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New York, New York, It's a Wonderful Town--But a Bit Provincial
Loose Canon loves the notion that her fellow red staters are converging today on the capitol of blueness for the Republican convention only to be greeted by protests from
realreds--just kidding. They're simply ordinary men and women who happen to believe that George Bush is the reincarnation of Adolph Hitler.
LC loves New York and hopes her fellow reds will have a marvelous time. Sure, the city is less congested when middle aged men and women aren't out protesting with flag-draped simulated coffins. But it's a great town. There's just one problem with New York--it's so parochial. New York parochial? As I have
noted elsewhere this morning, it really and truly is.
Loose Canon was kidding in her crack about reds--but it's still important to recognize that
someof those organizing the protests aren't just ordinary folks. I came across an interesting
description of Leslie Cagan, one of the organizers of this week's festivities, and a leader of United for Peace and Justice, one of the key organizations protesting the Republican National Convention:
"To understand UPJ, consider the pedigree of its chief operative, Leslie Cagan. The New York Times has called her 'one of the grandes dames of the country's progressive movement,' a woman whose 'organizational skills are prodigious.' Indeed, Cagan has been active in New York City politics. She was a field director for the 1989 campaign of David Dinkins, who was elected mayor. But the Times neglected to mention her long-standing ties to the Communist movement. In reality, Cagan is a longtime revolutionary activist. She has spent the past thirty years mobilizing what must be counted as millions of protesters at demonstrations and rallies around the world. They denounce American foreign and military policies--the litany of alleged crimes 'against humanity.'"
Straight Talk about the 9/11 Commission
A terrifically provocative
dissenting opinion about the 9/11 commissionby Richard Posner, a judge on the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and frequent writer on legal subjects had lots of good stuff.
Here is one good point:
"The tale of how we were surprised by the 9/11 attacks is a product of hindsight; it could not be otherwise. And with the aid of hindsight it is easy to identify missed opportunities (though fewer than had been suspected) to have prevented the attacks, and tempting to leap from that observation to the conclusion that the failure to prevent them was the result not of bad luck, the enemy's skill and ingenuity or the difficulty of defending against suicide attacks or protecting an almost infinite array of potential targets, but of systemic failures in the nation's intelligence and security apparatus that can be corrected by changing the apparatus.
"That is the leap the commission makes, and it is not sustained by the report's narrative. The narrative points to something different, banal and deeply disturbing: that it is almost impossible to take effective action to prevent something that hasn't occurred previously. Once the 9/11 attacks did occur, measures were taken that have reduced the likelihood of a recurrence. But before the attacks, it was psychologically and politically impossible to take those measures."
Here's a second (though by all mean not the only other one worth your consideration):
"The enormous public relations effort that the commission orchestrated to win support for the report before it could be digested also invites criticism--though it was effective: in a poll conducted just after publication, 61 percent of the respondents said the commission had done a good job, though probably none of them had read the report. The participation of the relatives of the terrorists' victims (described in the report as the commission's "partners") lends an unserious note to the project (as does the relentless self-promotion of several of the members). One can feel for the families' loss, but being a victim's relative doesn't qualify a person to advise on how the disaster might have been prevented."
A Swarm of Locusts: Plague on Secularists?
A plague of locusts is, well, plaguing the town of Matera in Italy, where the out-of-doors scenes in "The Passion of the Christ" were filmed. Writing on Tech Central Station,
Dominick Standish is amusedby the attempt to blame the plague on global warming.
Global warming, says Standish, is the secularist's faith:
"Many of the responses to the swarms of locusts and other extreme conditions have been reminiscent of biblical, pre-scientific times. Most media commentators report weather-related events without recourse to the science of climate change. They employ the language of global warming to 'explain' problems in a manner common to pre-modern superstition. Even the prestigious New Scientist journal ran an article this month with the following doomsday scenario on Europe's future:
"European winters will disappear by 2080 and extreme weather will become more common unless global warming across the continent is slowed."
