Jeb

In the latest issue of the Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes has a slavering love poem to Governor Jeb Bush of Florida. Really an over-the-top performance by Freddie the Beedle. Ed Kilgore comments on it at TPM Cafe.

Barnes remarks, as many have, that in the early '90s Jeb Bush seemed more like presidential timber than his older brother George W., and that it was a curious reversal of fortune in 1994 (Dubya winning the governor's race in Texas that year, Jeb losing in Florida) that gave Dubya the inside track to the GOP nomination for president. The title of Kilgore's post is "Buyer's Remorse," the idea being that given the spoiled legacy of Dubya's presidency, a lot of conservatives are musing wistfully, what if it had been Jeb.

Kilgore:

My take is that Barnes is signalling the official adoption of the "wrong Bush" theory by W.'s most devoted followers. ...

To understand the significance of Barnes' column, you have to know that this once-solid-if-conservative columnist has long served as the ultimate hagiographer of W.-As-World-Historical Figure. This epiphany dates back to the 2000 presidential nominating contest, when Fred hedged bets for Bush while the rest of the Weekly Standard crew climbed aboard the Straight Talk Express. So Barnes' buyer's remorse about backing the "wrong Bush" is a big-time sign that even his most loyal supporters are abandoning him.

It's fun to imagine what goes on behind the scenes in Poppy Bush's family. I'm not sure it's a very instructive pastime, but there's something irresistible about it. Barnes quotes Jeb Bush denying that his family sees itself as a dynasty, but that denial is pretty absurd on its face. And I share Kilgore's opinion that a third Bush running for President anytime soon is unfeasible. It's easy to foresee Jeb living out his days in frustration and indignation, feeling he was denied his rightful reign in the White House. Although the Carlyle Group profits will make Jeb's a very comfortable sort of purgatory.

Duke lacrosse

After a few relatively quiet weeks on the Duke lacrosse team rape scandal beat, David Brooks brings it back up again in his most recent column. (It was picked up in the Raleigh N&O, where I read it -- I don't do NY Times Select.) I'll take this occasion to post something here about the scandal--I've been thinking about it quite a bit.

Brooks columnized about the lacrosse rape case once before (on April 9--reproduced here on the Feministe blog) and he set his glib tone right from the opening sentence: "All great scandals occur twice, first as Tom Wolfe novels..." He lacks a basic understanding of the nature of rape, calling it a failure of chivalry, or a case of "lust gone wild," and nowhere in the piece do you sense the existence of a flesh-and-blood woman alleging a violent crime.

In the April 9 column Brooks set up a dichotomy between the language of sociology and that of morality; he remarked how the general run of commentary on the Duke case rested so heavily on racism, sexism, and other -isms, and so little on character, will power, and the young men's descent into "depravity" (Brooks's word), abetted by "shock jocks and raunch culture" (also Brooks's words).

Why the problem has to be one either of nature or of nurture, and not both, is a strawman. Here in Duke's backyard, there is plenty of pointed discussion both of the individual lacrosse players and of systemic problems the rape case reflects. But strawman arguments come in handy for Brooks in the May 28 follow-up piece. This column is not glib, but rather full of tender sympathy... for the lacrosse players who may have been falsely accused.

First off, we know that the players are not dumb jocks--in fact, they are honor students. (Who ever said they were dumb?)

We also know that the lacrosse players are not the amoral goons of popular legend. The members of the Coleman commission [internal Duke investigation] interviewed many of the people the players came into contact with and found almost universal praise and admiration. The groundskeeper and the equipment manager described the current team as among the best groups of young men they have worked with during their long tenures at Duke.

Well, the groundskeeper and equipment manager aren't the players' peers. This is a little like getting the butler and gardener to vouch for the character of Richie Rich; it's a curious tack if you're trying to bolster the case for some guys who are thought to suffer from an elitist sense of privilege. But anyhoo.

"The committee has not heard evidence that the cohesiveness of this group is either racist or sexist," the Coleman report says. The current and former black members of the team are "extremely positive" about the support they received. The coach of the women's lacrosse team says relations between the men and women are respectful and supportive. "They are great kids," she has said of the male players.

"The cohesiveness of the group is not racist or sexist" doesn't tell us much, merely that the lacrosse team was not a chapter of Aryan Nations. Nobody said they were constituted as a hate organization. Also, "current or former black team members" in the Duke lacrosse program adds up to maybe three people. But I'll concede the point that many people at Duke like and admire the lacrosse players.

[Coleman report again:] "Their conduct has not been different in character than the conduct of the typical Duke student who abuses alcohol."

Okay. Much greater in frequency (even Brooks admits), but not different in character. Typical of Duke students who abuse alcohol, which is many of them.

There may have been a rape that night, but it didn't grow out of a culture of depravity, and it can't be explained by the sweeping sociological theories that were tossed about with such wild abandon a few weeks ago.

Okay, now I'm confused. Seven weeks ago Brooks said it was one or the other of these: depravity or a sociological explanation. If it's neither, what is it? The reality of rape is strangely absent from this piece; all we hear about is an assessment of the treatment the lacrosse players received.

(You know another word that is absent from this piece? "Indictment." That's a new development in this story since early April that you'd think might rate a mention.)

Here's the nut of Brooks's recent column, howver:

Furthermore, when you look at the hyperpoliticized assertions made by Jesse Jackson, Houston Baker, and dozens of activists and professors, you see how mighty social causes like the civil rights movement, feminism, and the labor movement have spun off a series of narrow social prejudices among the privileged class.

The members of the lacrosse team were male, mostly white and mostly members of the suburban bourgeois middle class (39 of 54 recent graduates went on to careers in finance). For many on the tenured left, bashing people like that is all that's left of their once-great activism.

75% of Duke lacrosse players graduate and go on to Wall Street? Wow. That's how I read it--I don't think these guys are going to be loan officers at your local credit union. Anyway, notice how David Brooks identifies the privileged class in America as "the tenured left," and not these well-to-do Duke students who are future masters of the universe. That's the old conservative switcheroo. And I'm glad our community's pain could be converted for use in Brooks's project.

Brooks thinks he is ratcheting the controversy down by portraying the lacrosse players as typical rather than atypical. I'd feel better if I thought the players under indictment were deviants or bullies, that their presence at Duke was a fluke or an aberration. The more troubling thought is that they are typical of Duke's campus life--are put on a pedestal by many students. The day the first two players, Seligmann and Finnerty, were indicted, a local TV station interviewed two young women students who lived in their dorm. These women gushed over the players, called them the sweetest and gentlest people they knew. Hell, Finnerty has another charge pending against him, for beating up a guy in D.C. last summer. A lot of people express wonder at how the players, seemingly average college students, and apparently on a ladder to success, might commit such an awful crime. I also wonder why this young woman, similarly normal and well-adjusted, views this guy with two violent offenses on his rap sheet as "the sweetest boy she knows." What's going on in her head? Is it self-protective Duke tribalism, or is her self-esteem and judgment of people's characters that shaky?

