Category: Old Dish

He’s suing a blogger for parody? What a jerk.

Roy and Silo were together for six years and brought up a baby penguin. But now Silo has a girlfriend. Roy is hanging. I’m completely distraught.

“I have been reading you for some time now, and while a lot of conservatives and moderates have moved away because of your stances, I still come in to see what you have to say. I find this latest exchange between you and Reynolds distressing. I read Glenn all the time, and I do not think he is a ‘triumphalist’. He does err on the side of the positive, but frankly I am rather glad that he does. The mainstream press simply never ever does, and it is nice to have news sources that refuse to descend into eternal gloom and doom.
I fully understand your desire to point out the problems and hold people accountable. I am growing increasingly dissatisfied with Bush’s handling of the war I voted for him to handle. That having been said, your site does now feel relentlessly negative. I know it is not but it very much has that tone. Calling you a Kos diarist is unfair, but in a war where morale is difficult enough as it is, your site erodes it vastly more for me than any hardcore lefty site precisely because you did and do have credibility on the issue. It is painful to read your blog now and some people just can’t handle it. It is difficult for me.
I still support the Iraq war strongly. I still think it was completely the right thing to do, but I am beginning to realize that democracy in the middle east may be a necessary condition, but it is hardly sufficient. The London murderers grew up in a democracy. It did not seem to have helped. This problem is vastly more dire than I had hoped, and the neo-con strategy of transforming the middle east, which I agreed with before, may not work.”

A round-up of responses to the Hitch-Galloway debate.

“INSANE”: That’s how Catholic conservative Amy Wellborn describes the apparent new policy of the Catholic church to ban even celibate homosexual priests committed to the magisterium. I should say that her characterization of me is off-base. I do indeed dissent from Humanae Vitae and do not believe that all sex should be procreative in intent or potential. But I’m not a priest; and I’ve never said or argued that gay priests shouldn’t live by exactly the same standards as straight ones, i.e. celibacy; and I’ve never argued, for that matter, that my own beliefs about sexuality as a whole are compatible with the Church’s (I am joined in that by the vast majority of contraceptive-using heterosexual Catholics). The issue of celibacy itself – for gay and straight priests alike – is a separate matter to be discussed on another occasion. But I’m heartened by Amy’s view that the policy of “not-even-celibate-gays” is so extreme and so confused in its theology that it cannot be pursued. But we’ll see. Where I differ from Wellborn is her support for banning priests who self-identify as gay, rather than those merely privately tormented by same-sex desire. I think part of the problem that led to the hideous “acting out” of some emotionally stunted priests has been exactly the deep gay self-hatred among some gay priests, inculcated by the Church. So let’s be consistent here: If being gay is no sin, then there’s no sin in being open about it. In fact, if the Church is serious about urging gay men and women to be celibate even in their lay lives, shouldn’t celibate openly gay priests be key leaders of this effort? If more were open about both their sexual orientation and their commitment to celibacy, it seems to me it would be healthier for them and the church. And priests also emerge from the society they live in. The next generation will not grow up with the same prejudices about homosexuality that my generation did; and “gay culture,” if it exists as such, will change into something far more complex as well. Self-identifying as gay in a generation’s time will be no more dispositive about someone than saying you’re Latino or black; it’s a standard that won’t last five years, let alone five decades. The church should concentrate on forbidding sexual abuse, not stigmatizing sexual orientation. It’s an actual response to an actual problem – not scapegoating; and it’s the Catholic thing to do.

“If you read [Osama bin Laden] in his own words, he sounds like somebody who would be a very high-minded and welcome voice in global politics,” – Duke religion professor, Bruce Lawrence, on his new collection of bin Laden’s speeches and writing.

I think it’s pretty clear that’s the Bush administration’s fundamental response to Katrina. The key test of their responsibility will be if they cut spending elsewhere to come up with $200 billion. But they won’t. Guns and butter – borrowed from us, the next generation and the Chinese government. I really didn’t believe that the president would actually spend more of other people’s money in his second term than in the first. But he looks set to pull it off. Peggy Noonan says we need a debate about conservatism. Here’s a starter: fiscal conservatism as we have known it is over. No liberal Democrat would ever have managed to spend as much and as incompetently as this administration. Even in opposition, the GOP would have mounted a defense of the country’s fiscal standing against such reckless big government liberalism. But in power, the only difference between the GOP and, say, a Ted Kennedy administration is that the Republican free spending goes to different interest groups, has no restraint or domestic opposition, and rests on borrowing rather than taxing. Yes, Katrina reconstruction is inevitable and important. But $200 billion doesn’t grow on trees. Where is it going to come from? Part of the point of fiscal responsiblity, after all, is that disasters do happen and the government should have fiscal lee-way to respond to them. But we have no lee-way at all, thanks to this president and his party. Tonight, the president will try and rescue himself politically by spending money he doesn’t have. As Margaret Thatcher once remarked, the only thing socialists are good at is spending other people’s money. That’s the one thing this president has known how to do – whether it was daddy’s money or yours.

“On one hand I couldn’t give a shit about Germany and on the other I’m full of rage … The general atmosphere of depression makes me furious, the utter idleness, this uptight existence. It seems to me that the whole of Germany is sitting on the toilet, groaning. You know exactly what has to happen for things to get going again but the German sits there cursing that there’s no toilet paper left and that’s why he can’t do it. That’s Germany.” – German theater director, Christoph Schlingensief, in the Guardian today.

There’s a plan to put together a film trilogy in honor of the Dutch film director who was murdered by an Islamo-fascist.

We now have two state legislatures backing marriage rights for gay couples. Since the advent of marriages for gays in Massachusetts, public opinion has swung dramatically in favor of them. Why? The reality is that this is a sane, modest, conservative, practical reform – and when you actually see couples committing to one another and taking responsibility for each other, very few are dismayed. I’m waiting for the reaction from the theocon right. They have always framed their arguments around judicial tyranny. Now, they have democratically elected majorities and states’ rights to fight against. In Massachusetts, the vote to abandon the constitutional amendment banning marriage was a whopping 157 to 39. What’s their argument now?

The two keep getting closer. Check out this and this.

EMAIL OF THE DAY II: “‘Andrew Sullivan is completing his transformation into a Kos Diarist.’ Don’t you understand yet? You are either ‘with’ them or ‘against’ them! I understood perfectly well from the outset that all you were trying to do was show that the triumphalism of the Bush apologists (including Reynolds) was, shall we say, er… premature. Instapundit has been quoting and linking to triumphalist anecdotes about Iraq for the past 2-1/2 years, wholly unfazed by the fact that the news headlines give the lie to it just about every other day. Only unswervingly partisan hit-men seeking to score rhetorical points would have interpreted what you wrote the way Reynolds and his correspondents did. This is another example of the way your friend has lowered the level of debate. You should not have apologized.”