The New Breed of Pilgrim
Writing in the Spectator,
John Laughlin reportsthat on his recent pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, Spain's holiest Christian site, most of the people were New Agers on a voyage of self-discovery: "Even the Archbishop of Santiago, in his sermon, told the throngs in his cathedral that 'We are all pilgrims'--a nice enough thought, perhaps, but rather irritating for those of us who actually were."
Sex Ed at Hogwarts?
Loose Canon had thought that Planned Parenthood's ghastly "I had an abortion" T-shirt was about as pathetic as you could get. But after pathos comes bathos.
In an
open letter with fanciful illustrationsreminiscent of those in the Harry Potter books, Joan Malin, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood of New York City, urges Harry's creator, J. K. Rowling, to add sex ed to the Hogwarts curriculum:
"We all care about Harry and his friends," writes Malin in one of those you-can't-make-this-stuff-up moments. "We want them to grow up to be mature, caring adults. I am not suggesting that the next book in the series become a part of the politics of sex education, but I do know that what happens to Harry has the opportunity to affect a generation's learning about love and sexuality."
Planned Parenthood does offer a few perfunctory overtures towards abstinence, of course, but can you imagine the Hogwarts sex ed program the PP folks
reallyhave in mind?
I don't share his view that the use of the occult makes the Harry Potter books doubtful for children, but blogger Travis McSherley of
fillingupspace(which tipped me to the sex-ed-at-Hogwarts story), has this to say:
"Presumably, this would be a move to confuse (brainwash, if you wish) young kids who are captivated by the Potter series. The target audience for the books is about 12, which is far too young to be receiving intricate details about sex--regardless of what Planned Parenthood may think. And to bury such topics in the pages of a fantasy novel would be outrageous. Now, rest assured, parents, there's little chance in the world that Potter author J.K. Rowling would reference such controversial subjects in her books (though the fact that they deal with occult ought to be reason enough to have caution)."
But Most of the Time Planned Parenthood Isn't That Funny
There was nothing to make us laugh in Planned Parenthood's victory in a court ruling earlier this week that declared the ban on partial birth abortions unconstitutional.
Even Judge Richard Conway Casey who made the ruling seemed to find the whole thing pretty odious. (You can read the
whole ruling here.)
Here's some good stuff from a
National Review reporton the sorry business:
"Judge Casey was clearly troubled by the morality, ethics, and purported medical justifications of this abortion method. After a three-week trial, he found that D&X abortions 'subject fetuses to
severe pain.' Indeed, as the unrebutted testimony of a medical expert in infant and fetal pain showed, partial-birth abortion 'may subject fetuses beyond twenty weeks' gestational age to prolonged and excruciating pain,' especially when the skull is punctured or crushed. He also found that at least some of the doctors who performed these abortions--many of whom testified at the trial before him--were not concerned by the pain experienced by the aborted child and do not 'convey to their patients that their fetuses may undergo severe pain during a D&X.'
"Most importantly, Judge Casey concluded that many of the purported medical reasons that abortionists relied upon to justify the necessity of partial-birth abortion were 'false,' 'incoherent' or 'merely theoretical.' Rejecting the common myth that partial-birth abortion is justified by certain maternal medical circumstances, Casey reasoned: 'In no case involving these or other maternal health conditions could [the National Abortion Federation and its testifying witnesses] point to a specific patient or actual circumstance in which D&X was necessary to protect a woman's health.' Similarly, the many purported safety advantages proffered by abortionists in support of the banned procedure 'do not rise above the realm of the hypothetical.'
"So how on earth could Judge Casey find such a 'brutal' and 'barbaric' method of abortion protected by the Constitution? His answer--however reluctant--was relatively simple: The Supreme Court made me do it. Judge Casey reasoned that the Supreme Court's 2000 decision in
Stenberg v. Carhartcompelled him to invalidate the federal ban where plaintiffs were able to produce some doctors (supported by some medical associations) willing to testify that 'D&X has some safety advantages...over D&E for some women in some circumstances.' According to Judge Casey 'however hypothetical and unsubstantiated by scientific evidence' the abortionists' testimony at trial was, he was constitutionally compelled by the Supreme Court to accept it."
