The Dish

Sometimes, I think Aaron Sorkin is writing the news these days. I missed this story on the road the last couple of days, but it’s a rich one:

Federal investigators are trying to determine whether [former Republican congressman Randy ‘Duke’] Cunningham and other legislators brought prostitutes to the hotels or prostitutes were provided for them there, according to a report in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal  and confirmed by the Union-Tribune.

The alleged practices were funded by a defense contractor. I doubt the other legislators are Democrats. The story is getting longer and stronger legs. DeLay is gone; Limbaugh has struck a plea bargain in return for mandatory drug treatment; Cunningham may have been given escorts as a bribe … in the Watergate hotel! Who needs a miniseries?

"Less than 24 hours after I testified before a grand jury investigating those murders (and the church burning that preceded them), the Klan initiated a campaign to ‘ruin’ me, a WASP lady with eight great-grandparents buried in Neshoba County, [Mississippi]" – Florence Latimer Mars, a Southern white woman who took great risks in the civil rights movement, when others in her place and class looked away. She died last Sunday.

They’re grim. 100,000 families have so far been forced to flee their homes; U.S. fatalities were sharply up in April; 8,300 civilian Iraqis were murdered by terrorist insurgents in 2005. In terms of civilian deaths, adjusted for population size, Iraq endured something like twenty-five 9/11s last year. Let’s put it another way: a territory controlled by U.S. forces accounted for 50 percent of deaths caused by terrorists on the planet last year. If that is a successful military occupation, then I’m not sure what failure would be. I guess I should ask Powerline.

(Photo: Thaier al Sudani/Reuters.)

Henry Miller hauls out the old "inhaling smoke is bad for you" line against medical marijuana. Has he ever heard of this?

Ross Douthat thinks it’s legitimate for people to decide to vote for or against a candidate because of their religious denomination. Money quote:

[L]et’s suppose that Mormonism hadn’t dropped the whole polygamy thing, and that Mitt Romney’s jokes about "a man, and a woman, and a woman . . ." actually reflected current Latter-Day dogma. Would Sullivan and Novak still object to voters taking Romney’s religion into account? Would Reilly still write that Mormonism only seems strange "because it’s new, which makes the human agency behind it especially palpable"?
Again, I’d vote for Romney. But Mormonism is different from most American faiths, even if it’s not as different as it used to be – and voters should be allowed to consider those differences when deciding how to vote, without being accused of rolling back religious freedom.

He has a point. I wonder if anyone will bring up Mormonism’s relatively recent history of racial discrimination as well. The trouble is that once we have acquiesced to the notion that you don’t need and shouldn’t want a bright line between political life and religious life, these kinds of questions are inevitable. This one really is a slippery slope. Once you have accepted that large numbers of people voted for W solely on the basis of his evangelical protestantism, then how can you argue against people voting against him or anyone else on similar, purely sectarian grounds? Ross is right that the constitutional issue is separate: there’s no legal bar on someone of any faith from becoming president. But there is a growing social consensus that religion matters in politics. The theocons have helped bring this about; the Christianists have pioneered it; the Catholic hierarchy in Rome is abetting it. Once public policy issues become religious and doctrinal issues, all this is on the table. But it is a dangerous and divisive world we are creating. It would be ironic if Romney, the theocon candidate for 2008, were a primary victim. Stupid poetic justice, as Homer would say.

They make for exciting and unpredictable courtroom drama and testimony. In the Guantanamo Military Commissions "trials," you can invoke the Geneva Conventions one minute; and dispense with them the next. Hey, we’re America. We may have invented the Geneva Conventions, but, under Bush, they only apply when Rummy feels like it. He’s the Decider! Money quote from the ACLU’s highly readable eye-witness blog on Rummy’s "trials":

As the saying goes, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. It’s fair to say that the Commission proceedings have been a public relations disaster for the U.S. ‚Äì not because the congenial military spinners lack skill, but because they have such a lousy product to sell. When former members of the prosecution characterize the Commission system as a "fraud on the American people"; when a Commission member, sitting as judge and jury, concedes under questioning that he is unfamiliar with the Geneva Conventions; when the Commissions feature the extraordinary spectacle of a shouting match between two colonels in the U.S. military ‚Äì one the Presiding Officer, the other defense counsel ‚Äì over the lack of clear guidelines for these proceedings; the problem is not one of communications.

If you care about the fate of the American justice system, bookmark this blog.