I will say that the sociological angle has been overplayed in some ways. Does Durham have town-gown tensions? Yes--like many college communities. Racial tensions? Sure--like many cities in the South and in other regions of the country. But prior to the lacrosse story breaking, not many people around here consciously thought of Durham as a place with a race-relations problem. The problems that the lacrosse team scandal exemplifies are predominantly Duke problems, they are not Durham problems. (I commend to your attention this excellent piece in the Independent about the unfair treatment Durham gets in the court of public opinion. I also commend this piece about how the scandal has roiled Duke's campus. It's in the Duke alumni magazine, so there's a certain pro-Duke spin, but it lays out the issues pretty well, and is not blatantly trying to sweep things under the rug.)

I don't expect the lacrosse players to be convicted. That statement probably won't shock anybody. This is our own little Joe College version of the O.J. Simpson trial, with Joe Cheshire in the F. Lee Bailey role, Mike Nifong as the hapless prosecutor... Sorry, now I'm being glib. I really don't know if a rape occurred or not, I just know how hard it is to prosecute rape, the physical evidence seems ambiguous, and the victim in the case will not be a very credible witness. The players will walk. That's my cold-eyed reality-based assessment. (Furthermore, after an acquittal I predict there will be an ugly tendency by Duke students to view the players and by extention themselves as victims, for having allegations thrown about that were ultimately not proven.)

The racial insults, however, almost certainly happened--the players' lawyers don't even really dispute that. I think it's likely that someone threatened to rape the women with a broom handle, as has been reported. The verbal abuse, verbal assault really, ought to be chargeable, as far as I'm concerned. Also, I don't think enough has been made of the fact that the lacrosse players lured the women to that house on false pretenses. They promised that the party was a small gathering of baseball and track athletes--I don't know whether that was to conceal their identities in case of trouble after the fact, or to get past a bad reputation of the lacrosse team's; it's bad either way--and they promised the women money which they don't seem to have intended to pay. They lied; they set a trap; their abuse and humiliation of those women was quite premeditated. To sum up: The things we are pretty certain the players did are disgraceful, and really troubling to anyone who cares about Duke University, and takes it seriously as a place that educates leaders and citizens.

Bracket time

I wouldn't bother if the semi-secret forum where my buddies hang out wasn't on the fritz, but I gotta get on the record with my picks before games tip off in a couple of hours.

(Like I posted this time last year, I have a terrible time with my priorities every March. The NCAA tourney! And my fantasy baseball draft! And yet the powers that be at my job have contrived a really busy month of actual urgent work for me.)

Anyway, without further ado:

ATLANTA REGION

1. Duke, George Washington, Texas A&M, LSU, Southern Illinois, Iowa, Cal, Texas

2. Duke, LSU, Iowa, Texas

3. Duke, Iowa.

4. Duke

OAKLAND REGION

1. Memphis, Arkansas, Pitt, Bradley, Indiana, Gonzaga, Alabama, UCLA

2. Memphis, Pitt, Gonzaga, UCLA

3. Pitt, Gonzaga

4. Pitt

WASHINGTON D.C. REGION

1. UConn, UAB, Washington, Illinois, George Mason, UNC, Seton Hall, Tennessee

2. UConn, Illinois, UNC, Tennessee

3. UConn, Tennesee

4. UConn

MINNEAPOLIS REGION

1. Villanova, Wisconsin, Nevada, BC, Oklahoma, Florida, Northern Iowa, Ohio State

2. Villanova, Nevada, Florida, Northern Iowa

3. Villanova, Northern Iowa

4. VIllanova

TITLE GAME: UConn over Gonzaga, 78-72.

See, I have three sentimental favorites in the tourney: Davidson, NC State, and West Virginia. I am going against sentiment and picking all of them to lose their first game. (Davidson doesn't really have a chance, NCSU has stunk horribly the last two weeks or more, and WVU is just in that 6/11 slot that is ripe for an upset, plus they had a miraculous run last year and I think the karmic wheel is going to turn against them.) But then I am compensating psychologically by having all three of their vanquishers getting vanquished themselves in the next game. I can live with this.

Then three No. 1 seeds going to the Final Four--that's pretty conservative. And a No. 3, Gonzaga getting through (I like Gonzaga's name and overall gestalt), and No. 1 Memphis getting knocked out (I have an ancient grudge against Memphis from years ago -- I picked them to win the national title one year as a real longshot, and they didn't even come close.)

Fantasy baseball draft on March 28.

Happy New Year! / public editors suck

Via Atrios: The Washington Post's ombudsman is for shit.

So, I've noticed, is NPR's. So is the Raleigh News & Observer's, for the most part. His title should be Chief Flack, not Public Editor. I guess I've gleaned a little bit of insight about the inner workings of the paper from his columns, e.g. what copy editors do, but it's always quite slanted and quite protective of the N&O's staff. He never holds anyone's feet to the fire. One of his recent columns was devoted to why the paper is sometimes wrinkled during the printing process. Hard-hitting stuff!

The NYT's new guy Calame has done some good things; he came down pretty hard on Judith Miller, and he was frank in writing that the Times's managing editor would not respond to his questions about NSA domestic eavesdropping and why the paper held the story for over a year. But Calame's predecessor Dan Okrent was a bit of a disaster.

Fear of the online world, and lack of understanding of it, are the crux of the dilemma for public editors. The WaPo has been persistently nettled by the phenomenon of bloggers, in their guise of self-appointed watchdogs of the establishment media. That's Deborah Howell's problem in the episode linked above. Newspapers are in a difficult and confusing position -- I say confusing because these misunderstandings lead them to commit acts of self-mutilation. Here's John Harris training his fire on the Post's in-house blogger Dan Froomkin. Okrent's low point was when he sided with an Internet troll named Donald Luskin over the Times' editorial page superstar Paul Krugman.

The latest black eye on the news business was the reporting of the mine accident in Upshur County, West Virginia last week. It's A Miracle! // oops, no it's not. West Virginians are marked by religious faith, but they're also marked by a deep sense of stoicism. Being braced for the worst; not expecting the universe to hand them a break. That sense of stoicism deserted some of them on that fateful day. Bottom line, I have trouble singling out the media for criticism. There was a generalized premature delirium, and I don't see why anybody, reporters or family members or CEOs or anybody else, was celebrating until those miners emerged from underground.

Seen At Work

A middle-aged gentleman wearing a orange corduroy sportcoat with elbow patches, over a tennis-ball green argyle sweater. And that was over a shirt, a patterned polyester job that could've been worn by one of the extras in Saturday Night Fever, only, nah, too garish.

Unbelievable. Words cannot do justice to this sartorial trainwreck. It was something only a supremely self-confident man would dare.