What's the Opposite of Love?
Beliefnet has a
terrific interview with Christopher West, who has written about Pope John Paul II's "theology of the body" and what West sees as a "sexual counter-revolution" in the making.
What's so good about the interview is that the Church's sexual teachings are seriously explored instead of ignorantly mocked--which is rare today. There is a coherent theology, and it rests not on saying no but on love.
As West says:
"What's wrong with the world today is we no longer understand what it means to love. So often what we call love in our culture is nothing but a man and woman or two men or whoever using one another for our own selfish pleasure.
"The opposite of love, for the Pope, is not hatred. The opposite of love is to use someone as a means to my own selfish end. This is not some abstract theology--we know this to be true. When somebody uses us, treats us as a thing rather than as a person, we feel violated."
Trireme Vets for Truth
As Victor Davis Hanson, historian and National Review contributor,
notes today, the trireme vets at the battle of Salamis had, like the Swift boat vets of Vietnam, differing accounts of what happened in the fog of war:
"The problem of reconstructing what happened at the battle of Salamis (480 B.C.) is not just the wide expanse of time that separates accounts in Aeschylus, Herodotus, Plutarch, and Diodorus. Instead, the more fundamental problem is that the thousands of Athenians who rowed there and provided the primary sources of knowledge for these later chronicles almost immediately gave very different versions of what they saw and did."
Let's move right along from triremes to swift boats...
"What is the lesson of all this?" ask Hanson. "That we should accept that Senator Kerry was a brave man who endured fire in service to his country, and leave it at that? But can we? You see, there is
anotherproblem with Mr. Kerry's current dilemma--and it is not his courage under fire, but rather something called Nemesis. Some of us in February of this year worried that Kerry's subordinates and surrogates were making a strategic error in grandstanding his own Vietnam military service while denigrating George Bush's controversial tenure in the National Guard. Moveon.org and its epigones had a field day slurring the president to Kerry's mute delight, and only a fool would have believed that there would not be some sort of payback come summer."
And there's this to consider:
"Swift-boat vets were probably willing to grimace and bite their teeth throughout the present campaign, but
notwhen Kerry paraded his service, saluted the Democratic delegates ('reporting for duty'), and posed as a time-honored proud warrior of the American military.
"And so now we have the present mess that will go on for weeks and can only hurt Kerry. He is earning a reputation for once welcoming third-party hit ads, then (now) whining about them; for parading his service, then whining about scrutiny of it; for spouting braggadocio, then whining about hurtful speech. As the Greeks remind us, pride can lead to hubris and then to Nemesis--on its tragic and ultimate rendezvous with ruin."
A Serious Conundrum for Serious Catholics
Loose Canon mercifully has been spared a moral dilemma that apparently confronts many other Catholics--can a papist in good conscience vote for a pro-choice Catholic for president? I refer, of course, to John "Reporting for Duty" Kerry.
It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that LC isn't even tempted to vote for John Kerry. But what if you do have that sort of urge?
There are now two competing aides for the faithful Catholic. The first "
Faithful Citizenship: A Catholic Call to Political Responsibility," distributed by the U.S. Catholic Conference.
As Catholic World News reports,
it is not without its faults:
"[The document] has been criticized even within the Church for placing the paramount issue of abortion on a level playing field with other lesser issues like promoting 'social justice' and 'global solidarity.' Bob Laird, director of the Family Life Office of the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, said, 'It equates abortion with debt relief. They are not equal.'"
