Category: The Dish

If you read one post today, I hope it was this one.

Oh crap. A reader writes:

Congratulations (I think) – you are far more complex and less readable than James Joyce was in Finnegan’s Wake. At least you aren’t as prolix.

Yeah, well if you count up the words on this blog – closing in on 700,000 words a year, you might think again.

A reader writes:

Babalu Blog completely misses the point on Bush’s Cuba speech.  It’s not that Bush is wrong about Cuba — clearly, he’s right.  But unlike Reagan in 1987, Bush in 2007 has as much credibility lecturing about the human rights of prisoners as the Catholic Church would have advising schools on how to prevent child molestation.

Ross makes the case:

Hillary may not be the best choice for the Democrats, but she’s definitely the safest; I think nominating her more or less guarantees the party 48 percent of the vote, since she’s sufficiently tested and savvy and all the rest of it to make a Dukakis or Dole-style wipeout almost completely unimaginable. And in a year when things will (probably) be going the Democrats’ way anyway, there’s a lot to be said for nominating a known quantity and assuming that, in spite of what Jonah rightly calls the "irreducible core" of anti-Hillary sentiment, the political landscape alone will ensure that her guaranteed 48 percent rises to 51-53 percent by November ’08. Whereas Obama and to a lesser extent Edwards both have a higher ceiling, but also a much lower floor, since neither has been through the fire already the way Hillary has (indeed, Obama has never run against significant GOP opposition of any kind), and either one could flame out disastrously in the heat of a general-election campaign.

I don’t disagree. Clinton is the hardest candidate to sell but equally the hardest candidate to beat. I think the salient questions are: how dangerous do you think the world now is? And how dangerous is the polarization that Clinton – with say a brutally divisive, Bush-style 51 percent victory – will, to my mind, inevitably deepen in that context? Those are the themes of my essay coming out in the next Atlantic, so I’ll shut up now until people can read and respond to the full case for Obama I try to make.

Fox News is actually broadcasting the notion that the Los Angeles fires were set by al Qaeda?

Now, the feds are after almonds.

NASA’s time-lapse photography of what happened this winter in the Arctic. Astonishing – and grief-inducing.

An instant – and hilarious – classic.

Have you noticed that the long-legged bigot has been touting her Christianity lately? She knows where the market is, I guess. Michael Livingston argues:

She has dismissed most of the Bible and the words of Jesus defending the poor, the widow, the prisoner—the least among us—and spewed her venom that has little or nothing to do with orthodox Christianity. But Ms. Coulter and her ilk are the ones to whom the media gives most of its attention.

He suggests that the media should shut her out. I don’t think they can, although my respect for anyone on television actually inviting her on to spew more hatred is, shall we say, limited. In the end, I have faith that what she represents, apart from her own callow self-enrichment, will be seen for what it is. I’m with this guy:

So you keep on spewing, Ann Coulter. You keep right on saying all the detestable things you perhaps even believe, so that the average American can see the buffoonish and ugly face of the religio-political underside. And you, dear media, keep right on allowing her and her kind plenty of airtime and space with which to hang themselves.

As Mr. Livingston himself concedes, while seemingly missing the why, "There are some signs that the toxic message of the extreme right of American Christians may be faltering."

That’s the beauty of media exposure. In time, it tends to devour the offensively unhinged.