(Display Name not set)July 2006 Archives

From Tacitus:

Let us call the childrens' deaths in Qana what they are: a horrific freak of war. They were not intended; they were not actively sought; and they were not the product of criminal negligence. In weeks of war and thousands of sorties against a foe that intentionally hides amongst civilians in the active hope of just this manner of carnage, the remarkable fact is that this hasn't happened before. Contrary to founding advocates of airpower -- and unlike its battlefield foes -- Israel does not seek the death of civilians for their own sake. Pace the rationalizations extended to Allied aircrews obliterating Western European villagers unfortunate enough to live near a rail junction, Israel does not even regard acceptance of this manner of death -- unintended, incidental, and not worth especial efforts to preclude -- as acceptable within the moral parameters of war. The uninformed and the insane will react with bitter derision upon being told this, on the heels of the news from Qana: but their emotional self-indulgence does not negate the fact at hand.

Need it be said -- and it is a sign of our fallen age that it does need to be said -- Israel's enemy in this war operates under no such constraint. (One assumes that in bygone days, the difference between a Western democracy and a band of murderous savages would not need repeated explanation.) Hezbollah and the average Islamist do not shrink from direct assaults on civlians as such and as an end in itself. Indeed, it has been their sole tactic in this entire war. If they have not produced scenes of masses of dead children, it is not for lack of trying -- it is, after all, the only thing they try for. That they have not managed it is indicative of the confluence of blind luck and Israeli battlefield superiority. But give it time: give it infinite time to launch its rockets and try its luck, as the braying proponents of ceasefire would have it, and eventually we'll see Jewish children, too, incinerated in their sleep. The difference, of course, is that the perpetrators then will celebrate.

In a sane world, we would give thanks for Hezbollah's failure to murder, regret what has happened in Qana, and reaffirm the justice of the Israeli war. But this is not a sane world: in place of right and wrong, too many appear to operate in a universe of strong and weak (or, one suspects, Jew and non-Jew) -- and their sympathy goes to the weak, even if the weak is a shell of a polity married to a genocide-minded Muslim murder-front. For those of us with our sanity intact, we have but one message this morning for the IAF: keep bombing.

Sorry for the light blogging. I volunteered to write an op-ed piece for the DMN's Viewpoints page tomorrow, and just finished it. And I gotta head out in about half an hour to pop a couple of sedatives before I hit the dentist's office. A filling. I am the biggest freaking hysteric you ever saw about the dentist. They give me the Novocain shot, they gas me, they put an iPod on my head, and they tell me to take two Halcions -- and still I'm a nervous wreck. But a completely disoriented one, which is why Mrs. Crunchy has to drive me to and from the dentist on days like this, lest a cop pull me over and I be dragged from the car stumbling and ranting about how the *&%^$# factory farmers control the world. ;-D

UPDATE: Well, somehow I survived. Playing the Talking Heads "Remain in Light" at top volume on the iPod is helpful. But the frickin' Halcions didn't kick in until I was leaving the doctor's office. Must be an off-brand. I was a cartoon can clinging to the ceiling. Those poor people in that dentist's office.

Hey, if you had to listen to your iPod to calm you down while getting a filling, what would you put on it? I need intense, loud music, in part to drown out the whine of the drill.

Here's praise from an unlikely quarter: a former Clinton speechwriter likes "Crunchy Cons." Carter Wilkie, who calls us "progressive reactionaries," writes:

Centrist Democrats will relate to Crunchy Cons instinctively. Secular liberals who won't should read it carefully for commonalities, instead of demonizing others who see differently. Or they can reread Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, whose deep faith sharpened their political point of view. Neither was a moral relativist. Both could distinguish right from wrong.

In the absence of such Democrats on the ballot, Dreher's "Crunchy Cons" will vote Republican. As one of them explains, "The Republican Party is at least somewhat hospitable to religious traditionalists, while the Democratic Party is hostile, or at a minimum has made itself unable to oppose those who are hostile. It's the difference between an unreliable ally and an enemy."

The key to winning elections is to have more allies than enemies.

