Category: The Dish

A quick history of civilization via Will Wilkinson:

Gucci and Louis Vuitton team up to create high fashion gas-masks.

(Hat tip: Notcot).

A reader writes:

Hillary Clinton is not fit for the Supreme Court. Stop talking about it. It will not and should not happen.

This is not a partisan comment, just simple fact. The clearest example is also the one most ready at hand. Harriet Miers was a lawyer at a very large and prestigious Texas law firm for almost twenty years. She eventually became the president of that firm and the president of the Texas Bar.

She then served as White House staff secretary, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, and finally White House Counsel. In short, no matter what your politics, this is a distinguished legal career, and clearly puts her near the top of her profession. BUT, she was universally (and rightly) deemed unfit for the Supreme Court. Because, among other reasons, she had never served as a judge, she had no publicly articulated judicial philosophy, and she had not demonstrated the type and degree of intellect that would suggest she could capably serve on the highest court in the land.

Hillary Clinton, for her part, worked for a similar number of years in a less distinguished law firm, in a smaller legal community. Since 1992, to my knowledge, she has not practiced law or served in any legal or judicial capacity. In short, as a lawyer, Senator Clinton has a less impressive resume than did Harriet Miers, and clearly has at least the same deficiencies identified above, and if nominated would richly merit a similar fate. This is not to say that Senator Clinton has not had a tremendous career that should be admired. But it ain’t a legal career, and she has no more claim to the gifts of a Supreme Court Justice than did Ms. Miers.

Finally – why do your misguided references to Senator Clinton as a potential Supreme Court Justice merit yet another reply? Because the Supreme Court does not need (and likely could not stand) to be further debased by a nakedly political appointment like the one you suggest. No one, and I mean no one, would pick Senator Clinton as a Supreme Court nominee based on apparent legal talent. And putting her there would confirm the most cynical assumptions about how politics works, and how decisions are made, in this country.

So, stop already, okay?

Actually, I don’t think the professional legal model is the only one that works for SCOTUS. Clinton is easily smart enough to get up to speed on esoteric issues; and she would fit the model of a political figure adding legislative experience to the bench.

Creepier: LifeGem promises to make a " high-quality diamond created from the carbon of your loved one."

(Hat tip: Graydon)

"The story of John McCain, beautiful fatalist. Sure he’s a maverick, driven by a sense of honor and integrity that never leaves him alone. But that’s the crux of it: It never leaves him alone. Integrity is a burden and a torture for John McCain, as much as it is an inspiration. He’s writing a story, projected upon the national stage, about ideals and the way that they slam against the rocks of the human, all too human. The results are not very pretty. They do, however, portray a basic truth about what it is like to be a human being. He is:

    involved in mankind," – Morgan Meis, Smart Set.

A reader writes:

You wrote this today about the fundamentalist kerfuffle over McDonald’s:

If Wildmon could have seen our wedding, he would have witnessed two families, of all generations, bringing two men more closely together and in greater communion with their own parents and sisters and brothers and nieces and cousins and nephews and friends.

That is precisely what would have horrified Wildmon about your same-sex wedding. For fundamentalist Christians, a wedding is about the joining of a man and woman in a way that reinforces certain ideas about patriarchy and divine authority: God over man; man over woman; couple over child. When you and Aaron married, you rebelled against the idea that marriage and family is a way of submitting to the correct order of creation. Instead you replaced it with all sorts of horizontal and egalitarian commitments that celebrate love, equality, companionship and the joining of families rather than the production of children within a hierarchical family unit.

No wonder Wildmon sees you as a threat to civilization. If we followed your example, pretty soon we’d be out of metaphors for a God who looks a lot like an abusive, judgmental father-lord.

I didn’t think this was possible, but I nearly feel sorry for Karl Rove.

I’m pretty sure you’re only allowed one week per year.