A
competing guidehas been produced by Catholic Answers, a lay group. This guide places more emphasis on Catholic teaching on the so-called life issues:
"'Voters' Guide for Serious Catholics' is a 10-page booklet produced by Catholic Answers, a lay apostolate based in San Diego whose primary mission is defending Catholic teaching. Citing papal and Vatican documents, 'Voter's Guide' identifies five issues it calls 'non-negotiable': abortion, euthanasia, fetal stem cell research, human cloning, and homosexual 'marriage.' Supporting any of these issues, according to the guide, would disqualify a candidate as a viable option for a faithful Catholic."
Frank Norris, Catholic Answers' director of development, has said that more than a million of the guides have been distributed. The U.S. Catholic Conference reportedly discourages such distribution.
As LC says, John Kerry is not, personally, even a remote temptation. But what if it were Rudolph Giuliani, a pro-choice Republican, whom LC admires inordinately, who was running for president?
I think you'd have to weigh the matter very seriously, trying to determine how the candidate's pro-choice stand would affect judicial appointments and the spending of federal money for abortions. You'd have to decide if, by your vote, you supported somebody who simply holds a view that is utterly incompatible with church teaching or somebody who would actively promote a culture of death.
The Swift Boat Veterans: They Just Wouldn't Fit In at Tina Brown's
Forget the charges and counter charges of the competing bands of brothers. Former Talk magazine editor and CNBC talk show host Tina Brown gets right to the heart of the matter about the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth--they're old and ugly.
Here's
Ms. Brown from her column in today's Washington Post:
"The worst thing about the Swift boat moment has been the steady march of aggrieved sexagenarians across our TV screens, banging the hollow drums of their pasts. They were heroes once and young, but look what politics has wrought: Gabby, flabby, John O'Neill, author of 'Unfit for Command', shifty George Elliott..."
Well, you get the picture. But there's a bright side. Ms. Brown says these yucky old guys have motivated donors to flock to fundraisers such as the one hosted in posh East Hampton by prominent Democratic fundraiser Alan Patricoff.
The Patricoff event was so inspiring that "some [guests] like the photographer Clifford Ross, who lives in the West Village, came back from the weekend fundraiser to start a 'battleground block party,' recruiting New York foot soldiers to go out and get out the vote in swing states."
Rest assured that these foot soldiers will be Beautiful People.
P.S. Ms. Brown isn't the only member of the chattering classes who finds the Swifties just tooo unattractive.
Don't miss
Mark Steyn on L.A. Times scribe Ron Brownstein's reportingon the Swifties:
"As Lord Charteris, the Queen's courtier, remarked of Fergie: 'Vulgar, vulgar, vulgar.' That's Brownstein on the Swiftees."
Morituri te salutant: Candidate Kerry's visit to the Jon Stewart show was so awful that even
Slate.com poked fun at itwith a piece headlined "If He Only Had a Heart:" "And then, when the interview was over and Kerry rose to leave, he caused audible groans in my household by
saluting the audience(just as he did at the opening of his convention speech: 'John Kerry reporting for duty.' Lieutenant Kerry, your first order is to stop saluting the audience. It makes you look like a total tool)."
The
New York Post on the Kerry campaign's use of Max Cleland: "In one of the stranger photo-ops in an increasingly bizarre presidential season, former U.S. Sen. Max Cleland yesterday rode his wheelchair to the front gate of President Bush's Texas ranch to protest attacks on Democratic candidate John Kerry's Vietnam War record.
"Cleland lost two legs and an arm in Vietnam--hence the wheelchair--but we won't patronize him by pretending he is anything other than what he became after losing his Senate re-election race two years ago: bitterly resentful, highly partisan and an effective deflector shield for Kerry whenever the latter's military bona fides are called into question."
Abu Ghraib: No Black Eye for Rummy
The press will work over time to tout yesterday's report on the abuses at Abu Ghraib as a disaster for the Bush administration. Here's a
reality check from the Wall Street Journal:
"The report offers invaluable perspective on the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib and is devastating to those who've sought to pin blame on an alleged culture of lawlessness going all the way to the top of the Bush Administration. John Kerry must be even more disoriented by the Swift boat story than he appears if he thinks now's the time to call for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation.
