The Dish

Another excellent column by David Brooks this morning, even though his effortless list of neuroscience reading made me feel as if I should crawl back into my hole of ignorance. But this view of faith in modernity is a powerful one:

Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

My italics. The question embedded here is the momentous one, it seems to me. Why should God be love? As someone never able to shake off belief in God, I find it much more challenging to believe that God is benign. Why should God not be evil? That, to my mind, is the greatest revelation of Jesus – and it has to be  revelation. Deus Caritas Est. Buddhists intuit this, which is why the overlaps between Buddhism and Christianity have been so compelling to many in recent years.

I could go on, but I obviously have some reading to do … Derb’s two farthings are here.

James Pethokoukis hears Huckabee is at the top of McCain’s veep list. Malkin’s reaction: "Can someone please fast-forward to 2012? Please." Meanwhile, Limbaugh is trashing McCain’s climate change proposals; and National Review is calling him … Al Gore. The horror.

Josh Claybourne examines the domestic debates about the Mexican-American war which began 162 years ago today.

A reader writes:

If it makes you feel better:

We have two beautiful husky mixes adopted from a rescue.  Like all huskies, they have a prey instinct that can never be fully trained out. We thought we’d done pretty well…until the day I arrived home from a walk and they brutally put down a feral cat that had been hiding under my car.  In our suburban driveway.  In the middle of the day.  With the neighbors standing about 10 feet away.

I was shocked/embarrassed.  The dogs were elated for the rest of the day ("PLEASE, one more walk?  PLEASE").

How I got over it:  When reciting the story to a friend of ours, he shared that, while growing up in Canada, his husky had the same problem.  But his husky kept taking down deer.

Another warns:

Unfortunately, the bloodletting could get worse with Dusty.  Every dog is different and I believe breeds matter, but there is an old-saying from here in the South that proves accurate more often than not:  Once a dog sucks eggs… Basically, once they taste blood, they’ll always go after it.

We have two Jack Russells

and I watched one almost swim himself to the point of drowning to kill a Black Swan at my parents house.  We thought letting them run free in the country would be safe (in spite of the rare squirrel carcass that would show up in the backyard).  Unfortunately, the country just turned out to be a target-rich environment.  By the time I got the canoe out into the water and was able to get to him, the swan was history.  When I dragged Max out of the water, he had a glazed look in his eyes like he couldn’t even see me.  Perhaps the canine-equivalent to the "thousand-yard stare."  The funny thing is, if the Max is leashed, Oscar actually plays with all other creatures.  It’s like Max is a cult-leader.

The entire escapade left us scared to ever let him loose and answered a long-time question I had posed to my step-father:  What kind of fool pays $500 for a black swan?  The kind with a blood-thirsty Jack Russell.

Goldberg is more polite than I was.

George Will has some questions for John McCain. I liked this one:

You vow to nominate judges who "take as their sole responsibility the enforcement of laws made by the people’s elected representatives." Their sole responsibility?

Since when did conservatism mean eliminating judicial pushback against over-reaching legislatures and executives?

From Meng Bomin: Obama is blue; Clinton red; Edwards green. WV and Kentucky are red country; Oregon looks blue to me. Michigan has no blue on this map. More fascinating mappage here.

David Roberts looks at McCain’s climate plan.

"He’s a half-breed and he’s a Muslim. How can you trust that?" – a Clinton volunteer in Pennsylvania. The Washington Post’s account of some of the raw racism experienced by some Obama campaigners is a depressing read.

Ross considers the conservative resurgence in Britain:

For American conservatives looking across the pond for inspiration, what’s at stake in the current – and perhaps temporary – Tory renaissance has less to do with policy specifics (the shape of U.S. politics more or less ensures that any revived American Right will have to be simultaneously more libertarian and more socially-conservative than Cameron’s Tories) than with the broader question of whether Anglo-American conservatives can successfully govern a welfare-state society in an era that isn’t characterized by profound, late-Seventies-style disillusionment with the administrative state.

I know enough to know I need to spend time there to figure out what’s going on. I’m planning on it. Reihan, who has paid closer attention to Cameronism than I have, defends it ably here. It certainly feels great to have a conservative party that hews to moderate rhetoric, has no real interest in religious fundamentalism and is keen to decentralize power. But maybe my roots are showing. I will note that McCain was Cameron’s guest at the Tory Conference – back when McCain was discounted as the GOP nominee. I will also note that Cameron’s insistence on being the green party – putting "conserve" back into conservatism – was critical to restoring public confidence. McCain is following Cameron’s lead on this.

These are interesting times: signs of saplings in the scorched conservative forest.

(Photo: David Cameron by Peter MacDiarmid/Getty.)