Category: The Dish

Michael Medved sees the good side of the basketball player:

Recent comments by retired basketball star Tim (‘I hate gay people’) Hardaway did serious damage to his image and career but also unwittingly raised serious cultural issues about sexuality and gender. Hardaway appropriately apologized for his harsh remarks, but many (if not most) Americans no doubt share his instinctive reluctance to share showers and locker rooms with open homosexuals…

When Hardaway says ‘I hate gay people’ what he suggests at the deepest level is that he feels revolted by the very notion of same-sex eroticism and that he’d prefer not to face the distraction of such thoughts in the locker room or on the court. In this sense, the reluctance to team (in athletics or the military) with announced homosexuals isn’t bigotry, it’s common sense.

I notice that nowhere in his column does Medved criticize an expression of hatred for homosexuals. It was the harshness of its expression he objected to.

A group of Persian intellectuals in the country and in exile have published an open letter taking the Tehran regime to task for its disgusting conference on the Jewish Holocaust. It’s an encouraging read. Money quote:

Forgotten amongst all the sensationalism in the Iranian media accompanying the conference, was the bitter reality that the undermining or denial of human suffering for the sake of making political points – whatever they might be – will inevitably lead to moral degeneration: a moral degeneration that makes any judgment on the wrongfulness of the murder of the innocent dependent upon its political reverberations; a moral degeneration where by questioning the number of the victims, it fails to realize that "whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind".

Underneath the poisonous regime, there is hope in Persia.

A reader reprimands:

I may be wrong, but my understanding of ‘bigotry’ was an out-and-out hatred of a group of people. I don’t sense this in Romney’s quote. I sense ridiculousness, studipidity, and a certain amount of religious chauvinism, but not bigotry. I worry about semantic leak. Strong words should be reserved for the strong situations/people/sentiments to which they apply. Romney’s opinion on this matter is silly and tiresome, but it is a far cry from bigotry.

My online dictionary defines "bigotry" as "intolerance toward those who hold different opinions than oneself." "Chauvinism" is defined as "excessive or prejudiced loyalty for one’s own group, cause or gender." Maybe bigotry is what the victim of chauvinism thinks of the chauvinist. Or maybe we need a word that can somehow bridge the gap between the two. But, on reflection, I think the reader is closer to the truth than my first stab: Romney is attempting vicarious chauvinism on the part of a religion, evangelical Christianity, he doesn’t share. I’m not sure we have a word in English for that, except shameless.

It’s a scoop from ABC News’ Jon Karl:

Karl: You probably heard John McCain again come out and say that your friend Donald Rumsfeld is perhaps the worst Secretary of Defense ever.  What do you make of that?

Cheney: I just fundamentally disagree with John. John said some nasty things about me the other day, and then next time he saw me, ran over to me and apologized. Maybe he’ll apologize to Rumsfeld.

Karl: So what’s your take on where Secretary Rumsfeld fits in?

Cheney: I think Don’s a great secretary. I know a little bit about the job. I’ve watched what he’s done over there for six years. I think he did a superb job in terms of managing the Pentagon under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. He and John McCain had a number of dust-ups over policy, didn’t have anything to do with Iraq — other issues that were involved. John’s entitled to his opinion. I just think he’s wrong.

Karl: I know we’re just about out of time, but I wanted to clarify: Senator McCain had said that the problem with President Bush is he listened to you too much. So this is what he was apologizing to you for?

Cheney: Yes, yes.

Karl: What did he say?

Cheney: Well, he came up to me on the floor a couple of days later, the next time I was on the floor of the Senate, said he’d been quoted out of context, and then basically offered an apology which I was happy to accept.

Is the good senator going to take that lying down? And what were these "other issues"? Torture, maybe – a subject John McCain who, unlike Cheney, served in combat and was tortured, knows something about.

I’m sorry but I missed Mark Steyn’s response to Mark Kleiman’s concern that Steyn may be endorsing genocide of European Muslims thus:

My book isn’t about what I want to happen but what I think will happen.

Steyn says I accused him of supporting genocide. I plainly didn’t. In fact, I said that he "clearly rejects it." I merely noted his cool indifference to the possibility. Elsewhere, Steyn has considered the chance of an anti-Muslim final solution and writes:

Even if you’re hot for a new Holocaust, demography tells. There are no Hitlers to hand.

Am I wrong to detect a certain tone of regret in this? Again, this isn’t an endorsement of genocide. It’s an argument that it’s not feasible in Europe – no new Hitlers, dammit – and would destroy the character of America to become genocidal. Glenn Reynolds is in the same camp. He has predicted genocide, but doesn’t actually endorse it. In this post, he lays his view out with clarity:

Civilized societies have always won against barbarians ever since the industrial revolution made making things a greater source of power than breaking them.

