The Dish

A reader writes:

Given that we’ve had a World of Warcraft post and a Right Said Fred post all within the past day — well, 26 hours — I figure that it’s an appropriate time to subject you to this:

Sweet.

You can hear his crack about Romney here. Actually, when you listen to him, you realize he hasn’t had a melt-down or whatever crap the Hewittites are spreading. He’s making a joke. Go ask JPod if it’s funny.

A reader writes:

Re: "Right Says Fred," OK, be honest: How long have you been waiting to use that headline?

(Clearly, he’s too sexy for his party.)

Way too sexy. Bonus weird autobiographical detail: The 90s pop group "Right Said Fred" featuring extremely hot, openly gay shirtless bodybuilder Richard Fairbrass continues to do quite well in Germany and South Africa. Here’s the weirdness: Richard lived up the street from me growing up – five houses away on Furzefield Road in East Grinstead. His family basically coopted our dog. In retrospect we were both probably too sexy for East Grinstead. But someone might want to check the water in that part of the town.

They’re co-sponsoring a bill to encourage divestment from companies that do business with Iran. I don’t see much evidence that Obama is a dove toward the theocrats in Tehran.

Or "The Godfather IV":

Marty Lederman got there first. Another, subtler YouTube on the same theme can be viewed here. The whole affair would be hilarious if only I had a sense of humor. But we can’t all have been reared under the exquisitely comic tutelage of Norm and Midge.

A reader writes:

I know I’m singing to the choir here, but I really think that Falwell’s legacy is simple… he brought fundamentalist’ christianism out from under a rock and injected it into the daily conversation. For all we hear about liberals vs. conservatives, those terms have been so perverted and twisted that the debate has become essentially irrelevant. The welfare state has been proven unworkable and the classic definition of conservatism (smaller government + lower taxes = more personal liberty and a stronger, freer republic) has been on life support since the right sold their souls and went after the wallace voters in ’68 and then embraced falwell in ’80.

The only relevant ideological debate now is around fundamentalism. Examine the definition, then list the characteristics of that brand of faith and it’s remarkably similar wherever you go: Belief in an all-encompassing "truth". Literal interpretation of a sacred text. Strict adherence to doctrine and dogma with no regard to conscience, reason or science. Blind loyalty to anointed leaders. An outright war on homosexuality and lesser, more subtle restrictions on the rights of women and people of color. Reliance on violence, torture, and terrorism… and most frightening, a strong, welcoming belief in a cleansing apocalypse.

They’re all there…every single trait, in every single sect that subscribes to fundamentalism, whether it’s religious or secular, Christian or Muslim, communist or Nazi. and in a world where the pace of change is accelerating geometrically, the lure of certain truth is particularly seductive, especially to the poor and disenfranchised. That’s Falwell’s legacy, and if the rest of us don’t step up and call it for the bullshit that it is, we’re all in trouble.

Your thoughts?

That thesis is the essential premise of my book, "The Conservative Soul." I agree that our response to fundamentalism – mainly Islamist and secondly Christianist – is the key task of our time. The point of the book is both to rescue conservative politics from the Falwell delusion, but also to argue that fundamentalists are just flat out wrong about what religious faith truly is. Or, in the words of Montaigne,

"Some impose upon the world beliefs they do not hold; others, more in number, impose beliefs upon themselves, not being able to penetrate into what it really is to believe."

I think that fundamentalists are too afraid to really believe. Jesus always, always told us, "Be not afraid." How can those seeking to follow in his footsteps construct a theology entirely based on not taking his advice?

It continues with the paleocon American Spectator’s review of Bob Kagan’s neocon manifesto, "Dangerous Nation."

Malcolm Gladwell gets all excited. Computers may be able to help create irresistible popular hits. Scott Esposito sighs here.

A reader vents:

To paraphrase a line from Apocalypse Now the bullshit piles up so fast on the illegal immigration issue you need to have wings to stay above it. The proposed immigration "reform" bill does very little for the immigrant and nothing for the communities which are unable to absorb their masses, but is a boon for corporations and liberal grandstanders needing to show their tolerance for diversity.   

For the record, it is Big Business and liberals – not racists, "Bible thumpers" and "raving Dobbsians" – and sweethearts like your reader who relates the discussion about the farmer and his 35 cent peach, who wish to institutionalize a type of serfdom, one where employers do not need to provide brown-skinned Mexican worker bees with a minimum wage or benefits of any kind.  All perfectly legal as long as we keep getting our fruit at a discount and our tables bussed cheaply.

And it is liberals – champions of government services – who apparently want to ensure that cities like Los Angeles where I live, must forever bankrupt and shut down community hospitals and emergency medical services; endure public schools jammed to the rafters with children of immigrants illiterate in their native language let alone English; and paralyze public transportation and other infrastructure simply by being overwhelmed by the hundreds of thousands of immigrants pouring across the border every year.

I can think of nothing more elitist and more effective in wiping out the middle class than to in essence enshrine this madness into law, which is what the new proposal does.  And it is the champions of the little people – in concert with Big Business – who are leading the charge!

But hey, at least when a Malibu doctor’s wife leaves her kids with the normalized nanny, has her hedges trimmed by the legalized gardener and hands the keys of her Range Rover to the documented valet, she can point to her pro-illegal immigration reform bumper sticker and feel smug about it before crunching on her low-priced baby green salad.

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery—even if mixed with fear—that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature," – Albert Einstein, "The World As I See It," Ideas and Opinions (NY: Laurel, 1954), pp. 22-23.