Category: Old Dish

“I think it’s also important for the president to lay out a timetable as to how long they will be involved and when they will be withdrawn.” – Governor George W. Bush, June 5, 1999, on the troops deployed to Kosovo under president Clinton. I should say I disagreed with Bush then and I disagree with his critics on a timetable now. Kosovo worked because of military force and perseverance. For all our mistakes, perseverance in Iraq – and no timetable for withdrawal – is our only responsible option now. I just hope the president tonight outlines a credible strategy for victory; and begins to re-shuffle the team that brought us into the current mess.

Here’s a story on the full context of those hideous Phelps protesters at a military funeral. The fallen hero wasn’t gay; but some on the far religious right believe that 9/11 was a legitimate rebuke to America’s toleration of homosexuality; and so they picket these funerals out of some kind of deranged fanaticism. I like this detail, though:

On the corner of a narrow street lined with Colonial-era buildings, the Kansas contingent tried shouting its anti-homosexual message at mourners who overflowed from the church. But every time demonstrators spoke out, the 14-man Boston Police Department bagpipe band broke into thunderous sound. “I thought that was cool,” said Day Newburg, 34, who stood outside the church with her husband, mother-in-law and 2-year-old daughter. “Those bagpipers drowned them right out.”

Best use of public funds in a long time. Small factoid: Phelps is a Democrat. But his loyalties are to the fringes of the religious right.

Hitch delivers a spot-on retort to those who claim or seem to claim that those of us who are not actually in uniform or who do not have sons to send into battle are somehow illegitimate as commentators or supporters or critics of the effort. The whole ploy is ludicrous. We have a volunteer army, that is directed, as it should be, by civilians. The military is answerable to people who have no military experience, because it is answerable – and should be accountable – to a civilian democracy. This isn’t Burma or Cuba. The rest is cheap shots.

An emailer with even more time to waste than the rest of us explains the flash mind-reader:

No matter which two-digit number you pick, adding the digits and subtracting from the original number will result in a factor of 9: 81, 72, 63, 54, 45, 36, 27, 18, or 9. (Go ahead and pick any two-digit number – it’s just one of those neat mathematical factoids.)
Go to the site and look at the symbols next to the numbers I’ve listed above – they’re all the same. The smart part about the flash mind reader, however, is that the symbols change every time you click “try again.” Again, those numbers listed above will always have the same symbol next to them, although the symbols will change from attempt to attempt.
In short – yes, it’s a huge waste of time, but at least now you aren’t one of those people clicking and clicking and clicking, wondering how a computer can read your mind.

Spoiler.

Santorum and Durbin co-sponsor a bill – to protect animal welfare. Good for both of them.

I don’t agree with everything in this op-ed (I still believe the Iraq war was worth fighting and is still eminently worth winning), but I share his despair on fiscal and moral matters.

It worked for me. Major time-waster, though.

A classic English obit of a classically English fellow, William Donaldson, a sexual compulsive who, under the pseudonym, Henry Root, wrote famous people hilarious letters of sympathy, reproof and sheer right-wing nuttiness, many of which were politely responded to. Root’s persona was a kind of John-Derbyshire-meets-Hugh-Hefner. He loved twitting the self-righteous:

He had an unerring eye for the approach which would rankle most with his recipients. Writing to Harriet Harman, then of “The National Council for so-called Civil Liberties”, he began: “I saw you on television the other night… Why should an attractive lass like you want to confuse her pretty little head with complicated matters of politics, jurisprudence, sociology and the so-called rights of man? Leave such considerations to us men, that’s my advice to you. A pretty girl like you should have settled down by now with a husband and a couple of kiddies.” If she must work, he continued, she should consider a career such as “that of model, actress, ballroom dancing instructor or newsreader”, before enclosing a pound for her to buy a pretty dress and urging the future MP to get in touch with “my friend Lord Delfont”.

No evidence of a reply. He was also the producer of the first British concert given by Bob Dylan. Some might brag about such hipness, long before Dylan was famous. Not Donaldson: “He [Dylan] was sitting in my office one day when I came back from lunch. I couldn’t get rid of the fucker.”

“Senator Santorum proposes an interesting hypothesis regarding the sexual abuse of children by Roman Cathoic clergy based on his experience in the USA. I live in Ireland where we have had an equally serious problem, but in a society which was, until very recently, Roman Catholic in everyway the Senator could wish for. Yet the sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy was rampant here during the period when Catholic moral teaching was universally accepted by the general population, and enforced by the state through its civil and criminal law. When I moved to the Republic of Ireland in 1990 contraceptives were illegal – with the exception of condoms, these being available to married couples at the discretion of their family doctors. Girls who had babies out of wedlock were commonly incarcerated in Church-run ‘Magdalen Laundries’ for the rest of their lives, and their children adopted or kept in children’s homes were they were easy prey for pedophile priests. Homosexuality was so thoroughly driven underground that I know people my age (now 41) that had never heard of it, and the Irish language had no word for it. 99% of schools were Catholic, 90% of the population were weekly mass goers and monthly confession was the norm for the majority. Divorce was banned by the constitution. There was no “plague of cultural liberalism”; there was no liberalism at all! It was almost a perfect Catholic State.

Yet the physical and sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy was rampant. Indeed it has been the exposure of these crimes that has revolutionized Irish society in the course of 10 years. In the past 10 years the Catholic Church’s standing in Ireland has totally collapsed. Now the state-run TV service carries adverts encouraging contraception. Homosexuality is now legal, gay couples are common and unremarkable, the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) is a separated man who lives with a woman he is not married to. This is not remarkable to anyone. Mass attendance though still high by international standards, has plummeted, and there aren’t enough seminarians in the country to fill a booth in my local ‘Eddie Rocket’s’ diner. Irish society has never been so open, liberal, pluralistic, and so safe for our children. Senator Rick Santorum could not be more wrong. Liberalism has been good for Ireland culturally and economically, our children are well educated, confident and much much less likely to suffer sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic priests.”

Larry David can’t sleep. warning: the monologue makes Mickey Kaus sound serene.