The Dish

Jonah Goldberg posts an endless letter hyperventilating about how I somehow didn’t provide full context for a couple of quotes and links to NRO’s Corner blog yesterday. Maybe I should indeed have elaborated that the NRO debate about "racial superiority" was not about Americans’ purported racial superiority to potential immigrants, but fears of potential immigrants’ purported racial superiority to Americans. Well, excuuuse me. Two links not enough?  I just found it interesting that the whole concept of "racial superiority" or "inferiority" was being debated at all. As for Herr Derbyshire, readers know by now, I’d hope, that I find his eccentric celebration of prejudice to be more amusing than shocking. And then there are those moments when a gleam appears in the eye of a dotty uncle when he talks about rounding up illegal immigrants "in greatly increased sweeps", and depleting their numbers by "attrition" … and you wonder what he’d tolerate given half the chance. Look: Jonah Goldberg isn’t John Derbyshire; and Ramesh Ponnuru isn’t Ann Coulter. But they choose to hug them close. Sorry if that gets embarrassing from time to time. Deal with it.

Another email:

The problem with Christianism is a theological as well as a political one. The Republican Party is very happy to lock the Evangelicals into being its permanent, hardcore political base. However, one has to look at the reason why Evangelicals are so easily lured by political ambitions.
For me, the reason is clearly arrogance, which is best expressed by the lay clergy of Evangelical Churches. Any person with a big-enough ego and a flair for the stage can be a preacher. Becoming part of the clergy is not a "calling" as it is in non-Evangelical Christianity, it is not a painful, strenuous, humbling personal experience, it’s showbiz. An already big-ego on the preacher’s podium bloats up beyond imagination when adulated by the thousands of church-goers who flock into the mega-churches, and the result is what traditional Christianity calls "exaltation", the preacher loses any sense of proportion and plays God.
Which is why there appears to be no conscientious objection to make unChristian calls of "taking out" foreign leaders, or advertising "God wants you to be rich" workshops between sermons, or calling "godless" all those who are not Evangelicals.

And people like Howard Dean go on Pat Robertson’s show and give him legitimacy. And we’re giving John McCain a hard time!

(Photo of Tom Coburn and James Dobson by John Clanton/Tulsa World/AP.)

The immigrant is fretting about the racial status quo in America and has an ideal solution for the immigration issue:

One: That all legal immigration into the U.S.A., excepting only cases crucial to our national security, be halted forthwith.
Two: That Congress authorize the federal government, as a matter of the highest priority, to construct high walls along our entire northern and southern borders, supplemented by electronic monitoring devices and manned patrols in much greater numbers than at present; and that Congress designate all necessary funds for this effort.
Three: That by widespread and rigorous enforcement of employer sanctions, and greatly increased sweeps of suspect workplaces, and by responding with dispatch to citizen reports, the enforcement arm of our immigration services begin the human but speedy removal of illegal immigrants from our nation, by attrition and deportation; and that Congress designate all necessary funds for this purpose..

There are a few dissents, of course. My favorite:

"But Derb, I really think you’re wrong about the racial-superiority thing."

Fade out to Brokeback jokes, torture humor, and zygote rights. Ah, conservatism. I hardly knew ye.

Tony Snow’s first day at the office … well, let’s just say there were some kinks.

I mentioned my recent trip to my home town on the blog, but I got to write a longer diarist page on it for The New Republic. I discovered a few things about my home town I’d never known before. Here it is.

James Wood gets it all perfectly right, as he often does:

So we have a heaven-made circularity: Colbert, abjuring comedy for bitter irony, attacks the MSM like the bloggers do; the MSM decide not to mention Colbert, or decide that he wasn’t funny, or was rude; and the bloggers get to cry foul, charging that this shows, at best, exactly what is wrong with the cloth-eared MSM – or, at worst, that a conspiracy to silence Colbert has begun. At which point the MSM, in their stolid, evenhanded way, write up the "controversy." Who can blame the bloggers?

James can also write a sentence like the following:

On this, I’m with the foul-mouthers, the underground men, the crazies, the semi-literates with their paranoid monikers.

Me too. James: get thee a blog.

(Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.)

Vicky Pollard has a real-life doppelganger. My own guide to the British "chav" phenom can be read here.

Christianist Mel Gibson hasn’t always seen eye to eye with George W. Bush, as my post earlier today suggested. Wiki points out:

Despite the fact that he has been perceived as being a conservative Republican (even though he has never identified himself as such), Gibson joined many of his colleagues in the entertainment industry in opposition to the Iraq War and even praised the liberal director Michael Moore and his documentary film Fahrenheit 9/11, leading some to question labeling him as a conservative, although it’s possible he leans more towards traditionally anti-interventionist paleoconservatism.

Gibson first became concerned about Bush once it was revealed that there were no WMDs in Iraq. I have a feeling Gibson would be more in line with Buchananite America Firstism than Bush’s Wilsonian incompetence.

A "He-Man" fan remembers his temps perdu.

Stilton cheese becomes a perfume. Brits suddenly smell better.