Sunny Days in Heaven

2006-09-08T13:40:00.000-07:00

New English Review

You can find me blogging at The Iconoclast and writing articles at NER now.

2006-03-10T09:51:00.000-08:00

Today's Quote:

The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous.

Shana Alexander

And hostile.

People pretty much enjoy being average, but don't want to think of themselves as average. Excellence creates unfortunate comparisons that aren't easily overlooked by both the one who is excellent and others who are not.

2006-02-17T23:31:00.000-08:00

So, what's your problem?

Why haven't you met God?

Have you ever asked yourself that question? I've met a lot of people who have said at one time (myself included), "If God wants me to know him or do what he wants, he knows where to find me. Go ahead and give me a call, God."

Naomi Wolf, the Jewish feminist, claims she has met Jesus recently. So why haven't you?

Then there's another feminist writer in England who is taking a year off to explore "spirituality" after she had an encounter where she felt anointed as if a jar of beautiful ointment poured down upon her and she felt transcendant love or peace or happiness.

Most religious people have had some kind of inkling or experience which sustains them in their faith, but few have ever had the full "technicolor Hollywood experience" as someone I know once put it of being knocked of their horse, dazzled by the burning bush or had the spirit of God like a dove descend upon them and send them into the wilderness for forty days and nights.

What makes God either so picky, elusive, impassive to requests, or capricious?

More on that in another blog, but ask yourself, this - is it possible that I could meet God directly but I just haven't really wanted to?

2006-01-17T01:35:00.000-08:00

MLK Day

I marched in the 60's for civil rights and yet, I am deeply underwhelmed by MLK Jr. day. I've always though it was a a cause in search of a desire. Particularly after so much has been revealed of MLK's clay feet.

I can easily forgive sins in a great man, but not one who purported to be a great and a religious man. MLk's philandering and plagiarism have greatly lowered my esteem for the man despite his good acomplishments. Add to that his communism later on, and we have serious problems taking the holiday seriously.

2006-01-14T11:59:00.000-08:00

I never read about this in Revelation

The engineering of green glowing pigs:

2006-01-13T16:06:00.000-08:00

Hilarious

The Devil

According to MSNBC, about 50 people died in Saudi Arabia during the annual ritual of throwing stones at the devil. Apparently a stampede broke out when somebody tripped on luggage. That sounds like a poorly conceived punch line, but it actually happened. And it isn’t the first time. In 1990, 1,426 people died in a stampede while throwing stones at the very same devil. (No word as to whether luggage was involved.) And in 2004, the devil killed another 244 stone-throwers the same way. By my count, the score is Devil 1,720 and Believers 0.

This is on the same day that the guy who shot John Paul II was freed. Clearly, the devil is having a good day.

I think it’s interesting that when you pray to God for a new bike, it hardly ever materializes in your bedroom within seconds. But when you throw stones at the devil, quite often you get an immediate response. That’s an example of good customer service.

I laughed.

(via Relapsed Catholic)

2006-01-12T15:08:00.000-08:00

A Man's home is his castle

Ever want to build a castle? This man is. He includes instructions and the work accomplished thus far.

His other website illustrates other castles in America.

2006-01-12T14:43:00.000-08:00

To heck with 'em

Cute Overload wouldn't use the picture below for their site, so I will use it for mine.

From the Sacramento Bee

2006-01-12T14:06:00.000-08:00

Why do judges drift Left?

Some say it's the elite they find themselves in, others say it is all about playing roles, others say it is about acquiring perspectives they did not have through their colleagues, but I say it's because too many people are soft headed and weak minded. That is, too many find it impossible to say to the poor, the weak, the marginalized, the oppressed - tough luck. I feel for you, but the fact is, we can't make life fair by altering society on your behalf. You have to win that on your own through your elected officials.

“We don’t really take a case in order to, quote-unquote, do justice” or “to make sure that the good guy won and the bad guy lost,” Scalia said.

Robert Bork provides a popular answer: justices “tend to drift to the left in response to elite opinion.” According to his theory, judges come to associate with and respond to “the intellectual class . . . dominant in, for example, the universities, the media, church bureaucracies, and foundation staffs.” Once seated on the court, right-leaning judges eventually adopt “the intelligentsia’s attitude, which is to the cultural left of the American people.”

As the left-leaning judge Guido Calabresi explains, “I am extraordinarily role-conscious. I think that we play roles all the time. What is appropriate for me as a judge, what is appropriate for me as a scholar, what is appropriate as a dean [of Yale Law School], and what is appropriate if I did more op-ed writing . . . are completely different things.”

That kind of elasticity which is common to men, often called compartmentalization, allows a man to make terrible decisions which are divorced from a greater reality because he has narrowed his role and how he defines a situation before him.

But more is at work than the desire to convey an appearance of objectivity. The job of judging, unlike most occupations, strongly encourages individuals to see sides of an issue that are otherwise easily ignored. And the information that emerges may help explain why juridical drift is so often leftward.

Justice O’Connor, in a tribute to the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, described the influence of his “special perspective” on her—an influence that appears to have contributed to her leftward trajectory: “At oral arguments and conference meetings, in opinions and dissents, Justice Marshall imparted not only his legal acumen but also his life experiences, constantly pushing and prodding us to respond not only to the persuasiveness of legal argument but also to the power of moral truth.”

You see, because Marshall suffered, society must be engineered so that it won't happen to him again even if society has already changed and would not make him suffer such as he had again.

I think TR had it right:

When Theodore Roosevelt, feeling badly betrayed by his erstwhile nominee, remarked of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. that he “could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that”. . .

If judgment is going to be all about acceptance by a Georgetown elite and a lot of touchy feely sadness about unfairness, then we will always be in trouble.

2006-01-12T12:18:00.000-08:00

Peter Max meets Jesus

A Catholic artist, Daniel Mitsui, in a pen and ink medium creates some marvelous images.

2006-01-07T15:49:00.000-08:00

Accepting all the outrage

I have not been blogging that much lately for a few reasons. I've been writing movie reviews for Spero News and that has been satisfying. Also, I notice a number of things that would normally cause me to proclaim my disgust with the Left and the MSM, but knowing that others are on the case, I don't feel as inclined to join the chorus or find an obscure event that few know about yet and broadcast as far as I can.

It's as if I have a certain capacity for absurdities and idiotarians and I am full to the brim. I can't rouse greater passion in complaint or lament.

I am glad that others continue to fight the good fight, but I am losing energy for the daily grind.

Even so, I have hope that people are doing things to stem the tide or reverse the course of culture.

2006-01-05T00:22:00.000-08:00

Serenity delivers

I watched the 2005 movie Serenity on DVD last night and I am happy to report that it is every bit as good as I reported last September.

This is a movie as good as Gunga Din which is one of the greatest action adventure movies ever made. In fact it puts any Indiana Jones movie to shame.

If you haven't seen Serenity, do so. Buy it. It is a classic. It will probably never have a sequel which is good in some ways. It didn't make enough money to promise more films, but being nearly perfect as it is, it's unique quality should remain so and undiluted by sequels of mixed quality.

2006-01-03T14:46:00.000-08:00

Sac Bee wants you dead

Do you think physical characteristics and ethnic ones might be useful in identifying suspects of a crime? The Sac Bee doesn't think so.

It reports on a local murder and kidnapping and refuses to define any outward charateristics of either the victims or perpetrators.

Detectives were interviewing the kidnapping victims Tuesday morning. Marshall said it is not clear how the victims knew the suspects, but the kidnappings and killing were not a random act.

Marshall said there is little description of the suspects, other than the dark-colored Hummer they were last seen driving.

This is disingenuous, of course. There is no doubt as to the skin color of the people involved, but the Bee will want citizens to have every dark Hummer around pulled over.

The Bee is staffed by some really sick and dangerous SOBs.

2006-01-02T21:34:00.000-08:00

Deconstructing Steven

My essay on Steven Spielberg and his being a very over-rated artist is up at Spero News.

We are seeing Spielberg's midlife crisis played out in his films. They aren’t great. They aren’t horrible. They mark time, but they aren’t accomplishing what he wants.

2005-12-31T21:34:00.000-08:00

California Flood Blogging

I'm in Sacramento in River Park a few blocks from the levee of the American River which flows into the Sacramento a mile or so farther downstream. If the American River breaches the levee, the flood plan says there will be at least 4-6 feet of water in my house.

I went to the river a few days ago to check how it was. It had filled to its banks. I went today to check with some fear that it was much higher given the flooding in so many other areas and the continuing rain.

I was relieved to find it was the same. Up to the banks but nowhere close to the levee 10 -15 feet higher.

On the left corner you can see part of the levee I am standing on. The distance to the river is maybe 100 yards.

The tree and brush you see in the middle of the river are from an island that is generally not flooded during the summer. The river is usually about one fourth to one third the width of what you see here.

2005-12-30T11:09:00.000-08:00

Dennis Prager shocks his listeners

Dennis Prager, the radio talk show personality, is getting divorced after seventeen years of marriage. It is his second marriage. There are children involved. As one who has been a great inspiration and model to others, Prager’s situation comes as something of a shock to his listeners and fans, but it is very often the case that the physician cannot heal himself: the marriage counselor who cannot save his own marriage, the pastor who cannot inspire his child, and so forth.

When I was a younger Catholic, I would have found moral fault with Dennis because I wholeheartedly embraced the Church’s teaching on divorce, and the verse from Malachi that God hates divorce.

Dennis often says that it is better for a person to have married and divorced then never to have married at all. There is wisdom in that. Dennis is also Jewish and has a different perspective on marriage than a Catholic will have. He has also said that even though God hates divorce, he doesn’t say don’t do it. I think that is a trifle facile, though.

I cannot presume to determine how much pain is too much or bearable for another person. I think that in the course of my life I have developed a greater tolerance, perhaps, for emotional suffering than others. I can only say this because other people have suggested it to me; and I have noticed that a great many people seem to reach their limit before I have in similar circumstances.

One of the things that I have learned is if you endure to your limit and hang on, the suffering often resolves itself to the extent that you make the best of a sad situation.

I think there has to be a certain amount of intransigence on someone’s part to destroy a marriage, and what can be done when that happens? I don’t quite understand Dennis when he insists that his wife and he are suffering a tragedy, that they are both good people, and making it seem that no one is to blame.

I’m not about pointing fingers here, but if these two people have as much affection and respect for each other as Dennis reports, it’s difficult to understand how they have reached such an impasse. It’s none of my business, of course, and speculation would be odious as to the causes of this dissolution. I am simply trying to maintain the same level of respect for Dennis as I had before. It’s hard to believe that someone as wise, kind, sincere, intelligent, understanding, and compassionate as Dennis Prager needs to end his marriage.

But I will still listen to his program because no matter what, the man speaks truth and brings a kind of joy to his work.

2005-12-29T17:40:00.000-08:00

Jonah is a good guy

Thanks to Jonah Goldberg for his link from The Corner. I emailed him because I felt he'd recognize a beloved cousin of Cosmo who was loved and will be missed.

If I had the money I'd sign up for one of NRO's cruise ship vacations just so I could thank him in person.

I suppose the death of a pet shouldn't grieve us that much, but I feel it keenly along with my daughter. I didn't expect it to sadden me as much as it does. I think part of it is that I also saw the body of my wife or child in that of my dog's corpse. It made me imagine what if it were not just a beloved dog but a beloved relative.

The death of loved ones, even that of a dog, can be such a hard thing to bear, and we easily forget just how stern the hard facts of life are.

"Golden lads and girls all must,
like chimney sweepers, come to dust."

That's why I love Shakespeare so much. He knew.

***

Thanks also to Bryan of JYB.

2005-12-29T16:11:00.000-08:00

Luna RIP

Luna Today

We had our fourteen year old dog, Luna, euthanized today.

And I am angry. I’m angry and I’m overcome with sorrow.

Luna was the most beautiful dog I have ever seen. She was the smartest, the most docile, the quietest and loveliest creature among her kind, and it makes me angry that something I loved as much as she is dead.

It makes me angry that people walk around this world laughing and scorning eternal life and the resurrection of the dead. It makes me angry that people of the Academy, the Media, the Government, the entertainment industry have got nothing but hatred for Christians and those who suffer the pain of losing beloved people and creatures and who turn with their whole hearts to the redeemer of sorrows and the resurrector of life.

Have these people, these haters, these vicious, cynical homunculi never lost someone, something they loved to death, and not known in their heart that there must be something more than death? Have these wise fools never grasped the depth of grief, the righteous demand for a justice which makes love itself an eternal reward?

Our dog was of such beauty and excellence, such sweetness and obedience, of such great blessing to her small pack of humans that I shall never see her like again.

There was not a stranger who ever met her who did not like her, admire her beauty and poise, regard her calmness. She was friendly without being demanding of attention. She didn’t much care if someone petted her or not unless it was the evening and she was pleased to be touched. She happily obeyed with a snap of the fingers, a motion of the hand, a simple word.

I ask myself how it is possible that my Luna who had so much that was perfect should die, but that some smart aleck, smarmy comedian should grin and mock righteousness, innocence, honor, courage, and love with such ease and so little penalty? That even churchmen might say he should be immortal and my pet is annihilated.

Perhaps it’s all absurd and I shall never see my dog again, or my wife or child -- that there is no heaven as we imagine or that it works differently than we think. If I had a hundred dogs or wives on Earth, shall I have them all back in the next world?

Nevertheless, I know that when I carried my dead dog’s body away, when I emptied the house of her things, a bed, two bowls, food and medicine, and whatnot -- I know that something of immense reality was cut out of my life without hardly a fare thee well and there has to be an answer to that diminishment.

The impassivity of God is a great burden to those who love him. How often are his consolations nowhere to be found; and yet, in such as this -- what consolation is there? When someone, something we love dies should we not feel it? Should we not be bereft and miserable? How should God comfort us except to let us suffer our pain?

And even in such misery do not our souls both curse God for our suffering, and still thank him for our certain faith that we shall live again and that which we love shall live again?

Let them be damned who live to make fun of innocence, purity, and simplicity. They have cursed themselves, but oh, how I often wish they would feel it.

God, how I loved that dog.

2005-12-23T22:13:00.000-08:00

Hiatus

I will be on hiatus for the Christmas break.

2005-12-15T14:52:00.000-08:00

I promise I'll never change

Rod Dreher at The Corner makes these comments:

I predict "Brokeback" will be a box office flop, and we'll see a long, pearls-clutching round of media bashing of Red America for being insecure and idiotic. But really, film critics are insanely insular. I was one for seven or eight years, and they are almost to a man quite liberal. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but it's clear to me why so many people distrust film critics, and are mostly right to do so.