Blessed Are the Merry

I want to take a moment to salute Bill O'Reilly and his righteous crusade to rescue our country from the PC Orwellian nightmare of people saying Happy Holidays, and to return us to the sweet holy harmony of people saying Merry Christmas.

Happy Holidays is an all-inclusive vision of hell, a card-carrying ACLU-supporting tofurkey-eating Kwanzaa-colored dystopia. A vortex of postmodern chaos, it can mean anything: shoot, Osama Bin Laden can have Happy Holidays sitting in a dark cave, with no tree or tinsel or Johnny Mathis records or anything.

But ah, Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas is a sentiment to set your cash register jing-jing-jingling. Merry Christmas is where Ebenezer Scrooge got the true spirit and started spending some of that bankroll, am I right? Merry Christmas sounds like America: get it? A-merry-ca! Merry Christmas really is like a picture frame by Currier and Ives, crossed with a full-color catalog by Abercrombie and Fitch. Merry Christmas summons up a fair-haired, blue-eyed, Fox News watching paradise, in the tradition of great Christmas-loving Americans like Irving Berlin and Jules Rankin. Most of all, Merry Christmas really rubs it in the face of Jews and Moslems and Ethical Humanists and other infidels.

And goodness knows, merriness is the supreme value of the Christian religion. As in those famous verses, "Blessed are the merry"... "Be merry unto your neighbor as thou wouldst have him be merry unto you"... "God saw what he had done and said that it was merry"... and on and on.



"Always look on the bright side of life." Jesus met his painful, humiliating death with the right attitude -- a merry attitude. (Unlike Graham Chapman, I'm sure, who met his end with a gay attitude, and not in the nice old-fashioned sense but in the modern filthy diseased abomination sense.)

Long live the Church of the All-American Merry Christmas, and our pope, Bill O'Reilly, and his disciples, deployed all over the nation as Wal-Mart greeters.

UPDATE: New York Times: "Religious conservatives have a cause this holiday season: the commercialization of Christmas. They're for it."

Go Cal

It's no longer timely, but the NYT ran a story last week, archived here, about a lawsuit against the University of California system by a group of Christian schools. These schools offer certain courses taught from a strict Biblical perspective (including Christianity's Influence in American History and Biology According to Bob Jones) and UC refuses to accept these courses on an applicant's transcript. The lawsuit calls this policy a First Amendment violation.

I say give 'em hell, Cal. Getting into a name-brand college isn't a right. UC Berkeley ought to be able to set its admissions standards according to its own mission and values, and if a high school has curricular priorities that are antithetical to UC's priorities--free and open-minded inquiry, investigative rigor--then students of that high school ought to expect to be penalized.

Evangelicals are trying to have their cake and eat it too in this case. If they think their values are Godly ones and they are God's elect, they should expect to be scorned by sinful society, not rewarded with status and consumer choice. God or Mammon? Put up or shut up, you yahoos.

Oops, I almost forgot: I learned about this story at The Revealer, which praised Carolyn Marshall for "an admirable job of refereeing... Marshall lets the parents of Calvary hang themselves (or at least hang their cause as somewhat hysterical) with their own rope ... in a way that makes the case for overreaction better than any editorializing could." THAT'S the way to report on these Scripture vs. Scientific Consensus stories.

Sis Boom Bah

You thought college cheerleading was silly? That all those young people take away after senior year is a souvenir megaphone and the memory of a little slap and tickle in the school van on the tail end of a road trip?

Not so. Conveying enthusiasm and getting people to do what you want them to do are abilities that come in handy in business. Being a cute athletic young woman never hurt either. Anyway, according to this article, there is a pipeline between being a cheerleader (especially at a big state school where the sports culture is king) and working as a sales rep for a pharmaceutical company.

I find this kind of thing interesting. Maybe because I didn't have a clue about career planning or networking when I was in school, I'm intrigued by people who really do leverage their school ties and networks. I also find it interesting that below the George W. Bush league of prep school and Ivy League cronyism, there's a regional brand of social networking driven by college sports and fraternities/sororities. I haven't tested this theory, but I suspect that by studying a list of, say, the 1965 DKE pledge class at Chapel Hill, you could figure out quite a bit about business and politics in the state of North Carolina today.

So being a cheerleader is a ticket to a high-paying sales job. Besides the benefit of being an attractive perky woman, there are advantages to being, for instance, a former University of Kentucky cheerleader when calling on doctors in Kentucky. Of course, it mainly works for women, since female sexuality has more exchange value in the marketplace. (We still feel a little weird about male cheerleaders, don't we?) I also wonder if we'll ever read of a pipeline of college athletes into a certain profession--say, that lacrosse goalies make great dentists, or soccer forwards make great clinical psychologists--and if not, why not. Isn't cheerleading the derivative activity, the auxiliary, the parasitic?

Looksism is nothing new, I guess, and I give these women credit for combining beauty with some brain power and initiative, and making some real money. Though it's disturbing to think of doctors dispensing meds because of the bounce of the sales rep's pom-poms, not whether patients benefit from the meds. And it makes me wonder whether Big Pharma devotes nearly as much insight and innovation to developing new medicines as they do to highly-focused efforts to hire cheerleaders.

She Said, He Said, I Said

A month or so ago I defended Jodi Wilgoren for a story she wrote about the culture war over evolution. Some in the blogosphere felt that the New York Times shouldn't devote any ink to a disreputable scientific position (namely, creationism or I.D.). Basically, I felt (1) that the mere fact of the controversy, of a large segment of the lay public that differs with expert scientific consensus, was newsworthy; and (2) the creationist position looked bad under Wilgoren's scrutiny. Myopia, self-delusion, even malicious anti-intellectualism are on the march in the U.S. The best response progressives can make is not to curse these movements, nor ignore them, but describe them calmly and closely--if possible, let the Flat Earthers tell their own story, give their own account, alongside established scholarly opinion. The Flat Earthers will shoot themselves in the foot, or worse.

Wilgoren's coffee shop story, which I blogged about yesterday, may have been lightweight lifestyle journalism, but was basically unobjectionable. The he said-she said approach is a problem when applied to matters of national politics and/or when high-powered spin doctors are involved. But in Wilgoren's hands, on these softer cultural stories, with selective use of detail, I think the merits of the two sides can be fairly judged. And hey, Wilgoren's piece won't lead to an unjust war or a skewed presidential election, like the work of some NYT reporters I could name.

Now for an encore, I'm going to pick another bone with Pharyngula and defend another mainstream reporter who gives voice to the wingnut position on science. NPR's religion reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty has come in for criticism in the past from Atrios, Media Matters and elsewhere for some items on her resume: she lectures at a seminar for evangelical journalists, and has received money from one of Howard Ahmanson's foundations (other Ahmanson foundations support the Discovery Institute as well as anti-gay causes.)