If there were a cease-fire in Lebanon, Hezbollah would have won this war. They will still have their missiles and infrastructure. But of vastly greater importance, they will have shown themselves to be the only Arab fighting force in history capable of fighting the Israelis to a draw. This will increase their status exponentially, and show that militant Islamic fundamentalism is the hope of the future for the Arab world. A popular pan-Arab revolution could easily result in the overthrow of one or more moderate Arab regimes. And Israel would be in deadly peril, having been proved mortal.

What's happening now in Lebanon is horrible. But it's not the worst thing. And it is entirely the fault of Hezbollah. Israel must fight on, and the United States must support her. Because no one else will.

By the way, I hope you didn't miss this story from the NYT on Saturday, in which fleeing Lebanese Christians blamed Hezbollah for their misery, saying that Hezbollah was hiding among them firing missiles at the Israelis. Check out this passage from British journalist William Dalrymple's "From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East," in which he interviews an elderly priest of the Suriani people, an Arab Christian sect living in southern Turkey. The old priest fought as a boy in Ein Wardo, where his people had holed up to resist mass murder during World War I at the hands of the Muslims:

"After the war, when I was a young man," said Abouna Shabo, "we were friends. But then we were in the majority, so they could give us no trouble. Now the Muslims have all the power and it is different. My son is right."

"They give us very bad trouble," said Bedros [the son]. "In the last three years ten Christians have been killed in the villages around Ein Wardo. We cannot be friends like this."

..."These days feel just like those before 1914," said the old priest, pulling himself slowly out of his chair and making his way, bent-backed, across the room. "It feels like before a storm. You can see the black clouds, and the first drops are already falling."

The book was published in 1997. Earlier on this journey, Dalrymple stopped at a monastery in the area, where a monk told him that Hezbollah had gotten active there, in Turkey. The Turkish authorities, the monk reasoned, considered Hezbollah an effective counterweight against the PKK, the Kurdish revolutionists. Said the monk:

"Sometimes the Hezbollah kidnap Christian girls from remote farms and villages and force them to marry Muslims. They say they are saving their souls; it happened to four girls last year. Another Hezbollah unit has taken over Mar Bobo a Christian village near here: about ten or fifteen gunmen live there now. They've seized the roof of the church as their strongpoint, and they make the Christian owmen wear veils. They say we should go back to Europe where Christians come from, as if we were all French or German, as if our ancestors weren't here for centuries before the first Muslims settled here. Now our people live in fear. Anything can happen to them."

If you think the infidels of Europe don't have it coming to them when Hezbollah and its allies get finished with Israel, you're dreaming.

A friend who lives in Seattle, just down the street from the Jewish center that was shot up by the angry Muslim on Friday, writes that he took a walk in the neighborhood this afternoon. This is what he saw:

A little old man was standing a couple doors down from the Jewish Center, holding a sign which read, "I am a Muslim but today I am a Jew."

UPDATE: Reader Clare notes in the comboxes that the shooting suspect, who had declared himself a Muslim, had actually left his Islamic faith last year and accepted Christian baptism. Read all about it. Will Andrew Sullivan take this opportunity to declare the suspect a Christianist anti-Semite, just like Mel Gibson? This guy, Haq, also seems to have had mental problems, and there was tension between him and his father.

This report alleges that when Mel Gibson got popped for DUI, he cut loose with a drunken anti-Semitic rant--and that the original police report noting this (images of which--the alleged police report--are available via that link)--was suppressed by the arresting...

This, from the Corner, cannot be improved upon:Britishism [John Derbyshire]My exhortation, at the end of this week's Radio Derb, to "keep your pecker up" has been widely misunderstood. I apologize. This is a Britishism. It means: Keep an optimistic attitude...

How did I miss the fact that David Pryce-Jones has a blog? And a very good blog it is, too. I've mentioned before how much I learned from DPJ's "The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs," especially about how...

Not this. But it's hilarious all the same.(Hat tip: Rachel B., who's in the book.)...

You know what I want to have a Two-Minutes Hate over? The stupid new ad campaign from Snickers....

Reader Tope, in a combox below, draws our attention to an extraordinary post by Michael Totten, and American who lived for a while in Lebanon. Read the whole thing. Totten paints a portrait of an entire nation on the brink...