You know, it's not only liberal cultural politics that separate most critics from the mass audience, but something harder to pin down. It has to do with experience. Critics live in such a rarefied and aestheticized world, seeing five to 10 movies a week, that they quickly grow bored with the sameness of movies. Without quite realizing it--this happened to me as a conservative--critics become suckers for novelty, especially of the transgressive sort.

I am completely and absolutely immune to the disease of jadedness. I dislike mediocrity and sameness as much as the next fellow, but I love goodness, truth, and beauty more than anything and I don't require that those three things be packaged in novel ways.

Heck, they are so rare anyway that I can hardly bemoan similarity in presentation when there is no embarrassment of riches in that regard.

I also appreciate more than most purity and simplicity and have some contempt for the kind of cleverness which outwits itself, that is, undermines its impact, power, and directness through expository tricks which frustrate more than amuse or delight.

I hate it when

"the most important film critics in North America at the 1998 Toronto Film Festival, roaring their approval of the creepy and misanthropic Todd Solondz's film "Happiness," which featured, among other transgressive delights, a comic set piece showing a suburban dad trying to drug his son's little playmate so he could anally rape him (he succeeded). It was one of the sickest movies I've ever had to sit through, but it received rave reviews--and, unsurprisingly, flopped at the box office."

I do not oppose depiction of evil, the reality of things in the world, but I cannot abide the failure to recognize evil for what it is and does, or gets cute with it.

Truth is novelty enough for me, and I never tire of it.

2005-12-15T10:35:00.000-08:00

Persecuted for Christ's sake, will the church help?

This story from Canada (via Relapsed Catholic) involves a number of issues.

A member of the Knights of Columbus who is in charge of renting the fraternity's hall for weddings and other events alleges he was fired from his day job at Costco for his involvement in denying two lesbians the facility for their same-sex "wedding." The human rights case in which the lesbian couple successfully sued the Knights of Columbus over the denial of the hall made international headlines.

David Hauser told LifeSiteNews.com in an exclusive interview that Tracey Smith, one of the lesbians involved in the human rights complaint against the Knights, was also a co-worker of his at Costco. Hauser related that Smith and many of the management at the Port Coquitlam warehouse were openly homosexual. He related that for months before Smith and her same-sex partner approached his wife for the hall rental, these same individuals had been asking him about his involvement with the hall, and knew that he was in charge of bookings.

Hauser, who initially re-financed his mortgage after the job loss, faces the prospect of losing his home if nothing changes in the next few months. "It's pretty degrading and humiliating for Sandra and I . . . and all for that cause."

I am wondering though, apart from the obvious injustices perpetrated against Hauser by vicious people and idiot bureaucrats, where is the Church? Why aren't we reading that his local parish church is doing everything to help support the family financially and in getting him work?

Maybe that is happening, but I doubt it. My own experience with Catholic parishes is that that they do very little to help their own members when they have a crisis that is not spiritual but worldly.

2005-12-13T10:43:00.000-08:00

Kong is all wrong

Kong In Love

The new King Kong would be spectacularly awful if it weren’t so tedious and boring. It stinks. It’s dumb. It’s stupid. It’s long. It’s Kong in love.

See Kong in love. He moons longingly. Kong skates. Kong sings. Kong dances. Kong whirls like Fred Astaire walking a foot off the ground in love. Music swells romantically for Kong in love.

Watch the sunset with Kong. Watch the sunrise with Kong. Snuggle up in his fur or against his bosom. Ah, so sweet. Kong in love.

Kong destroying New York, but wait, here comes Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts). She catches his eye. Walks in slow motion toward him through the haze in a thin white dress on a winter’s night. Kong waits expectantly, gazes longingly at her. -- Yes, it’s her, the one, true blonde that I love. My dear, my darling comes to me. In the midst of all this madness; this crazy, crazy, world, ah, my lover comes to me. . . Whenas in silks my Julia goes. / Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows / That liquefaction of her clothes. / Next, when Kong casts his eyes and see / That brave vibration each way free; / Oh how that glittering taketh me!

I worry about spoiling the movie so if you have no idea happens in King Kong, do not read this review unless you trust my word that this is a horribly bad movie; one of the worst.

Peter Jackson must be a real jerk because he shows such contempt for humanity and takes so much pleasure in treating people like so many matchsticks to be tossed away (literally) to death as nothings, mere bagatelle no one will miss.

He wants us to fall in love with Kong as Kong falls in love with Beauty and feel sorry when humans kill the murderous beast. Of course, you’ll have to wait three hours for the beast to die. His death is as bad as the hammiest actor who ever played Hamlet. You’ll be pleading at that point, saying DIE ALREADY you stupid cartoon!!

The movie is a joke. Peter Jackson, the director, takes himself so seriously that he actually thought he could improve on the original which was a silly but fun movie to begin with. Nor is it for children. The scenes on Skull Island with the natives are horrific. Well, I guess they were in the original when Kong chomps on a bunch of the natives. That wasn’t nice, but nothing like the Heart of Darkness which Jackson invests in the tale, as if people are supposed to know Conrad’s novella apart from Apocalypse Now by Coppola.

Jack Black plays Carl Denham, a hard luck movie producer/director and is not as bad as I thought he would be. There is a very long series of events of exposition which occur before we ever get to Skull Island where Kong is. We are bored for an hour and a half before anything happens. There is a great deal of back story to explain all the major characters as if we care. We don’t. Please, get on with it already.

Then they take forever to get there, but wait! They don’t get there. But wait! The island calls them, they can’t escape it.

Jack Black has a map of long lost Skull Island. It blows out of his hands while on deck. Why do important papers always get blown away in movies out of people’s hands as if they don’t care to hold on to them? It doesn’t matter, though, because the island beckons them. It draws them. It has magic and force. They can’t escape it.

Now we are on the island and we will have action sequences that go on and on and on like Energizer Bunny. Had enough? Nope, here comes some more. If more is better than even more and more must be best.

Ever tried to run away from a stampeding herd of brontosauruses? Think they might miss stepping on you as you ran under their bodies? Wrong. They will miss you. And when they crash in a huge train wreck of a pile up, think you might not get squished? Wrong again. You’ll walk away without a scratch if you’re important to the plot. But if you’re cast like a crewman number three on Star Trek for an Away Team, you’re history, of course.

Kong, after taking the Beauty for his own, swings her around in his fist like a little rag doll over and over but “non dolor est, Pitie.” (It doesn’t hurt, Pitius. Sorry, obscure ancient Roman allusion. Google it. You‘ll love the story.)

I thought Terrence Malick was self-indulgent, but he has a soul mate in Peter Jackson.

Then there’s the Kong battle with T Rex. Three or four of them. He fights them on the plain. He fights them on the mountain. He fights them in the canyon and he fights them in the air. He drops Beauty a number of times only to catch her. Count on Jackson to repeat an action many times.

Then giant insects attack Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) and he has them shot off his body while gyrating around in frenzy by a guy with a Thompson submachine gun. Easy that.

Beauty, having been saved by Kong wants to return the favor when he’s on top the Empire State building, because Beauty, you see, loves Kong. It doesn’t matter how many people he kills in his rampages, he really means well and is good at heart.

Jackson is so intent on trying to manipulate us into loving Kong as well, that he goes into overkill in trying to create sympathy. But he fails by trying way too hard. In the original, we are a bit sorry when Kong dies. Here, we can’t wait for him to reap his eternal ape reward. And he doesn’t even die well. Not the marvelous thump, thump, thump down the terraces of the building, but a dying fall like a sigh into space. So sad. Oh, poor Kong. (Thank God it’s over., Now I can go to the bathroom!)

This movie stinks. It reeks. It’s awful. It’s offal. It’s odious. It’s ordure. Do not waste a dime on this dog.

2005-12-13T01:56:00.000-08:00

Good on you, mate

Arnold denies clemency. Tookie Williams meets his Maker. Justice is served. Cowardice is thwarted.

2005-12-13T01:55:00.000-08:00

Is this a great image or what?

2005-12-13T01:44:00.000-08:00

They love us in Iraq

Even though Bush claims we have have killed 30,000 Iraqis during the invasion and subsequent occupation, they love us in Iraq.

When asked what would be the worst thing that could happen to Iraq in the next 12 months, only 8.9% chose "occupation not leaving Iraq."

When asked what would be the best thing that could happen to Iraq in the next 12 months, only 5.7% chose American forces leaving Iraq.

One thing is sure, American media fails to reflect the reality reflected in this poll.

Also, some military sources say we have killed 50,000 terrorists or so.

Liberation, despite the cost in lives, seems to be valued by people who have suffered horrendously from vicious dictators. It proves the Left is insane.

2005-12-12T15:04:00.000-08:00

Bitter? Who me?

"When I was 15, I went to play the piano for this white guy's Christmas party" in Texas, Jamie Foxx says. But when he and a friend showed up at the client's mansion, the host stopped them, saying, "I can't have two n— in my house at one time."

Foxx says he was forced to send his friend home, even though his pal had given him a lift to the party.

The "Ray" star was so rankled by the experience that, once he hit it big in Hollywood, he instituted a similar quota system.

Whenever two white guys came to party at his pad, Foxx tells Oprah Winfrey in December's O, he'd tell them, "You all will have to make a decision between you two."

Foxx adds that his friends "had to counsel me and say, 'Don't fall into that same trap.' "

The Oscar winner later changed his entrance policy — though, he points out, he never set a limit on white women.

It's fun to be racist and try to hurt people who never did a thing to you.

2005-12-10T12:21:00.000-08:00

Today's Quote:

“For me, reason is the natural organ of truth, and imagination is the organ of understanding.”

C.S. Lewis

I have occasionally had the difficulty of explaining Grace to an atheist or skeptic. Artists have a similar difficulty in trying to explain what is beautiful to the tone deaf and dull.

It takes imagination to understand Grace or Beauty. How do you demonstrate the sublime to one who has no feeling for the profound? And Grace is generally a veery common sensation, but one which many refuse to acknowledge, for to do so would insist to them that human life is not reducible to nihilism.

The experience of Grace is often a "warm fuzzy" such as watching a sunset with a beloved, or conforting a child during an illness.

Often, the sense of awe that people experience from a spectacular vista is gracious. Samuel Johnson defined wonder in his dictionary as, "the experience of novelty upon ignorance."

There is much truth in that, but not enough truth, for wonder is often confrontation with essential mystery, or the discovery of possibilities that never occurred before, or merely apprehension of the sublime.

Imagination, though, requires more than an ability to escape in magical kingdoms of dragons, warriors, and wizards. I have been surprised at how many unimaginative young men have been captivated by things like Star Trek or Star Wars, and yet are incapable of sensing their own souls and its yearning for transcendence, and militantly refuse to identify in any way with the Christ story which has an incredible aspect of being mythical or archetypal and true at the same time.

It is as if people encounter the myth of Narcissus and Echo and never realize that it might have anything to do with Self, Ego, and Deafness to actual love.

Aesop's fables are imaginative, but how many would "get" the moral of the story if if they weren't tagged with it?

Jesus's parables challenge in exactly that way. So often he doesn't explain what they mean, and so those without ears do not hear them.

2005-12-08T08:52:00.000-08:00

The Pope Explains

Pope Benedict touches on a theme I have often noted, but he does so much more effortlessly and concisely.

"Man nurtures the suspicion that God, at the end of the day, takes something away from his life, that God is a competitor who limits our freedom and that we will be fully human only when we will have set him aside," Benedict said.

"There emerges in us the suspicion that the person who doesn't sin at all is basically a boring person, that something is lacking in his life, the dramatic dimension of being autonomous, that the freedom to say 'no' belongs to real human beings," the pontiff said.

How often have I heard someone say, "It's not the answers that matter, but the quality of the questions." Or "doubt is more important than truth."

Then there are all the Hollywood movies, TV shows, plays, and so-called art which insists everything is ambiguous, nothing is absolute (except this statement), and if everyone were the same, wouldn't it be a boring world?

The fact is that the righteous or viruous man is an intolerable bore to a world in love with distraction, thrills, chills, spills, and ignorance.

People do claim to be more alive because they say "no" to conforming themselves to God and the true or higher nature of being.

2005-12-08T00:18:00.000-08:00

Blog time

Had a bunch of movies to review the past few days. Little blog time.

So far, Narnia, thumb way way up.

Munich. Thumb down.

The New World. There isn't a low enough level for the thumb down to reach.

Look for my reviews at Spero News in the weeks to come as they are released.

****

Did I tell you that I'm enjoying being a film critic? Because I get to know about movies a few days or even weeks before you do, and by the time it comes out it's old news to me?

I'm ahead of the cultural curve, and sometimes I get free popcorn and a soda for my trouble. And my own seating section apart from the hoi polloi or even alone with a few peers in the biz. Cool.

2005-12-03T10:45:00.000-08:00

Drat!

I can't believe that I haven't gotten a notice from any of the three publicity agencies I am listed with as a film critic to see The Chronicles of Narnia film that opens next week Dec. 9th.

I don't believe that Disney and Walden Media aren't doing screenings since I know Ebert and Roeper will be giving a review from their screening of it.

I just don't understand why Sacramento has been left off the list. Or has it? I'll email the Bee critic to see if she's had notice of a screening.

2005-12-02T13:44:00.000-08:00

Just an opinion and none of my business but . . .

I’m a fan of James Lileks. So much so that I find it a shame how he squanders his gift for invention, his ability to coin expressions, create amazing similes at the drop of a hat.

I find it a shame because I am so poor in contrast, and I can hardly believe that he is so fecund. I fear he will run out of sharp sentences that delight so readily. He is prolific at making clauses and quips that sparkle and jump out.

James has a good life, as he readily admits. A wife, a child, religion, a job that pays him to write, an income from writing books, and his large and loyal group of fans. Yet, Lileks has a tendency toward melancholy and black moods (which he is adept at managing).

I was wondering why a man as blessed as he might also be a depressive?

Then it occurred to me. Although Lileks gets to make his living writing, something which he loves, his writing is unsatisfying to him on a very fundamental level. I’ll explain.

People who are driven to writing are not born to do so as many people imagine, but are determined by a number of psychological needs. There is the desire to call attention to oneself. Look at me! See how smart, clever, worthwhile, and wonderful I am. Go ahead and love me. This is compensation for an emotional imbalance of some sort.

There is a desire to express oneself creatively because it just plain feels good to make something that celebrates the beauty of everything you love about being alive. (Creativity turned to rage doesn’t really feel good any more than yelling at someone does. It gets something off your chest, and it feels satisfying at the moment to say what you feel, but it never really pays off emotionally if you have a conscience.)

