Category: Old Dish

“I could not help but think about the hurt and fear that would cause a group of men to commit suicide by flying planes into the World Trade Center buildings. Anger as a byproduct of hurt and fear was not a foreign concept to me.” – Jayson Blair, identifying with the mass-murderers of 9/11 on the day it happened, in his new book, “Burning Down My Masters’ House.”

FIXING FAT: “I don’t want the government telling me what to eat either. But I do think there’s one thing the government ought to do in this area, and that is to eliminate farm subsidies. Farm subsidies lower the price of corn, raise the price of sugar, and thus encourage the overproduction of corn sweeteners and processed corn which results in the paradox that it is far cheaper to eat high calorie junk food than it is to eat fresh food.
There are all sorts of other good free market reasons for the government to eliminate farm subsidies, not to mention the distributionalist concern that most of their benefits accrue to very wealthy corporations. But if processed corn were sold at its fair market value, instead of at the subsidized price, and if we didn’t have such a glut of corn, maybe the cost of “super-sizing” could go up a little bit, and some people might decide to go on a diet. Since there are plenty of reasons to eliminate farm subsidies anyway, it’s certainly worth a try.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

DAN GETS MARRIED: To a lesbian co-worker! Now this is an interesting idea for civil disobedience. Leave it to my friend Dan Savage to figure it out:

Amy Jenniges lives with her girlfriend, Sonia, and I live with my boyfriend, Terry. Last Friday I accompanied Amy and Sonia to room 403, the licensing division, at the King County Administration Building. When Amy and Sonia asked the clerk for a marriage license, the clerk turned white. You could see, “Oh my God, the gay activists are here!” running through her head. County clerks in the marriage license office had been warned to expect gay couples sooner or later, but I guess this particular clerk didn’t expect us to show up five minutes before closing on Friday.
The clerk called over her manager, a nice older white man, who explained that Amy and Sonia couldn’t have a marriage license. So I asked if Amy and I could have one–even though I’m gay and live with my boyfriend, and Amy’s a lesbian and lives with her girlfriend. We emphasized to the clerk and her manager that Amy and I don’t live together, we don’t love each other, we don’t plan to have kids together, and we’re going to go on living and sleeping with our same-sex partners after we get married. So could we still get a marriage license?
“Sure,” the license-department manager said, “If you’ve got $54, you can have a marriage license.” … It’s not the marriage license I’d like to have, of course. But, still, let me count my blessings: I have a 10-year relationship (but not the marriage license), a house (but not the marriage license), a kid (but not the marriage license), and my boyfriend’s credit-card bills (but not the marriage license). I don’t know what a guy has to do around here to get the marriage license. But I guess it’s some consolation that I can get a meaningless one anytime I like, just so long as I bring along a woman I don’t love and my $54.

Now what would the religious right say about that?

Curiouser and curiouser. Here’s a 1998 deposition from the alleged spy for Iraq, Susan Lindauer, in which she claims that it was Syria and not Libya that was responsible for the Pan Am 103 bombing. Even weirder, a Dan Pipes outfit published the deposition.

Those guys won deserved kudos for their coverage of the Boston arch-diocese’s treatment of child abuse charges. How about looking into the annulment issue? One Bay State reader suggests the following:

I think if someone were to look at the annulments granted in Boston and cross-tabulate that data against contributions across the range of Catholic Charities (to say nothing of the normal payola, which is obviously unaccounted), that someone would have the beginnings of a very good story.
The going rate, as I remember it, was roughly $40K-50K for an annulment.

I wonder how much Kerry paid for his. Why doesn’t someone ask him?

A Congressional aide is arrested for spying for Iraq before the liberation.

It’s personal. And Soros has an elaborate theory to justify his campaign to bring down this president.

“Before leaving the question of divorce, I should like to distinguish two things which are very often confused. The Christian conception of marriage is one; the other is the quite different question — how far Christians, if they are voters or members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for everyone. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.” – C.S. Lewis, from “Mere Christianity.” What an extraordinary contrast to the current religious right.