...or, today's All-Purpose Mideast Post. Because I've got a lot of work to do this afternoon, and a wake to attend, and besides that, Mrs. Crunchy e-mails to say she's worried about the situation in Lebanon and all, but this...

Lee Siegel, who blogs at The New Republic Online, writes about how blogging and comboxes have a way of bringing out the most obnoxious people, and the obnoxious sides of lots of non-obnoxious people. I have no idea what he...

Fjordman at the Brussels Journal notices an interesting dynamic in Europe:[A]uthorities are stepping up censorship efforts, openly talking about media “speech codes” and aggressively slapping labels such as “racism” or “xenophobia” on anybody daring to criticize the immigration policies or...

Paleocon Paul Gottfried questions the premises of right-wing populism:A key dividing line between the Right and other political positions is its appeal to the people in opposition to political elites. In "The Revolt of the Elites," Christopher Lasch exemplifies thei...

Prof. Lukacs says that "inflation" has ruined the meaning of the word "conservative":Most conservatives disliked liberals more than they liked liberty. Serial marriages, divorces, consumers of pornography, barbaric households with mannerless children were as frequent among conservatives as they were...

From Jeremy Beer's TAC essay, in which he praises the work of the Brandywine Conservancy, which buys up and protects land in his Pennsylvania region -- and happens to be run by liberals who happen to love the land and...

The Manhattan Institute's Heather Mac Donald believes that the conservative movement is alienating people like here: atheist or agnostic conservatives who are conservative not in spite of their skepticism, but because of it. She says that the conservative movement "is...

President Bush said yesterday:And I believe that Iraq, in some ways, faces the same difficulty, and that is a new democracy is emerging and there are people who are willing to use terrorist techniques to stop it. That's what the...

A construction worker just found an early medieval Psalter buried in an Irish bog -- a find that's being compared to the Dead Sea Scrolls in terms of its significance. It was discovered open to Psalm 83 -- which, given...

Mark Shea slaps me over my claim, re: Israel's response to Hezbollah, that "proportionality is madness." I think Mark has a good point. It was wrong of me to make that blanket claim about the abstract principle of proportionality. What...

The new issue of The American Conservative arrived last night, and I read it all from cover to cover. They don't have any of it up on their site yet (not even the cover), but for anyone interested in the...

Ross Douthat says liberals believe in Francis Bacon's dictum that the ends of politics are "the conquest of nature for the relief of man's estate." Conservatives are those who say "no" to Baconism, or "no" up to a point. The...

Claes Ryn, who teachs politics at Catholic University in Washington, had what I consider the best essay of the impressive bunch. In it, he argues that modern American conservatism has been "enthralled by politics," and has failed to understand and...

Dom Bettinelli brought to my attention last night a great piece by Bill McKibben in the current National Geographic, about the future of the environmentalism. Unfortunately it's not available online. Anyway, in the essay McKibben talks about how profoundly global...

I get guilty pleasure out of Ann Coulter most of the time, but in this interview with Bnet editor Charlotte Allen, she really pours on the obnoxiousness. She seems to have decided ahead of time that Charlotte, a former editor...

Cal Thomas writes that the conflict between the West and the Islamic world is not open to being solved by politics as usual:This is a religious divide. The president thinks people we see in bondage want to be as free...

There's been some rumbling in various comboxes and in my e-mail box with people wondering what this blog is all about. Someone said a day or so ago that he thought this was supposed to be a place to discuss...

Nerdissimus Ken Jennings is trying too hard to be cool by biting the hand that fed his ungrateful butt $2.5 million. What a jerk....

A Shaidlian coda to the hysterical screaming fit some lefty commenters had in the George Michael comboxes, in which they insisted that cruising for anonymous sex in public places had nothing whatsoever to do with gay male culture, and for...

Clark Stooksbury passes along Walker Percy's advice on Bourbon drinking. Percy's essay on Bourbon really is fine, and the recipe for a proper mint julep he includes is first-rate (secret ingredient: a light dusting of fresh-grated nutmeg). It pains me...

...is not guilty (by reason of insanity) of the murders of her five children. I think this verdict is just and merciful. It is hard -- extremely hard -- for many people to accept that a mother could be so...

Tony Blankley wonders, as well we all might, why, after the bloody wake-up call of 9/11, we're not talking and arguing about the true nature of the threat Islamic fundamentalism poses to our civilization. Excerpt:In five years we have, remarkably,...