I started to compose a hair-splitting point-by-point defense of Hagerty, but the hell with it. (If you care to, raise some points in Comments and I'll see if I can answer them.) I don't always think she does a great job; a couple of years ago I heard her freeze up during a live report on "All Things Considered"--the worst I've ever heard a broadcast reporter choke under pressure. But I'm reminded of the protest some right-wing blog made recently, that a gay reporter should not cover the gay marriage debate--it's a conflict of interest. That's horseshit, and so, in a milder form, are some of the complaints about Hagerty. An evangelical can cover the religion beat--if she's careful.

The story in question, from last weekend, examines a tempest in a teapot: an editor at a small science journal approved for publication a paper on Intelligent Design. The journal has ties to the Smithsonian Institution, a fact which amplified the inevitable protests of evolutionary biologists, and led to some negative consequences for this editor Richard Sternberg: basically, a certain amount of professional ostracism. (Which he deserves. If not a reactionary, he's at least a dope.) The story goes on to discuss young biologists who hold anti-Darwin views but who feel they must conceal them in order to receive tenure. Hagerty interviews both sides, the mainstream Darwin defenders and the conservatives. She lets the right-wing biologists tell their story, air their gripes, and at the end we (I, at least) get the feeling they're whining. It's noteworthy that that a few scientists are trying to get Intelligent Design on the agenda. It's somewhat enlightening to get this window into the workings and politics of scientific publishing and academic hiring. But in the end, you conclude that ID proponents are marginal, and for very good reasons. (Having a science Ph.D. and believing in Intelligent Design is an absurdity, and should never have been allowed to happen, and if such a person is weeded out at the tenure stage, well, better late than never.)

using my inside voice

Jodi Wilgoren of the New York Times strikes again, this time reporting from the North Side of Chicago, on a controversy over the deportment of toddlers in coffee shops. One local barista has posted a sign stating that "children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices when coming to A Taste of Heaven". Fightin' words! A band of rogue stroller-pushing angels has unholstered its Blackberries and fired a volley of e-mails, threatening boycott.

Two observations. First: My God, people are touchy on the subject of children. Parents are stressed and guilt-ridden and oversaturated with information and opinions about child-rearing, so offer them one more opinion and get ready to have your head handed to you:

"I love people who don't have children who tell you how to parent," said Alison Miller, 35, a psychologist, corporate coach and mother of two. "I'd love for him to be responsible for three children for the next year and see if he can control the volume of their voices every minute of the day."

But even non-parents have a chip on their shoulder about their choice NOT to have children.

Mr. McCauley, 44, said the protesting parents were "former cheerleaders and beauty queens" who "have a very strong sense of entitlement."

Me, I have a very strong sense that this fellow is still dealing with the trauma of all the wedgies he got during 10th grade gym class. I've noted in the past that there is a nascent "rights of the child-free" movement that projects some weird shit at times. Do they think we parents are jealous of them? That we think they're selfish? That we are lemmings, whereas they have the courage of their convictions? Look, I can picture the noise and the X-games antics that kids get up to in a coffee shop; mine have done it occasionally. (I remember my oldest TKOing herself, running headlong into the edge of a table; I remember my youngest howling with pain when she stuck her fingers into my piping-hot cup of Kona Blend. Each was age 2 or 3 at the time.) But is it really that persistent a problem? Is it way over the level of rudeness and unpleasantness Mr. McCauley should expect and be prepared to tolerate as proprietor of a retail business? Obviously, I can't know for sure, but in this yuppie neighborhood (in Wilgoren's description), I'm skeptical that this is an epidemic.

Second observation: Coffee shops are modern-day lifestyle temples, some kind of wired-for-WiFi cross between lending libraries and cloister walks, only with a not-too-edgy alt-rock soundtrack warbling at a tasteful volume. I occasionally enjoy lingering in quiet and comfort with a latte and a newspaper. I really don't normally have my kids in tow when I go for coffee, I recognize that Starbucks and its ilk are essentially adult spaces, but on a day when I'm going to have my daughters with me and want to juggle child care with some other errands, I'd resent the suggestion that I'm barred from them. The coffee shop seems to be one of the places where the rubber hits the road in balancing public against private, and access for all against our own standards of comfort and convenience.

At any rate, the celestial battle over A Taste of Heaven is headed for an apocalyptic showdown:

Mr. McCauley said he would rather go out of business than back down. He likens this one small step toward good manners to his personal effort to decrease pollution by hiring only people who live close enough to walk to work.

"I can't change the situation in Iraq, I can't change the situation in New Orleans," he said. "But I can change this little corner of the world."

I salute you, sir. Others are working with great fanfare on issues like child abuse, poverty, failing public schools, but nobody is confronting the little-acknowledged crisis of toddler etiquette as boldly as you.

Genco Olive Oil

I picked up the New York Times at the Raleigh airport on Sunday morning, looking for the Judith Miller postmortem. Alas, it wasn't in the national print edition. I did finally track it down online, but after reading Tina Brown give the highlights and lowlights here (including a juicy quote that the Times didn't use), I may not bother to plow through the official version. Clearly, Judy ain't telling the whole truth (darn those Secret Service logbooks!), and the Times itself hasn't come to grips with the self-inflicted harm that came with letting Miller "run amok."

Judy Miller is no First Amendment martyr, she's a conniver and a dupe. Miller's name is tarnished for all time. Good. The Times's reputation has taken a beating. That's a shame, although their reputation hasn't cut all that much ice with me for quite a while. I still wish they would be the great paper they can be. If Dick Cheney departs in disgrace, well, he's done his damage already and he'll live out his few remaining sclerotic years counting his Halliburton profits. If bringing down Karl Rove will mean the end of Karl Roveism, great, but I'm not certain that genie can be put back in the bottle easily.

Inasmuch as the unfolding of Plamegate has sapped the momentum and vitality of that ongoing disaster we call the Bush Administration--hurray. Personally, though, the emotion I take from it is less satisfaction than dismay at how long it's taken, how much effort it's taken, how much resistance and denial there's been--dismay to be reminded how completely screwed up American national politics are. Official Washington is decadent. That's a funny word to use for such an uptight, near-beer sort of city, but it fits when standards of truth and decency have collapsed the way they have on the banks of the Potomac. It's remarkable how the earnest Rhodes Scholars of the Bill Clinton administration were scorned as outsiders and naifs by the semi-permanent D.C. social gatekeepers, but the Mayberry Machiavellis of the G.W. Bush team were accepted. It isn't obvious to me that it should've worked out that way. The Bush crew had a shrewd understanding of D.C. tribal rites, but they also applied bullying tactics very effectively. There's a Stockholm Syndrome quality to the media's acquiescence.

