Category: Old Dish

“I couldn’t agree more with your comment on ‘secularism gone nuts,’ and hope nobody complains about my Virginia license plate. It reads 16 EZK 49 for the Biblical definition of the sin of sodomy (Ezekiel chapter 16, verse 49): “Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.” Who knew so many Republicans are sodomites??”

As you know, I’m a secularist and believe religion is best kept to the private sphere. But this kind of suppression of religious belief is truly noxious, and merely gives the religious right more grist for paranoia.

LIBERTY BEFORE DEMOCRACY? A tweaking of the Bush doctrine.

CAVUTO: Not only knee-pads but several contributions to the Bush campaign, up to $2000 in 2002. Here, here, and here. Hey: fair and balanced.

LOWER OFFICER STANDARDS: The military, facing a recruitment crisis, is lowering standards for officers, allowing people who have committed minor crimes. Obvious commentary from a retired army officer here.

THE ANSWER, MY FRIEND: Thanks for all your theories about the military pee blowing in the wind. Just to recap, here’s the official description of what happened:

The guard had left his observation area post and went outside to urinate. He urinated near an air vent and the wind blew his urine through the vent into the block. The Sergeant of the Guard (SOG) responded and immediately relieved the guard. The SOG ensured the detainee received a fresh uniform and a new Koran. The Joint Detention Operations Group (JDOG) 2 commander reprimanded the guard and assigned him to gate guard duty where he had no contact with detainees for the remainder of his assignment at JTF-GTMO.

Here’s a useful picture of what we might be dealing with. A little pee splatter is not uncommon. But there are many places to take leaks. I’ve taken advantage of trees, bushes, dark urban corners, alleys, and all sorts of places in my time. But I tend not to pee near an air-vent that leads directly into a someone’s living quarters. I don’t scout around for a basement apartment, look for an airvent and pee just nearby. Even if I did, and some pee drifted in the wind into an open air-vent, what are the chances that even a small amount would make it on to an individual inside? If I were a soldier and this was an absurd mistake, I can see being disciplined. But I don’t see why I’d be forbidden access to any detainees for the rest of my time in Gitmo. The obvious truth is that a guard decided to humiliate a Muslim prisoner by pissing on him through an airvent. The military cannot say that because the story would then read: Koran not flushed, but pissed on. So they came up with the magic pee, whose ability to swerve left then right into the designated wind vent rivals the smartest of smart bombs. Our military sure is high-tech these days. And no, this isn’t a huge deal. It’s just a petty lie that makes us suspect bigger ones.

An emailer informs me:

Your reference to Jesus’ closes friend as a ‘former prostitute’ I assume is Mary Magdalene. Please know there is nothing to suggest she was a prostitute. Even the Vatican, many years ago, acknowledged the mistake of previous teaching. The assumption of sexual sin when women are described in the Bible as sinners is evidence of the patriarchy that continues today. I’ve heard it preached about the woman at the well, the woman who anointed Jesus and Mary Magdalene, all being guilty of sexual sin or being prostitutes. There are no facts in evidence to support that. The woman at the well, having five husbands, could just as easily been her first four died and she was handed off to brothers as property – the custom in those days. There have been other suggestions that the five husbands stood for five different iterations of God in Samaritan culture…etc. In future writings when you mention Mary Magdalene, don’t fall into the trap of a centuries old mistake. Give her a break. She’s had the worst press of anyone in the Bible.

Point taken.

I was onto something.

Neil Cavuto seems to have conducted this interview with knee-pads on. But my favorite piece of slobbering sycophancy is the following attempt to get at why the president’s campaign for social security reform has not won much public support. Over to the man who makes Larry King look like an interrogator at Bagram:

CAVUTO: But in the meantime, the news channels then hear what you’re saying, and then later on, we have this Michael Jackson update. I mean, his trial and his ongoing saga has gripped the nation for the past four-and-a-half, five months as you’ve been on this campaign.

CAVUTO: I know this is a little outlandish, Mr. President…

BUSH: No, that’s all right, Neil.

CAVUTO: Do you think that the focus on Michael Jackson has hurt you?

Good grief.

The big downside of the Democrats’ winning the next presidential election is that they will have to raise taxes. A lot. Matt Yglesias is honest enough to say he has no idea how they’re going to get away with it.

It takes another blow from the do-gooders.

PISSING IN THE WIND: Maybe I should get this off my chest. I don’t believe the military’s account of how a Koran got splattered by a guard’s urine. The reason is not that I have completely lost trust in the military’s credibility (although I have a lot less faith than I did a couple of years ago, and that goes for Pat Tilman’s parents as well). It’s that the story, in its face, seems like something obviously made up. We are supposed to believe that a guard was relieving himself outside near the open window of a cell. His pee was allegedly carried by a gust of wind, which somehow managed to guide the pee around and into an open window, where the Koran and a detainee were unfortunately placed. I mean: come off it. They have no latrines? There are ground-level open windows for prisoners? Our military is so high-tech that their pee can now turn corners? Maybe someone out there can help me understand this story better. Have I missed something? Or is this as laughable on its face as it appears to be?