There is also a third desire of creative self-expression - to know yourself, to seek out truth, to understand, to discover meaning. Writing, for example, reveals something about the writer, and if he wants, he can examine his writing to learn what was underlying his expression at the time, same as a man studies his dreams to see what they might mean below the surface.

Shakespeare reveals the depth that psychological self-discovery can get to, and he might even have realized the mythical dimensions of being through his plays.

So imagine that you’re a curious man, a reflective one who is stuck in place writing the same page over and over again except that the words are simply different. The same attitude. The same style. The same gimmicks and devices. The same detachment or enagagement.

It’s a form of torture. It’s a bit like being a world class athlete relegated to always playing in a league of third stringers. And you have to do it for the money. As much as you try to find it satisfying, you know that you aren’t being challenged in a way that would thrill and expand your being, both in joy and skill.

Creativity, ultimately or at its essence, is a soul search for God. By knowing God, we also get to know ourselves. One feeds the other and we spiral in ascension of truth, goodness, and beauty. That is, our vision of being, our consciousness develops in ways that are awesome, only to learn there is more that is awesome to come.

We see in all our works how well we mirror purity, simplicity, and joy if we are willing to be open to what our conscience (or the Holy Spirit) informs us about reality.

People who want to make progress in prayer, for example, are told to keep a journal and write down what they think and feel, experience, doubt, and wonder about God and themselves.

It works. It helps people advance in prayer and understanding.

Simply because some writing is more commercial or “light”, it doesn’t make it less illuminating if the person or the critic delves into content and what it can otherwise mean apart from social commentary, discursive exposition, or superficial intent.

But if you’re a thoughtful person who enjoys questing for more knowledge about the nature of reality and the Self, being stuck in a position of having to crank out the columns, the pages, the books and so forth that are commercially valuable, but spiritually empty or lightweight -- well, it gnaws at the soul. It always feels good to accomplish a goal, and doing that which earns a living is obviously good, the soul wants to get on the flying horse and ride. The stomach makes it crawl back into the cave to mine coal.

Postponing the active and devoted quest in Truth to its ever more amazing revelations debilitates and depresses. No matter how marvelous many consolations are -- wife, children, providing for others, fellowship with like minded people, creature comforts which are delightful -- these don’t satisfy the soul in the same way that seeking God and truth does.

As St. Augustine wrote, “My heart is restless until it rests in You.”

A life filled with even worthwhile distractions wears on a soulful man. He has his pleasures, but they don’t please the soul. A sensitive human being suffers in these circumstances, and I thinks it’s fair to say that James Lileks is an astute, insightful, and sensitive fellow. And that’s why he gets down in the mouth fairly regularly, I think.

2005-12-02T09:21:00.000-08:00

Rejected!!!

I sent an opinion piece to First Things and was rejected. I can't seem to stimulate the kind of debate that would be worthwhile for Christianity (I believe.

See what you think of the article.

******

Mr. Bottum,

I have an opinion piece which examines briefly the situation which Christianity and Judaism face in Biblical and Traditional authority looking at the problem of The Fall and Adam and Eve.

If The Fall is our story of our condition, a very premise of our alienation from God, how do we reconcile that story looked at either literally or metaphorically against our certain knowledge that sin and death existed before man ever appeared.

I believe it opens up a debate that shakes our theology at its core and leads to my piece and title:

God does not write nor institute

“God does not write books,” said Roman Catholic scholar, Raymond Brown. He might have also added, “nor does he establish religions.”

Who does these things, then?

We do. People, that is.

Surely they are inspired people, though?

Certainly, except what do you mean by inspired?

Influenced by God in some mystical/spiritual manner.

Which is?

I don’t know but God does it. It’s a mystery.

Not a lot to hang a book and religion on these days, though, is it?

It is not that rationalism is challenging religion and faith in its desire to destroy the competition, but that rationality within religion and faith demands a new accounting in “justifying the ways of God to men.”

It is not religion and faith that rationality challenges in this case, but theology which grows out of faith and provides a foundation for religion. For faith precedes religion.

In Christianity, it is faith which inspires Peter to declare on Pentecost that Jesus died in atonement for our sins. This is theology before religion. He is offering an explanation for why God did what he did through Jesus whom they have met and know to be God.

How do we know that God really did intend that Jesus act as the sacrifice which reconciles us to him? We have Paul’s Epistles and the book of Acts to tell us, the repetitions of tradition, and the exclamations of saints attesting to the accuracy of the Holy Spirit.

Is that really good enough for us today? Could the people who wrote the Bible be mistaken? Or rather, is it possible that their understanding was partial and limited to the circumstances of their culture?

Let us take up a matter where we are compelled to say the Bible is wrong, a simple matter of Christian and Jewish faith - the story of Adam and Eve.

It is no longer credible for an intelligent and serious man to believe that human existence came into being as Genesis describes it; nor to really postulate that our condition is based upon a Fall from perfection and Edenic life; that we are not what we were meant to be.

We are reasonably certain (beyond a doubt) now that human life proceeded from a long process of animal evolution in which humanity at some point became self-aware in a way different than all other life; but the difference is more in degree than kind for other animals have many of the qualities which we once believed unique to Man such as a moral sense of justice, an ability to deceive or be shamed.

Nevertheless, it may have been God’s direct intervention which made it possible for Man to perceive himself and actively participate in the development of his own consciousness as an adult (the process of prayer). But it could just as well be the way God inherently planned for life to naturally develop on its own such as we. Life is purposeful, but we cannot exactly establish when that purpose was put into motion or being.

Thus, we are certain that death was present in the world long before mammals ran upon it, and more than likely, sin, too, was present in the fact that other animals sought there own selfish interest within their own groups, such as a monkey who lies.

Out foraging one day, a monkey finds a tree with much delicious fruit. What does he do? He runs to another area of the forest and makes the cry which signals a food find to all the other monkeys. He then runs back to his fruit filled tree and gorges himself while the other monkeys gather where there is no food and will not stumble upon him having his fill.

That, my friends, is sin. Whether such sins took place before Man ever appeared, I can’t say, but it illustrates that sin is not limited to humans. It is built into well developed animal life.

It is fair to say then, that sin and death were not a result of Adam and Eve disobeying God in the Garden.

Now some will spiritualize the religious claim or myth as occurring in eternity and then manifesting in this Creation, but that begs too many other questions.

Others may rationalize that the story is a type which allegorizes our real condition -- that of fallen creatures who suffer, sin, and die. We can only be redeemed or saved by an agency other than ourselves. (This I am not going to dispute.) But if it's an allegory, might not a different one also serve or argue another idea?

Some might suggest that just as the Greek myth of Narcissus is a psychological fable about the disaster of self-love and egotism, the Adam and Eve story reflects spiritual reality.

But how do we know that we are fallen beings when we start out as nothing and become conscious and then self-conscious? In one sense ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Like all animals, we begin from nothing that’s conscious and then have being, and then more of it.

Furthermore, it would be impossible for God to create Adam and Eve out of whole cloth, so to speak. That is, God could not create the persons as completely conscious individuals with likes and dislikes, thoughts and feelings all of a sudden. A person is the result of a process from conception to adulthood. There are no shortcuts. No Athena bursting from God’s head fully formed in personality.

God might have the power to create the meat and flesh of an Adam out of nothing, a mere assemblage of organs and such, but the person of Adam? No rational man could accept the possibility.

A number of people are now suggesting that we haven’t ceased to evolve but may become more intelligent than we are now. I must insist though that there is a difference between intelligence and consciousness (as I mean it). Intelligence need not be wise. We may become better computers, indeed. Consciousness refers to development of knowing, of wisdom, insight and discovery.

There are many intelligent people who discover next to nothing significant over the course of their lives; while there are a few humans who become knowing, wise, exceptionally creative and are good computers.

So, in the Adam and Eve story we have a serious breakdown of theology which cannot account for reality as we must know it if we are rational besides also being spiritual.

Does this prove that God didn’t write the Bible or establish religions? Not yet. There are many other “myths” which must be scrutinized honestly before any man can say he thinks faith has been cleared of a lot of underbrush and ornamentation, but the modern challenge to belief in the Fall is a good place to start the debate.

Can anyone really support the Bible’s account in Genesis for our condition?

2005-11-29T08:48:00.000-08:00

Can Never Trust 'Em

People, that is.

According to the survey done this month by Russell Research for TV Watch, 81% of American TV watchers worry about the kinds of programs their children could be exposed to, and 91% of parents said more parental involvement is the best way to keep kids from seeing what they shouldn't see. Just 9% of parents said the government should increase control and enforcement of network television programming.

Let's see, people want government to take care of their medical, employment, food, and housing needs but lay off the TV set you bureaucratic goons!

I have often noticed that the Libertarian's biggest fear is that some day someone may take his pornography away from him (most Libertarians are men). They fear that more than the NRA fears the ACLU before a liberal court.

Yet 91% of Americans are terrified (to put it hyperbolically) that Big Brother will take Desperate Housewives or Jerry Springer away from them.

It's funny. Government censorship gave us Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne and myriad others. In America, it gave us Frank Capra, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and many more.

Yeah, I have to say that censorship ruins everything.

No one set of parents can police the culture for their children's sake. People have some right to expect a greater effort from their society to act in loco parentis since only society can be everywhere at once.

But then, the idea that society exists more for the benefit of children than for the vices of adults is a novel and odious idea to most these days. O tempora, O mores.

2005-11-29T08:30:00.000-08:00

The Church Rules

The Vatican newspaper said on Tuesday that homosexuality risked "destabilizing people and society", had no social or moral value and could never match the importance of the relationship between a man and a woman.

No social or moral value.

Does it matter what the Church says? If it didn't, why would Hollywood, Broadway, and the MSM attack it so regularly?

I will always love the Church for remaining faithful to its morality.

2005-11-28T10:46:00.000-08:00

Another myth shot down

What causes the feeling of deja vu?

Just delayed signals in the brain.

2005-11-27T15:11:00.000-08:00

Do you need one of these?

2005-11-27T13:31:00.000-08:00

What is dumb?

I got this link from a Steve Sailor article comparing Kerry's and Bush's IQ.

Another IQ expert, Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute, the co-author of the bestseller "The Bell Curve," came up with a similar result when asked by UPI. Noting that everybody except high school dropouts takes the PSAT when they are sophomores, Murray calculated from PSAT scores that "I think you're safe in saying that Dubya's IQ, based on his SAT score, is in excess of 120, which puts him the top 10 percent of the distribution, but I wouldn't try to be more precise than that."

By way of comparison, Bush's 2000 opponent Al Gore scored 134 and 133 the two times he took an IQ test in high school, putting him just under the top 1 percent of the public. Not surprisingly, the former vice president's' SAT scores were also strong but not stratospheric: Verbal 625, Math 730, for a total of 1,355 out of a perfect score of 1,600.

If anything proves the meaninglessness of a high IQ what could do more to discredit a high number than Al Gore's 133?

The man is a raving lunatic, but I guess the IQ means that he gets to his idiotic conclusions faster than 99% of other nutballs would.

To a small extent, I think that there is some inheritability of intelligence, but I find conclusions about IQ based on race to be fundamentally flawed.

When you see how lower class people treat their toddlers and small children, you can easily see how they are completely unstimulated intellectually.

Children who are not mentally stimulated, and in fact are actively discouraged at an early age are intellectually handicapped the rest of their lives.

2005-11-27T12:20:00.000-08:00

Place your bets

Bush plans to outline his illegal immigration plan this week.

I am going to bet that it will be completely unsatisfactory and a mere rehash of his earlier nonsense of an amnesty program for those already here and no real enforcement of the border or the laws.

The article in the LA Times states:

The debate pits advocates of strict new immigration limits against powerful business interests that rely on cheap immigrant labor. That divide is apparent in contentious campaigns in which immigration-control activists are challenging establishment Republicans.

We keep hearing about how business is pro-Republican yet we see that an enormous amount of big business donates far more to Democrats, so exactly who would the GOP be alienating by enforcing the laws? Small businessmen who own landscaping companies, and restaurant owners?

I can live with those employers being ticked off at Bush.

2005-11-27T11:46:00.000-08:00

Didja ever wonder how . . . ?

You've seen it hundreds of times om TV or in a movie. Someone finds a door or gate locked and so he pulls out his pistol and blows the lock off.

Someone decided to see if this really works. He used pistols, rifles and a shotgun firing a breeching slug.

The shotgun was the only thing that did the job. That's why you see our troops using them in Iraq.

2005-11-25T09:35:00.000-08:00

What Matters

The most important thing for a self-aware creature to know is that he will not be annihilated by death. If he doesn't have a certain faith in his immortality, life is worthless.

Faith here doesn't mean belief in a wished for sense, but knowledge and trust in spiritual reality.

2005-11-24T11:51:00.000-08:00

Cathedral Makeover

The Sacramental Cathedral was renovated ($25 million) and just re-opened. It is now the most beautiful church in Northern California outside of San Francisco.

It is much lighter in tone with many fine features in marble and lovely woods.

I don't know what the thing below is called, a kind of cage with pews for adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, but it is completely new. The pews are all new but with no padding as usual for Catholic churches since you are not supposed to ever feel comfortable, but that going to Mass is a sort of penance service.

It was difficult to take these pictures since the light was low and uneven and the church had many people wandering around during the tour

2005-11-22T23:29:00.000-08:00

A Paper Tiger?

So we can't defeat the Chinese in a conventional war?

The overwhelming assessment by Asian officials, diplomats and analysts is that the U.S. military simply cannot defeat China. It has been an assessment relayed to U.S. government officials over the past few months by countries such as Australia, Japan and South Korea.

Most Asian officials have expressed their views privately. Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara has gone public, warning that the United States would lose any war with China.

Mr. Ishihara said U.S. ground forces, with the exception of the Marines, are "extremely incompetent" and would be unable to stem a Chinese conventional attack. Indeed, he asserted that China would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons against Asian and American cities—even at the risk of a massive U.S. retaliation.

The governor said the U.S. military could not counter a wave of millions of Chinese soldiers prepared to die in any onslaught against U.S. forces. After 2,000 casualties, he said, the U.S. military would be forced to withdraw.

Officials acknowledge that Mr. Ishihara's views reflect the widespread skepticism of U.S. military capabilities in such countries as Australia, India, Japan, Singapore and South Korea. They said the U.S.-led war in Iraq has pointed to the American weakness in low-tech warfare.