It won’t happen, largely because, er, McCain is a Republican, he would outshine Kerry anywhere he went, and, in the good senator’s own words, “It’s impossible to imagine the Democratic Party seeking a pro-life, free-trading, non-protectionist, deficit hawk.” But at the same time, you can see why it’s tempting. McCain represents the kind of Republicanism that independents admire and support: fiscally conservative, strong in defense, and yet hostile to the sectarianism of the religious right. But that Republicanism was defeated in 2000 in South Carolina, when George W. Bush unleashed the attack-dogs of the far right. Many of us hoped that Bush would integrate McCainism into the party. He hasn’t. Instead, he has entrenched the fanatics who defeated McCain in the primaries. So the McCain fantasy endures. A Kerry-McCain ticket would steady the nerves of those who worry about Kerry’s defense posture, and McCain could be deputed in office to wrestle with some of the more populist stands he and Kerry support: demonizing the drug companies, for example, or campaign finance reform. can you imagine a McCain-Cheney debate? Priceless. McCain is also a little like Max Cleland, a war hero savaged by the Bush machine. he has every reason to want a little revenge. and it’s a dish always best served really, really cold.

A SAUDI THAW? More evidence of some positive developments in the Arab-Muslim world after the liberation of Iraq.

JAYSON BLAIR GOES FOR IT: So what does Blair do now? What would you do if you wanted the purest, darkest revenge against the newspaper that eventually rejected you? You’d go on Bill O’Reilly and you would describe the New York Times as a den of leftist, ideological conformity in which any dissent from left-liberalism is tantamount to career suicide. You’d confirm the most paranoid critic’s view that the NYT is as objective as a MoveOn ad. Watching the spectacle last night had my jaw drop close to the floor. Can we say chutzpah! Now, as it happens, of course, Blair may have a point. (Although he greatly exaggerates.) But the fact is: Blair would say anything and indeed has said anything to get attention. His credibility on this issue is no different than his credibility on any issue. Sorry, Bill. A liar’s a liar. Even when they might inadvertently stumble onto something close to the truth.

TEN PERCENT: That’s the percentage of Catholic marriages that end in an annulment. At least according to this source. And here are some of the reasons allowed for divorce, I mean, annulment. Here’s another amazing statistic: “American Catholics make up 5% of the world’s Catholic population, but they get 80% of the Catholic world’s annulments.” And then here’s something that Stanley Kurtz should consider:

In the early 1960s, about 300 declarations of nullity came from the United States each year; today that annual figure has grown to over 60,000. By any measure, that is a staggering increase.

I wonder if Kurtz will write an essay blaming the Catholic church for the decline in marriage in America, as he has blamed gays for it in Scandinavia. This one institution has presided over an exponential increase in de facto divorces in the U.S. in the last forty years. And getting an annulment really isn’t that hard: 90 percent of applications for annulments are granted. Maybe Kerry didn’t need any extra influence at all! It’s the Catholic church that has opened the door wide to the decline of religious marriage in America. So where’s National Review on this one? 60,000 Catholic annulments for straights a year, and NRO devotes all its energies to gays? Frankly, I do not believe that annulment is such an awful thing. It may be humane in many cases. But it’s important to note that even the Catholic church, which claims to have absolute standards on questions such as marriage, makes exceptions to its rules for the human beings it ministers to. But only if they’re straight.

