Category: The Dish

Brad DeLong and Arnold Kling have at it over FDR’s legacy. My sympathies lie with Kling.

You want to see a real celebrity interview? Here’s a real celebrity interview:

"Well, it seems that the military has gone around and fired a whole bunch of people who speak foreign languages — Farsi and Arabic, etc… For some reason, the military seems more afraid of gay people than they are against terrorists, but they’re very brave with the terrorists … If the terrorists ever got a hold of this information, they’d get a platoon of lesbians to chase us out of Baghdad," – congressman Gary Ackerman, to Condi Rice yesterday.

My favorite singer from last night gets booted out of the competition – for once getting busted for possessing weed. Yep: musicians are no longer allowed to get near the stuff. Musicians …

Marty Peretz unloads on George Soros. Money quote from Sixty Minutes in 1998:

Kroft: "My understanding is that you went … went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews."

Soros: "Yes, that’s right. Yes."

Kroft: "I mean, that’s–that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?"

Soros: "Not, not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don’t … you don’t see the connection. But it was–it created no–no problem at all."

Kroft: "No feeling of guilt?"

Soros: "No."

It’s by Gregg Easterbrook, another Atlantic colleague. I like its ecumenism:

God (or Adonai or Allah), let me play well but fairly.
Let competition make me strong but never hostile.
In this and in all things, guide me to the virtuous path.
If I know victory, grant me happiness;
If I am denied, keep me from envy.
See me not when I am cheered, but when I bend to help my opponent up.
Seal it in my heart that everyone who takes the field with me becomes my brother.
Remind me that sports are just games.
Teach me something that will matter once the games are over.
And if through athletics I set an example – let it be a good one.

(Photo of Welsh rugby team before their game with Ireland last week by Stu Forster of Getty. In Wales, rugby is a religion, so this prayer seemed appropriate.)

One thing that the virulently anti-gay position of the Republican party must deal with is the next generation. I’ve been to several campuses the past few years to give talks and meet students, and one of the most striking things is not just how over it most campuses are on the gay issue, but how the younger generation reacts to the word "conservative." When I was in college, it had something to do with fighting communism, increasing individual liberty, lowering taxes, getting government off our backs, etc. Now, it is almost completely identified with religious intolerance. A key reason for that, I think, is the gay issue – and the gulf between attitudes among the young and their parents.

The next generation, by and large, doesn’t care. As this USA Today story shows, kids are now coming out all over the country in their early teens, where only a decade ago, it was college, and a decade before it was in their twenties. The accelerating pace of social acceptance, whether you like it or not, is an empirical fact. I wonder how many Republicans realize that the Rove strategy of appealing to fundamentalist faith as the critical political ideology of the right could eventually destroy the conservative movement. It might have secured a few short-term victories, but at the expense of medium-term coherence as a coalition and long-term collapse. And I have a suspicion that the collapse could come sooner than some might imagine.

Johann Hari sees some post-modern art he doesn’t like at all. I don’t blame him. The artist in question, however, had a cow:

What a cheap fat-faced ugly four-eyed shot. Cheaper still because a lazy editor saw fit to allow a journalist to sling words like "fascist" around and permit shoddy thoughtcrimes to stand as journalism? Oh yes you did!

"Thoughtcrimes"? See for yourself.

Here’s an Amnesty International ad from 1989, exposing waterboarding as torture. I don’t think they ever imagined that an American president would one day authorize it. Neither did I. Notice that there is no question as to whether this is torture. It took war criminals like Rumsfeld and far-right hacks at the WSJ editorial board to do that.

Christianists strike again in Africa.