one hand, she relied on absurd slogans such as “Drill, baby, drill!” and ugly insinuations about “real America.” Her emergence revealed that America is in a period of decadence and unseriousness, even as its decline as an economic and world power accelerated and its moral authority crumbled. But the cynicism endured. We are asked to believe that she wrote a 400-page autobiography in two months. Although no one ever believed Harper Collins’ Jonathan Burnham was actually interested in the content of books, this new contract and its absurd delivery date closes the case. Then we have John Fund this morning hailing the book as a sure-fire best-seller, and praising the rogue strategy against McCain. He is no doubt correct about the sales. But Fund is allegedly a serious figure on the right. His and his newspaper’s capitulation to the Palin farce is another sign that just as Burnham believes publishing is simply marketing, so Fund believes politics is about what sells. He reveals the contours of the next Republican presidential campaign, in which Palin will lead a cohort of Beck and Limbaugh dittoheads on a platform of a holy war in the Middle East, the restitution of torture as a core American value, and tax cuts in the face of massive and mounting debt. Here’s what we will face in the future:

Ms. Palin was booked on grueling interviews with hostile reporters while talk-show hosts such as Glenn Beck couldn’t even get through to her aides. Mr. Beck tells me he was stunned when he picked up the phone one day just before the election to discover Sarah Palin was on the other end of the line. “She explained that she had been blocked from reaching her audience, so she was now ‘going rogue’ and booking her own interviews,” Mr. Beck told me. “I was thrilled she had burst out of the cage they’d built for her and we were finally talking.”

Translation: we couldn’t get enough infomercials on Fox, but next time we will. The days of open press conferences will be over as Palin narrow-casts only to the base. At the same time, you see the right urging a coup, while all but beating a drum for the assassination of the president, an event that would tip this country into a near civil war. In this climate, establishment conservatism for the most part is fanning the flames and pouring on the gasoline.

I always thought it would get worse before it gets better. But I never thought it would get this poisonous this soon.

(Full disclosure: Burnham published my last book, The Conservative Soul. I know whereof I speak.)