The Dish

"We’re now in a totally new era where information is information and you just really have to set your own threshold in what you believe," – Matt Drudge, founding father of the blogosphere, and media super-genius.

Albert Mohler offers a revealing glimpse into the fundamentalist mindset on the question of homosexuality.

Upon close reading, it really does seem as if the basic moral quandary in stem-cell research has now been overcome. That moral quandary was real, and it is a mark of a certain non-religious fundamentalism that some enthusiasts for the research refused to acknowledge that the objections were indeed serious. But we’re facing another moment when science in effect rescues us from our political and moral impasse. There’s reason to hope it can impact our debate in other ways. One day, one hopes, any trade-off between environmental responsibility and economic growth might be rendered moot by new energy sources that enable us to maintain our economically and technologically advanced society without turning the Arctic into Club Med. Science has also enabled humans to have fuller sex lives without any number of diseases that were once fatal and are now manageable – from syphillis to herpes to (almost) HIV. RU-486 may well render the state’s role in policing pregnancy irrelevant to many women. None of this makes the moral issues behind these debates any less relevant – the utilitarian use of human life, the ethical obligation not to damage our planet, the morality that should underpin our sexual aspects of our life as much as every other, the moral status of an embryo or early fetus. But it does make the practical impact of those debates less zero-sum, and the theoretical debates that much more … theoretical. In the end our knowledge doesn’t only damn us; it can also save us.

(Photo: a human embryonic stem (hES) cell colony on a mouse embryonic fibroblast (MEF) feeder layer.)

"She hasn’t accomplished anything on her own since getting admitted to Yale Law. She isn’t Dianne Feinstein, who spent years as mayor of San Francisco before becoming a senator, or Nancy Pelosi, who became Madam Speaker on the strength of her political abilities. All Hillary is, is Mrs. Clinton. She became a partner at the Rose Law Firm because of that, senator of New York because of that, and (heaven help us) she could become president because of that," – Joan Di Cola, a Boston lawyer, in a letter to The Wall Street Journal this week, cited by MoDo in a must-read column this morning.

I love this classic Dowd summary of Clinton’s "experience" in foreign policy:

She went on some first lady jaunts and made a good speech at a U.N. women’s conference in Beijing. But she was certainly not, as her top Iowa supporter, former governor Tom Vilsack claimed yesterday on MSNBC, “the face of the administration in foreign affairs.”

She was a top adviser who had a Nixonian bent for secrecy and a knack for hard-core politicking. But if running a great war room qualified you for president, Carville and Stephanopoulos would be leading the pack.

Finally, I hope, voters will get to see past the flim-flam being thrown in their faces by the Clinton machine.

Mark Hemingway responds to his critics – rather persuasively, I’d say.

A reader writes:

That young Catholic soldier’s reflection on morality and war was heartening to me as someone of the same generation who ponders these basic questions all the time. The statement that struck me most was the following:

"But I understand that sometimes the way that the world is killing is necessary. There’s just no way to avoid it. That doesn’t make it right.”

This should be a simple concept to understand — human beings are moral agents who are constantly faced with choices to be moral or immoral. However, as the soldier so wisely acknowledged, the rationalization of immorality does not magically transform the nature of the act. This is where, as you said, the previous generations have sunk into an abyss of relativism.

Those who condone torture for example, do not even take the morally coherent, if incorrect position that it is a “necessary evil”. Leaving aside those who support it out of sadistic revenge, the “rational” torture apologists seem to think that if there exists even a possibility that torture yields what they consider to be positive results (saving lives), this somehow transforms the objective evil of the act of torture into a good. (We should be “proud” of water boarding). In essence, they have devolved their argument for torture to the most common and ancient excuse for evil — The Greater Good. “The ends justify the means”. Really? These are conservatives? I thought such unmoored justifications for the overturning of traditional morality was the purview of Gnostic, Utopian ideologies?

Transposed into law and buoyed by fear and dependency, these specious arguments have undermined our philosophical underpinnings in Enlightenment principles.  A toxic, knee-jerk defensiveness has emerged in parallel to this moral degradation, smearing anyone as anti-American, unpatriotic or even treasonous should they make light of the uncomfortable reality.  I believe this is an implicit acknowledgement of guilt.   The perception, which was not always accurate but has become so, is that there is nothing “special” about America anymore in terms of higher principles or values.  We have become just another faction in the history of factions.  Our “leaders” and too many normal citizens have become monsters in their effort to destroy monsters.  And through the beauty of our representative democracy, they dragged us, the heretics, along with them.

You always say “know hope”.  I don’t really subscribe to “stage” theories of history but maybe it has to get worse before it gets better.  If hubris is the disease, is humiliation the cure?  What will it take to humiliate ourselves back to sanity?  Is it too horrible to contemplate?