Category: The Dish

A reader writes:

So I’m returning here, my native land, on a sleep-deprived overnight flight from Europe and, without realizing it, step over the line on the floor before the Immigration booth. The officer barks at me like an angry pitbull, I look up and find myself confronted with a glare so intense that one would assume a drawn gun would be the next step in the process.  I step back, but the glare continues. I rise to some higher level of wakefulness and say to myself I’m not putting up with this shit and do my very best to match him in glare intensity.  He only breaks off momentarily to hand back the passport of the preceding citizen and immediately returns to shooting me with eye darts – and I’m thinking, what the hell is this guy’s problem?  Does a half-step over a painted line ten feet back from his little booth represent a serious assault on the Homeland? 

It’s my turn, so I walk forward with our eyes locked like the start of a fight at the Garden and slide him my USofA passport while he still seems more interested in excavating my pupils.  At that point I am so hoping that he starts using his mouth like he’s using his eyes because I’m totally up for it.  He hands back my passport without saying a word, apparently because his leash as yet still only goes so far.

Now imagine Giuliani taking the leash and the collar off. He can’t wait. And Fox News will provide the choreography. Meanwhile, a Lou Dobbs wet dream: a New Zealand blogger detained for over a month because his departure from the US was six days past his visa expiration:

He still has no court date, hasn’t even been formally arrested, is just held in detention.  It sounds like he will be released and deported in a week or so – after six weeks detention.

This should be a wake up call for anyone visiting the US – be very very careful with your visa dates.  The consequences can be dire.

But it also reflects badly on the US – there has to be a better way to handle immigration than this.  I mean six weeks detention for a couple of days overdue – shocking.

The guy was leaving the country and they still harassed him. Ricks has just gotten home, too exhausted for a full debrief yet. Here’s another horror story of a woman hauled off in shackles because of a minor error in her papers.

A pretty staggering editorial from the WaPo this monring, hailing Schumer and Feinstein’s decision to back Mukasey, depsite his refusal to state categorically that waterboarding is illegal torture:

While we, like Mr. Schumer, Ms. Feinstein and others, would have wished for such an answer, supplying it would have put Mr. Mukasey in conflict with Justice Department memos that likely allow the technique — memos that those who may have carried out or authorized waterboarding relied on for legal protection.

Well: duh. And the Post’s position is that when members of the executive branch violate the law, rip up the Geneva Conventions, and authorize torture in secret, the job of the Congress is to retroactively provide cover for such war crimes? Note that probably the only people ultimately liable would be the civilian politicians and legal hacks who authorized such law-breaking. So it’s OK to railroad a few military grunts for abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib but not OK to hold the people responsible who unleashed this virus in the first place? I guess the editors disapprove of war crimes, but when it might affect someone they know from cocktail parties in Bethesda, they’re happy to drop the matter.

My take on the surrender of Senators Feinstein and Schumer, and the uses their capitulation will be put to by the Cheney-esque right, can be read here.

"Republicans, supposed defenders of limited government, actually are enablers of an unlimited presidency. Their belief in strict construction of the Constitution evaporates, and they become, in behavior if not in thought, adherents of the woolly idea of a "living Constitution." They endorse, by their passivity, the idea that new threats justify ignoring the Framers’ text and logic about shared responsibility for war-making.

Unless and until Congress stops prattling about presidential "usurpation" of power and asserts its own, it will remain derelict regarding its duty of mutual participation in war-making. And it will merit its current marginalization," – George F. Will, one of a growing number of real conservatives in Washington, standing up to the Decider.

A reader writes:

Mike Huckabee’s statement that when science and God are in conflict, he will stand with God, because science changes every generation, while God does not, reminded me of a profound and contrary quote from Simone Weil: 

"It seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth.  Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth.  If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms."

Huckabee and Weil are likely to agree that there can be no conflict between God and the truth — and that when we think there is a conflict, it is because we have misunderstood one or the other.  But they seem to come from different corners in terms of how to resolve that misunderstanding.

Compare the quote from Lessing, which I made the epigraph for The Conservative Soul. I also love what Weil said next:

After this I came to feel that Plato was a mystic, that all the Iliad is bathed in Christian light, and that Dionysus and Osiris are in a certain sense Christ himself; and my love was thereby redoubled.

I never wondered whether Jesus was or was not the Incarnation of God; but in fact I was incapable of thinking of him without thinking of him as God.

In the spring of 1940 I read the Bhagavad-Gita. Strange to say it was in reading those marvelous words, words with such a Christian sound, put into the mouth of an incarnation of God, that I came to feel strongly that we owe an allegiance to religious truth which is quite different from the admiration we accord to a beautiful poem; it is something far more categorical.

My italics. This exactly expresses my own understanding, such as it is, of Jesus. And that understanding is the core of my faith. 