It's especially dismaying to people (like me) who imagine that being a New York Times reporter would be a fantastic thing to be. Simply covering national politics for America's leading newspaper, and doing it with integrity, doesn't slake some people's ambitions. This Miller creature was using her NYT credential to pursue some other agenda. She was a spy, essentially, or agent provocateur--a shadowy political operator, and the New York Times was her front. Remember, she didn't even write about Valerie Plame, she just stirred the pot in some yet-unknown way--propelled the story forward while keeping her by-line off of it.

Remember Genco Olive Oil Importers? It was the Corleone family business in "The Godfather," the legitimate facade for their real business of extortion, prostitution, etc. The New York Times and who knows who else (all Robert Novak's outlets for sure; Meet the Press, perhaps?) are like Genco in this case, and the real business is ratfucking and state propaganda. Of course, as Gene Lyons commented, even the Mob has more honor than to go after somebody's wife.

*

This verdict on Judy Miller is indisputable as far as I'm concerned. So it boggles my mind when Beltway mavens like Richard Cohen and Jacob Weisberg defend Miller and the Plamegate conspirators, and chastise special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

These guys are geniuses of self-promotion, in their way: calculatedly provocative, they are card carrying liberals who go against the grain of liberal conventional wisdom, in a way that might seem brave to their readers, but keeps them in the good graces of their sources and the Washington social scene. On the very day when anticipation over Plamegate indictments is at its height, both of them come out with columns saying that Fitzgerald's investigation is bad for liberal principles and he should shut it down. They're going for their "contrarian's merit badge," in James Wolcott's phrase.

Cohen urges Fitzgerald to close up shop and leave town, and leave politics to the Roves and Libbys --you know, the professionals: "Do not bring trivial charges -- nothing about conspiracies, please -- and nothing about official secrets, most of which are known to hairdressers, mistresses and dog walkers all over town." This pisses me off to no end, and it's something that I've written about in this space before: the notion that lots of people in the Washington politico-media establishment knew that Rove and Libby were engaged in reckless character assassination, and none of them deigned to let the other 290 million of us know. Washington hairdressers can be trusted to know what to do with "official secrets" but a federal prosecutor can't, and Joe and Jane Voter aren't even worth mentioning.

Weisberg and Cohen both allude to Ken Starr and the prosecutorial excesses of the Clinton years--which is the worst case of fighting the last war I've ever seen. Where is the proportionality? Clinton was trying to get his dick wet. Bush's minions were trying to fight a baseless, illegitimate war. Weisberg makes a big point that Libby certainly didn't blow Valerie Plame's cover intentionally, merely recklessly. I guess that makes a difference as to what particular statute Scooter will be charged under, but it hardly makes it less despicable.

Weisberg objects that Plamegate was not a mere attempt to hurt Joe Wilson--it was not simple retaliation, eye-for-an-eye. It was to score a point in the DOD v. CIA dispute over Iraqi WMDs: "Bush officials were in the middle of an argument in which they were largely wrong, and which they lost, but in which they thought they were right and were trying to win." Again, whether the harm to Wilson and Plame was Libby/Rove's pure intent or merely a side effect hardly matters. But I would also like to remind Mr. Weisberg of Slate magazine of the difference between a lie and a political position. By June 2003, only a fool or a dreamer could believe in the existence of Iraqi WMDs. Scooter Libby is a snake, but he is no fool nor dreamer. Good ideas don't need to have lies told about them in order to gain support.

Half of what really gripes Cohen, Weisberg, and their ilk is that Patrick Fitzgerald doesn't leak, and that makes their job as journalists harder. They are content with the status quo, where "senior administration officials" like Scooter and Turd Blossom call them up and feed them disinformation. Leaks are the lube in the gears of Washington society and career-making. Who cares that a leaked story will likely be bullshit, and may have barbaric consequences. It was Page One!

*

Voices of reason--

James Wolcott: If the shit really hits the fan, e.g. Cheney has to resign, "we'll hear the same frets and cries from the pundit shows about the country being torn apart and Americans losing faith in their government. But it isn't the country that will be torn apart by Plamegate any more than the country was torn apart during Watergate (which provided daily thrilling news entertainment value that bound citizens together); it's the Washington establishment that will be torn apart. And it should be torn apart." [Emphasis in the original]

Gene Lyons: Miller is wrong, it was possible to see the WMD intel was bogus -- "Maybe that’s the story Scooter Lewis and the country-club toughs in the White House really feared. What’s more, it was always there to be written, but not by Washington courtier-journalists who pride themselves more on the quality of their dinner party invitations and TV appearances than their professional integrity and skepticism. Do I believe that Miller can’t remember who told her “Valerie Flame’s” name ? A child wouldn’t believe it. The more clever of my two basset hounds would be suspicious. The real shame is that, absent an aggressive prosecutor, none of this would have become known." [Emphasis mine]

Don't do the crime if you can't do the time

It takes a special kind of sleazeball to smile for his mug shot. The same kind it takes to pimp out his own daughter in a hot tub for his rich lobbyist pals.

Keep your eye on the sparrow, Tom! You piece of shit...

The Grand Canyon and the Tattooed Paleontologist

The New York Times did a cover story the other day set in the Grand Canyon. Two different tour groups took raft trips down the Colorado River through the Canyon. One, organized by the National Center for Science Education, pointed to all the evidence of slow change over geologic time. The other, led by Canyon Ministries, looked at some of the same fossils and geologic formations and argued that they were evidence that Darwin and Lyall were wrong and God made it all happen in accordance with the Biblical account of creation and the Flood.

Pharyngula and others were all over it, as an egregious example of "he said she said" reporting. The story refuses to explicitly endorse either side of the controversy.

I'm going to muddle my point here. I usually deplore the "he said she said" approach as well, especially in political reporting, which is NYT's Jodi Wilgoren's beat. I am tempted to make a half-hearted exception in this case; I believe at least this is a good-faith disagreement (as opposed to "Nancy Pelosi tells the truth, then on the other hand Tom DeLay tells a lie, The End"). True, Wilgoren could have made clearer the massive weight of scientific consensus on the evolution side of the scale. But I don't think this is a brain-dead story; I think Wilgoren has framed it artfully and observed the most telling details. And I respect her intent (articulated in an e-mail to PZ Meyers of Pharyngula) to keep her opinion out of it. I think we Enlightenment types should be outraged that organized creationism exists, not that the New York Times reports on it per se.

Anyway, I got something out of this story. The structure of it and the length allowed for a nuanced view of where the sides were coming from. To put it another way, it gave both sides plenty of rope to hang themselves with.

It gives us vignettes like this:

Diana Panes began questioning evolution, which she had studied in school like most everybody else, seven years ago when [her son] came home from school asking whether Genesis was fable or history...

Of the explanations offered by Mr. Vail and other creationists, she said, "For me it was just the most immense relief that it didn't have to remain a mystery forever." [Emphasis mine]

Another data point in my theory that a huge cause of conservative nonsense in the U.S. is baby-boomer parents who can't handle awkward conversations with their teenagers.