Via TMatt comes this L.A. Times story about the Christian Booksellers Association's annual convention. The CBA is well-known for being a Mecca for what some uncharitably call "Jesus junk." I don't know about other Christians, but I can't stand seeing...

Lots of urgent complaints lately about the violence the Israelis are inflicting on Lebanon. You'd have to have a heart of stone not to pity those poor innocent souls caught up in this war. But at the same time, what...

Here's an interview Christina Hoff Sommers did with James Bowman about his book "Honor: A History," to which I linked in the previous post. The first thing it reminded me of was how much more comfortable I am raising my...

How do you say "Sieg heil!" in Arabic? Ask the Hitler, I mean, Hezbollah Youth giving the Nazi salute at a rally photographed by Time magazine. This is what evil is. You tell me how to negotiate with it. You...

Richard Cohen speaks truth in today's WaPo. Excerpt:The dire consequences of proportionality are so clear that it makes you wonder if it is a fig leaf for anti-Israel sentiment in general. Anyone who knows anything about the Middle East knows...

Reihan Salam has an excellent post criticizing the Times for its alarmism over Poland's turn toward tradition and populism. One can certainly understand cause for concern over the return of anti-Semitism and chauvinism in Poland, and it really is hard...

Joshua Trevino makes a brief case for letting Iraq -- a country whose borders were determined and imposed by the British, not by any organic process -- separate into ethno-religious states. I don't see how this fate is to be...

Is Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee a closet crunchy-con? He came by the DMN today to talk to the editorial board about his run for the GOP presidential nomination. I wasn't able to attend the meeting, but my colleagues came out...

The WaPo's Sebastian Mallaby writes:The question about loneliness is: Why do people do this to themselves? Why do Americans, who reported an average of nearly three close friends in 1985, now report an average of just over two? And why...

Celebrity train wreck George Michael got caught having gay sex in the bushes in a London park with a geezer this past weekend. What interested me most was the pervy popster's response to the press when confronted:"Are you gay? No?...

William F. Buckley tells CBS News that President Bush has let down the side:"I think Mr. Bush faces a singular problem best defined, I think, as the absence of effective conservative ideology — with the result that he ended up...

Daniel Larison cites some post-ESCR-veto comments by Tony Snow that draw the moral meaning of the president's act into question. Maybe those of you in the CC comboxes who thought he was cynical were more right than I gave you...

Jody Bottum says the Vatican's approach to the Middle East has failed to take into consideration how radically the situation has changed:Of course, in one sense, [Vatican Secretary of State Angelo Cardinal] Sodano was merely indulging the kind of ritual...

Ross Douthat has a great piece in First Things this month reviewing the typing of gibbering fearmongers who see militant Jesus freaks behind every tree. His piece calmly but utterly eviscerates the wack-job paranoia of the Kevin Phillipses, the Michelle...

I was arguing with some colleagues yesterday about democracy in the Middle East. They were put out with me for taking the position that if given a choice between a democratically elected Islamist government, or a non-Islamist authoritarian regime, the...

Remember Julie and Hillary Goodridge, the lesbian couple whose lawsuit resulted in the Massachusetts Supreme Court imposing gay marriage on the state? They were the first same-sex couple married under the new regime there. What a day that was! According...

In today's Wall Street Journal, Fouad Ajami writes perhaps the most informative and moving analysis of Lebanon's tragedy I've yet seen. Lebanon, in his view, is held hostage to the thug Nasrallah and his puppetmasters in Damascus and Tehran. Let...

Kathryn Jean Lopez criticizes what she considers the Vatican's misguided analysis of the Israeli-Hezbollah clash, and Andrew Sullivan accuses her of being a right-wing cafeteria Catholic. This sort of thing happens all the time, and reflects a basic -- and...

Leave his sorry butt on the dock to bake. It couldn't happen to a more deserving fellow....

In First Things this month, Richard John Neuhaus alleges that his former-employee-turned-harsh-critic Damon Linker received a $160,000 advance for his forthcoming book "Theocons," which purports to expose how a small group of mostly Catholic conservative intellectuals have influenced the Republican...

