Category: Old Dish

“If Kerry had won, the Bush Bunch and the Congressional Republicans would have hung everything they posiibly could on him. Not that I’d be particularly sorry to see Kerry clobbered like that, but I can quite affirm that one of my reasons for finally deciding to vote for Bush was that, if the chickens did indeed come home to roost, they’d land squarely in his lap. And they are. ‘And that’s a good thing.'”

That email, by the way, was from John Francis Lehman (not the famous one). His blog is well worth checking out.

“If you want to talk irony: On the Washington Monthly website, there’s a list of “News and Opinion from our Contributing Editors” along the lefthand column. The second one down is from Joseph Nocera: “Trying to Wean Internet Users From Free,” and it’s dated 11/14/05. Hmmmm…. that sounds like an interesting enough article. Let’s see how that’s going to work, or at least what Joe’s ideas are.

THE ARTICLE IS BEHIND THE TIMES SELECT FIREWALL.

Now that’s funny.”

“Please keep hammering away on the torture/secret detention issues. Going into Iraq for slightly the wrong reason at slightly the wrong time in slightly the wrong way is unfortunate but does not have the potential to fundamentally harm our republic. Institutionalized torture, extra-judicial murder and secret detentions do. Everyone on the right needs to understand the truth of what has been done in all our names.”

I linked to their devastating interview with Noam Chomsky. It behooves me to link to their correction.

Among the best news on HIV lately is the drop in infection rates among African-Americans. Much of the drop can be attributed to needle-exchange programs. The response from the religious right? Here’s the Family Research Council: “The AIDS virus is spread through voluntary behavior. An unlimited supply of needles will not alter behavior patterns of irresponsible and often psychotic addicts.” Now, there’s the spirit of the Gospels. How many lives would have been lengthened and saved if these needle exchange policies had been put in place years ago? How much African-American health is worth FRC’s version of “morality”?

I missed this a couple of days ago. My bad. It’s fair, excellent, and thereby all the more brutal.

We have a crisis of confidence in the war. Read Congressman Murtha’s speech. (Hat tip: Rod.) He’s no MoveOn lefty. The president and vice-president are fighting back on the issue of their alleged deception before the war. As I have written here, I believe that the WMD intelligence fiasco was an honest and forgivable mistake, not a conspiracy or pre-meditated deception. The worst the administration was guilty of was occasional rhetorical excess in a very emotional period. But I do believe that the failure to prepare for the post-invasion phase, the far-too-late acknowledgment of the insurgency, the amateurism and pig-headedness of the early occupation, and the sanctioning of torture: all these required even those of us who believed in the war to call the administration on its incompetence and arrogance. What we need now is a very clear indication that our effort to train the Iraqi military is progressing, that the troops are well-equipped and cared for and that the political process isn’t degenerating into sectarianism. The fact that Bush’s and Cheney’s recent fight-back speeches were not about these vital matters is not a sign of their regaining strength. it’s a sign of their continuing and deepening vulnerability.

Josh Marshall cites an important nuance.

Bruce Bawer on what motivates many of Europe’s Muslim immigrants:

A [French] government report leaked last March depicted an increasingly two-track educational system: More and more Muslim students refuse to sing, dance, participate in sports, sketch a face, or play an instrument. They won’t draw a right angle (it looks like part of the Christian cross). They won’t read Voltaire and Rousseau (too antireligion), Cyrano de Bergerac (too racy), Madame Bovary (too pro-women), or Chrétien de Troyes (too chrétien). One school has separate toilets for “Muslims” and “Frenchmen”; another obeyed a Muslim leader’s call for separate locker rooms because “the circumcised should not have to undress alongside the impure.”

Many Muslims, wanting to enjoy Western prosperity but repelled by Western ways, travel regularly back to their homelands. From Oslo, where I live, there are more direct flights every week to Islamabad than to the US. A recent Norwegian report noted that among young Norwegians of Pakistani descent, family honor depends largely on “not being perceived as Norwegian – as integrated.”

This is not a case simply of an ethnic minority denied integration; it’s a case of a religious minority refusing integration, indeed attacking and denying the very values of secularism and liberalism upon which the West rests.

“Any deep-rooted prejudice against others, such as homophobia or misogyny, would be grounds for rejecting a candidate for the priesthood, but not their sexual orientation.” – Timothy Radcliffe, OP, Master, Dominican Order, 1992-2001, Blackfriars, Oxford. It’s great to see the former leader of the friary where I once attended mass standing up against bigotry in the Church.