Category: The Dish

How can you tell the difference between Hugh Hewitt and the House Republican Conference? Answer: often, you can’t. Listen to this:

The enormity of the double standard and the baseless nature of the charges against Hastert specifically and Republicans generally will backfire on Democrats and their soulmates in the MSM, but only if Hastert and others fire back, early, often and with the specificity and anger necessary to underscore exactly what the Democratic Party-MSM partnership is up to, again.

You can start with a contribution to the RNC. That will send a message to the party and to the media that conservatives haven’t forgotten episodes such as the dropping the DUI story on Bush the weekend before the 2000 election or the attempt by Dan Rather to use absurd forgeries or the New York Times’ hysterical last week charges about missing ammunition in Iraq to affect the 2004 election..  The purposeful conflating by MSM and Democrats of the Foley e-mail and the Foley IMs, combined the relentless attempt to obscure the media’s own indifference to the former makes for one more episode in the attempt to make politics and elections about other than the key issues, issues which significantly cut against a Democratic Party committed to appeasement in the war and silliness on a host of other issues.

Yep: Hugh Hewitt’s advice in the wake of the Foley affair is to donate to the RNC. You’ve got to hand it to him: he’s got chutzpah.

A reader makes a significant point:

First off, most young people today use an IM program called Trillian. The program allows you to use a single interface for all your IM contacts even though your IM friends may all use different IM programs (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, etc.).

As a by-product of using Trillian (and most other IM programs), all conversations are stored as a log file in the Trillian history folder. I’ve gone in and double checked and all of my IM conversations, going back years, are saved as long log files, one for each contact in my contact list. I believe that all of the main IM programs do the same thing.

So, no, people don’t actively or purposely ‘save’ IMs.  Most tech-savvy people know that IMs are automatically saved as a by-product of using an IM program.  So if anyone, at any time, has any reason to go back and track down a previous IM exchange, it’s relatively easy to do.

It’s scary to think, but unbeknownst to him, I’d assume that all of Mr. Foley’s old IM‚Äôs are probably stored on his PC, assuming a staffer did not go in and delete them once the story broke.

So this further undermines the notion that there was some nefarious plot at work here. The pages could have saved their IMs; or had their computers save them automatically.

"It’s now clear that Foley is a sick individual. But the question remains: Who would turn over the instant messages to ABC News rather than the police?  How long did they hold these explicit messages and further endanger more children?  In my mind, this person, group or political organization is as sick as Foley himself," – Congressman Patrick McHenry, supporting Speaker Hastert, in a press release today.

Thanks for your emails. It seems clear that the teens themselves recorded and saved the IM exchanges between Foley and the pages. Why? There’s a variety of possible answers. Because they were a) freaked out; b) wanted a record if anything later emerged that might impugn them; c) wanted to share the grossness among themselves and warn others; or even d) as leverage over a Congressman with influence or power. There’s no evidence so far as I can tell of any nefarious or politically motivated third party here (the pages themselves appear to be Republicans). And once the first story hit, Brian Ross was overwhelmed with unsolicited evidence of far-reaching online lechery between a congressman and teen pages. We’re in strange territory here, however. It’s not pedophilia; we have no evidence of actual sex; the victims are of legal age; the IMs and emails cover a spectrum of creepy to extremely inappropriate lechery. We have legal age teens interacting sexually online with a congressman – even to the point of what seems like ejaculation – and subsequently recording these exchanges for posterity. Who knows how many other such records exist? Or whether this is restricted to only one congressman?

"The National Anthem works better as a joke song," – Nick Gillespie.

Uh-oh. He’s right about Borat, though. May God defend him. And may George W. Bush drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq!

I have one question about the alleged 52 instant message exchanges that ABC News has in its hands. Who saves and records IM exchanges for posterity? I mean: I know how emails are saved and forwarded; it happens automatically. But I was unaware that IM interactions have some permanent record that can be retrieved after the fact. Is there such a possibility? Or did someone keep saving and recording these IM exchanges at the time – presumably the teens involved? It’s just an empirical question. But if these exchanges had to be taken down and recorded at the time, then it seems there are further questions to be asked about their provenance.

A reader writes:

Nice essay. My favorite line:

"From a humble faith comes toleration of other faiths. And from that toleration comes the oxygen that liberal democracy desperately needs to survive."

That’s it in a nutshell, buddy.

Elsewhere on the blog today you quoted Mark Foley on Clinton:

"It’s vile. It’s more sad than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction."

Let’s call fundamentalism what it is: religious addiction. Religion, like sex, like food, can become a drug. What should be a healthy and joyful part of a normal balanced life becomes a sickness, a neurotic attempt to fill the void within. It can even descend into psychosis ("An illness that prevents people from being able to distinguish between the real world and the imaginary world. Symptoms include hallucinations [seeing or hearing things that aren’t really there, or delusions], irrational thoughts and fears."). We’re used to associating religious addiction with small cults. But it can infect whole societies. And it’s extremely dangerous. It can damage, even destroy an individual life. It can fuel pogroms and inquisitions, mass suicides, terrorism, torture and murder. It can bring on wars. It can destroy the potential of whole societies – certainly, whole democracies – for generations. Perhaps, in some cases, for good.

So let’s not mince words. The first step in fighting an addiction is calling it what it is: Fundamentalism is religious addiction.

I prefer to think of extreme religious fundamentalism as more a function of neurosis than addiction. Any thoughts?

That’s an interesting idea. And the blog involved is a literate and articulate one. Check out this wonderful discussion of the virtue of "adoration." And a paean to agape. As the blogosphere evolves, it’s good to keep up with the inspiring innovations as well as the dreadful ones.

"A political movement by nature draws lines, makes distinctions, pronounces judgment; in contrast, Jesus’ love cuts across lines, transcends distinctions, and dispenses grace. Regardless of the merits of a given issue – whether a pro-life lobby out of the Right or a peace-and-justice lobby out of the Left – political movements risk pulling onto themselves the mantle of power that smothers love. From Jesus I learn that, whatever activism I get involved in, it must not drive out love and humility, or otherwise I betray the kingdom of heaven," – Philip Yancey, "The Jesus I Never Knew."

This is obviously related to my account of non-fundamentalist Christianity in this essay, "Why Not Seeing Is Believing." The political dimension of this kind of moderate faith – limited, morally neutral government – is explored in the final chapter of "The Conservative Soul."

Several readers have asked me what I mean by that phrase in the quote below. Read the essay and you’ll find out. I’m talking about the polarization in America between religious fundamentalists who proclaim their inerrancy and certainty as the only legitimate form of religion and the secular atheists who agree with them. There’s no question in my mind that America is suffering from a dialogue in which excessive fundamentalism spawns an understandable but misguided anti-religious sensibility that borders on contempt for all people of faith. This is the culture war cycle that is consuming the country and polarizing the political parties into religious and secular camps – a dangerous development. My point is that one important response is for non-fundamentalist believers to speak up more, to take on the fundamentalists, to refuse to have their faith coopted, and to fill the growing vacuum in the center of American life. That’s what the essay is arguing about and it’s what my book tries to make a long and careful case for.