"'The behavior of our troops is so much better than it was in World War II,' Mr. Schlesinger [former secretary of defense and head of the commission conducting the investigation] told us yesterday, by way of comparison. Of the Abu Ghraib photos, he added, 'It is preposterous that what these pictures show is we were prepared to use torture to get information,' as Senator Ted Kennedy and others have alleged. Rather, Mr. Schlesinger characterized the photographed Abu Ghraib abuses as 'free-lance activities on the part of the night shift,' echoing the testimony we've heard so far during the courts martial for the accused."
The Most Annoying Story in Today's Paper
The competition was stiff--after all, Thursday is the day that Tina Brown's column appears in the Washington Post (see above). But there was a clear winner.
The distinction belongs undeniably to
a piece in today's Washington Post Style sectionheadlined "Changing Our Tune" about the debate over the arrangement of the national anthem that is being sung at the Olympics.
Here's a nugget:
"Paul Breiner, whose 204 arrangements of the world's national anthems are being performed at the Athens Olympics, had no intention of wandering into the blue-state/red-state thickets when he arranged 'The Star-Spangled Banner.' But that hasn't slowed critics from reading political philosophy into his genteel, romanticized orchestration of the famous tune.
"A 'Europe-friendly version of the anthem,' designed 'to play down the notion of the U.S. as a chest-thumping, butt-kicking, jingoistic powerhouse,' sniffed a writer in the Wall Street Journal, quoting an unnamed musician. 'Even our warlike national anthem has been transformed, from blaring horns to peaceful, soothing strings' wrote Maureen Dowd in the New York Times, in a column about the toning-down of U.S. bravado at the Athens games.
A peaceful, soothing national anthem. LC doesn't know whether to laugh or weep.
Hell: It's Just Not Cool
Why do non-believers find hell such a hoot? Oh, yes, it's because we Christians are so ignorant that we'll believe anything. Hell just isn't cool.
Christianity Today's excellent weblog, written by blogger Ted Olsen, reports that the pseuds are getting together to make fun of the belief in hell (and the folks, like LC, who believe in it):
"To lampoon (Christian) fundamentalist beliefs about hell," the secularist group Center for Inquiry-West is staging its own production of Hell House, the evangelistic drama created by Colorado youth pastor Keenan Roberts. The play has attracted a large cadre of hip comedians and actors, including Bill Maher (Satan), Andy Richter (Jesus), Richard Belzer, Simpsons producer and standup comic Dana Gould , former porn star Traci Lords, Patton Oswalt (whose website proclaims "Christians hate me"), David Cross, Sarah Silverman, 24's Mary Lynn Rajskub, The Daily Show's Matt Walsh, Six Feet Under's Justina Machado and Rainn Wilson, and, um, a guy named Craig Bierko."
The producer obtained the pastor's script by pretending to want it for a youth group-and then wittily named her company The Youth Group.
The promotional site
for the play ("Witness a human sacrifice! Feast your eyes on a grody abortion!") explains that Hollywood Hell House "is not in any way an indictment of religion, Christianity, or the Bible. Its purpose is to demonstrate the absurdity of a literal interpretation of the Bible, specifically the belief in a literal everlasting hell."
Loose Canon believes in a literal everlasting hell, though it doesn't necessarily look like a Hieronymus Bosch painting (though, come to think of it, Bill Maher would have been the perfect model for Satan for HB). It you want to know more about the real hell-as opposed to the h ell of going to what is surely a lugubrious play-LC can refer you to
a helluva piecein the Catholic Encyclopedia.
LC can't resist foisting upon you one of her favorite quotes, the epitaph on the frontispiece of Dame Muriel Spark's wonderful
"Loitering with Intent"-which, by the way, is a helluva good novel.
Here's the quote: "What are the four last things to be ever remembered? A. The four last things to be ever remembered are Death, Judgment, Hell and Heaven.--The Penny Catechism.'' Forewarned, Bill.