Compare and contrast:

"I think Bill [O’Reilly] asked the governor [Huckabee] if he really believed in Adam and Eve.  The answer doesn’t matter to me so much as what the question represents:  A huge breach in the previously widely respected understanding that such questions are not asked of presidential candidates and, if asked, politely turned aside as inappropriate in a nation built on the premise that religious tests are unconstitutional in law and that politics is best kept very clear of theological disputes appropriate to church debates and academic settings," – Hugh Hewitt, November 1, 2007.

"If you know a Roman Catholic bishop or priest, please pass this along to him with a request for a response. If they don’t mind, ask them to copy me on the response at hhewitt@hughhewitt.com.

John Kerry is the second most visible American right now, and the most visible self-identified Roman Catholic in the country. The most influential newspaper in the world, the New York Times, reported on Tuesday that Kerry had issued the equivalent of a new catechism for the Roman Catholic Church. … The New York Times helpfully added that "Mr. Kerry apparently meant John XXIII, as there is no Pius XXIII." Too bad the paper couldn’t explain the rest of Kerry’s absurd statement, or add more detail to the new Kerry Catechism of Convenient Catholicism.

It will be interesting to see if the hierarchy of the American Roman Catholic Church allows this statement to go uncontradicted. If what Kerry says is true, then the Church really doesn’t care if its members advocate for wide-ranging abortion rights and receive Holy Communion, despite the bishop of St. Louis’ instruction to Kerry to refrain from the sacrament on that bishop’s turf.

I am not familiar with those documents of Vatican II to which Kerry refers, and would appreciate direction to them. Perhaps they are in the small volume of works by Pope Pius XXIII," – Hugh Hewitt, April 7, 2004.

Under the covers, a beagle snoozes:

A Catholic laments:

It seems to me that the underlying problem with the contemporary hymns is an almost universal lack of understanding in the modern American Catholic Church about what Mass is in the first place. If it is a gathering of friendly Christian people around the table of fellowship in order to get strength and encouragement from one another as we all think about Jesus, why then the contemporary hymns fit the bill very nicely, but then, so would quite a few snippets of music I can think of like–"My favorite things" from The Sound of Music.

However, if the Mass is meant to take us to the threshold of heaven; if it is meant to be a glimpse of glory and a participation in the worship of the spheres of heaven itself, why then the sentimental, sweet and comforting songs just won’t do. They wont’ do not because they are bad or untrue, but because they are not good and true enough. Worship that takes us to the threshold of glory needs to be, well…glorious.

This is one area where my aesthetic sympathy for the theocons overwhelms my dismay with some of their theology.

(Hat tip: The Curt Jester.)

A new wrinkle in the war on terror:

This story has been repeated endlessly, both in the U.S. and in other countries. Someone — these are all real — notices a funny smell, or some white powder, or two people passing an envelope, or a dark-skinned man leaving boxes at the curb, or a cell phone in an airplane seat; the police cordon off the area, make arrests, and/or evacuate airplanes; and in the end the cause of the alarm is revealed as a pot of Thai chili sauce, or flour, or a utility bill, or an English professor recycling, or a cell phone in an airplane seat.

Of course, by then it’s too late for the authorities to admit that they made a mistake and overreacted, that a sane voice of reason at some level should have prevailed. What follows is the parade of police and elected officials praising each other for doing a great job, and prosecuting the poor victim — the person who was different in the first place — for having the temerity to try to trick them.

For some reason, governments are encouraging this kind of behavior. It’s not just the publicity campaigns asking people to come forward and snitch on their neighbors; they’re asking certain professions to pay particular attention: truckers to watch the highways, students to watch campuses, and scuba instructors to watch their students. The U.S. wanted meter readers and telephone repairmen to snoop around houses. There’s even a new law protecting people who turn in their travel mates based on some undefined "objectively reasonable suspicion," whatever that is.

My essay on the transformational potential of Barack Obama’s candidacy is now online:

Strictly speaking, Obama is at the tail end of the Boomer generation. But he is not of it.

“Partly because my mother, you know, was smack-dab in the middle of the Baby Boom generation,” he told me. “She was only 18 when she had me. So when I think of Baby Boomers, I think of my mother’s generation. And you know, I was too young for the formative period of the ’60s—civil rights, sexual revolution, Vietnam War. Those all sort of passed me by.”

Obama’s mother was, in fact, born only five years earlier than Hillary Clinton. He did not politically come of age during the Vietnam era, and he is simply less afraid of the right wing than Clinton is, because he has emerged on the national stage during a period of conservative decadence and decline. And so, for example, he felt much freer than Clinton to say he was prepared to meet and hold talks with hostile world leaders in his first year in office. He has proposed sweeping middle-class tax cuts and opposed drastic reforms of Social Security, without being tarred as a fiscally reckless liberal. (Of course, such accusations are hard to make after the fiscal performance of today’s “conservatives.”) Even his more conservative positions—like his openness to bombing Pakistan, or his support for merit pay for public-school teachers—do not appear to emerge from a desire or need to credentialize himself with the right. He is among the first Democrats in a generation not to be afraid or ashamed of what they actually believe, which also gives them more freedom to move pragmatically to the right, if necessary. He does not smell, as Clinton does, of political fear.