The Dish

The fusion of religion and politics and the use of Biblical authority to strip other people of civil rights is not, of course, unique to America. In Northern Ireland, for example, sectarian conflict was accompanied by incredibly repressive attitudes toward sexual minorities and women. When I went on Ulster television for "Virtually Normal" in 1995, it was the first ever broadcast acoss Northern Ireland dealing specifically with the homosexual question. They invited ten openly gay people to be in the studio audience, and only three had the balls to show up. And so it is not that surprising that a leading politician in Ulster would respond to a brutal gay-bashing by criticizing the attack but adding that she nonetheless believed that homosexuality was an "abomination" and made her feel "sick" and "nauseous". She believed that sexual orientation could be cured by psychiatry. She argued that

"just as a murderer can be redeemed by the blood of Christ, so can a homosexual…. If anyone takes issue, they're taking issue with the word of God".

She stated that homosexuality was worse than child abuse:

"There can be no viler act, apart from homosexuality and sodomy, than sexually abusing innocent children."

You know what's coming, don't you?

The astonishing details of MP Iris Robinson's affair with a 19-year-old – whom she had known since he was nine – have been laid bare today. Her lover, Kirk McCambley, now 21, owns a cafe in south Belfast and the visitors' centre which houses the cafe was built by the council on which Mrs Robinson sits. The wife of the Northern Ireland First Minister Peter Robinson helped Mr McCambley get started in business after first identifying a freshly developed council site on the banks of the river Lagan in south Belfast for his new venture and persuaded two local developers to stump up £50,000 in 2008 for catering equipment to kit out the cafe, Mr McCambley told the BBC. Astonishingly Mrs Robinson demanded a £5,000 kickback paid directly to her after her lover received the funding.

From the Mail.

Where there is Christianism, there is usually hypocrisy, corruption and abuse. From Haggard to Maciel, from the Vatican to the Swaggarts, from Rove to Limbaugh, the sheer gulf between their public moralism and their private failings is vast. That's because they're human; and they deserve compassion and understanding, the compassion and understanding they always, always deny to others.

"An appraisal on Dec. 31 about David Levine, the caricaturist for The New York Review of Books who died on Dec. 29, may have left the incorrect impression that the Russian writer Aleksandr Pushkin, the subject of one of Mr. Levine’s drawings, was homosexual. The description of Pushkin as “a gay man” was a reference to his demeanor, not his sexual orientation," – NYT.

(Hat tip: Balk)

Columbus, Ohio, 3 pm

The Millions previews the "most anticipated" books of 2010. Here's one:

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart: A reader points out in the comments that Shteyngart has a new book coming out and since we absolutely would have included it had we known about it, here it is. A recent item at The Rumpus has the scoop: His new novel is set slightly in the future. When he started writing it a few years ago, he envisioned a world where the world’s economy had collapsed and the central banks had to bail out the Big Three automakers. As that came to pass, he had to keep changing his novel, which got bleaker and bleaker. And now it’s set in ‘a completely illiterate New York,’ he said. ‘In other words, next Tuesday.’”

“I don’t see what the point is of a public editor criticizing a story for the New York Times if they’re going to republish it a year later,” – Seton Hall Law Professor Mark Denbeaux on the persistent gullibility of Elizabeth Bumiller’s Pentagon-fed stenography.

I don't have the book yet – they have an insane embargo on it – but this nugget is worth chewing over:

In the days leading up to an interview with ABC News’ Charlie Gibson, aides were worried with Ms. Palin’s grasp of facts. She couldn’t explain why North and South Korea were separate nations and she did not know what the Federal Reserve did. She also said she believed Saddam Hussein attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

People ask – and some junior apparatchiks like Continetti even write books trying to understand – why liberals, independents and non-fundie conservatives "hate" Palin. The answer is: we don't hate Palin. I sure don't. I'm just mesmerized by her as the biggest freak show to be given this powerful a role in America since Michael Jackson. As the record shows, I was not predisposed against her. In fact, the idea of Palin – the feisty right-feminist who took on special interests and reformed government, while skinning caribou with her bare teeth – was as appealing to me as it obviously was to McCain. And I'm not even starbursted by her boobies.

