Category: The Dish

Bush does the obvious. Kerry gives him the chance. This is politics. Bush has no coherent argument for his party or his record. This is not what this election is or should be about. But Kerry is the gift that keeps on giving, isn’t he? He just rallied the base – the Republican base – more successfully than Karl Rove could. Someone very close to the president once observed that Bush’s signature theme is his luck. Above all, he is lucky in his enemies. And how.

A reader writes:

"When I first found out one of my sons was gay I went immediately to the computer and googled "Catholic" and "homosexuality". It was the first and probably most painful of the paralyzing issues that I felt I needed to tackle in order to arrive at the peaceful acceptance I knew would eventually come. Sadly, I was already reeling from intense anger over the Church’s enormous betrayal of its most vulnerable. The abuse scandal and the horrendous sin of covering it up for decades was for me so painful, so unforgivable, and so destructive that I was unsure I could remain a Catholic even before learning that I was the mother of an "objectively disordered" and "intrinsically evil" son who by loving someone would be committing the unforgivable sin of "deviant love".

I am so glad that you chose to excerpt your answer to CSPAN’s Brian Lamb’s question about remaining in the Catholic Church in spite of its open hostility to Gays and Lesbians. Your dogged commitment to remaining a practicing Catholic at first made me feel so ashamed of my own painful decision to leave the Church. I spent months agonizing and soul searching before deciding that my choice to leave the Church was the right thing for me to do. In spite of the fact that you and I arrived at different decisions, reading your columns and posts helped me to see another side to the story that I was not able to see because of my blinding rage and sorrow. Unfortunately, I just cannot worship in a Church that has deemed one of my children evil, especially when it is coming from a Church that has not only failed to take true responsibility for its own evil. As far as I am concerned, the moral high ground upon which they think they can proclaim gays evil, crumbled decades ago."

One day, the Catholic Church will formally apologize for what it has done to the souls of gay people – and to the children some of its priests have raped and brutalized and traumatized for generations.

(Photo: Gianni Giansanti/Polaris.)

Rick Santorum gets points for honesty. He is opposed to the "pursuit of happiness" proclaimed as one of the three basic principles of the American experiment by the founding fathers. My third chapter, "The Theo-Conservative Project," is a detailed but respectful critique of his book, "It Takes A Family," its confusion about science, and its terrible fear of individual liberty.

You have to wait to the very end of the clip to hear him actually say the words that the "pursuit of happiness harms America." And he tries to portray such a pursuit as somehow an enemy of personal responsibility. But why not both? Isn’t that what true conservatism means? And since when was it the role of government to be the means of imposing values and responsibility? In Santorum, you see how the big government left met the moralizing right and became Bush-Rove conservatism. It’s a vision of America suited for October 31. And it’s time to fight back against it.

Thanks for taking the time to read the whole book. You’re not the first one to say it has the wrong title. Maybe I should have played off Sam Harris’ book and called it "The Beginning of Faith." But when I tried to write about politics in these times, I simply found it impossible not to write about religion. Our foreign policy is shaped by a response to religious Islamic extremism; and our domestic politics, as you so ably demonstrate, has become about the use and abuse of religion for partisan poitical purposes.

I was struck in your book by many things that really are not about politics. Your account of your adolescence is honest, and very funny. Hormones are indeed a laugh riot, and I sometimes wonder whether God gave them to us to ensure that we remember to laugh at ourselves from time to time. But I was particularly struck by what you yourself describe as the moment of your epiphany: your brain tumor, your near-death experience when driving a car and blacking out. You may well have died if your wife had not seized the steering wheel.

So here’s my question: throughout the book, you seem a man able to examine himself, to reconsider roads taken, to evolve and change. You moved from left to right to beyond both. And yet you also suggest that without this encounter with mortality and terror, your epiphany about what you were doing with your life might never have happened. Or at least not happened the way it did.

