Month: November 2009

A reader writes:

The university teacher writing about young couples getting married solely to have sex offers a perfect example of how, over time, a practical religious requirement can morph into fundamentalist law.  In societies without reliable birth control, for example, the religious requirement that sex should only take place within marriage helped ensure that children could be brought up within the security of a recognized social unit, the family.  People still had sex outside of marriage of course, and children have always been born out of wedlock, but the taboo at least helped to curb the practice.

But in an age where the danger of children born out of wedlock has been greatly diminished by advancements in birth control, the idea that marriage in and of itself is a vehicle for sex is outmoded.  To demand kids not to have sex before getting married, while refusing to educate them on birth control and safe sex, leads to the very problems the original religious tenet tried to prevent: unwanted pregnancies and parent-less children.

A reader writes:

If you think of Palin as a politician trying to build a movement, it's indeed peculiar that she wouldn't want any video or audio coverage of an address that was, reportedly, delivered well and warmly received. But if you think of that address as content she wishes to sell at paid appearances, the restrictions make perfect sense. She wants to be paid to deliver this speech again and again, just as a movie distributor wants to charge numerous audiences to watch its film. If people see it online, they're less likely to pay to see it in person, and there will be some who decide they don't like it enough to pay for it.

A reader writes:

One thing you've done recently on your blog that has irritated me is run letters from readers claiming that "the GOP has been crazy all along" and alleging that the Gingrich Revolution of 1994 had the same incoherent rage as the present GOP, even going so far as to slander the Contract with America.

This is absurd. The Republican revolution in 1994 was far more positive, far more focused and far more reasonable.  The contract focused them around spending reduction, welfare reform and ethics reform.  There was no mention of affirmative action, immigration, abortion, gays or any of the other dog whistle issues currently driving the GOP.  Even Rush Limbaugh — trust me on this — was smart and focused in his criticism of Clinton.  He was a joy to hear then; he's

unbearable now. 

The buildup to the 1994 mid-terms was, for me and many Republicans, a time of optimism and excitement; the buildup now is one of fear and loathing.  There is simply no comparison between 1993 and 2009.

The shame of the current state of the GOP is that they are the festering ruin of the good ideas that prevailed in the mid-90's — ideas reduced to ideology; thought reduced to dogma.

And dogma now reduced to paranoid and hateful bile. My reader is right about the Contract With America. It was specific; it was constructive; and it was not a Christianist screed. What my other readers were referring to, I suspect, is the fringe attack on the Clintons, the Vince Foster, drug-running in Arkansas, and on an on – the kind of stuff David Brock was hired to disseminate.

Now, it seems, that's all that Republicanism is. Which is why, mercifully, there are fewer and fewer people in the party.

Details:

Al-Attiya said Sunday the parliament reached a formula for the election law that was accepted by all the blocs. Hill told CNN a vote will be held in Kirkuk, but that the election law will not solve the issue. "Kirkuk will be solved by a political process which involves the good offices of the U.N.," Hill said. Another key dispute holding up the law has involved lists to be used on election day. Politicians disagree over whether to use open lists that name candidates or closed lists that name just their parties. The law used in the 2005 election calls for a closed list. The law that passed Sunday calls for open lists. Al-Maliki called the use of open lists part of the "historic victory."

A reader writes:

The reason elite opinion makers are reticent to too strongly overplay the religion card with Nidal Hasan, in a way they maybe weren't as reticent to do with George Tiller, is because Islam is a minority faith and many of its practitioners might well be subject to retaliatory violence in the wake of Fort Hood.  To "apply the same standard of inquiry and criticism to all religions" omits the important fact that there are a great many people in this country who would NOT apply the same standard to Hasan as they applied to George Tiller.  They might say that Tiller was a bad apple in an otherwise good faith, while simultaneously saying Hasan is the apple that proves the badness of the whole batch.  To pretend otherwise is obvious and repugnant sophistry.