Through four days, Mr. Vail mentioned public schools only once, saying that 80 percent of Christians walked away from their faith when studying science that confounded the creation story. "It's foundational to our faith... We're raising a generation of confused children, and it's the public schools that are doing it!"

I think the 80% figure is pulled from somebody's ass, but I think we see an important bit of subtext here. There are people in this country for whom being book-smart is not the highest value. These people are threatened by change, afraid of being made obsolete, disturbed that their children are being educated into different values than the parents hold. They latch onto creationism as an anchor. It's irrational, it's unhealthy, it's misplaced focus, but it's a teeny bit understandable.

Pharyngula feels, and some of his commenters agree, that the story goes out of its way to make the pro-Darwin side look bad. The young male paleontologist with tattoos and painted toenails, who calls himself a devout Christian--is he a freak? Is his portrait designed to make the scientists' side look bad to the religionists' side? I disagree, for three reasons off the top of my head. One, a person can be smart, well-educated, creative, non-conformist, a tattooed weirdo even, and be a Christian. Two, do tattoos and church repel each other like oil and water? No--there are entire congregations of pierced, tattooed, Gen-X Christians. Three, who is reading the New York Times in the first place? A lot of creationists, or a lot of secular Bobos with a not-very-nuanced picture of Christians?

Look at what our tattooed paleotologist says:

"Ultimately, creationism is not just bad science to me, it's bad Christianity, it's Bible worship... God doesn't require you to be stupid, to deny what you see, to deny what you know."

Shazam. This is the focal point of the article, for me. "Bibliolatry," my undergrad religion professor Max Polley called it. He deplored Bibliolatry, and he was a Bible scholar. The God I believe in wants to use your faculties freely.

Let me be clear: Evolution is the truth, evolution should be taught in the public schools, and any explanation, from Intelligent Design on down, that relies on a divine Creator, should be excluded from science classes. Creationism is an error that, in its manifestation as a political campaign, could have disastrous consequences. But evolution represents a huge cultural rift. A veritable Grand Canyon. Look at the poll numbers (I know it's painful) showing how many average Joes and Janes disbelieve evolution. This rift is not going to be closed with a ringing concluding paragraph to a New York Times story. If it's ever going to be closed, it's going to take time and patience and listening and understanding. I think Jodi Wilgoren's story contributed.

A Tale Told By an Idiot

Crooked Timber informs me of a new campaign to tell the world who the "real" William Shakespeare was.

It is amazing how resilient is the idea that William Shakespeare, son of a Stratford glovemaker, couldn't have written the plays that are attributed to him. One of these so-called epiphanic breakthroughs arises every few years. The latest candidate for "real Shakespeare" is Sir Henry Neville, but of course the Earl of Oxford, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and others have been nominated in the past. Each epiphany gets smacked down, but somebody else will come forward with another one before long.

I was glad to see that almost nobody among the commenters at Crooked Timber, who surely include some people more knowledgeable about the Bard than I am, gives this theory any credence either. (There's also the intriguing report that this Rubinstein person also retails anti-Darwin theories. An all-purpose debunker.) Someone at CT raises the pertinent issue of what authorship meant in Elizabethan times. Parts of that argument are over my head, but it seems clear that Shakespeare was at least influenced by Marlowe and other colleagues and patrons, and that the plays existed as performances for some years before they were published as texts. So it's likely there was a collaborative aspect to the creation of the plays in the Shakespeare canon. And there is little biographical data about Shakespeare the man, hence lots of room for speculation, lots of room for conspiracy theories.

Mostly what I detect, in these essays on why the Stratford man couldn't be the author of Hamlet, are inessential things. The ad hominem thing, for one: it's just evident in the rhetoric that some of these guys use that they hold the snobbish assumption that a man of humble social origins and little formal education could not possibly have written these great works of literature.

There's also the Occam's Razor verdict: People construct these elaborate schema for the Earl of Oxford's authorship: huge edifices of circumstantial evidence, how this scene in Henry V corresponds to some episode in the life of Edward de Vere, etc. All of which obscures the Oxfordians' enormous timeline problem: Oxford died well before many of the plays are believed to have been written. (Marlowe died even earlier.)

One argument the anti-Stratfordians always allude to is that a person of low rank like Shakespeare could never have had the knowledge of politics and court life that is reflected in the plays. But you never hear the reverse--you never hear anyone wonder how the Earl of Oxford could possibly have written realistically about gravediggers or household servants.

Anyway, some people think this stuff is great fun. I feel a teeny bit insulted on behalf of the Stratford man. Whatever.

Priests

I am not a Catholic. I know and admire many Catholics, including some priests, and I don't feel I have the right to pass judgment on their church. It's not my church, and for many people being Catholic is not quite a free choice; it's something they're born into, and to be loyal and committed to one's ancestral religious tradition is a praiseworthy thing, in my view. Mind you, I said loyal and committed, not blindly or uncritically obedient. The Catholics I admire see the problems of Catholicism, struggle with them, and work within the system to address them.

Despite not wanting to judge, and despite not wanting to betray the confidence of some Catholic "insiders" I know, the situation of Catholic priests fascinates me and I want to comment on it. For all that the Protestant Reformation rejected and denounced about Catholicism, there's still a sense even among Protestants that Catholic worship is the real 200-proof stuff. I've heard Protestant ministers speak that way explicitly, kind of an inversion of the way British Invasion rock musicians spoke of Muddy Waters and B.B. King. Lutheran and Presbyterian preachers (some, at least) are dazzled by the solemnity of Catholic worship, the sense of an unbroken 2000-year tradition, the power of ceremony, of stained glass and incense, the priest's focal role in confession and absolution. And as little tempted as they are to a life of celibacy, they are also a little in awe of it: the way Catholic priests so utterly set themselves apart, the dedication entailed in forswearing sex and other worldly comforts. The figure and the office of the priest are so highly esteemed. It certainly must clarify many things about who is the leader, who is the follower, things which can get very mixed up in Protestant parishes.

I wanted to get that on the record: some of the qualities of Catholic life and ministry that even non-Catholics admire. Of course, there are lots of aspects of Catholicism that an American Protestant layperson like me finds strange and incongruous. Something I blogged about once or twice before, and call me a fool but I put some stock in it, is the connection I have found between being active in one’s church and being a citizen of the American republic. America was founded, largely, by religious dissenters from Catholicism and Anglicanism. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were heavily informed by the principles and structures of representative government that Congregationalists, Quakers, Moravians had followed and were accustomed to. The Catholic Church didn’t come onto the scene in American culture until relatively late, in the 19th century, brought by Irish and other immigrants. And Catholic church governance is not characterized by transparency, or checks and balances, or representation of all its members, or freedom of dissent. I don’t mean to be nativist here: I think America must welcome and accommodate immigrant cultures, but it must uphold American-style democracy in doing so. Catholicism and American-style democracy are nervous neighbors, and always will be.