Dr K nails it today. What an absolutely pathetic spectacle in D.C. over gas prices. Almost all our leaders are giving off a rancid whiff of opportunism and stupidity – from Pelosi’s dumb-ass populism to Bush’s transparent politicking to the absurd notion that high gas prices are somehow all a result of evil corporations. In truth, these high gas prices are an obvious function of demand and supply, and, as such, they are one of the best things to happen in a long time. I hope they go much higher. Soon. If they don’t, the government should force them higher with a big fat gas tax. Only higher oil prices will actually jump-start the new, greener technologies we all say we want (and our planet desperately needs). The government can help a little at the margins: lift ethanol tariffs from Brazil, drill in Alaska, insist on flex-fuel capacity in every American-made car. But for the rest, let the market show people that there are costs to things. This president has never let reality intrude on his conversations with the American public on energy, war, or much else for that matter; so maybe reality will have to speak for itself. Maybe the only way people will stop using SUVs is when they actually have to pay for their ecological destruction and energy inefficiency.

One simple conclusion: conservative government really is dead, isn’t it? A conservative government would simply say: we have no control over global oil prices; consumers reap what they sow; companies should be left alone; and if your wallet is empty because of all that gas in your SUV, you’ve learned a useful lesson in self-government. If only Margaret Thatcher were around to punctuate that lecture with a swipe of her handbag.

In Sweden, the new world struggle against fundamentalist politics continues. The largest Muslim group in Sweden is demanding complete separaration from liberal society, the inculcation of sexist legal norms, and the de facto partition of the country into a zone for the faithful and a zone for the infidels:

The proposals include allowing imams into state (public) schools to give Muslim children separate lessons in Islam and their parents’ native languages. The letter also said that boys and girls should have separate swimming lessons and that divorces between Muslims should be approved by an imam.

The government has issued a strong statement refusing any such thing. But as Muslim populations grow, and as many segments of them continue to fight against the basic safeguards for equality and freedom in the West, it seems to me that the government should go one step further. It should propose that those who do indeed wish to live under Sharia can do so – in a Muslim country. Offer the extremists a subsidy, and a plane ticket back to paradise. If people want to live in a theocracy, let them. But leave our freedoms alone.

The finished version of the documentary about Mychal Judge, the FDNY chaplain, "Saint of 9/11", was shown last night at the Tribeca Film Festival to a packed house. I truly hope that it will get wide distribution and that many will see it. I say this not simply because this saintly man was gay, because he would be barred from the priesthood under the current Pope, or because, in the mysterious way God works, Judge’s sexual orientation actually became a way for him to minister more effectively to the marginalized, sick, poor and forgotten. I say it simply because we Catholics need to hear the stories of the good priests every now and again. We have absorbed so many tales of abuse and arrogance that our faith may be dented. But the good work of good priests continues, out of the headlines, in the pews and streets and living rooms of America. Mychal served everyone in the spirit of St Francis: carefree, open-eyed, laughing, humble. Some of his greatest friends were alcoholics saved from street corners, a mother who lost her daughter on TWA Flight 800, a disabled former cop whom he wheeled across Ireland in an attempt to persuade the people there of God’s healing power of forgiveness. 

Mychal never had a checking account; he never had a mortgage. He spoke of how "fantastic" it was to understand that an omnipotent God has not yet invented tomorrow, and so we can set about our lives each day in the wonder of not-knowing. Whom shall God send us? How will we be asked to serve? Which person we ignored yesterday will God be asking us to minister to today? He had such a great sense of mystery and a resolute astonishing faith in the power of God’s love to redeem everything – and not in some distant eschatological future but now. He was also a big, brusque Irishman, a recovering alcoholic, and a priest of the old school who loved and knew and cared for the great American Catholic family. That’s why he stayed closeted among his beloved firefighters. He knew, sadly, that it would place a barrer between him and some of them. His service came first, and he died doing it.

For me, his ministry to people with AIDS in the very early days means the most. We forget how terrifying HIV was in the early and mid 1980s, how patients would be quarantined in dark rooms, abandoned by their families, with their meals rolled into their rooms on trolleys. From the beginning, Mychal did as Jesus did and walked right in and kissed these frightened souls on the lips. If they recoiled from the sight of a priest – gay men at that time saw the church as an alien, hostile entity – he would persist in silence. He would simply bring holy oils, take a chair to the bottom of their hospital beds, and massage their bony, cold, pain-racked feet. He seemed to express no anger, just a kind of suspended joy in the moment, a joy he found resuscitated by the fact of the resurrection and the intercession of Our Lady. I wish I had met him. What a role model. But through this film, we do meet him, and see the face of God again, and laugh, and sigh.

Ryan Lizza’s afore-mentioned piece on the senator from Virginia is now online.