John Paul II was a great pope, but he was often frustratingly opaque in his writing and speaking style. The John Paul II Random Speech Generator is funny because its nonsense lines sound ... well, they sound an awful lot...

Here's an Amazon link to "Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology" one of the late media theorist Neil Postman's many books. And here's an interview in which he described himself as a "conservative," even though he was on the...

Andrew Sullivan writes:I feel obliged to come to the president's defense on his embryonic stem cell research veto. I find the absolutism of those who view a blastocyst as a human person to be morally unpersuasive, but I cannot see...

Austin Bramwell, in his devastating American Conservative carpet-bombing of John Dean's new book, which trashes conservatism as a stewpot of right-wing, God-loving crypto-fascism, credits Dean with a single good insight:He rightly senses that conservatism, in the philosophic sense, does not...

In the film criticism thread below, reader Simon had some really interesting things to say:One of the great conceits of our balkanized, affinity-based culture is that single people with good incomes living in large metropolitan areas often assume their experience...

The Belgian government is still coming after Paul Belien, on spurious grounds. That's the ticket -- attack the messenger. That'll fix things....

The Washington Post has revealed itself ignorant of a pretty basic (and pretty important) fact of history. TMatt and the Get Religion gang are calling the newspaper on it. Believe it or not, one of the most important newspapers in...

President Bush has done the right thing in vetoing the bill that would have provided federal funding for the willful destruction of embryonic human life in pursuit of stem-cell research. The president spoke of his veto while surrounded by so-called...

Right now in my living room, on the Daystar Television Network, a Pentecostal-flavored channel, they're having a live Israel-fest, with a bunch of Christians standing in front of a massive Israeli flag singing a klezmer-ish song called, "If I Forget...

As fiercely as I'm willing to stand up for Israel's right to defend itself by crushing the Islamofascist nutters, I cannot understand the enthusiasm shown by some on the Right for getting the United States involved in a shooting war...

Why do the opinions of film critics so often differ from those of the general public? Tony Scott tried to answer the question in Tuesday's Times, but I couldn't really figure out what he was saying. Here's my short(ish) answer,...

It's 9:30 p.m. here in Dallas, and it's 101 freakin' degrees outside. Wasn't this mentioned in Deuteronomy or something as a harbinger of the End? IJS.If some moron movie studio would just buy rights to "Crunchy Cons," I'd blow the...

...a Dostoevskian allegory for downcast converts who are fed up with the church, and wondering what it all means. This is sublime. Thanks to Reader John for the link to this passage from "The Brothers Karamazov."...

The Senate says we ought to do research anyway on those embryos, which are just going to be discarded. Okay, so as long as we're starting to treat human creatures instrumentally, why don't we put death-row inmates to the stake...

Lawrence Auster offers a crucial insight into our chronic inability to take the Islamist terrorists at their word, and why we can't muster the effort to see what is plainly in front of us. Says Larry, speaking truth:They [Western elites]...

If you read nothing else today, read Spengler's analysis of the current Mideast crisis. Then read it again, resisting the temptation to head for the hills or crawl into a bottle of gin.US policy has turned to dust and ashes....

Via Steve Sailer comes this astonishing bit of truth-telling from my friend Austin Bramwell, a young conservative lawyer who was tapped by Bill Buckley to continue his legacy at National Review. Bramwell wrote it in the July 17 issue of...

A reader draws my attention to this WaPo review of Nina Planck's book "Real Food: What To Eat, and Why." Reviewer Jonathan Yardley concedes that Planck's probably right to say that all the mass-produced, processed junk that fills the American...

Josh Trevino has an interesting analysis of why Europe is falling all over itself to castigate Israel for defending itself against the provocations of the same forces that ultimately wish to destroy European civilization as well. Excerpt:Israel is Western —...

Oengus Moonbones has removed this blog from his blogroll. Why? Let him tell you:The terrorist dirtbags in Syria, Lebanon, and Iran have recently escalated their War of Total Annihilation against Israel, and they are doing so through their usual proxy...

Ran into a fairly high-ranking military friend just back from a lengthy stint in one of the most dangerous parts of Iraq. N. has a lot of contempt for Rumsfeld and Cheney, and said that feeling is widely shared in...

