Category: The Dish

"If I know anything, I know scary, and giving this president and this out-of-control Congress two more years to screw up our future is downright terrifying," – Stephen King.

"At 20, I was obsessed with what people were thinking about me. At 40, I’d stopped being obsessed with what people were thinking about me. At 60, I finally realized that nobody had ever been thinking about me at all," – an old quip cited by John Derbyshire in a really touching and excellent column on his relationship with Christianity.

Derb really is a conservative of doubt, I think, and, despite his bouts of curmudgeon and prejudice, I’ve come to admire and respect his intellectual honesty, especially up against the Curia Santorumorum at NRO. I’d love to know what he thinks of my book. I have a dreadful feeling he might actually agree with a lot of it.

Well, it’s Halloween. Here’s an amazingly good CGI DVD extra from "The Final Fantasy: Spirits Within" by Ingmar Bergman, I think. They’re doing the dance from "Thriller."

Brother Barnes:

I personally think Republicans are going to lose the House … [T]he question is not whether they’re going to hold the House, but how ‚Äî whether they’re going to just lose a few more seats beyond that or a good number. Now, I don’t think they’re going to lose many more and so Democrats may have a numerical majority in the House, but not a working governing majority …

A longtime reader writes:

Why do you think the anger of the left – the decent left – is any less than yours? Do you think we feel less betrayed? Wrong. Do you think we are less betrayed? Wrong.

Like your African-American friends, many of us on the left knew the WMD argument was game. I wrote you years ago that the WMD was a set-up; that they knew it; that they lied about it; that they believed they’d find some old munitions left over from the first Gulf War that they could hold up and justify themselves with; that they were shocked shitless when they found the whole country swept clean and they were left standing there speechless like the idiots they are. But even I never suspected the level of incompetence and perfidy they’ve shown since – to the American people, and to the Iraqis.

Do I blame you for being mad? Not a bit. But keep in mind that those of us on the left who saw this coming – and saw a hundred other issues coming, from abrogation of the wall between church and state to the ballooning deficit – we have spent the last five years being called every ugly, vicious name in the book because we tried to stop this, because we tried to warn the American people: haters, traitors, pussies, weenies, liars, partisans, hacks, wacks, radicals, commies, atheists, morally confused, mentally challenged and anything, anything except patriots who love this country and everything it stands for – or ought to stand for. Even the name "liberal", that honorable word, has been made into a curse. So don’t tell me the anger of the betrayed and decent right and center is deeper. Just tell us thanks for keeping the faith, for fighting the good fight. Just for once, call us brothers and sisters.

And remember: don’t get mad. Get even. Keep speaking out. The book (yes, I’ve read it), the blog: they make a difference. They matter. When you explain, as you do in the book, how you see classic conservatism as the defense of liberty from brutality through doubt, caution, common sense and rigorous self-examination, when you show how our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution are classic small-c conservative documents, you build a ground for dialog between left and right and a way out of this mess.

I do not agree with all your views on particular policies – but that’s not necessary, because I respect and trust your good intentions and good faith, your essential humility and humanity – and I’ve seen you grow and change over the years, often, as now, with considerable pain. That’s to be respected, and it’s why I advise all liberals to give "The Conservative Soul" a read; it’s well worth it. In any case, we agree on the bedrock issues, which utterly transcend left and right. We can agree to disagree on particular policies here and there – and get on with it. The challenges we face in the coming years – from global warming to nuclear proliferation to economic instability – will require us to meet on common ground.

On these grounds, I have indeed come to see that many, many liberals are indeed my brothers and my sisters. And increasing numbers of conservatives as well, thank God. For some on the far left, Bush could never have done any right, ever. I’m not going to exculpate the hate-filled parts of the far-left. But many, many others on the left were right about these people in power; and I was wrong. I threw some smug invective their way and, in retrospect, I am ashamed of it. Sure, I recognized my error before the last election, but that doesn’t excuse it. Sure, some of it was just misunderstanding each other, in a climate of great fear, and some of it was just my arrogance that I was right. But that doesn’t excuse it all either. My book is an attempt to rescue something from the wreckage – an atonement of sorts – and to move forward.