I had the same experience eleven years ago when I was diagnosed with HIV, when it was a death-sentence. In retrospect, all my writing since has flowed from that moment. It felt as if God were taking me by the lapels and shaking me so hard I couldn’t breathe. (I recount the experience in my previous book, "Love Undetectable." The date inscribed on my prologue to ‘Virtually Normal‘ was also the anniversary of the day I found out I had HIV: June 23, 1993.) I identified with that moment in your book a lot, and wonder how critical you think it was in your evolution toward speaking truth to power?

Or am I being unfair? Was the evolution already in train and this brush with death just a coincidence? Could God work through a brain tumor? Or a virus that is killing countless people, even as I live on?

Or were we just scared into faith?

A good question.

Someone did a Lego version of Michael Jackson’s "Thriller." It’s great. The whole thing can be seen here.

David Kuo and I will be discussing each other’s books and the ideas within them – our agreements and disagreements – over the next few days, on our respective blogs. He started yesterday. He begins:

Dear Andrew,

Would that I knew where to start this discussion/letter/dialogue.

Truth be told when we talked about this idea of a ‘blogalogue’ I hadn’t read all of your book and therefore didn’t understand what a monumental work you had produced. In many ways it is improperly titled. This isn‚Äôt just "The Conservative Soul"; it is really "First Things" (with all appropriate respect to the journal of the same name) because the driving narrative of the book seems to me to be understanding God, prioritizing God, and loving God. Everything else flows from that ‚Äì for well or for ill…

His post continues here on his own blog. I will respond later today to the questions he subsequently raises, and to the remarkable book he has written.

This is a scary video. Do not click on it if you are squeamish, especially if you are at work (and I know you are). Put down coffee, drinks, or anything else, for that matter. Click at your own risk. And Happy Halloween. Just watch the car closely and see what special effects can do.

We may be approaching a moment a little similar to the moment when Barry Goldwater was tasked to go to Nixon in 1974 and tell him it was over and he should resign. No, I don’t mean Bush will quit if the elections are a disaster for the Rove strategy of "divide and terrify". I mean that the reality-based members of the Republican establishment, represented by James Baker, will step in and tell Bush he cannot stay in denial any longer about Iraq. All the options are grim – but the grimmest of all is the prospect of Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rove continuing their deranged idea that their "strategy" has been anything but a shambles. That’s why it’s so important that the GOP is given a drubbing next week. It will provide an opening for sanity. There are enough sane Republicans and patriotic Democrats to make the tough decisions now needed.

What would that mean? Almost certainly a radical redeployment within Iraq along the lines sagely laid out by Fareed Zakaria in a must-read essay in this week’s Newsweek. We cannot leave prematurely, but neither do we have much chance of staying without making matters worse unless we threaten to leave in the near future. My own fear is that our only realistic option is the following, endorsed by Fareed:

There is one shift that the United States itself needs to make: we must talk to Iraq’s neighbors about their common interest in security and stability in Iraq. None of these countries – not even Syria and Iran – would benefit from the breakup of Iraq, which could produce a flood of refugees and stir up their own restive minority populations. Our regional gambit might well lead to nothing. But not trying it, in the face of so few options, reflects a bizarrely insular and ideological obstinacy.

We may have to open up negotiations with Tehran and Damascus. Both regimes are despicable. But our interests in stabilizing Iraq are the same as theirs’. Call it realism’s revenge. We don’t have to prop these regimes up or provide more legitimacy to them than is needed to prevent mass ethnic cleansing and/or genocide in Iraq. But we are where we are. We have to rely on China to deal with North Korea; and no stability in Iraq is possible without the Iranians, Saudis, Syrians and, perhaps most critically, Jordan. Zelikow gets this. So does Rice, I think. Cheney and Rumsfeld stand in the way, as they did at the beginning. And I’ve become convinced that the only way to dispense with Rumsfeld and neutralize Cheney is a big Democratic victory next Tuesday.

So if you want to make the necessary hard choices in Iraq, you know what to do next Tuesday.

(Photo of Maliki: Wathiq Khuzaie/AFP/GETTY.)

"In the Middle East a pessimist is an optimist with experience … [Iraq] gradually deteriorates to civil war [and] the US presence is more and more a part of the problem and not the solution. Democratization may lead to a radical Shi’a government," – former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, at Indiana University.