Former KBR contractor Dawn Leamon testifies during a hearing of a Senate Foreign Relations Committee subcommittee on ‘Closing Legal Loopholes: Prosecuting Sexual Assaults and Other Violent Crimes Committed Overseas by American Civilians in a Combat Environment’ April 9, 2008 in Washington, DC. Leamon and Mary Beth Kineston, also a former KBR contractor both allege they were victims of sexual assault while working for KBR in Iraq. By Win McNamee/Getty Images.

My description of my friend Mike Kinsley’s essay as "Godless" was not meant as an insult in any way. I’m sorry if some interpreted it that way. I was trying to express simply my distance from his experience, not any criticism of it. A reader writes:

I was touched by Mike Kinsley’s essay. How brave of him, I thought, not to fall back on easy consolations. Not all of us unbelievers are as crude or as savage as Hitch. Nor are we all so illogical.  He won’t imagine what the world might have been like or would be like if his wish were granted and there had never been organized religion, for instance. Call me an agnostic, because there is always a possibility that my view of the world, however deeply held and hard earned, is wrong or incomplete or, at best, based on misunderstood evidence.  But. My daughter Kate’s birthday will be on April 15th.  She would have been 41 if she were alive.  She died in her shower in Brussels in 1994 of carbon monoxide poisoning.  The circumstances of her death were in all ways awful.  She was almost 27.

If God is all powerful, why would he let a wonderful, miraculous, beloved young person die in such an awful, hideous, careless, poisonous way?  If He knew and didn’t stop it, he is evil.  If he knew and couldn’t stop it, he is not God, in that there are limits to his power.

And her loss of her life isn’t the end of it.  Her death almost killed her mother, my ex-wife.  It deeply hurt her sister and brother…and her step-sister, my step-daughter, who was 12 at the time, was deeply affected by a sense of loss she hadn’t even known the world could provide.

I had been becoming less and less committed to my faith as Kate grew older.  We all went to church every Sunday, and gave monies, and then, little by little, we’d stopped: the church seemed to want things to flow toward it, and didn’t really want to create energies flowing the other way….it was, somehow, becoming irrelevant to me; and fundamentalism was [and remains] morally repugnant to me in every way.  Faith, whatever it is, isn’t easy or glib or automatic or free of doubt….it just isn’t.  Not if you use your head.

Faith had been real to me, beautiful, elevating.  The words of Jesus in particular I found [and find] deeply intelligent and morally exquisite and enlightening.  The art and the music and architecture of the church universal  touch my soul in ways I still fail to understand, and if life were led in music, I’d probably still be a believer.

So my life has been permanently maimed as well.  Not what it would have been if I could call Kate on the phone and have a chat; if I could hug her; if I could watch her dazzling life continue to unfold as it was unfolding, in brilliance and wit and humor and with profound intelligence, exuberantly and gracefully growing more and more complex.  Such a loss.

We were all damaged by an accident which in a world impelled by God’s justice and love wouldn’t happen.

I know what you, as a believer, will say to me.  I said it to others myself in the day.  I KNOW the difference between faith and intelligence.  I know the deep need to accept, which to the extent I can, I have done.

But I also know this: God wants me to be honest, and frank, and candid, and sure of myself.  Especially, He wants me to be honest.

And, honestly, I cannot believe in such a Being.

I know the world is lambent, I know the numinous arisings of light when the wind hits my pond.  I understand full well, in part because of Kate’s awful loss, how lucky we are to be here.  I, as I age downward into decrepitude, feel the world leaving my grasp, and it hurts almost more than I can say.

I wish, as profoundly as I wish anything, that I could believe, that I could smile and say, oh yes, as I get closer to death, I get closer to Kate.  My faith sustains me; all will be well.

All will be well because the world, the physical beautiful world, will go on. And that sustains me, that and only that.

So, Andrew.  My response to Michael Kinsley is indeed the opposite of yours.  How brave, I think, to confront one’s leaving of the world without blinking and without piteous wailing, and with deep intellectual and emotional honesty.