Category: The Dish

I know that it’s possible to infer cynicism on the part of McCain and the GOP with respect to the North Carolina race-baiting ad. But I don’t share that cynicism and believe McCain is sincere in not liking or appreciating this kind of politics. With a couple of exceptions (the South Carolina moment that McCain himself has regretted), McCain just isn’t a Rove-style sleazebag. That’s why his candidacy remains one that many of us alienated from the GOP in recent years still take seriously. Money quote:

"They’re not listening to me because they’re out of touch with reality and the Republican Party. We are the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan and this kind of campaigning is unacceptable… I’ve done everything that I can to repudiate and to see that this kind of campaigning does not continue."

Good for him. If Republicans cannot win on the merits of their own policies and are reduced to the guilt-by-association racist smears on Obama, they deserve to lose.

An orthodox view. From the perspective of Catholic moral teaching, it seems to me that a government that allows abortion to take place is less morally culpable than a government that itself practises and defends a grave moral evil. The silence of the Bush-theocons on this is staggering, but to long-term observers of their political agenda, unsurprising.

A reader writes:

I haven’t been able to reach your site for about a week now.  I can get to it using a proxy server, but either you or The Atlantic said something that the CCP didn’t find appealing.

Yes, others have told me as much as well. I blame Fallows.

Scott Appleby notes how far we’ve come since the Second Council.

A reader writes:

I was appalled by Wieseltier’s suggestion that you were an anti-Semite — anyone who has followed your work closely would cringe at the idea — and am now pleased that he did the right thing to clarify his knee-jerk comment. And your response this morning furthers the debate, a good thing. I’d like to take that argument a step further, though.

When you offer a detailed critique of evangelical Protestantism in America, I may agree with the vast majority of your points (and I do), but I know you’re writing about that culture with no lived-in knowledge of the complexities and nuances of why evangelical Protestants think and behave in the ways they do. That’s why some of the Obama smears in Pennsylvania shocked you but didn’t surprise me in the least — I could see them coming from miles away. Similarly, I could offer my own opinions on the narcissistic impulses of certain strains of Catholicism or the Kristol/Lieberman faction of American Jews who conflate this country’s interests with Israel’s, but those opinions, informed or not, would lack a deeper ring of truth because I haven’t lived the experience. That’s why a writer like Reza Aslan is so important — he can describe and interpret the dangers of militant Islam and the larger internal conflict within Islam in far more illuminating ways than, say, Wieseltier or Peretz.

Benedict will be pissed: masturbation keeps men healthier – and certainly at lower risk for prostate cancer. But it’s been a long time since the Catholic church’s claims about "natural law" were actually reflected in what we empirically know about nature. About 700 years, actually.

As a new type of traffic light?

"One in ten voters say they changed party registration to vote in this year’s Pennsylvania primary.  Ten percent of the vote is huge.  That would be five times the past high for a crossover vote with a closed primary.  That’s an absolutely huge number — and once again, ladies and gentlemen, that is Operation Chaos," – Rush Limbaugh, one of the Clinton campaign’s most important supporters.

Friday fun. 
 

London, England, 5.22 pm.