Category: The Dish

Novak wants pro-choice politicians deprived of communion:

Vatican sources say the pope has not retreated from his long-held position that pro-choice politicians should be deprived of Communion, but the decisions in Washington and New York were not his. The effect was to dull the pope’s messages of faith, obligation and compassion.[…]

At Yankee Stadium, Benedict spoke of the "inalienable dignity and rights" of "the most defenseless of all human beings, the unborn child in the mother’s womb." In parishes across the country, the faithful hear their priests echo the Holy Father’s words. Those professions ring hollow when pro-choice politicians are honored as they were during the pope’s visit.

The politicization of the sacraments is a sad part of Catholic Christianism: the slow removal of any political space for dissent or conscience. Benedict is down with this, but he has a little too much sense to enforce it as ruthlessly as the theocons would want. He is now a pastor, thank goodness.

Current polling suggests that his favorables and unfavorables may be finally approaching Clinton levels. Part Wright, part Clinton, part a horrible April. But at the same time, he continues to gain slowly among super-delegates. He’s just 20 behind Clinton now. If the Michigan compromise holds, his likelihood of being the nominee approaches certainty. And McCain, in this period of massive Democratic bloodletting, still has no discernible lead over either of his competitors.

Could his uniquely non-pandering position help him reorient his candidacy?

Setauket, New York, 11 am.

Albert Hofmann, inventor of LSD, dies at 102. The drugs certainly stinted his life, didn’t they?

Mrs Tribune Of The People is pandering pathologically on the price of gas. With some minor populist complications:

With cameras mobbed together, Clinton hopped out of the truck without incident and joined Wilfing at the pump. She seemed very interested in the actual set up, acknowledging later that she hasn’t pumped her own gas in years.

He defends McCain’s evolving position on Iraq since 2005:

That is certainly one way of looking at it. Another is that the crisis in Iraq looked radically different, and was radically different, in early 2005. Rather than moving in a “neoconservative” direction — neoconservatives were divided, then as now, on the question of a long-term U.S. presence — but in the direction of filling the security vacuum. And filling the security vacuum strikes me as less an ideological notion and more about achieving the objective of a peaceful, stable Iraq. It so happens that McCain rejects the notion, widely held among the actually quite optimistic withdrawalists, that a U.S. withdrawal will lead to political reconciliation.

Filling the security vacuum with US troops not an ideological notion? It’s a commitment to occupying another sovereign country in the middle of a communal civil war in which no other party can thereby fill the vacuum. It’s putting military roots deep into the middle of Muslim Arabia with no guarantee we will ever be able to remove them and no real incentive for the Iraqi parties to ever come to reconciliation as long as the US remains the unconditional guarantor of stability. It’s empire. Or at best, a permanent protectorate.

Heilemann notes the real differences between Clinton’s shrewd 1992 gambit and Obama’s quandary with Wright. One other thing perhaps worth saying: the "government created AIDS" meme is both an appalling lie and actually, sadly, still very prevalent among urban African-Americans. Anyone who has had even the slightest contact with HIV work in the inner city knows this. It’s part insane paranoia, part racial poison, and part the legacy of Tuskegee. But it’s real. Wright’s nuttiness is less remarkable in that context, although it doesn’t make it any less inexcusable, of course. The difficult question is how you reach and engage inner city residents on these matters if you do not sometimes acquiesce in the sub-cultural memes that endure and make sense to them. I think you have to challenge it head-on, but I understand a pragmatic attempt to ignore this stuff if  that’s what it takes to reach otherwise very marginalized groups.

I guess the broader point is that any politician trying to represent all these factions: white, black, urban poor, suburban middle class, prosperous yuppies, et al will have to contain contradictions that will offend and shock some people. Part of Obama’s promise is his attempt to bring all these people along. But that’s risky. With that expansive goal, the baggage increases. And it can shift in flight and hit you on the head if you’re not careful.

All great video techniques were once mastered and pioneered by Michel Gondry:

A joke forwarded to me today:

One line summary of Obama’s speech yesterday: “I did not have pastoral relations with that man.”