"When we can't even control parts of Anbar, they get the message loud and clear," an official said, referring to the flashpoint province in western Iraq.

Claiming our Army forces are incompetent is a bit much. Yet, the assertions that we can't bear even 2000 deaths is something to consider.

Clearly our enemies (and China certainly is) see our culture of domestic weakness in military conflicts as something they can exploit, or find typical of us now.

They underestimate us, of course, but that's to be expected. And can any one of us say that they might not be right? Would we fight as we did in WW2 when we would not surrender and threw everything we had at the enemy? I hope so, but we have bred so many cowards and crybabies that one wonders.

One is almost tempted to say, bring it on, but that is sheer folly. I believe that we could defeat China but it would not be easy and the cost would be extreme.

They talk about China's millions ready to die, but I am fairly certain we can kill them at least ten to one in a conventional war. We are that much better in every respect.

Would they throw 100 million at us? We can lose ten million men. Would they throw 300 million men at us? We can't lose 30 million men. (We could but we wouldn't let it get that far.) It would go nuclear long before that, I believe.

Would out missile defense shield hold up enough to destroy them? I don't know, and what if their spies get our technology to block our missiles? Not good.

Interesting to know what our allies think, though, and what they Chinese are also probably thinking.

2005-11-20T14:13:00.000-08:00

Movie reviews

I have a few new movie reviews up at Spero News and The Sacramento Union.

I reviewed Syriana and Just Friends. Yours, Mine & Ours will be up soon.

2005-11-20T13:28:00.000-08:00

Curmudgeonistic

I have an opportunity to go to San Francisco for an advance screening of a Disney movie, Glory Road, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. He'll be at the VIP reception afterward along with the director and a few of the actors.

It's a sports movie about an all black starting lineup of a basketball team that took the NCAA by storm and changed the game in 1966. (They made the game much faster. I remember it.)

I was thinking that I'd like to ask Mr. Bruckheimer, "Sir, you've made a great deal of money and no longer need to work for a living. Why then do you wish to continue to make movies that are, at best, okay? Is that your continuing ambition? Never to make any great movies but always make forgettable, unnecessary ones? Is that what you live for?"

How do you think that would fly? Would it be worth the trip and would I have the nerve to really ask it?

Well, since I am always ready to be the proverbial turd in the punchbowl, I suppose I would ask the question. There's nothing like trying to get a rise out of people, some would say, but I prefer to think of it as being real rather excessively polite.

On the other hand, though, are gadflies really needed? They simply annoy for a second and are swatted away. Everybody hates a smart aleck, and that's what most critical questions sound like -- sour grapes.

2005-11-20T13:08:00.000-08:00

The devil's in the details

I have previously blogged on the controversy at a local Catholic high school in Sacramento.

The student who was expelled in retaliation for "outing" a teacher who was an abortion clinic volunteer has published all the email correspondence and reported all the other events.

When you read the email exchange (very little on the other side) it is chilling. It were as if one were attempting a dialogue with fascists. The responses by Loretto to the Sills family are inhuman let alone unChristian. Although the school's communications say little, they reveal much about the personality behind them - a sick and bigoted creature hateful towards orthodox Catholicism.

I wrote an email to our Bishop's secretary pleading for some sign that the Bishop will do something on the Sills behalf, but I am not hopeful of a positive response. They were able to sacrifice thousands of children in order to protect a few priests. How eager is any one of them to rebuke some Religious sister in a dispute with lay Catholics?

Priests and clerics of all denominations make it so easy to hate the Church.

Well, put that way, men and women of all races make it easy to despise mankind.

If it weren't for that fact that most people generally act okay when we encounter them, I suppose we'd all commit suicide. That and the fact that there will be a reckoning in the afterlife is what sustains many of us.

Furthermore

For a more strenuous Catholic response, you can go here at Daily Catholic.

2005-11-16T08:52:00.000-08:00

The end of the Republic or None Dare Call it Treason

A number of Republican senators declare surrender just as we have turned the corner in Iraq and are now certain to win -- that is, continuing to build the country into an independant democracy that can stand on its own. (For how long Iraqis can maintain their freedom remains to be seen, but the power to try it has largely been accomplished and the terrorists defeated.)

Bill Clinton and the Democrats declare defeat at every opportunity and insist that our sacrifices have been stupid and worthless undermining our troops morale and our sense of purpose at home.

I am beside myself in horror of a large population of citizens who seem to want to destroy my country in an insane desire for a political edge.

It is not simply a matter of division or disagreement. It is a matter of a large group of people who seem purposely bent on insuring the destruction of our security, defense, economy, and institutions.

It is as if a major American political party has declared itself the enemy of America. How else can you explain the fervor of the attacks against Bush, the Republicans, conservatives, and Christianity?

We are at war. I repeat. We are at war and one party wants to make certain that we lose. That our people not only die for nothing, but that we snatch victory from their hands at the very moment of their success and turn all their work into merde.

It is like Viet Nam all over in some respects; that is, that we are forced to lose a war we have clearly won against an enemy we must prevail against for our sake and that of millions (maybe billions) of others.

Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter -- we already know how history will judge these men and their party at this time. The first man is a preening narcissist and the second a fool. Both were incompetent except Clinton sounded good while doing nothing.

I had hoped that if we had learned one lesson from Viet Nam it was that we must never abandon our troops in the field and turn victory into defeat; that when we go to war we go at it wholeheartedly and don't quit until we have done what we intended to do: win.

I don't know what to say. How does a reasonable man respond to these attacks on the entire social fabric of a great nation? It is clear that nation divided against itself cannot stand. The Republic cannot survive these kinds of challenges.

What officer corps and army is going to continue to serve politicians who betray them at every turn when they try to do their jobs and defend America?

Furthermore

I keep hearing from the liberal/Left that polls show that Americans have turned against this war in Iraq. Today the hew and cry of the seditious and treasonous continues at full pitch and increasing hysteria, and yet I don't notice my fellow Americans showing any sense of frustration or anger over how things are going in Iraq. (Not that I'm polling my neighbors or man on the street.)

I could be wrong. Maybe the polls are right, but when you know how the MSM manipulates polls from the framing of the questions to the rigging of the samples, you have to be skeptical.

This has to be one of histories greatest tantrums of a spoiled class. The histrionic insanity of charges being made -- well, the grief of it, the shock of it to the body politic is simply staggering on the one hand, and yet, absolutely meaningless on the other.

Is America even listening to any of it anymore? Probably not which may explain the continual ratcheting up of crazy rhetoric. Yet, you can't help but think it damages civil discourse and patriotic feeling.

Update

Michael Barone sees it, too:

The Democrats are trying to relitigate the prewar intelligence issue in the hopes of delegitimizing this administration. But in delegitimizing the administration, they also tend to delegitimize the efforts of the U.S. government, including military personnel, in Iraq and generally in the war against Islamic terrorism. To the extent they delegitimize the United States, they are hurting the cause of freedom for millions of people.

. . . The Democrats who are peddling the Big Lie of "Bush lied" are doing so either (a) deliberately to injure the cause of the United States and of freedom in the world or, as I think, (b) with reckless disregard of whether they injure the cause of the United States and of freedom in the world. What they are doing may suit their political needs, but it hurts our country.

2005-11-12T18:45:00.000-08:00

We just keep losing

Last week I briefly detailed three examples of Catholics seeing their faith trampled. Prior to that I had been positive about the Loretto High School case in Sacramento.

I said, "expect a lawsuit" and it dutifully came and the high school capitulated without a struggle to compensate the fired teacher. (via Amy Welborn)

It seems pretty clear that the school was very happy to pay the teacher since they never wanted to fire her in the first place. But one wonders where the compensation is for the student they expelled in retaliation of exposing their fraudulent Catholicity.

Let's see how fast Loretto settles the lawsuit that the Sills bring against them (if they do). I'm betting they will fight that one.

Update

Loretto High School stated that one of the reasons Katelyn Sills was expelled was because of:

"An email circulated on October 27, 2005, throughout the Sacramento region has slandered the reputation and integruty (sic) of Loretto High School. " Excerpt from letter to Loretto students.

What was the horrible email that was worthy of such reaction?

It was this:

Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2005 10:36 AM
Subject: We ask for your prayers

Dear friends and family,

Please pray for our family during this crisis at Katelyn's high school. Click here to see Katelyn's blog, including the recent Sacramento Bee articles, and then skim through the"comments" section. Additonally (sic), the school has prohibited me from campus. Please pray for our family and for Loretto CATHOLIC High School.

Thank you,

wynette"

via De Civitate Dei and Conservative Schooler

2005-11-10T15:24:00.000-08:00

There's one born every second

Someone bought this piece of junk at auction for 24 million dollars. It was bought by a dealer who must be looking to sell it for even more.

"This exceedingly rare work was the pinnacle of a four-decade career," said Tobias Meyer, Sotheby's worldwide head of contemporary art and the auctioneer for the evening.

There was a time when I was clever enough to explain the intellectually thrilling meaning of such nonsense, the real irony (which is all important) being that so many people were cowed into believing the pretense that this was art and said something about reality. The next biggest joke of course being that millionaires were sufficiently duped by their status seeking desires to pay such sums.

It was a great con and it's still being played. Remember the expression -- a fool and his money are soon parted. Tap something primitive (the yearning egotism for greater status) in even the most worldly and self-proclaimed, hard nosed, bottom line guys and you get lots of new clothes for emperors being made.

2005-11-09T08:39:00.000-08:00

Win one, lose two

A few weeks ago I noted a win for the good guys when Sacramento's Bishop Weigand ordered a drama techer fired at Loretto High School for her pro-abortion activites and convictions.

In retaliation, Loretto's principal had the student, Katelyn Sills, who first reported the teacher's activities expelled.

And today we learn that Georgetown University approves of homosexual unions by providing "partners" benefits.

I've said it before and I will probably keep saying it 'til Hell freezes over, but exactly what's the point in having bishops in the Catholic Church? If they are the singular teaching authorities for the faith, and they won't teach it (and uphold it in their sees), what good are they?

I guess there is no getting over the fact that people in positions of authority prefer to be liked than scorned by people in their own elite class. Therefore, all those horrible orthodox activists and complainers carry no water when the bishop likes being respected and humored by university presidents and so such.

Those grubby, ignorant little Marianists with their rosaries, scapulars, prayer cards, and novena devotions are so declasse.

Update

Make that lose three (perhaps).

A student at Duquesne University, another "Catholic" college was taken to task for remarks he made at an off-campus website. (The thought police will track you down.

Miner was found guilty of offending the university's anti-discrimination policy which prohibits discrimination based on "sexual orientation" among other things. Miner told LifeSiteNews.com that he explained at the hearing that his use of the word 'subhuman' was meant towards the homosexual act and not homosexual persons. Moreover, Miner read the Catholic Catechism in his defence as the Catechism refers to homosexual acts as, "acts as acts of grave depravity", "intrinsically disordered" and "contrary to the natural law." His was nonetheless found guilty of the charges.

His punishment? Really cute:

As punishment, Miner was ordered to remove the comments from the website and to write a ten page "objective, expository essay on the viewpoints for and against homosexuality using specific readings." While Miner removed the website comments he refused to write an essay in support of homosexuality as he said it was a violation of his faith.

2005-11-08T22:52:00.000-08:00

Cal Props

Doesn't look good for the group we wanted, but the Paycheck Protection seems to be passing. That's a boon and good for the FAM since my wife is a PS teacher.

This map illustrates the divide in my state. Please, let's seceed! Except Sacramento County is Blue. (They messed up the map and reversed the colors which have become typed.)

Update

Nope. We lost 'em all. Did I mention I hate California? Liberalism is a mental disease, as the man said.

It's tough enough putting up with politics in a conservative State because log rolling and corruption is endemic to it. But put decent people in a place like California and the degradation of decency and sense is rapid and demoralizing. Depravity is tough to fight in ordinary circumstances. But in Sodom and Gomorrah, it's impossible.

If ever a State needed to be split into two parts, this is one.

2005-11-08T15:55:00.000-08:00

Apple Polishing?

U.S. Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito said on Tuesday that the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion "deserved great respect" but did not say how he would rule on it, a Democratic senator said.

Let's see, maybe another one of these judicial nominees will maintain that the Dred Scott decision is still worthy of respect.

Is this disingenuous or what? Is Alito serious? Judge Roberts mouthed the same sort of nonsense. Can these guys be trusted at all? God help us if they don't have a pro-life agenda.

Perhaps it's simply that the prospect of power makes these people mealy-mouthed. Like any job interview, you try to say anything that will get you the job.

I think Roberts and Alito are indeed being deceptive when they try to give liberals the impression they aren't all that conservative. They don't fool the liberals, but they scare the heck out of me.

2005-11-07T10:59:00.000-08:00

True story, slightly blue

Here’s a funny story. It involves one mildly, bad word but you’ll understand why it’s necessary at the conclusion of the story, and not be too offended given the circumstances.

My wife is teaching first grade this year. One of her fellow teachers is teaching second grade. Now, the school my wife teaches in has many immigrant children including a large number of Asian children whose English is limited with parents who do not speak English at home.

The second grade teacher was giving her class an important skills test and while carefully explaining to the seven year olds how to take the test correctly all of a sudden a boy raises his hand and exclaims loudly, “Teacher, my dick hurts!”

Despite the rather bold description of his private part, only one other boy in the class knew what he meant. All the other children began asking each other what a “dick” was.

The teacher didn’t know what else to do except to send him the office and have the secretary call his mother to take him to the doctor.

The next day the boy comes back to school with a note from his mother which read:

“We took him to the doctor and the doctor said his dick is fine.”

2005-11-03T15:06:00.000-08:00

New Times, same ol' massa

Isn't it curious how it is when African-Americans are conservatives or function in the Republican Party, other blacks and Dems accuse them of being house n*****s.

Yet, the blacks who cling to the Democrats have exactly what to show for it? They are treated like field n*****s. They work for the white man and get nothing for it. They elect the Dems and life only gets worse for them in greater numbers. They have more babies murdered (abortion), more young men uneducated, incarcerated, and killed, more women without husbands, and so on.

As Dr. Phil would say about their politics, "How's that workin' for ya?"

2005-11-02T21:36:00.000-08:00

The Wheel will turn

I can't allowed myself to experience the true depth of my feelings when I read about things like this where the Ninth Circuit Court declares in a ruling:

...there is no fundamental right of parents to be the exclusive provider of information regarding sexual matters to their children, either independent of their right to direct the upbringing and education of their children or encompassed by it.