What They Don't Want You to Know
Swami
is bent out of shape by attempts at fairness at AOL: "You may recall that Swami was upset by an AOL News screen that offered members a chance to view the Swift Boat Vets commercial and the Kerry response--as if they merited equal time."
Swami: Listen to yourself. Do you and your kind (as you once referred to the compassion mafia) get to decide or does the public get to decide?
Here are some articles specially chosen with an eye to acquainting the Swami with the First Amendment and the duties of the press:
Syndicated columnist Robert Samuelson:
"We have entered an era of constitutional censorship. Hardly anyone wants to admit this -- the legalized demolition of the First Amendment would seem shocking -- and so hardly anyone does. The evidence, though, abounds. The latest is the controversy over the anti-Kerry ads by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and parallel anti-Bush ads by Democratic "527" groups such as MoveOn.org. Let's assume (for argument's sake) that everything in these ads is untrue. Still, the United States' political tradition is that voters judge the truthfulness and relevance of campaign arguments. We haven't wanted our political speech filtered."
Columnist Jonah Goldberg
:
"The Swift Boat Vets for Truth have started a tragic, stupid argument. Oh, I don't mean the factual debate about John Kerry's war record. I'm referring to the argument over what sort of speech should be permitted during an election campaign. As for the steady bleeding the Kerry campaign has suffered over the Swift Boat controversy itself, let's just say it was a self-inflicted wound. No president in recent memory has more explicitly run as a war hero."
Columnist and TV pundit Tony Blankley
:
"It was only after a CBS poll showed that Kerry had lost a net 14 percent of the veteran's vote to Bush -- without aid of major media coverage or substantial national advertising -- that the major media outlets began to lumber, resentfully, in the vague direction of the story. And even then, they hardly engaged themselves in the spirit of objective journalism.
"According to Editor and Publisher, the respected voice of official big-time journalism: `Chicago Tribune managing editor James O'Shea tells Joe Strupp the Swift Boat controversy may be an instance of a growing problem for newspapers in the expanding media world -- being forced to follow a questionable story because non-print outlets have made it an issue. `There are too many places for people to get information,' says O'Shea. `I don't think newspapers can be gatekeepers anymore -- to say this is wrong, and we will ignore it. Now we have to say this is wrong, and here is why.'"
Did you say gatekeeper?
Oh, Swami loves you.
But it won't work anymore.
Well, That's One Way of Looking At It
Here's a quote from
a National Review piecethat asks why John Kerry can't be more like James McGreevey, the New Jersey governor who announced that he was resigning and came out of the closet in one fell swoop:
"McGreevey is a pro-choice Catholic, in stark opposition to Church teaching. In June, Archbishop John J. Myers of the Newark diocese released a five-page statement titled "A Time for Honesty," in which he wrote that Catholic politicians who support abortion rights should not seek Communion. In response, New Jersey's pro-choice governor said that he would respect the archbishop's request and not seek the Eucharist at Mass. Oddly, McGreevey said he would accept Communion in private (whatever that means) but not in public, even though Myers made no distinction. Still, unlike most pro-choice politicians, he was willing to accept Church authority on an issue the Church understands as a matter of life and death."
Swiss Finishing School Docents for Truth
If you're sick and tired of the Swiss boat vets, the Weekly Standard has a hilarious parody in the form of a "news" story of charges headlined "Swiss Finishing School Docents for Truth."
In one of the ads, Bitsy van Rensselaer recalls being in Italy when George Bush called Positano Pensacola. "I was humiliated in front of my sommelier," pouts Bitsy.
Unfortunately, only subscribers can get the parody.
In the Beginning...
Loose Canon is a probably a bit looser than Christianity Today, the respected Protestant magazine. But Christianity Today raised a valid point about
Newsweek's beautifully illustrated report on biblical archeologyin Iraq and Israel.