Yes we are, said Newt Gingrich on today's "Meet the Press." It has mostly to do with radical Islam, and according to Gingrich, "we don't have the right attitude about this." He's right. We simply do not take the challenge...

Archbishop Milingo, who has once again left the Catholic Church and has gone back to the loving arms of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Excerpt from John Allen's exclusive interview:Milingo added that he was "very surprised at how the Catholic...

Fox News blogger Father Jonathan, on the incredible courage of Regina Doman, the mother who accidentally ran over and killed her little boy in the church parking lot -- in front of her five other children:Joshua's mother, Regina, stood in...

Via the Mighty, Mighty Kathy Shaidle -- whose deliciously tart, gimlet-eyed conservative Cathlic blog you had better read, or I'm coming over to ask how come you don't, huh? Huh? -- comes this fantastic Credenda Agenda essay exploring why so...

NRO's Andy McCarthy, responding to Michael Ledeen, utters a difficult truth:Democracy promotion as a goal of national policy is fine and admirable. On the other hand, selling democratization as a complete, self-contained response to terrorism is nothing beyond a more...

David Horowitz puts the current Near East violence in perspective. Excerpt:Hizbollah and Hamas, and their patron Iran, have sworn to remove Israel from the face of the earth -- in those very words. Iran has defied the world community in...

We just got word here that Charles Smith has died of cancer. Charles -- I wish you could have known him. He was one of those wonderful characters that Southern small towns have a way of producing. Charles came from...

Michael Brendan Dougherty weighs in on Caleb Stegall's call for a new populism that returns real power to localities, and allows for the emergence of regional differences, and the return to a more nationalist sensibility (versus progressive globalism). Well and...

Here's the Dallas Morning News editorial send-off for Bishop Charles Grahmann, who turns 75 tomorrow. All you need to know about the kind of man the Bishop of Dallas is can be found in this passage from today's DMN story...

Condemns Israel's attack on Lebanon. Says Sodano, the Secretary of State:"In particular, the Holy See deplores right now the attack on Lebanon, a free and sovereign nation, and assures its closeness to these people who already have suffered so much...

Several commentators in the comboxes below have deplored Israel for attacking Lebanon in response to the Hezbollah-instigated war against it. Lee Smith, writing from Beirut, says instead that all of Lebanese society has been ignoring for a long time the...

Following up on Karl Rove's address to the group La Raza ("The Race"), Michelle Malkin wants to know why federal taxpayer dollars are going to fund charter schools that teach separatist agitprop to Latino students. Good question. But more broadly,...

I haven't....

Amy Welborn drew my attention to a story out of Canada in which a 40-ish self-described "yuppie" decided to abort her unborn child because the baby stood a good chance of being born with significant handicaps ... and she and...

Today I drove into St. Francisville to visit the farmer's market and to look in on Ellen Kennon. Actually I've never met Ellen, but I read about her in The Wall Street Journal. She runs her own interior paint and...

Just think how different this crisis between Israel and its neighbors would be if Iran had nuclear weapons. Hezbollah is the Iranian proxy army on Israel's northern border. What if Ahmadenijad had the power to say, "Hands off Hezbollah, or...

I've been on the road to south Louisiana most of the day, and out of touch with the news. I just logged on to see that Israel is now at war on two fronts. God be with them. Hamas and...

I don't care how badly you think of Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco for the way she handled Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, she deserved your thanks for a veto she issued yesterday. The state House and Senate overwhelmingly voted to...

I spent much of the roadtrip today in the company of Ken Myers, via his most excellent Mars Hill Audio series. I played an older one devoted to the work of Flannery O'Connor. There was a fantastic interview with Ralph...

A New Orleans reader writes:I recall you saying in your book that no one (or almost no one) preaches about greed. The pastor of my church regularly gives sermons on what he generally refers to as “more.” His latest was...

Check out this letter to the editor of the Lansing State Journal in Michigan:I read Le Roy Barnett's letter ("Muslims, speak up," June 26) about Muslims' opinion on Abdul Rahman's conversion to Christianity.Islam is not only a religion, it is...

Bishop Charles Grahmann of Dallas will turn 75 on Saturday. He will be most remembered in this diocese for having presided over disaster after disaster involving pervy priests (check out Bishop Grahmann's legacy here, if you can stomach it). Given...