But it became almost immediately clear that she knew nothing about anything, had a private life that you usually see hashed out on Judge Judy, covered up her total lack of governing competence with so many lies they were hard to keep track of, and had next-to-no knowledge of any domestic or foreign policy issues, including energy. Isn't that enough to regard her nomination is a total farce, the biggest insult ever delivered to voters since … well, Dan Quayle, who was far more informed, smart and serious than Palin ever was.

The idea that this person was qualified to run a country in one of its most serious crises, economically and militarily, beggars belief. The recklessness it revealed in McCain showed that he too was simply unqualified for high office, gambling with the core security of the US for cheap tactical advantage.

A reader writes:

You said in response to a reader's dissent that you only want to fire "those who failed to see the clear data in front of them and take appropriate action".  Whaaa?  These last two weeks you've been on the war path against Napolitano, not some anonymous analyst who you assume made a bad decision.  Are you saying Napolitano herself had the "clear data" in front of her, and failed to take action?  How do you know this?  What evidence do you have of this?  To me it sounds like you are totally backpedaling.

Yeah, I have, I guess. My core belief is that someone should be held responsible and accountable and that actual consequences for that should follow. My first impulse – that Napolitano should take the fall – was one expression of this, reflecting the British notion that the minister involved should resign whether or not he or she was directly responsible for the debacle:

Peter Carrington was Foreign Secretary in 1982 when the Falkland Islands were invaded by Argentina. He took full responsibility for the complacency and failures in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to foresee this development and resigned.

That was my first impulse. But I understand this is culturally British – and even a relic as British politics have become less principled since. So my "off with her head!" initial response was ill-advised, even dumb in retrospect.

But once we have very specific instances of failure, after a thorough investigation, it seems to me good management to hold individuals accountable. In the private sector for the most part, profound failures of this sort that could have led to the deaths of hundreds of people would lead to resignations and firings. I don't see why the government should have lower standards of accountability.  In fact, because government as a monopoly on these types of things, I think government's standards of accountability should be higher. And I think the increasing incompetence of government is partly due to the fact that failure simply bears no cost to the individual.

We run the government the way the teachers unions run schools. If no one can be fired for being useless, there is precious little real mechanism for improvement. And if liberals want government's reputation to actually improve, they might listen to ornery anti-government types like me. If Obama actually fired some people for incompetence, it would also wake up independents who are growing suspicious that he is too much like Bush on debt and competence.

AdFreak compiles the top 30 from 2009. The following is from the Victoria Transport Accident Commission:

AdFreak captions:

This PSA cautioned against smoking dope and driving, and featured an appropriately grisly ending. The message was confusing, though, as the man gets run down by fate after doing the right thing—letting his sober wife take the wheel.

From the Heileprin 2008 campaign gossip motherlode:

The [Clinton] war room within a war room dismissed or discredited much of the gossip floating around, but not all of it. The stories about one woman were more concrete, and after some discreet fact-finding, the group concluded that they were true: that BIll was indeed having an affair — and not a frivolous one-night stand but a sustained romantic relationship.  … For months, thereafter, the war room within a war room braced for the explosion, which her aides knew could come at any moment.

The real revelation of the book is its portrayal of Elizabeth Edwards. If the book is accurate, then the discrepancy between her public and saintly image with the private, quite awful reality, is one of the starkest in American public life:

I would be remiss if I did not point to the chapters about the unbelievably dysfunctional husband and wife team of John and Elizabeth Edwards. Not only, it turns out, did many senior Edwards staffer suspect that John was having an affair, several confronted John Edwards about it, and came away believing the rumors. At least three campaign aides resigned because of their knowledge of the affair well before the national media picked up on those early National Enquirer stories.

And John and Elizabeth (who the book says was known to Edwards insiders as an "abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending, crazywoman") fought, in front of staffers, about the affair. The authors describe a moment where Elizabeth, in a such a state of fury, deliberately tears her blouse in the parking lot of a Raleigh airport terminal, "exposing herself. 'Look at me," she wailed at John and then staggered, nearly falling to the ground." (That's page 142.) (This was in October, by the way, well before the media took the reports of the Hunter affair seriously.)

Ambers has more juicy dope here.