It turns out that the Alger-Hiss-loving lefty, Victor Navasky, has been running the Columbia Journalism Review for a year already! Nick Lemann was instrumental in hiring the almost comically old left dinosaur as a “distinguished journalist” to supervise the publication. It remains, of course, strictly unbiased, if a lot less transparent than, say, blogs. Mediacrity has the details. Now can you imagine the fuss if they had hired Bill Buckley? And kept it on the DL for so long?

You can’t beat Lileks on reviewing the Sith thingy. Money quote:

Re: Naboo Senator gestation periods. Apparently they don’t show for six months, then swell up like infected tonsils in the last week. They’re also able to give birth with their legs clamped together, to judge from the device they clamped over Padme in the sickbay…
Not enough Wookies. And I don’t see them as the kind of guys who’d use a bowcaster, frankly; they seem more like shotgun types. You would not want to fight an army of a pissed off Wookies with shotguns. I bet they drink, too. They’re probably always drunk all the time, which is why their language seems so incoherent; for all we know they’re not saying anything at all, just yelling. Because they’re all hammered.

I say they’re stoned.

Where to start in thinking about the Michael Jackson case? I guess I’d rather not think about it at all. It seems to me we have two reasonable doubts: on the one hand, the characters behind the charges are so sleazy and their stories so easy to pick apart that Jackson should be acquitted; on the other, no grown man in his 40s regularly sleeping with teens can be entirely altruistic. I didn’t sit through the trial and I don’t know which doubt will prevail. And, to be perfectly honest, I just don’t know what I think Jackson might have done to the boys and teens in his care. It’s perfectly possible, of course, that both doubts are correct: that Jackson’s accusers are low-lifes and they are telling the truth. The case leaves me finally with a sense of intense sadness: about how this wreck of a human being, weaned on the poison of fame and money, came to believe that reality was as plastic as his own porcelain skin. And now reality hardens into a verdict.

CONGRATS TO KRISTOF: I’m looking forward to the dinner tonight for the Mike Kelly award given to Nick Kristof for his consistent attempt to bring to light the horror of Darfur and the West’s refusal to do much about it. Kristof’s writing can be a little earnest for my taste at times, but his essential decency and integrity as a writer and human being shine through everything he puts on paper. I’ve known him from a distance ever since we were together at Magdalen, Oxford, at the same time two decades ago; and my admiration has only grown since. Its only shadow is the recognition that this blog hasn’t done as much as it should have to highlight Darfur. I guess I didn’t have much to add to what Nick and others have been saying and urging. But I can still admire. In some small way, I hope the award serves the broader cause; and I’m absolutely sure Mike Kelly would have been a fellow advocate.

PERRY AGAIN: I missed some context about Texas governor Rick Perry’s comment that gay Texan couples who want to form stable relationships should go to another state. He was actually responding to a question about gay war veterans. Insult to injury. What do you call a gay man who risks his life to serve his country? A faggot.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God.” – Abraham Lincoln, Gen. Orders No. 100, art. 15 (1863).

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Speaking to “love’s ragged edge,” our synagogue-run pre-school just elected a gay dad to be president of the parents assistance league (PAL). He’s a former cruise director and has the most amazing money-making ideas. Plus, he gets along with just about everybody. And Thank God for Jeffrey. He has a lot more commitment to helping out at the school than pretty much any other mom, here. Plus, he has a sense of humor–you can roll your eyes at the guy when someone makes a particularly stupid remark, and he gets it. My twins and his older daughter graduated together today (seriously, they have graduation ceremonies for five-year-olds), and it was so sweet to see his mum here from Manchester, an elderly woman who was clearly proud to watch this momentous (to first-time parents) occasion. And you know what I thought? Thank God I live in a world where this woman gets to have grandchildren. Why should she be deprived of the basic human experience just because some on the loony right don’t know when to mind their own business. My parents are delighted by/obsessed with my kids, and this woman, who obviously raised an incredibly decent and charming son, deserves all the naches (yiddish for happiness) she can get. I’m sorry, but the people who would deny others the pleasures/bounty life has to offer are just hateful. They can’t deal with a rapidly changing world (I’m talking technology, science, globalization) and so they’re taking it out on the easiest targets. Imagine if they tried this crap with any other minority group? This is why I could never vote Republican. For the sake of a few votes, the party has not only been coopted by, but is helping bolster a very frightened bunch of losers. Why do you think people in the South didn’t want to give blacks equal rights? Because they were threatened. Well, I think gays just represent everything about the modern world that threatens the socially conservative right.”