Category: Old Dish

The presidential medal of freedom goes to George “Slam Dunk” Tenet, Tommy “We Have Enough Troops” Franks, and Paul “Disband the Iraqi Army” Bremer. It’s one thing never to punish error, but to reward it so magnificently! Steve Clemons vents here.

“Hoyt began moving his lips as if he were trying to suck the ice cream off the top of a cone without using his teeth … Slither slither slither slither went the tongue, but the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns – oh, God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest – no, the hand was cupping her entire right – Now!” – the winning entry in this year’s “Bad Sex” writing award, given by London’s Literary Review. It’s Tom Wolfe, from his new novel.

JEFF VERSUS JUAN: It’s a beaut.

The striking thing about this piece of video propaganda for the insurgency in Iraq is how Western-left it appears. From the British accent narrating the talking points to the weird challenge to “use the euro!”, it’s an interesting mesh of the anti-globalist, anti-American ideology in Europe and the murderous, Jihadist creed. The merger of the anti-globalist left and the anti-Semitic Jihadist right was always possible. Maybe this tape is evidence of its progress.

MCCAIN AND RUMMY: He’s right, of course. The sheer cumulation of incompetence, arrogance and denial make our current defense secretary a serious and continuing liability in the war on terror. The trouble is that Rumsfeld’s critical errors – misrreading pre-war intelligence, needlessly alienating allies, under-manning the occupation, the loosening of ethical restraints that led to Abu Ghraib, leaving troops in the theater without adequate armor, and on and on – are inextricable from the president’s own policy decisions. So Rummy stays.

“For four years it’s been one big all-you-can-eat buffet for the corporations, and now they’re coming back for more. Go ahead, you marvelous bastards! Rip out all the trees, pave the beaches, build 12-lane freeways, plunder the treasury, destroy our future. Cook the books, rig elections, pack the courts, hand the regulatory agencies over to fascist maniacs. Invade more countries, declare code red, invoke martial law, and keep going until your oil-sucking exploits kick off a nuclear exchange.” – Dean Opperman, Pasadena Weekly. The whole article is pretty hard to beat.

WHY MARRIAGE MATTERS: Married men are healthier:

The team, from Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, said the findings strengthened previous research suggesting that marriage improved people’s quality of life. A recent study concluded that single men were at greater risk of dying than smokers. Researchers said that singletons tended to drink more because they socialised more. They also worked longer because they had no partner to make time for and often missed meals. Dr Patricia Mona Eng said that increased alcohol consumption among widowed and divorced men could be linked to the stress of being alone.

That goes for gay men as well. The social pressures designed to keep them single and without family also makes them more liable to shorter, less healthy lives. So why do we have public policy that discourages health and encourages social isolation among a minority of Americans? Is the argument really that gay male health actually detracts from straight male health? How exactly?

More irreverent Catholic calendars for the new year.

NYT’S “HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT”: Not in the newsroom, but at the Edison, New Jersey, printing plant. Money quote:

The Jewish plaintiff is Harvey Alpert, a 53-year-old resident of Marlboro, N.J., who began working at the Edison plant as a chauffeur in 1977 and is now a floorman. The complaint alleges that, like the other men bringing the suit, Alpert was “subjected to very offensive epithets” that included being addressed by a colleague as “a (expletive) fat Jew Bastard.” The same colleague is alleged to have said “I hate that Jew bastard. I want to kill him.”… The other complainants, two Latinos and six African-Americans, also alleged that fellow employees addressed them as “nigger,” “coon,” and “spook.” “This stuff is highly pervasive and of long standing in the sewer where these people have been working,” said one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, Jeffrey Bernbach of White Plains, N.Y., in an interview with New Jersey Jewish News. “The New York Times has long been aware of it and has done nothing to clean it up.”

I have no idea what truth there is behind these claims, but the suit is continuing.

CPAP UPDATE: I have a little piece in this week’s Time special on sleep about my apnea diagnosis and treatment. But there have been some subsequent developments. In general, I haven’t had the amazing burst of energy I had after my night in the hospital. Maybe the psychosomatic explanation holds up. But my sleep has been better; and longer; and deeper. I’m told it takes time to feel the cumulative effects; I do feel more rested; and sleeping itself has been much easier than I anticipated. But one side-effect has surprised me. It probably shouldn’t have. It makes sense, after all. I’ll give you a subtle hint: when you have air being pumped into you with a face mask for eight hours a night, and when there’s nowhere for it to escape, except some small holes in the top of the mask, then the air finds other outlets. So now, I officially have hot air coming out of both ends. The boyfriend has to choose between being deafened or fumigated. But my sleep is heavenly.

“For the last hour or so I’ve been blogging from the tire place. Found a flat tire on the Passat, pumped it up with a hand pump (no small job) and drove it over to get it fixed. There’s no wifi here, but the Verizon wireless card has worked great, letting me post to the blog and do research for a law review article I’m finishing up.” – Glenn Reynolds. I should add I don’t intend this in any way as negative. Glenn is a blog-hero. But he’s as funny sometimes when he doesn’t intend to be as when he does. The blog-widow would observe that this is just as true of me.

It’s a fight.

The Vatican is hawking a calendar featuring clerical hotties. I kid you not. Here are a few pics. (Clarification: this isn’t an official Vatican calendar. It’s just sold in Vatican gift-shops. And elsewhere.)

That should have been the Fort-Worth Star-Telegram.

We need to add more troops to our volunteer military. When you’re asking seventy-year-olds to serve, something is surely awry.

THE MICHAEL MOORE PROBLEM: Peter Beinart’s essay keeps getting attention, but I’m a little tired of these jaded conservatives predicting complete failure for the project of injecting a national security spine into the Democratic party. why is failure inevitable? I agree with Peter that abandoning liberalism’s inclusive social policy would be counter-productive. It’s one area where history is obviously on the Democrats’ side. A strong Democratic leader who took on the Michael Moores of the movement, while retaining the Democrats’ appeal to the excluded and marginalized, would do extremely well. Remember one Tony Blair, who took a far more ruined party and turned it into the natural party of government in a few years? And the Republicans – as fractious as they are currently hubristic – will soon over-reach. Beinart’s right. He just needs a leader. Right now, I see none. But no one ever does ahead of time, do they?

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Your recent piece on the high rate of divorce in supposedly “family values” red states missed an important point, of which I was reminded by today’s blog item on teen marriages. I’ve lived in the South for 30 years. Given the heavy religiosity in this part of the country, there’s a cultural emphasis on “no sex without marriage.” If you teach your kids to believe in Hell, and then teach them that they’re headed there if they engage in sex without being married, you reduce marriage to not a well-considered bond between two adults, but a license for two scared kids to screw. Of course, any marriage entered into out of fear of the devil or of social condemnation typically lasts until the participants find out there’s a lot more to life than fucking. Add to that the societal attitude that two kids getting married is a cause for celebration, rather than a life-ruining tragedy, and Christian fundamentalism pretty well foreordains the red states’ high divorce rates. It’s amazing they’re not higher.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “It’s like when the hijackers took over those four planes on Sept. 11 and took people to a place where they didn’t want to go. I think a lot of people feel that liberals have taken our country somewhere we don’t want to go. I think a lot more people realize this is our country and we’re going to take it back.” – Missouri State Representative Cynthia Davis, New York Times, today, comparing “liberals” to al Qaeda terrorists. Sean Hannity must be proud.