Civilized societies have found it harder, though, to beat the barbarians without killing all, or nearly all, of them. Were it really to become all-out war of the sort that Osama and his ilk want, the likely result would be genocide — unavoidable, and provoked, perhaps, but genocide nonetheless, akin to what Rome did to Carthage, or to what Americans did to American Indians. That’s what happens when two societies can’t live together, and the weaker one won’t stop fighting — especially when the weaker one targets the civilians and children of the stronger. This is why I think it’s important to pursue a vigorous military strategy now. Because if we don’t, the military strategy we’ll have to follow in five or ten years will be light-years beyond "vigorous."

Again, Reynolds isn’t urging genocide. He’s predicting it. With a little relish for flavor, wouldn’t you say?

I should add, I guess, that I don’t mean to get into a fight with my new Atlantic colleague, Mr Steyn. He is one of the funniest, sharpest writers in America today. Up there in humorous writing, in my book, with Kinsley, Hitchens, Barry, Chait. I share his disgust at Islamist fundamentalism and admire his willingness to tackle it head on. His wildly successful book, alas, is an intellectually vulgar diatribe based on the crudest demographic reductionism (and many very good jokes at the expense of the idiot left). I think the right is currently divided between those who hate the American left more than the Islamist right and those who take the opposite view. I’m afraid my dislike of anyone to the left of Joe Lieberman is not as intense as my dislike of religious terrorism. Which is why it’s getting lonely out here.

P.S. On this whole meme, Matt Yglesias has a good post.

A reader eloquently described his own faith in a humanist Jesus here. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for whose magazine I now work, wrote something similar. Money quote:

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, ‘I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.’

But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet’s lips, and said, in the next age, ‘This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man.’ The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man’s life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.

A challenging thought for Ash Wednesday.

A reader writes:

AAARHG! That snake picture needs to disappear. That’s the most provocative thing I’ve seen on your weblog since the beginning, and I don’t like it one bit. Intellectual challenges are fine, but…snakes in the nose cross the boundaries. I had never even HEARD of or imagined such a thing…and now, for the rest of my life, I will have to deal with the nightmares!

And I was on your side…

They’re worthy blog-fodder:

I broke my six-year-old’s favorite egg cup. This was not good. I was trying really hard at breakfast. I had scrambled some eggs for one of them, boiled an egg for another, made porridge on request, fed the baby, spread three different flavour jams (pear and raspberry, raspberry and strawberry) in stripes on one piece of bread. I had not laid down silent on the crumb-strewn floor. I remained upright and mobile at all times. Then I broke the egg cup.

Technically, the baby broke it, but really it was me because I said to my eldest: "She’ll be fine with it, don’t be silly" when she grabbed it and he wanted to take it back from her. She looked straight into my eyes to thank me for my trust in her, slowly opened her porridgy fingers and dropped it. The cup, last year’s gift from the Easter Bunny, smashed leaving a yellow spotted cheetah holding nothing but disappointment in his arms. My six-year-old gulped, he folded his arms together, laid them on the table and buried his head in them. The despair I think was half because of the egg-cup and half because of me. My four-year-old came over. He laid a consoling little hand on his brother’s heaving back. "Never mind," he said, "you can share my lion."

If you have not made "Wife In The North" a favorite of yours, you really should. And on the subject of infants, here’s another personal post on the subject from a blog well worth checking out, Liberal Catholic News.

Alicia Colon writes in the New York Sun:

The total military dead in the Iraq war between 2003 and this month stands at about 3,133. This is tragic, as are all deaths due to war, and we are facing a cowardly enemy unlike any other in our past that hides behind innocent citizens. Each death is blazoned in the headlines of newspapers and Internet sites. What is never compared is the number of military deaths during the Clinton administration: 1,245 in 1993; 1,109 in 1994; 1,055 in 1995; 1,008 in 1996. That’s 4,417 deaths in peacetime but, of course, who’s counting?

Were these deaths because of natural causes? Or accidents? Is there an intellectually honest defense of this paragraph? Or has the New York Sun lost its mind?

A reader writes:

I think you left out an important clause in your statement today about the gay rights movement pre-Stonewall. Perhaps it would be most complete if you had said:  "…there was a vital gay rights movement not coopted by the far left or by the Democratic Party fundraising machine, and one not yet driven by torch and pickfork from the ranks of Republicans."

I don’t pretend to believe that the Republican party ever welcomed or even exhibited ambivalence toward gays and lesbians being among them. However, from my experience, I believe many more gay Americans today would be Republican if the party were not antagonistic toward them and returned to its core conservative philosophy (as opposed to the religious dogma it follow currently).  I likely would, if Republicans made effort to earn my trust.

There are so many reasons why gay people might vote Republican if the GOP were a conservative party and not a religious one. Small government, individual freedom, low taxes, strong defense: these are values shared by many gay Americans. Personal responsibility is also one of them. When I think of a gay person who lives responsibly, saves his or her money, goes to church, contributes to charity and settles down in a stable relationship, I think: conservative. When such a couple wants to get married, I think: conservative. When such a person decides to serve his country in the military, I think: conservative. But the new Republican base sees all this and thinks: evil. It didn’t have to end this way. But it has. The GOP won a couple of elections with the help of it. They have won a generation’s contempt as well.