The priest sex abuse scandals exposed the conflict between Catholic governance and American jurisprudence. It exposed the dark side of the church’s (how to say this non-judgmentally) rigidly pre-modern views about human sexuality. And it exposed the capacity of American priests to be incredibly self-deluded and out of touch with the larger culture and how priests were perceived in it. It showed that what priests are ordained to is not simply a life of devotion, integrity, and self-denial. It is also, to say the least, a secretive and self-protective guild. I was struck, in some of my conversations with Catholic leaders circa 2001-2002, how they tended to see priest abuse as a P.R. problem that they had to manage, rather than a huge moral failure that they ought to confess and beg forgiveness for.

Incidentally, I haven’t read The Da Vinci Code. I know there are leaders and scholars (Catholic and Protestant too—Catholic controversies, including the priest sex abuse scandal, bleed into the Protestant world) who worry that overly credulous readers will take too seriously the stuff about centuries-old conspiracy and deception in the Vatican. I don’t know if this kind of paranoid speculation is a real problem (for instance, really keeping people away from or decreasing their trust of the church, not just being light entertainment), but I know that the Church’s modus operandi invites paranoid speculation.

Given the opacity of authority in the Catholic Church, the absolute and forbidding tone especially on matters of gender and sexuality, it's been hard to get my head around the idea (I’ve been working at it for five or six years now) that the Catholic priesthood is a gay vocation. (I'm sure this difficulty of mine reflects my limited view of sexuality as well as ignorance of Catholicism; I must underrate the erotic thrill of the taboo, for one thing.) A lot of knowledgeable people estimate that around 50% of American priests are gay in orientation. For centuries, "sensitive" young sons of Catholic families were attracted to, maybe even nudged toward, the priesthood. I am told that there are priests who interpret the vows of celibacy as not prohibiting same-sex activity. As long as there's no vagina in the room, anything goes, I guess, under that view.

I should qualify one statement: the Catholic priesthood in the U.S. and Europe is a gay vocation. In Africa and other developing regions, it’s a different story, which is an important bit of background. Catholicism is booming in the Third World, and stagnant in the developed world.

The news of the last couple of weeks is that the Vatican is preparing to issue an order that gay men (even sexually inactive gay men) will be barred from entering seminary to study for the priesthood. Obviously, this would be big, and lots of Catholic writers and commenters are voicing objections. As Michael Sean Winters points out in Slate, some bishops seem eager to make gay priests the scapegoats for the sex abuse scandals, when scheming, buck-passing bishops themselves are more culpable.

Winters suggests that a valuable reform would be for the church to restore the rule that bishops cannot “job-hop,” cannot be transferred to plummier bishoprics. This would eliminate one motivation for a bishop to duck accountability for problems in his diocese, since, to use Winters's example, the bishop of Bridgeport cannot angle to be appointed Bishop of New York.

John Allen, Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, observes here that the Catholic Church follows Italian conceptions of the law as an expression of ideal behavior, and doesn't expect its priests to live up to the letter of Catholic doctrine. A ban on gay priests would be enforced flexibly and with discretion. Well, that would explain a lot-—Allen’s piece made some light bulbs go off for me-- but my Protestant American self objects: Laws that are enforced unequally are no better, arguably worse, than no laws at all. Which brings us back around to the strangeness of Catholic authority in the American context.

If it comes to pass, a ban on gay seminarians will worsen one significant practical problem: the steady decline in numbers of American men who want to enter the priesthood--a decline that, judging by this and other actions, the Vatican seems not to be terribly concerned about.

Lottery

Some interesting news in North Carolina today. We just got a lottery, with the Governor's backing--it passed in a narrow vote with a strange-bedfellows coalition of liberal Demos and social-conservative Repos opposing it. And there was some chicanery and resulting bad feelings with the final vote: basically, the legislative session went into overtime and a couple of No votes had already left town and were unavailable to cast their votes.

I was opposed to it. I lived in New Jersey as a teenager, where there was a lottery. One summer I worked on a landscaping crew and one of the older guys, doing pretty much the same work as me for not much more money, with no better future prospects than mowing lawns, who I'm sure lived paycheck to paycheck and struggled to make his rent, was an inveterate Lotto player. That's my image of the typical lottery-ticket buyer. As a grown-up in North Carolina I took pride in being from a state that was one of the few holdouts against the lottery. I pretty much agree with the old joke that the lottery is a tax on poor math skills, and the hypocrisy of using a lottery to fund education just angers me. The numbers racket also nurtures a something-for-nothing or get-rich-quick ethic that I think society would be better off without.

But it's a done deal. Now it'll be a test of my principles, or self-righteousness or whatever, if I resist the temptation to buy the occasional ticket. "Maybe just when the pot gets really big...."

Anyway, to chair the new-lottery commission, Gov. Mike Easley appointed Charlie Sanders, who was a prominent opponent of the lottery bill. Sanders seems to want to have a "humane" lottery, with limited advertising, and an effort to inform people about the odds against winning. The argument you always heard in favor of the lottery was that people from NC were driving to SC or VA to buy tickets anyway. Sanders's attitude is, let's capture those people who are predisposed to play the lottery, but not expand the pool of ticket buyers through hype. Probably it'll never happen that way, but I thought it was a very good gesture. And exactly the kind of thing a Republican administration would never do after they had just won a bitterly-contested vote.

Double Helix in the Low Block

Who's ready to talk NBA basketball? Huh? Huh?

Chicago's Eddy Curry had an episode of cardiac arrhythmia last year, and before Chicago signs him to a $5 million contract, they are demanding a DNA test to see if he's susceptible to genetic heart problems.

It's interesting stuff, and I'm not sure where I come down. Curry's agent is spinning horror tales, that this is the first step toward all of us having to give DNA samples before we can get a job. On the other hand, is signing an NBA contract "getting a job" or selling your body at auction? One thing the Chicago front office is guided by is insurance--it may be that no one will insure a contract to a guy with a heart condition of unknown severity. And the linked article quotes the late Reggie Lewis's agent, reminding us that the downside here is Eddy Curry winding up dead. This is not a knee ligament we're talking about.

This points to one factor that may finally compel the United States to guarantee universal health coverage. Genetic screening will advance to a point where people's risk factors will be so measurable and projectable that lots of people will be unable to get private health insurance.

How-How!

My daughter and I signed up for Indian Princesses at the local YMCA. (Actually, in our town they drop the word "Indian" and call it Y-Princesses, but Indian Guides (for boys)and Princesses (for girls) are the more widely-known names.)