Previously this week we are learning about Ed schools who will not credential teachers who are not "culturally competent". That is, wildly Left in their politics and philosophy.

I was upset about that for a minute, but then I thought. Yes, please, even more. Pile it on and keep piling it on and pretty soon all those universities will have no one to teach or public schools to teach in.

Already we see a nascent movement in new Christian colleges and law schools; the homeschooling movement will either increase or the Christian private school systems will explode.

Newspapers are dying on the vine in part because of new media, but also because conservatives have abandoned them in droves. The old, mainline churches are close to dead. The cities have been abandoned by the middle class in many places, and a few states are losing their entrepreneurs and businessmen for friendlier places.

The day may well come in twenty years where the cities are little enclaves of the underclass and the gated communities of liberals running their dirty and vicious little fiefdoms (as it already is in many places).

What a strange place America will be in twenty or thirty years.

But then 1930 was pretty strange to someone from 1900 I suppose.

Moral conservatives get very frustrated that so many of our less aware brethren pay such little attention to the egregious erosion of basic family rights, religious rights of conscience, and rights to self-determination -- to be left alone by all the puritanical busybodies who want to shove utopia down our gullets so that we might become the foix gras of their imaginations and dreams of domination.

Yes, the people are pretty damn slow to recognize the temperature in the pot increasing, but at some point the feet and the wallets do the voting and the perfect world nazis are left to themselves.

2005-11-02T15:05:00.000-08:00

The indomitable mujahadeen?

The Christian Science Monitor details special forces and army tactics in killing Taliban in Afghanistan.

The Taliban can't resist aggregating into larger groups when they see small units of Americans. They think they can swarm the Americans and win a battle.

"We've had a lot of success with textbook tactics, getting the smallest element engaged, and then using other assets to just pile on," says O'Neal. "The Taliban are more willing to engage with us when we have smaller numbers."

"I've never sent a squad in as bait," says Colonel Stammer, a native of Redfield, S.D. "I'm sure that it has emboldened the Taliban to attack. But there's no fight where our squads have made contact and lost. Whenever the Taliban fight us, they're decimated."

It mentions that 75% of the contacts result in engagements within hand grenade range.

For the most part, the Taliban are poorly trained, firing wildly enough that they can't hit American soldiers even at close range. "If we were that far from you," Velez says, pointing at a table just 10 feet away, "and I missed you, I would be upset at myself."

The Russians must have been really horrible at war in order for these clowns to have driven them out of the country.

2005-10-31T11:02:00.000-08:00

Pathological Liar

Via NewsBusters.org (link didn't work from Relapsed Catholic):

"In making his statement, he told another lie, like his claim about black churches being burned in his community when he was growing up.

"It was many months later that some enterprising reporter bothered to check the facts and found out that there were no black churches burned then in Arkansas. That fact was reported, but it never caught up with the original lie that Clinton told. (...)

"The latest Clinton lie, however, required no research to expose it. Here is what he said, from the AP story about Rosa Parks:

"Clinton said he was 9 years old when Parks refused to give up her seat. and he and his friends 'couldn't figure out anything we could do since we couldn't even vote. So we began to sit in the back of the bus when we got on.'"

"Hellooo. Hope, Arkansas, was a town of less than 9,000 when Bill Clinton was growing up there. Towns that small do not have public bus systems. So, he had to be talking about school buses. At that time, the school system in Hope was racially segregated. There would not have been any black students on the bus, relegated to the back of the bus..."

I guess this is what happens when one turns with his whole heart to Christ with repentence and submission to divine guidance. That is, after Bill Clinton inaugerated his famous Christian counseling with his accountability group pastors in the aftermath of Monica. (Heard much from his mentors on Bill's healing and recovery lately? How about ever?)

2005-10-31T10:54:00.000-08:00

Today's quote:

The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.

Sophocles

This has to be a bit qualified. A man doesn't cause himself to suffer illness in most cases or injury, but otherwise what Sophocles says here is probably the strongest reason there is that most people refuse to reflect upon their lives, their actions, their culpabilities. Suffering the recognition of what was has caused themselves harm is more than most people can bear.

2005-10-29T11:59:00.000-07:00

The H Word

"Where is the poet who has sung of that most lacerating of all human emotions, the cut that never heals -- male humiliation? Oh, the bards, the balladeers have stirred us with epics of the humiliated male's obsession with revenge...but that is letting the poor devil off easy. After all, the very urge, Vengeance is mine, gives him back a portion of his manhood. retaliation being manly stuff. But the feeling itself, male humilation, is unspeakable. No man can bring himself to describe it. The same man who will confess with relish and in lavish ghostwritten detail to every sort of debauchery and atrocity will not utter one peep about the humiliations that, in Orwell's phrase, "make up seventy-five percent of life." For confessing to humiliation means confessing that he has cringed, caved in, surrendered his honor without a fight to another man who has intimidated him -- that he has been unsexed and has plunged into a misery worse than the prospect of imminent death. Eternally, the sheer fear of physical confrontation -- even now -- in the twenty-first century! -- when life's major victories are won not by knights in armor on the field of battle but by sedentary men in central-heating-weight worsted suits inside glass-walled electronic chambers. Nor will a man ever free himself from that sickening moment of capitulation. A word, an image, a smell, a face will bring it flashing back, and he will drown all over again in the shame of lying still for his own unsexing." Tom Wolfe, I Am Charlotte Simmons

In the West, we ignore our humiliations because we can do nothing about them. The major ones, where we might have fought a duel over in another age if we were reckless enough, we can only shrug and walk away from. Fight? Even were I unafraid of being hurt, I'd end up in jail, sued for all I'm worth, lose my job, and have to answer, yes, on every new job application formed where it asks, have you ever been arrested? If yes, what for? Assault and battery? Well, yes, we are looking to hire violent men who can't control their emotions or have a misguided sense of honor.

And the minor humiliations? The "seventy-five percent of life"? Well, Orwell exaggerated. Generally we treat each other courteously or neutrally. The affronts when someone acts as if you are crap they stepped in may only occur once in every fifty encounters.

But in marginal places, frontiers, poverty zones, unstable and divided lands humiliation is given freer reign. Yugoslavia becomes Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and old grudges are remembered. The perfectly decent butcher from whom you've bought your meat for twenty years is now the enemy and gets beaten to death one night after closing up his shop. His sons don't know who did it, but they know it was one of you! And so they pounce one night with clubs when you're coming home from a friend's house.

Walk around your neighborhood some time and look at the Mexicans with the leafblowers. Most of them are mildly pleased when you smile, meet their eye, nod your head, and acknowledge them. But every once in a while one looks down, averts his eye, and then glances quickly back with a barely suppressed look of contempt. The look that says, "I hate you, you rich, gringo bastard. How dare you see me do this menial, shit work like I'm some damned slave?"

You know that the fellow would love to be free to shoot you dead and move in your house with all your stuff, and brag to his amigos how he was man enough to take from this world what he wanted.

So in Indonesia you have Muslims and Christians living together (see post below this one), but the Muslims start killing the Christians for, well, just because they aren't Muslims.

The Christians fight back and pretty soon the government and world leaders notice and say both groups are to blame for the violence and feuding. But both aren't to blame. The ones who started it are, but why punish the evil if you don't have to? After all, the evil have wives and children -- it looks bad if you hurt that tribe and not the other, too.

Now the humiliation isn't about feeling inferior or insulted, it's about having had friends and family viciously murdered. You have to do something about that! You can't just live there and forget it. Maybe the elders come to you and say you must forget it or there'll be no peace here ever. For the sake of the group you agree to not do anything, but then they come again and kill some more. What can you do? You can't keep letting it go. You either have to avenge it , go mad, or move far away where you never see those evil bastards again. People who don't remind you every day of what vicious, depraved, sadistic monsters they are right there under the surface.

Their faces smile at you but their eyes never do as they conduct business with you and your kind. You can see. They can't wait to get back at it because they enjoy it more than anything.

Now that's humilation. Every day. Going to the market where the murderers of your children gossip, sip tea, wag their heads in their animated conversations while they pretend to be decent human beings. There's that secret smile and light in their eyes sometimes when they look at you and it says, 'you know and I know what I'm really like, but there's nothing you can do now, is there?'

Thank God there's a Christ or so many of us would go mad.

2005-10-28T11:31:00.001-07:00

Ultimate Depravity

Christian girls beheaded in grisly Indonesian attack

Beslan, Oklahoma City, Indonesia.

Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim nation, but Central Sulawesi has a roughly equal number of Muslims and Christians. The province was the scene of a bloody religious war in 2001-2002 that killed around 1000 people from both communities.

At the time, beheadings, burnings and other atrocities were common.

Somewhere at this very moment some fellow is writing a story with a character who is evil and is trying to imagine how that character became so. Whether it's Stephen King, the guy who wrote all those Hannibal Lector books, or someone with a true crime Ted Bundy tale to tell, a writer is trying to use his imagination to discover how an innocent little boy grew up to be a sadistic psychopath dedicated to the pleasure, the sense of power, he gets from doing ultimate and gratuitous harm to another human being, especially a child.

The writer will make it all seem determined. The little boy will have a rotten mother, or no real mother. He'll have been abused sexually or violently. He'll have taken to tormenting insects and torturing small animals. He will be like a caged animal poked from all sides with sharp sticks by laughing boys until he goes mad. Whatever.

It will all seem to make psychological sense to the writer and the reader. The man became evil because he was treated so cruelly himself.

But that really isn't true.

The men who killed those three girls in Indonesia aren't criminal psychopaths like we see in the movies. They are a group of men who have banded together to avenge humiliations they are certain they or their families and group have suffered.

They are only evening the score, they think. So what if they beheaded children? If that's what it takes to make others cry and suffer, then so be it. In fact, it makes the suffering of others all the more acute. How wonderful. Now, let's go wash off, head home and have some tea. Soon we can laugh about how this one looked as we did this and that to the other one.

The human conscience is a pretty weak thing. It takes about 48 hours for any act of shame to lose its effect on us if we want it to pass. And most of the time we do want it to pass. Great crimes are generally committed by sadists who have no intention of feeling anything but wonder at their audacity and power.

The sadist, of course, always lives a life of fear that others are planning to do to him what he does to others, but such things don't often catch up to people like him. Since most people in the world aren't at peace with themselves, the sadist, the depraved thug, doesn't feel particularly out of place in the world.

In the mid 1800's a reporter for a Dublin newspaper went on a tour of the Irish countryside. On one rural road he came to a hovel in a small field where an old, weatherbeaten man in rags and tatters was working the ground with a worn hoe.

The reporter approached him, spoke a bit about his desire to learn more about the rural people like him, his situation and asked him what he might want.

"What I want? I tell you what I want. I want de Judgment Day!"

Beslan, Oklahoma City, Indonesia. I want the Judgment Day, too.

2005-10-28T11:31:00.000-07:00

Gotcha!

NEWS FLASH! Special Prosecutor catches Washingtonian aide in a lie.

Whoa! That's incredible. Wow. Justice will really be served by catching Scooter Libby lying in a matter of a non-crime. Like that never happens in D.C..

I feel so much safer now knowing that liars are being flushed out of the brambles of the Beltway.

2005-10-28T10:45:00.000-07:00

Victor Davis Hanson agree with me

Hanson expresses the same impatience with Bush's lack of communication and vision in his second term as I do, the sense of his missing the main chance to solidify conservative principles, and an aggressive foriegn policy which challenges the terrorist states like Syria and Iran.

If the president can win the hearts and minds of the American people on one theme, the others will fall into play. The more the president talks of principle and values, the more he can do so with zeal, and yes, real passion and occasional anger.

The odd thing is that so far the conventional advice to the president — keep the discussion on Iraq only to U.S. national security, not the upheaval of the existing corrupt order; reach out to the Democratic Senate; curb your idealistic rhetoric with Syria or Iran; ignore shrill enemies; nominate someone that the opposition will not seriously object to — has only emboldened critics here and abroad. It is time to go back on the offensive, both for the idealistic legacy of the Bush presidency and the immediate future of his ideas in the upcoming 2006 elections.

2005-10-27T13:44:00.000-07:00

Back to realism

Despite the conservative victory in getting Miers to resign her nomination, there isn't a great deal to hope for as Peggy Noonan relates.

The culture war has been lost as Pat Buchanan assures us even though the country becomes more conservative over time since liberals don't like to breed.

We suffer as every Republic suffers its decline. Our politicians used taxes to increase their power by buying votes with entitlements and projects. Those entitlements became addictions as would-be millionaires depended on projects to build their empires and kick back to their friendly pols. The vicious cycle began and there's no stopping it except by catastrophe.

An average person can't step outside his home and swat a mosquito without breaking some law, nor make a bad joke at the water cooler without "offending" someone and being sent to re-education camp.

Lawyers and "activists" have ruined our lives, our freedoms, and there's nothing we can do about it.

2005-10-27T12:59:00.000-07:00

One reason why I despise Israelis

The suicide bomber was identified as 20-year-old Hassan Abu Zeid, from the West Bank village of Kabatiya. He reportedly served time in an Israeli prison, but was released because he was classified as not having blood on his hands.

That is, the fellow was one of those that Israel released from jail in order to make nice with the Arabs. You see, it's more important for Israelis to appear nice than it is to protect the lives of citizens. They put a misguided principle of always wanting to prove their moral superiority over the protection of human life.

The response, of course, was DIDO (drive in, drive out assault of some kind). A tactic that has been useless, and always too little, too late.

2005-10-27T09:40:00.000-07:00

Harriet Bows Out

How marvelous for those of us who opposed her nomination. My schadenfreude overflows at the humiliation of people like Hugh Hewitt who played the fool for so many weeks in one of the most intellectually dishonest defenses of her and the President.

It wasn't that others simply disagreed and thought the President generally made good choices and that this one deserved a chance. Hugh led an attack on social conservatives that began with ad hominem broadsides charging others with elitism, sexism, and disloyalty. And then had the gall to claim that those against Miers were savage.

I'm happy that Bush came to his senses, though, and actually heard the hue and cry from the base.

There was really no doubt that the poor woman was unqualified for the job, yet Hewitt blew hard day and night about how few qualifications the job required. Talk about lowering the bar. I used to like Hewitt for his patter and guests, but he simply becomes insufferable on a number of issues and ocassions. This was one of them.

His problem like many others' is that once he has decided an issue, he only uses his skills as a lawyer to attack and win, and never to reconsider whether he could be wrong. He then uses every dirty rhetorical trick to try to win his case, and the truth be damned.