Tonight on PBS, the documentary "Tintin and I" will air. We're big fans of the classic Belgian cartoon journalist in our house (official Tintin site here; unofficial fansite here), and the DMN's TV critic was generous enough to let me...

I'm late this morning turning in a piece to a symposium that takes up the question of whether the terms "liberal" and "conservative" have any meaning any more, and what other ideological options, if any, are out there. The reason...

Spengler sees it coming whether Tehran wants it to or not. He quotes something I reported that a top Saudi minister said to the Dallas Morning News editorial board recenetly, and which I reported on this blog, to the effect...

Continuing the Chicken-Little-ism today, take a look at NY Daily News columnist Michael Goodwin's bit today declaring that World War III has begun. Excerpt:It's not perfectly clear when it started. Perhaps it was after the Berlin Wall fell and the...

Pope Benedict went to Spain and said that efforts -- such as legalizing gay marriage -- that undermine the traditional family are a serious threat to civilization.“In contemporary culture, we often see an excessive exaltation of the freedom of the...

Can you be theologically conservative but politically progressive? Of course, says Harvey Cox; in earlier generations of American Protestants, that was par for the course....

Except those damn dirty apes, with their special compasses....

A few days ago I blogged about Obama's speech, and remarked that it's time we had a new conversation about religion and politics in our country. Christopher Lasch, writing at the dawn of the Reagan era, suggested exactly the kind...

Catholic blogger Regina Doman's four year old son was killed yesterday in an accident in the church parking lot. Please pray for the Doman family. This is my worst fear, and I cannot imagine how that poor family is feeling...

Presenting Monk-e-mail, which singlehandedly brought production in my department to a grinding slowdown on Friday afternoon. We couldn't stop Monk-e-mailing each other. This thing is like crack. You have been warned....

Barbara Nicolosi, who is one of the doubleplus good guys (gals, whatever) out there on the front lines, writes here to say that she's sick and tired of ... well read this excerpt: I'm bored. Completely, mind-paralysingly, agonizingly bored. This...

Tonight on the CBS Evening News, I watched a report about how the Religious Left is finally starting to organize itself politically. A professor interviewed toward the end of the report had a piquant, and quite accurate, statement to make...

Well, you gotta hand it to the Italians. Congratulations to them on their World Cup win. I would have felt bad had France won after Italy had its goal disqualified on a questionable referee call, and especially after Zidane pulled...

I previously had in this spot a snarky response to Robert Stacy McCain's blustery, vapid comments. But I took it down. I'm quick to anger, and I'm trying to get better about that. Sorry for the trouble.UPDATE: Clark Stooksbury, reviewing...

Worthwhile Peter Steinfels column in Saturday's NYTimes. He features the work of C. John Somerville, author of "The Decline of the Secular University." Somerville argues that when American universities cut themselves off from their religious roots, they began to forfeit...

Who wrote this?:"I wonder how much time and blood it will take until Arabs and Muslims realize that the world is not the property of their ancestors and that God is not a trademark of their minds and that terror...

Amy Sullivan is my favorite member of the Religious Left. I was waiting for her reaction to Barack Obama's pro-faith speech to fellow Democrats. Here it is. Amy finds the most important thing about the speech to have been Obama's...

Maclin Horton forwarded to me a PDF version of a review of CC from a French Catholic publication. I think they liked it, though I'm going to have to spend more time with it than I have at the moment...

You can't get it because it's behind the NYT firewall, but there was today a lovely reflection today from Judith Warner, on children, "Harry Potter," and preparing for life's tragedies. Excerpt:I do not know what will happen to [her nine-year-old]...

While I prefer to cook Italian (last night I made Julie a lemon risotto), and though I could not possibly care less for soccer, I'll be rooting for France in the World Cup final this weekend. It's sentimental. In 1998,...

The English conservative philosopher Roger Scruton addressed the Vlaams Belang, the Flemish nationalist party in Belgium. He was warned not to do it, because the European left believes the VB is racist and xenophobic. Personally, I don't know, but having...

The Washington Times's Robert Stacy McCain has written a puckish review of "Crunchy Cons" at Reason.com. I appreciate the attention he's given the book there, and on the pages of TWT. RSM's not a fan of the book, to put...

