Category: The Dish

Andrew Breitbart alerted me to this blog. It’s the best new blog I’ve read in ages. Hilarious. He has an important addition to the vital news of the day re: Star Jones, and the merits of flashing in subway cars:

I once caught a guy masturbating openly in my driveway back in college. I went up on the roof and then carefully dumped a bucket of water on him. He was really angry because, as he told me later over coffee, he was "almost there."

Pertaining to flashing: I always felt there was an easier, more benign way of getting your jollies than exposing yourself to strangers on a train. For example: flash to your pets. Sometimes I’ll get really drunk and expose myself to my girdle-tailed lizard. She doesn’t seem to mind or care. Or, If I am feeling especially daring I will "accidentally" let my robe fall open while I am watching the View on television. For some reason, just knowing that Star Jones might know that I am watching her with my robe open is all I need to satisfy myself.

Go ahead. Make her day. Although flashing the TV appearances of Barbara Walters would provide more enduring satisfaction, methinks. But it’s highly subjective, I’ll concede.

She says so herself:

Asked on April 28 about Ms. Jones Reynolds’s future in the O’Donnell era, Ms. Walters told a New York Times reporter: "Rosie will be there. And if Star wants to continue to be there, she is welcome."
Ms. Walters said yesterday that when she made those remarks, she was aware that the network did not plan to renew Ms. Jones Reynolds’s contract. Asked to explain why she had suggested, erroneously, that Ms. Jones Reynolds would be the one making a decision about her future, Ms. Walters said, "I was trying to protect Star."

When Barbara Walters asks politicians to be straightforward in future, remember she is holding them to a standard she doesn’t apply to herself.

I’m trying to figure out what this classically passive-aggressive item written by Glenn Reynolds means. Here it is:

JEFF GOLDSTEIN CONFRONTS HOMOPHOBIA: And is undeterred.

What can this mean? So I click over to Jeff Goldstein’s site, and find some leftist troll has written a homophobic remark in the comments section. Goldstein comments:

Anyway, I‚Äôll leave this up as a public service to Andrew Sullivan ‚Äî just to let him know with whom he’s aligning himself these days. Seems it ain’t just the Islamists who might want to cut your head off, Andy.

Some quick thoughts. First (and I’m doing my best here): my name isn’t Andy. Second: Goldstein seems to be advancing the notion that there are two teams, and I’m now "aligned" with the homophobic one, i.e. the team Goldstein isn’t on. But what if someone’s approach to politics does not devolve into a moronic question of whose "team" you’re on? I know this is a difficult idea for someone like Goldstein or Reynolds to grapple with; it would require thinking, for example.

But let’s assume that Goldstein is making the point that the "left," whatever that now is, can be homophobic. He, a brave, Republican blogger, thinks I need to know this. Hmmm. That devastating insight somehow never occurred to me for the two decades in which I have been subjected to constant homophobic attacks from the gay left, accused of being the anti-Christ, a diseased faggot, a spreader of disease, my private life ransacked, my reputation lied about, my integrity smeared on a daily basis. Left-wing homophobia? Thanks, Mr Goldstein, for clueing me in. I look forward to your future receipt of slurs and innunedoes for writing what you believe. For the team! (Just don’t mention the rampant, far more virulent and empowered homophobia on the religious right, or you might forget whose "side" you’re on.)

It’s made America more bi-curious. At least online.

Wellington, New Zealand, morning.

A reader writes:

I’ve been following your posts about Strauss with some interest. I spent some time at the University of Chicago and had some interaction with his followers, Joseph Cropsey and Nathan Tarcov. I agree with you that whatever sort of conservatism Strauss espoused, it cannot be equated with contemporary neo-conservatism.

That said, I think you make too big a deal out of the differences between Strauss and ‘the contemporary academy.’  People in general, but especially so-called movement conservatives have failed to notice that academia has largely moved on from the post-modern nonsense that was peddled in many elite departments in the 1980s. To take a few examples: political theory and philosophy is overwhelmingly liberal (with a small L). The dominant figure is John Rawls, who was a defender of classical liberal principles drawn from John Locke. These days, I see multicultural critiques of liberalism in retreat. Empirical political science has its share of po-mos, but they are rarely found in elite departments in the US. These are dominated by rational choice theory and neo-positivist methods, preferably with a statistical component. Economics essentially has no post-moderns, while Marxists are rare. 

It is true that Anthropology remains a bastion of multi-culti b.s., but they are essentially alone in the social sciences. I know much less about humanities departments, but friends tell me that the French literary criticism wave passed long ago. English is returning to the close analysis of texts. Academic Philosophy is dominated by the Anglo-American school. Professional academics may be somewhat to the left of average Americans, but they are by no means outside the mainstream of liberal-democratic thought. My point is that Strauss is not such an outlier as you make him out to be, apart from some oddities of methodology (for instance, the search for ‘esoteric’ readings of ancient texts).

Detroit, Michigan, 9.48 pm.

The Catholic church wants to amend the American constitution to protect the sacredness of marriage, but grants divorces annulments routinely. A reader adds:

I’m surprised and charmed by your unfamiliarity with the Church’s annulment practices. One thing I would emphasize is that even for Catholics married in Catholic ceremonies, annulments seem easy enough. I have a friend, a fund-raiser for the Church, who has had two marriages zapped into oblivion, and may have her third erased as well. Just think, some sunny day gay Catholics will be able to take advantage of this particular brand of Church magic.

A sunny day in the fourth millennium maybe. Another reader comments:

Delighted you have recently discovered the wonderful miasma of RC marriage and annulment rules. As an Episcopal clergman recently observed: "There is nothing that has a greater hold on the minds of people than ignorance fraught with technicalities."

"A person is brought hither in the dungeon of a ship’s hold; thence he is vomited into a dungeon on land, loaded with irons, unfurnished with money, unsupported by friends, three thousand miles from all means of calling upon or confronting evidence, where no one local circumstance that tends to detect perjury can possibly be judged of;‚Äîsuch a person may be executed according to form, but he can never be tried according to justice.

I therefore could never reconcile myself to the bill I send you, which is expressly provided to remove all inconveniences from the establishment of a mode of trial which has ever appeared to me most unjust and most unconstitutional. Far from removing the difficulties which impede the execution of so mischievous a project, I would heap new difficulties upon it, if it were in my power. All the ancient, honest, juridical principles and institutions of England are so many clogs to check and retard the headlong course of violence and oppression. They were invented for this one good purpose, that what was not just should not be convenient. Convinced of this, I would leave things as I found them. The old, cool-headed, general law is as good as any deviation dictated by present heat," – Edmund Burke, leftist abetter of treasonous terrorists, defending the right to due process and fair trial in Gitmo the American colonies.

Can you imagine what writers like Mark Levin or Glenn Reynolds would say to Burke today? Or what Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld would say to him? They would regard him as a traitor to their conservatism. As indeed he is. To theirs’.

A dialogue with Leonard Cohen.