Because the world still needs America: the decent America we all love and so many around the world do not see any more.

Here’s one reason for conservatives not to be afraid sitting out this election or voting Democratic. Gridlock! The best government we’ve had in recent times was the Clinton-Gingrich face-off. They restrained the worst in each other, brought out the best, and gave us welfare reform, peace, and fiscal surpluses. Bush worked well with another party in Texas. He’ll not be so comfortable in Washington. But simply checking the current abuse of executive power will force these people to face reality in Iraq, and make the government less liable to do so much harm, especially to the Constitution. Bruce Bartlett makes the case here. Money quote:

I think the American people like divided government. They don’t trust either party to run the whole show and believe deeply in the separation of powers that the Founding Fathers established in the Constitution. To most people, dividing government by political party is just another way of separating power.

Bill Niskanen of the Cato Institute points out that every war in American history that lasted more than a few weeks was authorized by a unified government. It’s also worth noting that every major entitlement program – the spending programs that are bankrupting the country – was enacted by unified governments.

The great strength of the American system is its capacity for divided government. If there was ever a time for it, it’s now.

It’s the Bollywood version of Michael Jackson’s "Thriller". "Thriller," of course, was an amazingly innovative music video. It redefined the genre. And this horrifyingly bad Indian version makes you appreciate it more.

Well, the Hewitt Inquisition got a lot of play out there. So, for balance, here’s the transcript of an actual interview with someone with no agenda, CSPAN’s Brian Lamb. The video is also available on the same site. Here’s a section on faith:

LAMB: I don’t know quite how to ask this without sounding abrupt, but how can you then stay in the Catholic church and stay a conservative when both places are not terribly friendly?

SULLIVAN: Well, let me answer both sides of that question. In the Catholic church, not without a great deal of struggle and difficulty and pain. And, in fact, I spent – the last few years have been the loneliest. I couldn’t go to mass for a while after the child abuse scandal and then the fact they blamed it on gays in general. I just – I felt dumbfounded by that and I felt too much anger when I went into the church to be able to be in any way in a state to witness the mass.

But in the last year I have gradually come back to mass. And I‚Äôll tell you simply why, I love it. It’s my home. And the sacrament of the Eucharist is such a miracle to me. It’s been part of my life from the very beginning. I absolutely believe it is a unique way to encounter the Divine. And to be shut out of that for something I don‚Äôt think actually is integral to being a bad person. I really don‚Äôt. I don‚Äôt think my relationship [with Aaron] is in God‚Äôs eye a bad thing. I‚Äôve searched my soul about that and I don‚Äôt think it is.

So it’s who I am. It’s my home. Why should I leave my home? Where would I go? And my fellow Catholics, lay Catholics, people who you don’t see on TV, people who aren’t in the hierarchy are much more understanding and compassionate about the subject than the hierarchy is allowed to be in public. And even the priests that I know, though they do not and cannot say it’s OK, are not going to throw me out of a church I desperately feel a part of and care about.

And the book is in part an analysis of how faith can exist under those circumstances.

Sometimes, I think faith can come alive when you are somehow excluded from it for a while. Or when you cling to faith despite the pain. Only then do you realize how deeply you need God’s love. And how deeply you truly are loved by Him.

Redmond, Washington State, 9.40 am.

The email in-tray has been overwhelming of late and I’ve just been unable to read and respond to anything like the number I have done in the past. It’s running at over 400 a day, which is just physically impossible to absorb on a book tour. But I finally got home tonight, and so I’ll have more time now. And today, I had lunch with my Time.com editor, and they’re getting me an assistant/intern to help. I hate to think I’m missing huge chunks of your feedback because I just can’t manage it. But that will change soon. And we’re planning several other innovations to cope with the growth of the blog’s readership this year – and to have more fun with it. Stay tuned.

(This original post said I was getting over 800 emails a day. I guess that’s what it feels like. But I counted. It’s only around 400 – 500. High political season.)