“JOHN PILGER: Tony, do tell me – how do you mount a peaceful resistance to an invading force, which Human Rights Watch this week described as out of control, as rapacious, which has bought a kind of murderous street fighting, which is – and I’ve just said – has killed, you know, in their ‘Shock and Awe’, they killed up to 55,000 people. Robert Fisk, the independent correspondent, reckons that something like between 500 and 1,000 Iraqis are killed indirectly as a result of the American presence every week in that country.
Now, how do you say they should all sit down and say to the Americans: “You must go.” “It should be a peaceful resistance.” There are a lot of people actually opposing it peacefully and, if it was reported…
You know, I follow the reports of a number of human rights observers in Baghdad. There’s an enormous amount of peaceful resistance but on the other side of the resistance – and it’s one resistance – there is also fire being fought with fire. I don’t think one has to approve that. In fact, you can’t approve, under any circumstances, in my opinion, the killing of innocent people. But you have to understand why it happens. In the same way that we have to understand why September 11 happened.
TONY JONES: Can you approve in that context the killing of American, British or Australian troops who are in the occupying forces?
JOHN PILGER: Well yes, they’re legitimate targets. They’re illegally occupying a country. And I would have thought from an Iraqi’s point of view they are legitimate targets, they’d have to be, sure.
TONY JONES: So Australian troops you would regard in Iraq as legitimate targets?
JOHN PILGER: Excuse me but, really, that’s an unbecoming question.” – from an interview with ABC News in Australia. (Hat tip: Tim Blair.)

OUTING THE ENEMY: Maine’s Christian Civic League is planning to “out” lawmakers and political leaders in the state after the league failed to pass a constitutional amendment to ban civil marriage for gays. Money quote from a recent email from a League leader:

Since this matter of “sexual orientation” is of such fundamental importance that we must turn civilization on its head to accommodate it, we feel duty-bound to help you gain a better understanding.
We will therefore be writing about state leaders in coming months regarding their “sexual orientation.” We are, of course, most interested in the leaders among us who want to overturn marriage, eliminate the mother/father family as the ideal, etc. The list is long, so we won’t lack for material.
If you can help us, please do. E-mail us tips, rumors, speculation and facts. The more information we have the better. We will respect and honor confidentiality. Help the League stand for righteousness.

That’s right: righteousness.

WOLCOTT ON BLOGS: The dyspeptic critic, Jim Wolcott, celebrates blogs in the current Vanity Fair. Since it’s Vanity Fair, it must include the usual smears against anyone not in the anti-war left. Wolcott duly obliges. Jeff Jarvis has the goods.

Lawrence Kaplan dissects the idiocies of the Hollywood airhead.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: From a priest on the whole question of annulments:

I think you’ve brought pre-Conciliar vestiges of the conception of annulment into your description here– perhaps the sacramental theology that says some sort of “magic moment” either takes place, or doesn’t, in the celebration of a sacrament. The Church (today) would never, never say, nor in its teaching imply, that the marriage never “took place.” It says that the parties, however well-intentioned, had some defect in their commitment that did not come to light until after the sacrament was celebrated. In other words, the sacrament itself has gradual effects that take hold over time. In the case of an annulled marriage, the fullness of the sacrament’s grace cannot be realized or (better) accepted because of some serious obstacle that, for whatever reason, the spouses did not discover in their sacramental preparation. Along these lines, it is interesting to note that the sacrament of marriage is conferred on the couple not by the presiding minister (though a priestly/diaconal witness is canonically mandated), but by the couple itself. Actually, I find the Church’s teaching on annullments to be one of the more humane aspects of its canon law. Of course, it is subject to abuses, is easily misunderstood (because of the changes involved in Vatican II sacramental theology), and, sometimes, skewed by a stereotypical understanding of Church authority.

So how does it work when one of the parties adamantly refuses to recognize it?

I just observed Jayson Blair casting aspersions on the ethics of Slate’s Jack Shafer and of the New York Times for assigning Shafer a review of Blair’s book. Blair was on Larry King. Yes, Blair is criticizing other people’s ethics. He has the same syndrome as Stephen Glass. Saying you’re sorry does not mean you’re sorry, let alone taking responsibility. He hasn’t apologized to a single person he plagiarized; he hasn’t sent written apologies to his superiors. He is even claiming that he was sexually abused as a child but won’t name the perpetrator! Could that perpetrator still be abusing children? Has that occurred to Blair? Or is that made up as well? And toward the end of the fawning interview, Blair even tried to become a poster-child for mental health awareness. Give me a break. This charlatan is making money from this exercise in sociopathology. And the rest of the media – including Larry King – are helping him.