My sources are indicating that the Holy See is going to move very quickly to replace Bishop Charles Grahmann, who turns 75 a week from Saturday. I'm hearing that the next bishop has already been chosen -- and if the...

The Daily Mail reports that the Church of England is considering abandoning St. George as the patron of England because "his image is too warlike and may offend Muslims."Lord have mercy. These people. Ashamed of St. George! (Who may not...

Did he cheat accountability for his crimes? Well, look, the guy is dead, and like the great lady said, you can't get any poorer than that. Still, you'll pardon me if I refrain from trying to find something nice to...

Can it really be true that the Vatican is finally abandoning its Chamberlain-like policy of appeasement toward its relations with the Islamic world? Daniel Pipes thinks so. Excerpt:"Enough now with this turning the other cheek! It's our duty to protect...

The remarkable blog OCA News, run by Mark Stokoe and Orthodox Christians for Accountability, keeps plugging away for a settling of accounts and true repentance in the Orthodox Church in America, re: the financial scandal that much of the hierarchy...

I've been reading the Atlantic's liveblogging of the Aspen Institute's Ideas festival. Great stuff. Unsurprisingly, I got caught up in Ross Douthat's commentary about a Dutch smart guy's sweeping condemnation of the kitschification of Western culture. Here's Ross:...well, lets just...

Following on the great thread below in the "Of human bonding" comboxes, I want to pass on something an Orthodox priest told me. He was talking about how in the early church, during the great persecutions, it was vitally important...

Reihan Salam, who admits that as a non-Christian, he doesn't have a dog in this fight, certainly has the number of Episcopal Church liberals who are appalled that Anglicans in Africa have gotten all uppity with their rich American aunts...

July 3, 2006 -- early this morning, in a semi-dark living room in a little house in East Dallas, a bored little reading-obsessed boy pulled the first "Harry Potter" book off the family bookshelf, sat down on the couch, opened...

Caleb Stegall, our friend from the old NRO "Crunchy Cons" blog, had a long piece in yesterday's Dallas Morning News making a case for "folk populism" as a response to the failures of both the Republicans and the Democrats to...

ATOL's Spengler writes today about how utterly barbaric and murderous were primitive societies, and examines why there is a peculiar sentiment among certain Westerners to exalt primitives as somehow more "authentic" and morally unstained than we. Spengler believes Americans who...

Yet another launch delay looms. Is it just me, or are other people tired of the space shuttle, and wish we'd spend that money on something more, um, down to earth? I'm just sayin'....

Yet another launch delay looms. Is it just me, or are other people tired of the space shuttle, and wish we'd spend that money on something more, um, down to earth? I'm just sayin'....

Shmuel Rosner, writing in Slate, says that the situation in Gaza indicates that not even Hamas controls Palestinian society; that it is an anarchic state where power is wielded by men with guns who do what they damn well please....

There is a reason why the first thing I do when I get my Sunday NYT is turn to the Week in Review section to see what David Brooks is writing about. Brooks is the kind of writer who is...

A Catholic priest friend directs me to this letter from the Rt. Rev. Peter H. Beckwith, the conservative Episcopal Bishop of Springfield, Illinois, to his flock. Bp. Beckwith deplores the actions of this recent General Convention, and noted that the...

In a combox below, reader Jason posted this quote from the Pope:"We all know that reaching a goal in sports or business requires discipline and sacrifice, but then all of this is crowned by success, by reaching the desired aim....

The incomparable Hank Stuever of the WaPo examines the rival comic universes of Marvel and DC. This is an insightful and funny essay. Excerpt:DC was about younger kids in back yards, wearing bath towel capes, leaping from treehouses.Marvel was about...

Got my copy of Bill Buford's "Heat" today, and I'm in hog heaven tonight. Buford is the New Yorker writer who apprenticed himself to Mario Batali at Batali's first-rank restaurant Babbo, and who ended up going to Italy to learn...

So whines Hamas, anyway. Gosh, I certainly hope so. Couldn't happen to a more deserving group of people. You commit your government to the destruction of Israel and its people, you send hundreds of rockets into Israel, you tunnel in...