A reader forwards:
Grandma warned me yesterday not to tell anyone I was voting for Obama, but I am heading out the door in about an hour to do just that. Mom.
I’m struck by this clip. When a Clinton supporter is directly confronted with the fact that Obama is not a Muslim, she simply refuses to believe it. When people simply refuse to deal with fact, something else is going on.
First, McAuliffe assumes Tim Russert’s dad is dead. Then this classic from Britain.
National Review on McCain’s climate change speech. Oy. There are indeed good arguments about cap-and-trade, but NR would be more persuasive if they offered an alternative path to ameliorating global warming.
Anne Applebaum considers intervention in Burma:
Unfortunately, the phrase "coalition of the willing" is tainted forever—once again proving that the damage done by the Iraq war goes far beyond the Iraqi borders—but a coalition of the willing is exactly what we need. The French—whose foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, was himself a co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières—are already talking about finding alternative ways of delivering aid. Others in Europe and Asia might join in, along with some aid organizations. The Chinese should be embarrassed into contributing, asked again and again to help. This is their satrapy, after all, not ours.
Think of it as the true test of the Western humanitarian impulse: The international effort that went into coordinating the tsunami relief effort in late 2004 has to be repeated, but in much harsher, trickier, uglier political circumstances. Yes, we should help the Burmese, even against the will of their irrational leaders. Yes, we should think hard about the right way to do it. And, yes, there isn’t much time to ruminate about any of this.
James Joyner differs. Can we not simply run air-drops of food and clean water? It’s not invading as such if we do not provide ground-troops.
Mike Gravel celebrates his birthday:
Another excellent column by David Brooks this morning, even though his effortless list of neuroscience reading made me feel as if I should crawl back into my hole of ignorance. But this view of faith in modernity is a powerful one:
Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.
My italics. The question embedded here is the momentous one, it seems to me. Why should God be love? As someone never able to shake off belief in God, I find it much more challenging to believe that God is benign. Why should God not be evil? That, to my mind, is the greatest revelation of Jesus – and it has to be revelation. Deus Caritas Est. Buddhists intuit this, which is why the overlaps between Buddhism and Christianity have been so compelling to many in recent years.
I could go on, but I obviously have some reading to do … Derb’s two farthings are here.
Josh Claybourne examines the domestic debates about the Mexican-American war which began 162 years ago today.
A reader writes:
If it makes you feel better:
We have two beautiful husky mixes adopted from a rescue. Like all huskies, they have a prey instinct that can never be fully trained out. We thought we’d done pretty well…until the day I arrived home from a walk and they brutally put down a feral cat that had been hiding under my car. In our suburban driveway. In the middle of the day. With the neighbors standing about 10 feet away.
I was shocked/embarrassed. The dogs were elated for the rest of the day ("PLEASE, one more walk? PLEASE").
How I got over it: When reciting the story to a friend of ours, he shared that, while growing up in Canada, his husky had the same problem. But his husky kept taking down deer.
Another warns:
Unfortunately, the bloodletting could get worse with Dusty. Every dog is different and I believe breeds matter, but there is an old-saying from here in the South that proves accurate more often than not: Once a dog sucks eggs… Basically, once they taste blood, they’ll always go after it.
We have two Jack Russells
and I watched one almost swim himself to the point of drowning to kill a Black Swan at my parents house. We thought letting them run free in the country would be safe (in spite of the rare squirrel carcass that would show up in the backyard). Unfortunately, the country just turned out to be a target-rich environment. By the time I got the canoe out into the water and was able to get to him, the swan was history. When I dragged Max out of the water, he had a glazed look in his eyes like he couldn’t even see me. Perhaps the canine-equivalent to the "thousand-yard stare." The funny thing is, if the Max is leashed, Oscar actually plays with all other creatures. It’s like Max is a cult-leader.
The entire escapade left us scared to ever let him loose and answered a long-time question I had posed to my step-father: What kind of fool pays $500 for a black swan? The kind with a blood-thirsty Jack Russell.
Goldberg is more polite than I was.