I read Adam's recent post about his son's interest in Cub Scouts, and Adam's mixed feelings since he has long disliked (for good reasons) the institution of Scouting. Maybe he and I can trade notes. I didn't know too much about Indian Princesses, other than it was roughly equivalent to Girl Scouts, until I went to the first dads-only orientation meeting. We heard the Creation Myth of the Indian Guides and Princesses program: the story goes, a white businessman in 1926 went on a fishing trip and got to talking with his Ojibwa fishing guide. In the course of a long meaningful discussion, the guide said that the problem with the white man is he lets his women-folk raise his sons. That chance encounter planted the seed, and the White Founder cooked up a plan for fathers to spend one-on-one time with their sons (daughters got their corresponding gig 30 years later) and for eight to ten father-son pairs to get together in "tribes" for bonding and wilderness tramping and stuff, and the rest is history, leading up to the venerable program that dads and their kids enjoy today.

That's fine. You got your condescending stereotype of the wise shaman-like Indian, plus your outdated sexist and classist assumptions that the wife is home with the young'uns while the husband earns the income all day then retires to his Barcalounger and his newspaper when he gets home. And therefore Dad needs an assignment in order to spend quality time with his child. Then there's a vague Christian overlay on the whole thing (the "C" in YMCA). That's all fine. For an opportunity for your kid to have fun, you overlook stuff like that. And though it's a little jarring to volunteer to join an institution you find politically incorrect and a little ridiculous, you rationalize: hell, if I boycotted every unfair or ridiculous social institution, I wouldn't have a drivers' license, I wouldn't use deodorant, my wife would never have consented to live with me, etc.

Here's the weirder thing. There was more testosterone in that room than anyplace I've been in a long time. Fathers only, remember, maybe 50 or 60 of us. The meeting was led by these YMCA employees, local or regional rec directors, who were all 30ish or older, but if ever a job didn't really require a guy to grow up, YMCA rec director is the job. Each of them had a nickname: the barrel-chested guy was Moose, another guy was Big Hair which was amusing because he's had that name for years but now he's balding and crops his hair short. We're all actually supposed to have Indian-like nicknames, but my ideas for my own name are things like Otter or Surfing Bird that pop into my head from "Animal House" or silly old rock 'n' roll songs. There's a strong whiff of the college fraternity about this meeting: Moose and Big Hair lead us in chants and songs and pledges and other little rituals. ("How-How" is the greeting--we are expected to shout it in a hearty fashion.) In fact, in my little tribe the experienced Y-Princess dads joshed the newbie dads that we were going to be hazed, like deprived of sleep for a week, ha ha.

So Moose and Big Hair gave their spiel, cutting up and teasing each other all the while, half-sincerely going through the motions. It was like watching George W. Bush saying what a shame about the suffering of poor people, but hey, Trent Lott's house will rise again and my friend Brownie (nicknames again) is doing a heck of a job. Trying to be serious but undercutting the message with jokes and backslapping.

Apparently a major challenge of Y-Guides and Princesses is keeping the fathers in line. Moose implored us to follow the correct format for meetings, follow the rules for awarding patches, etc., without seeming to believe we really will. He actually said that one of the rules is "no firewater," ha ha ha, but apparently some irrepressible dads will turn the father-daughter campout into a cocktail party.

The locker-room atmosphere surprised me, but what also surprised me was how out of place I felt. I've been in quite a few locker rooms in my life, I used to work in high-technology sales (though granted, I sucked at it), I was in a college fraternity myself for crying out loud--when did I lose the ability to hang out with a crowd of manly men? All I can figure is it's down to 11 years of having daughters, no sons, and almost as many years working in the de-gendered metrosexual atmosphere of a university. Plus having cats in the house, no dogs. No-dogs was probably what did me in.

Anyway, I'll try to keep you updated. And may the Great Spirit rise like the dawning sun in all your hearts, ha ha.

John Scopes Rides Again

Very good article in the Hartford Courant from a couple of weeks ago. It's about Dr. Kenneth Miller, who is my number-one hero in the controversy over Intelligent Design, and about the pending lawsuit by the ACLU against the Dover (PA) school board, which is going to be a major milestone in said controversy. The article gives a good outline of the Scientific Creationism, later Intelligent Design, movement, and the resistance to it.

I blogged last spring about a talk I heard Miller give.

There Are Limits

Great post by August J. Pollak. (Thanks, Chana.) He details dimensions of the hurricane damage in New Orleans that I hadn't even thought of: the environmental catastrophe; the effect on wooden structures of soaking in water for weeks; etc. Then he makes the political connection:

So even if you are for the war in Iraq, even if you think the President is the glue holding this entire nation together, I simply cannot understand, or for that matter even believe at this point, the suggestion that this is less important than "fighting terror." Nor would I understand you or believe you if you said the money and resources we currently don't have to aid this nightmare were "better spent" protecting us from imagined threats in Iraq.
Two years ago we were told we needed to attack Saddam so one of our cities wouldn't be destroyed. One of our cities was just destroyed. And it appears that many more lives could have been saved, and many things protected, if there was more funding for infrastructure, more devotion to protective efforts, and more National Guardsmen here at home to do their actual job- guarding our nation- rather than deployed in Iraq.

Every idea, even a great one, has a cost. Even a nation with the strength of arms and noble ideals of the USA, has limits to what it can do, has to weigh potential benefits against their costs.

Christopher Hitchens has a new piece in the Weekly Standard, and masochist that I am, I read it. Poor Hitchens is really showing signs of wear and tear. While the thesis of the article is how proud Americans should be of the Iraq war effort and its many positive effects--a nutty, vainglorious and thoroughly Hitchensian position--he also occasionally (can I be reading right?) makes certain halting gestures toward admitting some second thoughts, some failures of prophecy on his own (Hitchens's!) part. One paragraph will make me cross-eyed with rage, which is totally normal and reassuring. Then the next will have me reeling in partial agreement. Like, for instance, Hitch has some pretty cutting things to say about President Bush.

But there's lots and lots of bloodthirsty lunacy too, less artfully stated than Hitchens usually manages. Near the end, he offers up his Top Ten Good Things About Dubya's Excellent Iraqi Adventure, which is pure comedy gold.

(1) The overthrow of Talibanism and Baathism, and the exposure of many highly suggestive links between the two elements of this Hitler-Stalin pact.

Naturally, we had to go to war to make sure that our stated reason for going to war was valid.

(3) The consequent unmasking of the A.Q. Khan network for the illicit transfer of nuclear technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea.

Which is a serious matter--a whole lot more serious than all the discredited charges about Saddam's WMD programs. Which begs the question, why didn't we invade Pakistan and currently have A.Q. Khan in custody. But let's move on.

(6) The ability to certify Iraq as actually disarmed, rather than accept the word of a psychopathic autocrat.

See # 1 above.

(10) The training and hardening of many thousands of American servicemen and women in a battle against the forces of nihilism and absolutism, which training and hardening will surely be of great use in future combat.

Did you realize that Iraq was just a warm-up? A preseason war!

Hitchens is the greatest force of nihilism and absolutism in journalism today. This is all a game of Risk to him.

Nope, there are limits.