Category: The Dish

A good summary:

Five-year old Felix Fritzl sees the moon for the first time after leaving the cellar his monstrous father condemned him to.

"[T]he plain fact is that" alcohol "makes other people, and indeed life itself, a good deal less boring. Kingsley grasped this essential fact very early in life, and (so to speak) never let go of the insight," – Hitch. But there are few people as boring as a drunk when you’re sober.

Old fart Bainbridge takes on my young reader. I mean old and fart in the nicest possible way.

Sam Stein searches for an expert who supports the gas tax holiday. Ask McClinton.

This probably has a better chance of working than the gas tax holiday. I should add that, while it’s obviously distressing that many are having difficulty paying for gas, in general, finding a way out of America’s oil-addiction is surely helped by price pressure, not hindered.

A reader writes:

Re your post below on politicizing the sacraments—I am a pastor in a mainline Protestant church.  Our of my work with abused and neglected children, I am rather reluctantly pro-choice.  One of the things I have always admired about the Roman Catholic Church is their pro-life position is morally consistent, in a way that the religious right (or my own, for that matter) is not.  They are against abortion, but also against the death penalty and against war except when it can be justified as a just war.  And, of course, the church is against the cruelty of torture.  So what I want to know is why there has never been any talk of denying sacraments to politicians who endorse the death penalty, or are pro-war and pro-torture?

The argument is that life-taking of the innocent is the deepest moral evil. But pro-choice politicians don’t actually engage in abortion and if they do not vote for public funding, the culpability is indirect. But being a member of a government that tortures amounts to direct complicity in an absolute moral evil; similarly waging pre-emptive war that violates just war doctrine. I’d say that from a Catholic viewpoint, many men in the Bush administration would be far less fit for communion than John Kerry ever was. But that just reinforces to me the need for the Church to treat individual human beings pastorally, not politically. We cannot and should not judge from an abstract distance. Theocons, eager to use the church for their own social agenda, don’t agree.

For Democrats assessing the electability of their candidates, it’s a real question.

Phillip Carter highlights a new study:

The study looks at the performance of soldiers who entered the Army with waivers for prior criminal convictions, no high school diploma or other reasons. In a nutshell, these soldiers get into slightly more trouble, but assuming they make it through basic training and avoid major trouble, they’re more likely to be better soldiers.

Given our current standards, that’s a relief, no?

"I really don’t want an African-American as President … I thought about it. I think he would put too many minorities in positions over the white race. That’s my opinion. After 1964, you saw what the South did … There’s a lot of white people that just wouldn’t vote for a colored person. Especially older people," – a Clinton supporter in Eastern Kentucky, to George Packer of the New Yorker.

One remarkable aspect of this race that I certainly didn’t expect but that the Clintons must be relishing: they may be becoming the vehicle for white racial resentment! When you recall how many of these voters felt about the Clintons in the 1990s, you really need a double take. But if the Clintons bring down the first serious black candidate for the presidency, they could ride a wave of redneck gratitude toward a re-branding in American politics. The Clintons would have no qualms about this – and obviously don’t. What the Clintons have to be in order to keep power, they will manage to be. And the Wright scandal gives all such sentiment a form of high-minded permission.

You watch this and want to look away. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, everything right in America can be wrecked by everything wrong in America.