Of course, Hewitt feels bloodied but unbowed as he continues his hysterical attacks against those who opposed Miers. And that's it. Hewitt is hysterical in his sky-is-falling rhetoric and the world will never recover. Talk about your basic spoil sport and poor loser.

2005-10-24T17:18:00.001-07:00

What a sap!

Me, that is.

I went looking on eBay for a cover photo a the Superman Bizarro World comic I could in the post below (scroll down). While there I saw an old Bizarro comic for sale for .99 GBP. (About 2 bucks American dollar).

I bid and won at the .99 price. Came time to pay and I get charged an additional 6 pounds for shipping. About $12 for Pete's sake! Talk about getting taken to the cleaners!

What a sap, I am.

2005-10-24T17:18:00.000-07:00

Restoration

My server wiped out many links in my previous photoblogs. I've restored a collection of photos and culled them a bithere at Sacramento Photo.

2005-10-23T17:23:00.000-07:00

For the Poll

"I oppose the Miers nomination."

This is the text to enter for N.Z. Bear's blog tracking poll on the nomination if you oppose it.

2005-10-22T18:39:00.000-07:00

Wouldn't wish it on a dog

George Clooney was seriously injured making a movie:

His chair was kicked backwards and his head smashed on the ground, damaging his spine. The injuries left him in such intense pain that he entertained suicidal thoughts and continues to suffer short-term memory loss.

Close associates claim doctors dismissed Clooney’s complaints until spinal fluid started leaking from his nose. Since then he has had numerous operations on the dura mater membrane.

Ordinary folks may take a kind of perverse pleasure in the fact that even the very rich and celebrated can get dismissed and misdiagnosed by doctors. I guess its kind of nice to know that everyone can get mistreated by doctors.

He says he could recover fully by taking six months off work but that is not going to happen in the near future.

That's just foolish, though. Health is more important than anything else he might be doing at this point.

2005-10-22T10:04:00.000-07:00

Dead in the water

The Harriet Miers nomination for the Supreme Court appears to not only have stalled but is shipping water and listing to port.

The latest revelation of her having been an advocate of affirmative action at the Texas Bar Ass. may be the bell that tolls her demise.

Bush really screwed the pooch on this one. (I'm trying to see how many metaphors I can mix in one brief article.)

Last Tuesday Adam Bellow argued at NRO that Bush's dynastic situation has been revealed:

" . . .Bush’s habit of appointing friends and retainers to major jobs in his administration. Some of these seem qualified enough — Condi Rice, Alberto Gonzales. Others seem more questionable, none more so than Michael Brown and Harriet Miers.

From the start, his administration was marked by a web of family connections, and certain members of the press were quick to cry nepotism.

You cannot understand George W. Bush without an understanding of his family, and dynastic families in general.

Dynastic families are not like yours and mine (unless your name is Bush or Kennedy). They are self-conscious, multigenerational enterprises displaying strong collective discipline and an innate, untutored grasp of certain perennial modes and orders that advance the family’s interest.

. . .the Bushes have created an enormous social network based on their family. Like other large successful clans they prefer their own company and that of their relatives, friends, and retainers.

In short, dynastic families are nothing but socially sanctioned mafias based on nepotism and various forms of patronage. Now that we have a dynastic family in office, it is inevitable that this will be exposed (my emphasis) to public view.

People have been trying to figure out what kind of bubble the Bushes live in for a long time. But it is not the cocoon of wealth that insulates them from reality and explains their frequent missteps and tone-deaf remarks, but that of family itself. The problem for W is that the ethic of friendship and loyalty that the Bushes cultivate and that brought him to power is threatening now to bring him down. He has made the common dynastic mistake of confusing loyalty and merit; in his eyes, the merit of people like Michael Brown and Harriet Miers consists in their being his friends. They are loyal to him, and their loyalty must be rewarded. Thus in Bush, the very loyalty that was a private virtue has become a public vice."

The only political dynasties I can think of in national politics are the Kennedys and Bushes. One might include the Roosevelts, Teddy and Franklin, but that's more tenuous since they were but cousins and their ascendency ended with them.

There were the Rockefellers as governors (Nelson became VP under Ford) and Jay Rockefeller, the great-grandson of John D., founder of the dynasty, is a senator from W. Virginia (previously governor).

There were the Longs of Louisiana, and father to son officeholders in various branches of government, but dynastic pretensions such as the Bushes and Kennedys is thus far unique in American politics.

The Adamses might have established one early in our history, but it fizzled out since the family lacked the necessary wealth to sustain its prominence. Wealth seems to be the deciding factor in such a thing. Money is needed to retain the connections, the employment and creation of loyalists.

Hence, the Rockefellers, Kennedys, and Bushes. The Roosevelts weren't rich enough, and the Bushes are just rich enough it seems.

Bellow's critique of Pres. Bush does help to explain why he seems incredibly tone deaf on so many issues important to conservatives, and why his father was completely oblivious to the needs of his Party during his term in office.

G. W. Bush had the chance to go down in history as a great president after his first term. He had cut taxes which had bouyed the economy and saved it after 9/11. He had commanded those who led lightening victories in Afghanistan and Iraq, and stayed the course in Iraq despite various mistakes.

But now, 9 months into his second term, what's happened? Just as Iraq appears to be turning the corner in being able to secure itself from internal enemies and terrorists, an event that should be heightening the President's standing and humiliating his critics on the left, Bush has stumbled hugely and lost all momentum.

The early attempt this term at fixing Social Security flamed out, Hurricane Katrina made him seem clueless, top aides may be crucified with indictments for next to nothing, he has been unwilling to fight the Dems in Congress or pitch a conservative message and build his party in strength, while the Miers nomination threatens to transform resoluteness as a leader into foolish obstinancy.

I have previously written that I believe Bush is out of his depth as president. That is not a fatal flaw. Most American presidents were mediocrities. A true incompetent can do a great deal of harm, though, as Jimmy Carter demonstrated.

That is not Bush, though. It just seems that second term presidents can't seem to do much right. Nixon, of course, self-destructed in his second term. Reagan lost focus and interest (perhaps it was his age and weariness), and now Bush seems to have fallen apart.

A number of conservatives who have been supporting Bush's choice in Miers have pointed out that it will damage Bush more to lose this initiative than it will harm the Court to have Miers, but at this point it's hard to see how Bush can be any more damaged than he already is by his misbegotten choice.

Despite Miers' position on abortion, it would probably do the Dems more good to get her confirmed than it will the Republicans. The latest revelation is damning.

"It's not just that Miers was in favor of racial quotas -- we'd pretty much known that for a while. It's the fundamental confirmation that she's a go-along-with-the-crowd establishmentarian." Jonah Goldberg

"Such is the perfect perversity of the nomination of Harriet Miers that it discredits, and even degrades, all who toil at justifying it." George Will

Is Bush resilient or imaginative enough to right his ship of state (back to nautical metaphors)? That is, does he possess the improvisational, political skills to reset his agenda, plan a strategy, and energize his staff and the country?

No, he doesn't.

Why? Because he is an inept communicator. Just as his father was. He has no clear political philosophy or principles, so how can he fall back to core beliefs (other than fuzzy Christian ones) and rebuild from there?

Republicans have also made too many excuses for Bush's verbal incoherencies. We wanted to believe that a lack of polish and articulateness was more endearing than disappointing; nor that it reflected upon his intellect -- that unkempt speech did not reflect an unkempt mind. But at some point, one has to admit that how a person writes and speaks is a condition of mental acuity.

Frankly, I am dreading the next three years of his leadership.

2005-10-21T12:47:00.000-07:00

Dreamer - The Little Horse That Could

Simply told and wholesome in manner, Dreamer pleases children and shouldn’t bore the parents. Ben Crane (Kurt Russell) is a racing horse trainer who saves a horse from destruction after the mare breaks her leg, but loses his job in doing so. The horse becomes part of his severance pay.

His daughter, Cale (Dakota Fanning), forges a better relationship with her father as they work to restore the horse to a healthy enough condition to earn a much as $300,000 for a foal.

There is a scene where Ben takes Cale to a breeding stable and a diminutive horse is trotted out as the male who will breed with Dreamer, but it’s a joke because the horse is the teaser who is meant to get things ready for the real stud stallion, Grand Slam. I was anticipating that we might actually get to see a scene from the Tom Wolfe novel, A Man in Full, enacted on screen which would have been amazing, but definitely not for children.

The breeding design is foiled, though, and the only hope Ben has left to provide for his family is if he can race the horse again successfully.

The movie creates a number of family conflicts which never appear to be very serious and are soon overcome as everyone pitches in together on their racing project.

‘Though produced by DreamWorks, this is a classic Disney film, and is tandem to The Greatest Game Ever Played released earlier last summer as nearly identical in applying every sports formula in a slick and competent manner, although the Disney golf movie was more interesting in its cinematography.

Dreamer’s racing shots are workmanlike, having none of the excitement of Seabiscuit, although the moment when Dreamer is injured is frightening and powerful.

Although the movie runs 98 minutes, it seems longer. The concentration of a great many family drama scenes throughout, and various reconciliations toward the end generate impatience rather than satisfaction since none appear to be very serious.

The acting is generally adequate and effective. The dialogue is better than what we get in most children’s movies, and the situations adult and not condescending. Although it is often difficult to distinguish what is being said since so much dialogue is spoken under the breath. The sharp and clear enunciation we get in old movies is lost today when lines are often mumbled. The characters are all stereotypes, of course, but played in a minor key. Dakota Fanning is a bit too wise for a child, but children won’t perceive her that way.

Part of the family drama is a supposed distance between father and daughter, and I wondered what the children in the theater thought about watching Ben come to appreciate his daughter more and express his affection to her. Do children watch such scenes in envy and hope, or with understanding and happiness?

A story about a father’s love for his child, the child’s love for the father, and the child’s desperate need for it to be reciprocated may be the most important drama in every persons life. I wish I could have experienced the reaction of the children to those scenes. Movies often illustrate the idyllic and imprint themselves on the young. I wonder how many children went home afterwards wishing their father was Kurt Russell?

I know I wished my dad was Fess Parker after I saw Old Yeller.

Anyway, as a movie for children I give Dreamer 3 stars out of four. It is well done but also well worn and lacks originality. As a movie for adults, I’d give it one and a half stars since it is pleasant, predictable, and ordinary.

2005-10-21T12:22:00.000-07:00

Bizarro Planet

Cameron Diaz surprised a class at Stanford University when the "Charlie's Angels" star helped lead a lecture on environmentally friendly design.

Diaz's appearance Thursday came as part of taping for an mtvU program called "Stand-In" in which celebrities teach a class. On Tuesday, Madonna lectured students at New York's Hunter College.

Really, the 21st Century is going to have to invent new words to convey the kind of absurdities which continue to spiral into such unforeseen dimensions. You just can't make this stuff up.

2005-10-15T22:53:00.000-07:00

What's wrong with this headline:

Thousands Gather for 10th Anniversary of Million Man March

Kind of brings a smile to one's face, doesn't it?

2005-10-15T22:37:00.000-07:00

Things you never thought you'd support

Neo-Nazis in Toledo, Ohio (all fifteen of them), decide to have a protest march and it leads to a riot which may or may not also be gang related in the black community.

When the rioting began, Ford (the mayor) tried to negotiate with those involved, but "they weren't interested in that." He said people in the crowd swore at him and wanted to know why he was protecting the Nazis.

Negotiate with a mob? Come on.

I never supported the American Nazi march through Skokie, Ill. years ago which the ACLU got approval for. Yet, as someone who has seen lefty nutballs hang soldiers in effigy from their homes in Sacramento, seen lefty morons outside our hospital for servicemen in Maryland try to demoralize our wounded soldiers, and have had to stand by while the sickest, most vile things are said and done to undermine this nation's security -- well, frankly, the black community can handle having fifteen bigots march through town looking like the idiots they are.

If that causes people to riot, then they should have been shot down in the street for attacking the police.

If I have to put up with leftist maniacs spewing their disgusting vulgarities and offenses, then others can put up with crazy fascists promoting their stinking garbage.

2005-10-15T16:55:00.000-07:00

This is just too rich

And when the prosecutor in the case asked her to explain how "Valerie Flame" appeared in the same notebook she used in interviewing Mr. Libby, Ms. Miller said she "didn't think" she heard it from him. "I said I believed the information came from another source, whom I could not recall," she wrote on Friday, recounting her testimony for an article that appears today.

There are more ironies piled on travesties piled on farces than you can shake a stick at in this whole affair.

Try to make a movie or write a book about this. Try. I dare you. Try. It would never make any sense and the auditor would kill himself before halfway through. The minutiae alone in terms of footnotes would drive a man crazy.

2005-10-15T09:09:00.000-07:00

One for our side (or expect a lawsuit)

Sacramento Bee:

A drama teacher at a Catholic high school in Sacramento was fired Thursday after church officials learned she had previously volunteered at an abortion clinic, school officials said Friday.

Marie Bain, 50, of Sacramento, who had taught at Loretto High School since August, was dismissed after a student's parent obtained pictures showing Bain escorting people into a Planned Parenthood clinic last spring.

"Obviously, the very public nature of Ms. Bain's previous volunteer activity at a Planned Parenthood Clinic is inconsistent with her position as a teacher at a Catholic high school and her role as a collaborator in the formation of Catholic women," Weigand wrote. "Abortion is gravely immoral and Ms. Bain's active and public participation in the procurement of abortions is morally inappropriate and unacceptable with regard to her work as a teacher at Loretto."

This teacher, though, doesn't think Catholic values should be practiced in private or that contrary practice that is private counts:

"We lost a great teacher," said Cynthia Mitterholzer, the dance instructor who will take over for Bain.

Mitterholzer said teachers working at a Catholic school understand they must follow certain rules.

However, "I think that your personal life is your personal life, and she complied with everything asked from the school in her contract."

Shall we say that Mitterholzer is unclear of the concept? There are no private acts in a Christian's life. They are all before the eyes of God, and every sin affects the community whether great or small, known or unknown.

It's like a marriage. Can a man cheat on his wife surreptitiously and not have it affect the relationship?

That is not to say that all the employees at Loretto are Catholics. I don't know if that's a requirement, but the terms and conditions of following Catholic morality is.

I can imagine the letters the Bee will get on this regarding evil Catholics and their fascist ways.

2005-10-14T15:56:00.000-07:00

Elizabethtown - A Sweet Road to Nowhere

Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown is a sweet, pleasant failure of a movie. It is also the dreaded chick flick (a term which has now entered the dictionary) which no red blooded, young man would dare to admire or see.

