The Dish

Another multicultural breakthrough for Madge. Ritchie, on the other hand, just looks hot.

Did he defect? Was he kidnapped? The mystery deepens.

Why would a civil rights organization give a man who used the word "faggot" to a gay man an Image Award? That’s what the NAACP just did. I wonder if HRC will complain? Yeah, right. They’ll have to ask Clinton permission first. Of course, Wiki tells me that

in 1994, Tupac Shakur was a nominee for Outstanding Actor in a Motion Picture for the film Poetic Justice although he had been charged in December 1993 with sexually abusing a woman. In 2004, R. Kelly’s Chocolate Factory was nominated for Outstanding Album although he was under indictment at the time for charges related to child pornography.

Still, they didn’t actually win, did they? Meanwhile, there’s more evidence of the group’s dysfunction here.

A Catholic parent struggles to find an answer.

A theocon complains that Obama’s campaign literature includes a call for universal healthcare. Why would a Christian not believe that providing excellent healthcare to the largest number of people is a defensible priority? Because we are supposed to suffer from illness. Money quote:

In his bracing little book on Secularization, Edward Norman, chancellor of York Minster, describes the conflict between Christianity and what he calls Secular Humanism by contrasting their attitudes toward suffering. Christianity "was founded in an act of expiatory pain, has regarded human suffering as not only inseparable from the nature of life on earth, as a matter of observable fact, but also as a necessary condition in spiritual formation." Christians seek, of course, to alleviate suffering, but God, not human suffering, is the center of the moral universe…

This is a box outside of which Senator Obama cannot think, and this is why his agenda looks so thoroughly Clintonesque. Here’s a suggestion: If he wants to transform American politics, perhaps his next fund-raising letter should say something along the lines of ‘Pain may be good for you.’

So the Christian injunction to heal and care for the sick is now to be abandoned. It might help a Democrat, after all.

"You went into jail in the summer. It is fall now … Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them," – Scooter Libby, writing to Judith Miller while she was in jail.

(Photo: Quaking Aspens, Little Cottonwood Canyon, Salt Lake County, Utah, by Scott Catron.)

It’s come to this? I’m watching Scarborough and see both Buchanan and Huffington agreeing that the Congress needs to take the Libby verdict from here on. Both opposed the war. I didn’t. But at this point, I agree with them. Why are those of us who favored the war not as eager to investigate whether we were deliberately misled? Weren’t we potentially conned as well?

Good for him.

A reader writes:

I think Andy McCarthy’s interpretation of the ‘Where’s Rove?’ comment is a bit disingenuous. The defense opened up their arguments saying that Libby was sacrificed to protect Rove and Cheney, but they then proceeded to provide none of this evidence. Rove wasn’t called to testify, Cheney was nowhere to be found, and Libby didn’t take the stand for his own defense. That juror comment is more an indictment of a poor job from the defense than it was of unnecessary charges being filed.

Andy believes that the investigators "should have quickly realized that the facts here did not warrant a prosecution" under IIPA. No crime no foul, no Libby indictment. I believed that investigators saw smoke, and decided to dig and find the fire. Problem is that Libby lied and constructed a bogus story to cover his (and Cheney’s) butt. This interference prevented the investigators in uncovering the facts that could have led to charges under the espionage and identity protection acts. Libby lied to hide the truth. If Libby did not lie, then Rove and Cheney may be on trial right now for the damage they have done. If that was what Libby intended to do, he seems to have succeeded.

But what if Libby now decides to tell the truth? I mean: about the real reason he lied and risked jail to protect his boss?

A reader writes:

Thank you, Andrew, for that post. I will testify to you about the bravest man I ever knew.

My brother, eleven years older than me, my godfather, was a semi-nelly queen from rural southeast Texas, where we grew up. Talk about steel. There, especially then, you take your life in your hands if you’re queer and honest about it. Far more likely you grow up closeted and hating yourself. Well, my brother didn’t hate himself, but plenty of people down there did. And somehow, in the face of hate, he displayed understanding and equanimity. How he managed understanding was sometimes beyond me. Like your friends, Andrew, my brother had more strength and courage and grace than Hannity and Coulter put together. He died of AIDS, Christmas 1994. He lived long enough to have several fatal diseases – Kaposi’s, pneumocystis carinii, etc. – by the time he died. He lived his illness without bitterness, complaint, or regret. He planned his death, from the hospice to the urn, so as not to be a burden to our parents or to his brothers or friends. All the while offering comfort to his friends who were sicker, cooking meals, driving to appointments, enforcing medical regimes.

I’ve never seen someone so kind to the nurses and doctors attending him.
"I’m sorry, I look horrible," he said to the doctor at his last appointment.
"Do you feel like you’re dying?" his doctor asked.
"Yes. Is that okay?"

He faced eternity with peace and wisdom and a great good humor that I continue to find simply stunning. I am not prone to experiencing profound revelations. But his death was just that to me. And this, of course, says nothing about who my brother was apart from his disease.

My brother was not a faggot. He was a man.

(Photo: a sanitation workers’ strike in Tennessee, February 11, 1968. More info here.)