Here's how the Newsweek story begins:
"What there was in the beginning, in the world of the Bible, is what there was in the land now called Iraq. There is nothing left of the Garden of Eden, no artifact at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where myth has placed the Temptation and the Fall."
Christianity Today opines
that "using the loaded word myth is a sure way to alienate a huge part of Newsweek's readership. And readers are going to get exactly the wrong idea about what the Bible says."
Loose Canon much prefers the word allegory to myth because the stories of the Old Testament contain, at the very least, a theological truth (and very often a historical truth). Will the use of the word myth alienate "a huge part" of Newsweek's readership? The newsmagazines enshrine the truth as seen by the media elite and for them, alas,
allthe stories of the Bible belong in a myth and symbol class.
Meanwhile, an
excellent piece in the Wall Street Journalby my colleague Charlotte Allen argues that claims that a recently excavated cave was John the Baptist's rest on "a combination of supposition and imaginative hypothesis:"
"Although the cave contains primitive drawings that seem to depict John's life, their placement and style connects them to a period several centuries later, when the Holy Land was part of the Byzantine Empire. Mr. Gibson derives his theory that John anointed his disciples in the cave from a foot-shaped depression over which oil could have been poured. The trouble is that, although the Gospels speak of John's baptizing with water, they say nothing of his anointing anyone."
Today's Swift Boat Item
Presidential candidate John Kerry's reaction to challenges about his four months in Vietnam by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth seems to boil down to this: Daddy, Daddy, make them stop saying mean things about me.
I refer, of course, to his campaign's asking the Bush campaign to stop the ads. But
John O'Sullivan commentsthat the daily papers have been so circumspect in reporting on the charges that getting at the truth requires reading between the lines--just like at Pravda:
"Vladimir Bukovsky, the great anti-Soviet dissident, once reproved me for quoting the old joke about the two main official Soviet newspapers: 'There's no truth in Pravda [Truth] and no news in Izvestia [News].' He pointed out that you could learn a great deal of truthful news from both papers if you read them with proper care.
"They often denounced 'anti-Soviet lies.' These lies had never been reported by them. Nor were they lies. And their exposure was the first that readers had been told of them. By reading the denunciation carefully, however, intelligent readers could decipher what the original story must have been.
"That is exactly how intelligent readers now have to read most of the establishment media--at least when they are reporting on the 'anti-Kerry lies' of the swift boat veterans. Two weeks ago I pointed out that the main media outlets were ignoring the story that 254 swift boat veterans were accusing Sen. John Kerry of being, in effect, a liar and a blowhard. I doubted that this suppression could be sustained for long since free-lance journalists on the Internet were examining it--and uncovering what seemed like damaging evidence that at least some of the charges had substance.
Fertility Clinics: Just a Thought
A Beliefnet member raises an excellent point with regard to yesterday's post of a
piece on the moral perils of embryonic stem cell researchby columnist Charles Krauthammer:
"What I want to know is when the people who are pro-life, anti-abortion, whatever you want to call them, are going to face up to the situation with fertility clinics, where dozens of embryos are 'discarded' every day. Instead of lining up outside abortion clinics where, despite constant propaganda to the contrary, most women go because of rape, incest, or severe medical problems, why aren't they lining up at the fertility clinics? Every attempt at conception at a clinic requires a lot of fertilized embryos, and the leftovers, after everyone's decided they're done, are just thrown in the trash. And I'd also like to know how many of those go into the stem cell lines... Just a thought..."
I'd have to disagree with the reasons cited for abortions, but otherwise this is a very good thought--if I'm reading it correctly.
He Took a Camera--Why Didn't He Get an Affidavit, too?
A clever lawyer who advertises on
Instapundithas come up with an advertisement based on the Swift Boat challenges to Kerry's seared-in-memory claim to have spent Christmas in Cambodia:
"SEARED in your memory--but didn't get it in writing? Don't give up the ship! We're lawyers who represent blogs, Web and brick-and-mortar businesses and other living things--decorated legal vets who do it better, swifter and cheaper."
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