Category: The Dish

He Went To The Dorms

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The latest creepy twist to the Foley saga:

A source with firsthand knowledge of events says that this coming Thursday, Kirk Fordham ‚Äî former chief of staff to both Foley and more recently Rep. Tom Reynolds, R-N.Y. ‚Äî will testify that a few years ago he was told by then-House clerk Jeff Trandahl that Foley had been stopped while trying to enter the pages’ dorm in an apparently intoxicated state. The source said Fordham will testify that he recalls this being the event that convinced both him and Trandahl to warn Hastert’s office, with Fordham designated to have the conversation with Hastert’s chief of staff, Scott Palmer. The source said that both aides had been watching Foley’s behavior with pages and that Fordham had counseled Foley to watch his behavior.

The source tells ABC News that Fordham will testify that he alerted Palmer that Foley had a pattern of displaying inappropriate behavior toward pages. Asked about Fordham’s claim that he met with Palmer in approximately 2003 to warn him about Foley’s behavior, Palmer said in a statement, "What Kirk Fordham said did not happen."

Someone is not telling the truth. But drunkenly trying to get into the dorm rooms of teens – reported to Hastert’s office – is not an incident anyone would easily forget. Not if they gave a damn about the safety of minors. Which appears to be low on the list of priorities of Speaker Hastert’s office.

(Photo: Yuri Gripas/AP.)

A YouTube Warning

A reader writes:

You should include another warning for the "Six Feet Under" clip. "Do not watch if you aren’t prepared for an emotionally draining experience involving the death of loved ones and yourself." I watched the finale of the show, which ended on that clip, and was floored – moved to despairing tears. These few minutes capture the inevitability of death, both the point and pointlessness of life, and the crushing surprise and lingering despair caused by death for survivors.  If they handed out Oscars and Emmys for scenes, this deserved both.

And I hadn’t had any real exposure to the death of a loved one yet. I can’t imagine how that clip might affect those who had. So, for their sakes, a warning for them would be a good thing.

Consider yourself warned. I got a pile of emails about it. I guess I lost friends in the plague years, and so I am more inured to the idea of death and life. In my C-SPAN interview with Brian Lamb (not sure yet when it will air), he caught me off-guard. I was all prepared to go on and make an argument about conservatism and he asked me what it was like to be HIV-positive. Huh? No one has asked me that in years. But I realize that the spiritual journey I recount a little in my book would have been impossible without the confrontation with mortality that I bumped into when I was still in my twenties. Maybe it takes watching people’s lives being shattered by illness to force you to lose a little religious certainty, and to grapple with the ineffable mystery of life more directly. So consider yourself unwarned. And watch the clip. It’s TV at its best.

Hillary in ’04?

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She seriously considered running for prez two years ago, according to a dishy new profile in the current Atlantic. Money quote:

Though she has always downplayed the issue, Clinton apparently flirted with running for the presidency in the 2004 election. According to one insider, in 2003 Mark Penn had created a unit within the polling firm of Penn, Schoen & Berland so clandestine that most of the staff didn‚Äôt even know it existed. It operated in a room whose computers had been disconnected from the company‚Äôs network. Penn polled to find out whether Clinton could break her pledge to serve a full term in the Senate and still maintain enough political viability to run for president. (Penn wouldn’t confirm ‚Äî or deny ‚Äî this episode, and said he believed that "at no time was she ever leaning in that direction.") Ultimately, of course, she chose not to. But she must have been tempted. "Some very important people were coming to her on bended knee asking her to run," a close friend of Clinton‚Äôs told me. "That was the phrase she used: ‘on bended knee.’"

Of course, she meant it in a completely different way than her husband.

The Islamic Anaconda

A reader challenges a definition in my essay:

Your ragument would be better if you noted the differences between religious fundamentalists and inerrantists. Note that those who call themselves "fundamentalists" in the United States aren’t really fundamental at all. They are inerrantists who attempt to ply convenient portions of holy writ to select current issues of the day – "hot button issues," so to speak. These days everyone can fumble through their King James’ for the few alleged passages condemning homosexuality, while turning a blind eye to the enormous chunks of text bespeaking economic justice. Hypocritical? Sometimes. Fundamental? No.

On the other hand, Christian fundamentalists, inerrant or no, seek a sheltering return to an earlier, more primitive "basic" period in Christian history that never existed. It couldn’t have. Nothing was ever basic. Take a look at the various Christian groups flowering in the immediate post-apostolic era, especially in the Upper Nile region, and you quickly see that in the Christian folds, no one ever agreed much about anything. (Maybe we have recaptured an initial essence of early Christianity! Maybe we never left it at all!)

In the 19th century, religious reconstructionist Alexander Campbell tried to found a single Christian movement under the guise of "No creed but Christ:"  "Where the Bible speaks, we speak. Where the Bible is silent, we are silent."  Not only was he unable to say a helluva lot, his movement to found a single Christian organization resulted in three more Christian denominations by 1908  (Disciples of Christ, Christian Churches, Churches of Christ).

These historic snippets would tend to strengthen claims that a solution to downward spirals toward religious wars would be a recovering, and a recognition, of religious diversity and the acknowledgment of more gray areas than religious certainty might allow.

When reading your article a few times to see if I could imagine an Islamic analog to Christian fundamentalists versus Christian inerrantists, I hit a pothole. Islam regards its holy text, the Koran, inerrant, and not only divinely inspired, each printed copy, or reproduced copy, to be highly sacred in regard.  Islam appears to be unlike Christian inerrantism in that Christian inerrantists turn a microscope toward a few passages addressing issues of social insecurity, but has no difficulty living with and dealing with the rest of modernity.

Islam has from the beginning been a rejection of modernity. At its beginning, Islam was at its most base a rejection of corrupt Christian society which left a spiritual vacuum in the outer reaches of the Sees of Alexandria and Jerusalem. Modernity has always been the apple that the Islamic anaconda just couldn’t swallow. The tension doesn’t result from the select, convenient misapplication of Koranic lections to various issues, hot buttons, phobias, social codas, whatever you will.  The tension results from the collision of the Islamic world with an entire world it never could, or will, envision, or safely pigeonhole.

Points well taken. Inevitably, a book will have to simplify and conflate a little in fewer than 300 pages. In Philly tonight, debating Peter Beinart, I found myself asking if, given the new technologies of destruction available, Islam will ever have enough time to reform itself before a catastrophe of some sort. History suggests that there is not enough time – and so the collision of Islam with modernity is looming in ever more destructive forms.

The Republican Contradiction

Tucker Carlson was brutally honest on the Chris Matthews’ Show about the dysfunction and hypocrisy at the core of the current GOP:

CARLSON: It goes deeper than that though. The deep truth is that the elites in the Republican Party have pure contempt for the evangelicals who put their party in power. Everybody in …

MATTHEWS:  How do you know that?  How do you know that?

CARLSON: Because I know them. Because I grew up with them. Because I live with them.  they live on my street. Because I live in Washington, and I know that everybody in our world has contempt for the evangelicals. And the evangelicals know that, and they’re beginning to learn that their own leaders sort of look askance at them and don’t share their values.

MATTHEWS: So this gay marriage issue and other issues related to the gay lifestyle are simply tools to get elected?

CARLSON: That’s exactly right. It’s pandering to the base in the most cynical way, and the base is beginning to figure it out.