Category: The Dish

You may feel sober, but you’re not. It happens to me all the time.

The Holmes-Cruise story keeps getting weirder.

Well, someone calling himself Dr Tom Cruise M.D. – no relation to the handsome, charming and supremely talented and enlightened movie actor, of course. And he has medical advice to share! Warning: put down your coffee cup.

Too depressing for words. Falwell is rightly a pariah for his outright bigotry on a whole range of issues. John McCain’s embrace of Falwell’s wing of the religious right may be an acknowledgment of political realities in the Christianist party he seeks to lead. But I agree with the man who said:

"Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right."

That guy was McCain, six years ago. I guess he’s changed his mind.

Tonight! I should say that I’ve followed the Colbert Report from the very beginning and think it’s only gotten better and better. It helps to have a repulsion-attraction formation to Bill O’Reilly (and boy do I have a problem with watching Bill). But it works even in its own right; and Colbert’s finessing of his own persona keeps improving. Watching him sew up Gary Hart was a real pleasure. Tonight should be beyond parodying.

A Christianist convergence of paranoia, fundamentalism and victimology: this is one vision of conservatism. It sure isn’t mine.

The rabidly Christianist website, WorldNetDaily, takes a pot-shot at the Catholic Church today. Breathless, ass-covering money quote:

"Could the Roman Catholic Church’s sex abuse crisis be tied to embedded Satanic and occultic imagery in its artwork ‚Äì some of it hundreds of years old?
That is the seemingly incredible thesis of a new documentary, ‘Rape of the Soul,’ made not by anti-Catholic bigots, but by devout followers of the Church."

See the trailer here (although the site is incredibly slow). Jesse Walker has subliminal fun here.

Iraq the Model’s Omar dissects Moqtada al Sadr’s whipping up of hysteria and paranoia about a joint U.S.-Iraqi army siege of the al-Mustafa mosque. He’s not buying Sadr’s story. Nor would I.

(Photo: Franco Pagetti/Polaris for Time.)

Why funny drawings matter in the now-global fight for free speech against theocratic pressure. My latest column here.

The great Czech leader and anti-Communist, Vaclav Havel, is delighted by the Czech Republic’s decision to give gay couples legal recognition and protection. Money quote from Havel:

"Though with a very tight margin, I am very glad that the legislation eventually made it through parliament. I was most intrigued in the debate by the absurd ideology advocated by the Christian Democrats and Klaus, who argue that family should have advantages since, unlike homosexual couples, it brings children to life. This is the concept of family as a sort of calf shed in which bulls can inseminate cows so that calves are born … This is nothing spiritual, nothing intellectual. This is a purely material concept of family. This is what made me most upset in the debate."

Yes, but it’s all they have left. Apart from fear.