If this story from the Telegraph pans out, it places religious fanaticism at the very center of the Fort Hood massacre. And if it's true, it's pretty amazing no news organization had previously come across it. To have an army psychiatrist giving talks on Jihad in a military context and not have anyone call him on it, or take measures to monitor him, or challenge him is … mind-blowing. It's p.c. at its most lethal.

Update: this story was indeed reported but I missed it. Here is the NPR piece. Money quote:

The psychiatrist [who worked alongside Hasan] says that he was very proud and upfront about being Muslim. And the psychiatrist hastened to say, and nobody minded that. But he seemed almost belligerent about being Muslim, and he gave a lecture one day that really freaked a lot of doctors out.

They have grand rounds, right? They, you know, dozens of medical staff come into an auditorium, and somebody stands at the podium at the front and gives a lecture about some academic issue, you know, what drugs to prescribe for what condition. But instead of that, he – Hasan apparently gave a long lecture on the Koran and talked about how if you don't believe, you are condemned to hell. Your head is cut off. You're set on fire.

Burning oil is burned down your throat.

And I said to the psychiatrist, but this could be a very interesting informational session, right? Where he's educating everybody about the Koran. He said but what disturbed everybody was that Hasan seemed to believe these things. And actually, a Muslim in the audience, a psychiatrist, raised his hand and said, excuse me. But I'm a Muslim and I do not believe these things in the Koran, and then I don't believe what you say the Koran says. And then Hasan didn't say, well, I'm just giving you one point of view. He basically just stared the guy down.

So he was actually challenged on these grounds in public and yet no one monitored him or disciplined him for this. He may not have been in any way connected to al Qaeda. But the point is: he didn't have to be. This kind of Jihad requires no sleeper cell – just a murderous, fundamentalist psyche.

Odd, isn't it, that the two Senators first out of the gate to describe the House bill as "for liberals by liberals" and to vow filibusters against any public option are Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman, the two most loyal senators who backed the guy who lost last year.

Jeremy Clarkson is pissed off, wants to leave Britain but is stymied as to where to go:

You can’t go to France because you need to complete 17 forms in triplicate every time you want to build a greenhouse, and you can’t go to Switzerland because you will be reported to your neighbours by the police and subsequently shot in the head if you don’t sweep your lawn properly …

You can’t go to Australia because it’s full of things that will eat you, you can’t go to New Zealand because they don’t accept anyone who is more than 40 and you can’t go to Monte Carlo because they don’t accept anyone who has less than 40 mill. … And you can’t go to Germany … because you just can’t.

The Caribbean sounds tempting, but there is no work, which means that one day, whether you like it or not, you’ll end up like all the other expats, with a nose like a burst beetroot, wondering if it’s okay to have a small sharpener at 10 in the morning. And, as I keep explaining to my daughter, we can’t go to America because if you catch a cold over there, the health system is designed in such a way that you end up without a house. Or dead.

Without even a death panel.

One more small thing that occurred to me glancing back through the archives today. I've long been slammed for turning against Bush's war only when it turned south. That's not entirely untrue – and criticizing a war plan as it unfolds is perfectly valid, when you could not know the war plan in advance. But from the beginning, I worried about too few troops, and before the beginning, I wrote the following:

I do think that an opportunity exists for Bush to neutralize and even co-opt some of these [liberal anti-war] people by his conduct in the post-war settlement. He must commit real resources, real troops, real money to reconstructing Iraq and to building the beginnings of democracy there. No friendly new dictator; no cut-and-run; no change of the subject. He has to show the essentially progressive nature of the war against Islamist terror and its state sponsors – not just for the security of the West but for the future of the Arab world. Rescinding some future tax cuts to help pay for this may well be prudent – and even popular. Bush can't reverse the tide of hatred on the far left. But he can try and reach out to the many liberals in the center who would support a proactive foreign policy, if they believed it was about more than mere national interest.

My turn against Bush was because he did not do these things, and did not pay for what he did do. It was not a fair-weather reversal; it was the pursuit of my own judgment and principles in the face of changing facts. It's what I'm supposed to do in my line of work.

… are copying Barack Obama's campaign website.