Guys, if you thought Jerry Maguire was a fluffy bed with ruffled pillows, scented candles, and a sweet, white wine kind of movie, this new one of Crowe’s is not for you.

Gals, if Orlando Bloom is your kind of leading man to get warm about, I feel sorry for you.

Orlando Bloom plays Drew. A creative shoe designer for a Nike-like company. His company has bet $937 million dollars on his design and guess what? It is a colossal blunder, flop, fiasco. And Dean wants to kill himself.

(Never mind the fact that it seems that this monolithic Nike-like company doesn’t seem to do market research, focus groups, or any of the myriad tests on public taste and style before launching a product that will cost a billion dollars. You just have to believe in the premise.)

As Drew prepares his suicide which is played for laughs since he is a bit inept and unconvincing, he receives a phone call from his sister. His father has died in Kentucky. He must fly there to make all the arrangements and meet a branch of the family he has no prior experience with. He promises us that when he is done he will go home and complete the interrupted self-slaughter.

Ah, but Kirsten Dunst as Claire Colburn is the stewardess (I mean flight attendant, sorry, old habits die hard) on a nearly empty flight and she meets him cute. That is she turns on the cute for his sake. (Do you think that airlines fly planes that only have two passengers on board cross country or might they not cancel the flight? That’s all I saw -- two passengers counting Orlando Bloom.)

She charms him with her Kentuckian ways. “It’s Lou-a-vul,” she tells him for Louisville.

If I have to recount the plot, we’ll be at this for days. There are a great many characters and a great number of sub-plots or possible sub-plots since no one plot seems to carry very far. There are numerous back stories which never get elucidated.

This movie has interesting characters, but they all remain mere sketches. Very well crafted sketches, but nothing much really happens with so many people involved. Questions are raised then dropped. It has no focus and labors mightily to bring forth a mouse.

The relationship between Drew and his West Point military father is apparently strained, but we never learn why or how.

There are some very funny scenes which are charming indeed. Drew meets a bridegroom Chuck at his hotel as he is trying to steal a few beers from Chuck’s pre-wedding party. Chuck comes to tears as he learns that Dean’s father just died.

“Life. Death. So close together. Separated by a hair between this room and that one,” he philosophizes with much emotion. It is very amusing.

Another scene is with the folks all gathered at his aunt’s house and the kids are wild. Claire has given Drew a video tape. Drew puts it on for the children who see a rugged man in a hard hat grab their attention with his promise to blow up a house if the children promise to mind their moms and dads. The children solemnly promise the television they will do so and are rewarded with a house being blown up. Marvelous scene.

Claire pursues Drew and two thirds of the way through the film, she sleeps with him. Which effectively ends the boy meets girl, boy gets girl love story. A common problem with most romantic comedies now. Once the couple have sex, the entire impetus of the story is concluded. Modern movies then tack on a coda where the people then have to decide if they love each other and want to be together. And we get that in Elizabethtown.

Here, though, we have a rather silly memorial for Drew’s father where his mother (Susan Sarandon) does a stand up comic routine (she’s taking classes), and a belabored tap dance (she took a class of that, too, in her mania to avoid grief).

Then, following the precise directions that Claire cooked up for him overnight with soundtrack provided by CDs she burned for him, he goes on a road trip with the urn carrying the remains of his father as he reconciles with his departed dad as we watch through the windshield. And still there is more.

This movie is ambitious and a complete failure. The pacing was off from the start with scenes which gave us little information compared to the time expended. It’s as if Crowe expected all his points to be made without dialogue and lots of music to cue our response to the situations which were simply not compelling.

Nor could the movie decide what it was about. It’s meant to be a sweet, romantic dramedy but ends up everywhere and nowhere. It has a great many characters who only exist to be quaint characters in a movie.

Orlando Bloom is unimpressive, the metro-sexual, boy male that Hollywood favors these days, but actual men do not. Kirsten Dunst starts off cute and then creates a character no one could believe is a real woman in a very short while. She is simply not that fascinating or attractive. She is a girl and not a woman.

Watch the DVD when it comes out and be glad you didn’t pay much money to see it.

************

Michael Medved gave it three stars for his friend, Cameron Crowe. (Seriously, they are friends. Crowe was on the radio show and said they go back twenty years.) Medved admired the warmth of the story, the love letter to red state America, its celebration of family and the Kentucky milieu without stereotypes. He mentioned that the audience applauded at the end of it.

People applauded at the screening I went to also. It wouldn't bother me at all if this movie does well. Simply because I thought it failed overall, I enjoyed the attempt and ambition to try and make a broad, warm hearted, Capra-esque film. It aimed high and I thought it missed the mark. It is warm and fuzzy, but the main characters are simply not substantial enough.

2005-10-13T16:35:00.000-07:00

Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more;

Hollywood sources confirmed last night that Sylvester Stallone has agreed to star in the sixth installment of the Rocky saga.

2005-10-13T08:49:00.000-07:00

Pot calls kettle black.

"TV is trash. I was raised without it. We don't have magazines or newspapers in the house either."

Madonna

2005-10-12T14:44:00.000-07:00

Nostalgie de la Boue

Sorry that the Americas was invaded by white men (and the Chinese in 1421, but that's a different story)?

Here's what we've missed with the Mayans and similarly the Aztecs:

“We now know that Maya warfare was intense, chronic, and unresolvable…” and that the sadness Stephens detected long ago was due to some very nasty customs indeed:

“Captives were tortured in unpleasant ways depicted clearly on the monuments and murals (such as yanking fingers out of sockets, pulling out teeth, cutting off the lower jaw, trimming of the lips and fingertips, pulling out the fingernails, and driving a pin through the lips), culminating, sometimes years later, in the sacrifice of the captive in other equally unpleasant ways such as tying the captive up into a ball by binding the arms and legs together, then rolling the balled-up captive down the steep stone staircase of a temple.”

2005-10-11T23:31:00.000-07:00

A Trail of Tears

Well, I have wept as much as I'm going to over the Catholic Church's abuse of children and young men.

We have been expecting for some time that when the LA Diocese's records were revealed, it would show Archbishop Mahoney as a chief enabler of pedophile priests just as Cardinal Law was.

I hope the diocese goes bankrupt and has to sell every thing it owns, especially the horrible Taj Mahoney Cathedral.

Frankly, I no longer accept the argument that faithful Catholics had nothing to do with this. By refusing to demand accountability in their parishes, by whitewashing the sins of priests, by ignoring their Christian duty to scrutinize the clergy and to fight clericalism with every ounce of their strength, the faithful became ignorant, indifferent, uninterested, and faithless sheep.

People, we Christians have a duty to know ourselves and the people we worship with. We have a duty to demand the best from our clergy, and open accounting. We have a duty to insist upon a voice or else shut the churches down with a refusal to give them a dime.

Catholic complacency is just as guilty as those foul priests and their shameless superiors.

But what can you do? It's the way of the world. People don't want to know themselves and their nature, nor learn how to read the character of others.

Damn those priests, and damn Mahoney and his fellow bishops. Dante knew where they belong.

2005-10-11T16:04:00.000-07:00

Verrrrrryyyyy Interesting

Isn't it interesting that the ad hominem attacks from Republicans toward those who express sincere, intelligent, and deliberated misgivings over Harriet Miers get to be called the kinds of names that the Left and Dems likes to use.

Elitism. Sexism. Oh, yes this is also supposed to be bigotry toward evangelical Christians according to Hugh Hewitt. Why if Miers had a drop of Indian, Spanish, or Negro blood in her we'd be called racist, too.

Hugh Hewitt believes himself to be the finest pragmatic political analyst in the world teaches us what we should never trust a lawyer. He has been well trained to distort other people's arguments with pride and pretend he has refuted what hasn't been asserted.

Lawyer think and speak is one of the worst possible things in the world. They puff up the possessor with the delusion that he wins every argument by virtue of twisting meaning in a way that makes them sound plausible in response, while they have missed the point entirely.

Hugh can't admit he is supporting Bush with blind loyalty, so he impugns other people's motives. Try to argue with Hugh and he plays his lawyer language obfuscation game and then declares what a clever boy he is.

He declares that Miers is being savaged when all that is being done is a hunt to find some bona fides that would persuade.

From the Washington Post:

"We spent about 1,200 hours together and had in excess of 6,000 agenda items, and I never knew where Harriet was going to be on any of those items until she cast her vote," former council colleague Jim Buerger said. "I wouldn't consider her a liberal, a moderate or a conservative, and I can't honestly think of any cause she championed."

On the one hand, she's no ideologue and plays her hand close to the vest. On the other hand, she doesn't buck the system.

The article is actually quite flattering.

She would meet with abortion rights advocates and gay rights activists but tell them firmly she did not agree with them. She backed a redistricting plan aimed at electing more minorities even though conservatives called it a quota system. She voted to raise taxes two years in a row, disagreeing with some colleagues who favored deeper budget cuts.

"That's the thing about Harriet -- she did things she didn't have to do and that, if you were only looking out for yourself, you wouldn't do," said John Wiley Price, the Democratic county commissioner whose arrest sparked the protest. "She was gutsy."

She doesn't really seem conservative, though, does she? She goes alone to get along. Well, then so does Hewitt and his crowd.

Furthermore

Hewitt's strange bedfellows include Arlen Specter, Harry Reid, Pat Leahy, and so on. When those creeps come out for a Bush nominee so strongly, you definitely have problems.

2005-10-11T12:33:00.000-07:00

Tell me this isn't what you always wished would happen to the Smurfs.

2005-10-10T22:37:00.000-07:00

How is this possible?

Okay, 98% of DNA between man and chimpanzees are identical or shared.

That, however, proves very little, since all life on Earth, from bacteria to humans, share at least 25 percent of their DNA.

Okay, I get that. All cellular life has a large component of identical features.

But explain this to me:

". . . humans and nematode worms share 75 percent of their DNA. . ."

Doesn't that strike you as just plain weird?

2005-10-10T21:33:00.000-07:00

Shield Law Ignores Bloggers?

I don't want to be covered by a shield law for journalists since I don't believe such people have any rights to withhold identities as anyone else does.

Yet, I would be covered by it because I now provide content for Spero News and for The Sacramento Union which are online news services.

But what if I write something on my blog? Will I be covered then? Not likely. And what if someone writes for one of the networks' blogs. Is that shielded journalism?

Sen. Lugar is nuts and I hope his bill dies a dirty death.

2005-10-10T09:20:00.000-07:00

Rules of engagement

One question that has not been very seriously analyzed out loud by the Bush administration is whether centrifugal forces of the various groups in Iraq is greater or lesser than centripetal ones.

Compare the forces that led to the United States after the American Revolution with those in Iraq. Or the forces in Germany that led to its unification. Even Switzerland with a population divided by three languages is an interesting study for comparison.

Now look at Turkey and its history with diverse groups. Everyone should know about the Armenians by now, but then there are the Greek Christian minority, and the Kurds. Not a happy place.

Imagine if Rhode Island of the thirteen colonies had somehow ruled over and brutalized the others. How welcome would it have been to be included when the others became free and desired unity?

We will be staying awhile in Iraq, no doubt. And we will create a functioning army and police dept.. The terrorists will be tamped down and the government will function to some extent although thoroughly corrupt and inept; but once the dust has settled for the most part, the centrifugal forces between the various parties and groups must inevitably lead to divided states.

Is it possible that the desire for oil money on everyone's part and the need to cooperate to get it to market will overcome divisions? It takes more than an economic benefit to peaceful coexistence to make natural enemies agreeable.

Nevertheless, despite the loss of initiative in the war on Islamofascists, we are killing a great many of them in Iraq, but we have failed to destroy Syrian and Iranian support for terrorism.

Are greater conflagrations necessary to quell rogue states like North Korea? I can't imagine South Korea ever acquiesing to a war which would result in many deaths for them.

We may eventually attempt to destroy Iran's nuclear program, but actually destroy the government? Not likely.

How to stop nuclear weapons proliferation? The Muslim nations want nuclear bombs. They will eventually get them. Our lack of will to use ruthless force now will very likely cost us dearly in the future. That is always the case.

Politicians by nature are vacillating. It's what makes them capable of forging compromises between various interests, but vacillators are the last thing a people need when faced with war.

Update

The good news is that North Korea may disintegrate without a shot being fired.

One can hope the same may occur in Syria and Iran, but wouldn't giving them a nudge help?

2005-10-09T14:11:00.000-07:00

Hope is a Fool

Someone once pointed out that the terrible thing about attending to politics is that you never lose by so much that you give up hope for a change of fortune. You keep being tantalized.

For Republicans and conservatives, Bush in 2000 was the Great Right Hope. When we looked at the record, though, all we saw was that he improved education in Texas (a myth we wanted to believe. Every governor plays with test scores to claim he has improved education), and that he worked well with Democrats in Texas.

Other than being George H.W. Bush's son, he had nothing else going for him.

In the first few months in office, he managed to get tax cuts which the liberal pundits assured us would not pass through Congress. They did, and Bush looked like someone who might get even more done as people continued to "misunderestimate" him.

Then 9/11 happened. In a short period of time, we knew we were in a dire war, and knew what needed to be done: destroy any government that gave aid and comfort to the Islamic terrorists.

Against the liberal pundits and news media who assured us Afghanistan was a quagmire, we altered the country with incredible speed and little cost.

And then Bush stalled. He knew Iraq had to be next, and not simply because they might have WMDs. But in trying to build an absurd coalition as there had been in Desert Storm under his father, he allowed his friends like Tony Blair to ruin the wave of popular momentum he had gained.

The Axis of Evil was never going to be seriously attended to. Bush put all his eggs into one basket, and that became Iraq. The new mission was not to destroy terror supporting governments, but democratizing Muslims.

And everything began to fizzle. Having failed to secure the dangerous areas of Iraq, nor secure its borders, military decisions were being over-ridden by political ones. Fallujah was turned over to the terrorists and many other nests allowed to develop. Mistakes happen in war, but these weren’t military mistakes, they were political ones by men who had not the heart for serious battle.

The great initiative that Bush started came to a screeching halt and was overcome with fear. Fear of the MSM, fear of the UN, fear of European opinion, fear of the Left, fear of Democratic opposition. The great American Gulliver laid down for a moment and the Lilliputians got to work.

Something happened in the White House, a case of nerves, and Bush trembled with the fear that he might not succeed in making Iraq a safe place. Imagine how it shook him when he contemplated that Iraq would devolve into a civil war with three sides and everyone in the world could point at him and declare, “I told you so, you war mongering buffoon”.

Thus, he tied us into Iraq until the inevitable happens: Iraq tears itself apart as democracy fails to establish itself and the tribes begin their endless wars with each other.

Bush was elected because we hoped he would be better than Clinton and his ilk. He was re-elected because we trusted him with our national security better than Kerry and his ilk.

But what is there to hope for from Bush now? He cannot really be counted on to lead. He doesn’t follow through on initiatives, nor fight for anything in Congress. Many people have turned against the war in Iraq, not because they are against war, but because they want it to be fought with fierceness and power. The blunder in appointing Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court has divided and demoralized his Party. His remarks about spending money to fight poverty after the New Orleans flood has exposed him as a classic, big government, goo goo liberal.

One of the problems is that we always hope for a Great Leader, a contemporary savior of some kind whether we have faith in the Divine or not. In democracies, we get stuck with mediocrities who do more harm than good. Whereas in any other system -- emperor, monarchy, oligarchy -- there is enormous harm done and very little good.

History has afforded us a few glimpses when a Great Man has governed well and managed a state competently, and so we keep hoping to elect someone fit for the job. There is much at stake, after all, but what hope can we have?

After 9/11 conservatives and many liberals, said, “Thank God, we have Bush and not Gore.” It seemed like divine providence. Bush himself believes he was uniquely placed in office for that moment. It’s not a wild assertion to believe in providence, but after these last four years, many have to be asking, “God, was Bush the best you could get for us at the time?”

For years now I have tried to give Bush the benefit of the doubt. “He has been resolute on the war,” we keep hearing from Republican Party cheerleaders. But it seems that not a month goes by when a few more items get added to the Con side of the ledger and none to the Pro side.

Well, I’m done with Bush. I have taken the measure of the man, I have seen his heart, and I am not the least impressed. He has no guiding principles. I can’t even say I admire his Christian principles since I don’t know what they are, either, other than some boilerplate spiritual utterances, and pious doings.

Do I really feel better knowing that the President is someone who prays everyday and over every major decision? Not in the least since I have no idea what place truth has in his ruminations with the Lord. For all I know, he might believe that God favors his conclusions because he hasn’t been struck down by lightning yet.

I would rather know that Bush is wise than that he is pious. That he is more like Elijah than Peter.

The office of Great Leader is never a place for reflective men, although a few like Washington and Lincoln may dispute that. Washington was a man of action, certainly, yet his formulation of principles to live by, his Farewell Address, his presiding over the Constitutional Convention suggest that while not an “intellectual”, he was capable of complex reasoning married to strong portions of wisdom.

Lincoln was the opposite. He was an intellectual, someone who reflected deeply on verities, history, and humanity who became a President who had to become an active man and war leader.

I did place some hope on Bush that he was better than an average politician. I considered that his reliance on God was a powerful and positive aspect of his character, but as I have learned -- conversion can help a man change his behavior, but it doesn’t necessarily change his personality. It changed his heart, but I don’t think it really changed his mind, his mental toolkit.

I think his leadership style is like an MBA’s. He likes the executive decision in which he decides what the right thing to do is, and then expects everyone to fall in line with it. But politics is a matter of consensus and representing what others, the people, think is right to do. He has previously strained the bonds of Party loyalty with his actions, but this time he exposed himself most fully to his own Party as a man who is not a team player, so to speak. By refusing to choose a judge from the conservative batting order, and by doing it so cavalierly with a demand for unwarranted trust, he demonstrated that he is not a conservative so much as his own little tin God when it comes down to it.

Bush had nothing to lose by consulting more with Republicans than Democrats, and everything to gain. Even if he had lost a floor fight in the Senate, he would have cemented and increased his political capital.

His perpetual comment that, “I know her heart” which he says about all his cronies, and even about Russia’s Putin (who then showed him how poor a judge of character Bush can be if he thought he made a friend in him) reflects poorly on his judgment.

I don’t care about Miers’ heart. I care about her judgment, wisdom, and record.

I expected Bush to have clay feet. I didn’t expect to find him willful and somewhat vapid. Why should anybody commit themselves to helping the Republicans maintain power when this is what they get for their trouble -- not a single voice at the table. Or one that is simply dismissed when the politician has gotten the office he wanted.

On the Right for a number of years now there has often been a hagiographic character to many profiles on Bush, on his genuineness, his Texas swagger, his naturalness with the folks, and his virtues as a leader. As a person, Bush is not without virtue, decency, kindness, and empathy. He does have a Christian manner and sincerity which very pleasing, but as a politician and leader I find him unskilled, hesitant, fearful, and unprepared to do battle.

Simply put, I don’t trust him and I think millions of others may have suddenly joined me in that feeling.

2005-10-08T09:46:00.000-07:00

Bush's Picks

Many conservatives were ecstatic over the John Roberts choice for SCOTUS while others considered him a stealth candidate. Particularly after he coyly suggested to the Judiciary Committee that Roe v. Wade was settled law while leaving unsaid whether he would vote to overturn it if he had the chance or simply let it stand.

Fair enough. He couldn't play his hand on that, but there was nothing in his "paper trail" to suggest how he would rule when he faces that issue on the bench.

Still, we have a good idea of where he stands constitutionally on any case that will be new to the court.

Harriet Miers is a cipher, though. Not only does she appear unqualified as a legal expert, she has no discernible constitutional philosophy other than a vague set of axioms iterated by Bush.

Her appointment is a real insult to those who have labored very hard for a very long time to deliver the Court from evil.

The people in the White House aren't stupid. Certainly they had to know something of what the reaction on the Right would be, yet they have no plan to defuse it. I guess Bush simply figures that she'll be confirmed and that will be that.

Which is true. Once confirmed that will be that. She may even turn out to be a decent appointment. But God help us if she is less than mediocre.

What is as troubling to conservatives is Bush's seeming contempt for the people who elected him twice.

Frankly, Bush was never that strong a Republican candidate. He barely won against a hapless and idiotic Al Gore (lost in popular vote), and should have trounced John Kerry despite the MSM's campaign for the Democrat which undoubtedly increased his percentage of the vote.

He was slow to go to war in Iraq when he had momentum on his side, and has failed to follow through on destroying governments that are still sponsoring terrorism like Syria and Iran.

He campaigned for an amendment to define marriage. Heard anything about that lately? And you never will again.

During his five years in office, millions of illegal aliens have entered the country with his approval. I mean that literally. He has completely approved of the invasion with his baseless rhetoric about such people doing the work Americans won't, improving our economy, and practicing good family values.

At some point you ask yourself, who is this guy? What makes him tick? Exactly what does he believe in? He appears to a sheep in wolf's clothing.

Some talk about his managerial style as that of a Harvard MBA, but I am more inclined at this point to give his former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's observations greater credence; that is, that Bush sits and listens and gives no indication of what he hears as registering.

Others say Bush is deeply engaged in meetings, but that comes from loyalists.

Conservatives have tried to excuse Bush's speech impediments, his inarticulateness, and verbal bumbling as being a matter separate from his leadership skills. He's just not a great communicator, he's a nervous speaker, he's not facile and glib which is good. He's an authentic, regular guy.

But when you start adding up all the minuses, you begin to assemble a picture of someone deeply out of his depth.

Many thought that Bush grew in office after 9/11. For the moment it appeared so. He was strong, resolute, determined, and serious. Yet, on further examination it doesn't appear he has grown at all, and proves the adage that presidents don't grow in offce, they are struck with the skill set and temperment that they came with.

In many respects, Bush has bungled the war in Iraq. Not so much militarily (although there have been major bungles, but that happens in war), but politically in allowing his opponents to undermine the cause. He has consistently failed to inform and rally the nation to his banner.

Fortunately for him, Americans aren't lacking in committment to their self-defense.

Bush is baffling. He is popular with our servicemen and women because he is genuinely one of them and concerned about their welfare. But to his Party, he seems indifferent. He doesn't connect with your average, working American. People loved Reagan because Reagan loved people. Some people love Bush because Bush only seems to love some people.

In his dance with America, Bush has two left feet. He sincerely tries to lead, he's earnest enough, but he can't get over his awkwardness and uncoordinated manner.

For the moment, he gives every sign that for the next three years he will be a caretaker President, since he shows no interest in the Republican agenda. Possibily his greatest chance to steer the country back to judicial sanity has been squandered with his choice of Roberts and Miers; and his unwillingness to engage in fierce partisan politics, to fight for conservative candidates and policies is thoroughly demoralizing.

Look around the political landscape, though. See any Republican with backbone or a dyed in the wool appeal? Neither do I.

2005-10-06T22:26:00.000-07:00

Overhumanizing the Enemy

Outstanding article at TCS by Helen Smith.

"Violence breeds violence -- but so can nonviolence. This is often forgotten in the debate over terrorism. . ."

2005-10-06T12:20:00.000-07:00

Shouting Fire in the theater

This legal case baffled me on first glance because if ever anyone was guilty of defamation, a group of anonymous bloggers were and deserved legal action against them.

In a series of obscenity-laced tirades, the bloggers, among other things, pointed to Cahill's "obvious mental deterioration," and made several sexual references about him and his wife, including using the name "Gahill" to suggest that Cahill, who has publicly feuded with Smyrna Mayor Mark Schaeffer, is homosexual.

In June, the lower court judge ruled that the Cahills had established a "good faith basis" for contending that they were victims of defamation and affirmed a previous order for Comcast to disclose the bloggers' identities.

That seems simple enough and fair. What the higher court overruled, though, was not the right of the plaintiffs from bringing an action against the bloggers, but that the anonymous bloggers should have been informed prior to their identities being exposed.

Under the standard adopted by the Supreme Court, a plaintiff must first try to notify the anonymous poster that he is the subject of subpoena or request for a court to disclose his identity, allowing the poster time to oppose the request. The plaintiff would then have to provide prima facie evidence of defamation strong enough to overcome a summary judgment motion.

"The decision of the Supreme Court helps provide protection for anonymous bloggers and anonymous speakers in general from lawsuits which have little or no merit and are filed solely to intimidate the speaker or suppress the speech," said David Finger, a Wilmington attorney representing John Doe No. 1.

I seriously disagree with these statements, though:

Steele noted in his opinion that plaintiffs in such cases can use the Internet to respond to character attacks and "generally set the record straight," and that, as in Cahill's case, blogs and chatrooms tend to be vehicles for people to express opinions, not facts.

"Given the context, no reasonable person could have interpreted these statements as being anything other than opinion. ... The statements are, therefore, incapable of a defamatory meaning," he wrote.

Defamation, slander, and libel are much too easily excused under Steele's umbrella. You can say anything about someone else, but then claim it's only an opinion. I didn't really mean that you are a Nazi, racist, fascist, illegitimate glutton and pedophile when I published that statement. That's just my opinion of you.

I'm sorry, as much as I approve of free speech, anything does not go when attacking someone you dislike or disagree with.

2005-10-06T11:49:00.000-07:00

via Relapsed Catholic

2005-10-05T00:02:00.000-07:00

The Sins of the Father

One of the greatest, if not the greatest, hardship is to be cursed with an idiot, a fool, a wastrel, a churl, and a jerk for a father.

We image God based upon our experience with our father (or lack of) as we develop as children. To have a weak, absent, or abusive father is to form an idea of God which is parallel to that of our sire. To have a decent, generous, moral man guide us is to become a fertile ground for faith to spring up, and a fruitful life.

I and my brothers and sister had the misfortune to be the progeny of a man who was weak, often absent, and generally abusive. That man, now nearly eighty years old, has become a King Lear figure in his own eyes as the father of wicked, disrespectful children. He is certainly a man “who knew himself but little“.

I, unfortunately, fulfill the Cordelia role of the child who speaks facts and sense to the childish father.

You would think that having grown a bit old yourself (I am in my fifties), you would be better equipped to deal with disagreeable and downright idiotic people, but, oh my soul, I am not so sanguine and unmired when dealing with the foolishness of my dad.

A bad or unwise parent is an emotional cross at any time of life. Talk about your mystic bonds of memory and connection -- none are more strongly rooted as that between parent and child.

We are every bit as imprinted to a mother and father as a chick is to the hen. We are chained with links of unconscious, primeval affection which are unbreakable; a tie of blood which is indelible.

Thus, we are wounded to the marrow when we have a venal or perverse soul at the other end of that consanguinal tether.

I am not a man who can freely harden his heart at will when confronted with a difficult relative. And part of my problem is that I refuse to bend my will to that of a bully who uses not violence but childish emotional reactions meant to effect submission to immoral, foolish, or capricious actions.

My father is a man who wants the approval of his children, but has never studied how to behave in a manner which might win it.

For example, he will send me a letter telling me how he never had any rapport with me as a child or man (as if that was something under my control as a child) and after insulting me ask me for a favor which costs me time, money, and detriment.

After giving me the back of his hand, he expects a submissive response when he has no actual power to compel it.

We see this time and time again in politics of one kind or another. Take the lefty who insults his country and people and then demands they acquiesce to his vision of life as if the reproof would act magically to transform the guilty reprobates into amenable vassals.

My father believes that belittling insults will have the positive effect of leading the sinner to repentance, and demands for forgiveness.

It is one of the worst kinds of offenses when a father attempts to use his power as a patriarch to willfully injure a child, not for the sake of moral correction, but to wheedle his way in a course of folly.

I realize I have not been very specific here, but the details behind this effusion are tedious yet ancient as a Greek drama. It is the kind of situation where the next word one hopes to hear about his dad, is that he is dead and will stop bothering you with absurd behavior.

But the damage is done. He has sown his seeds among my siblings and poisoned their lives and understanding. They will carry his bilious attitude and selfishness until either they are dead or finally repent of their character and habits.

The sins of the fathers are visited upon their children up to seven generations, indeed.

2005-10-04T21:29:00.000-07:00

Stop the presses!!

A young, educated white man goes to prison for a year (released in ten weeks due to overcrowding) for pot and MDMA possession and discovers:

I cannot begin to recount all the men I met, particularly those with prior records or those on parole, who were re-incarcerated for crimes they did not commit, simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people.

How does he know they're innocent? They told him they were. Well, that ought to be good enough for all of us.

All those innocent men are behind bars because:

. . .University of Nevada-Las Vegas Criminal Justice professor Richard Shelden calls a "criminal justice industrial complex" where “the police, the courts and the prison system have become huge, self-serving and self-perpetuating bureaucracies, which along with corporations, have a vested interest in keeping crime at a certain level.

Of course, it's all a scam! The System gets rich on creating criminals.

2005-10-03T10:45:00.001-07:00

SCOTUS and POTUS

"People are saying this was a pick made out of weakness. I disagree. I think this was a pick made out of lese majeste -- an "I am the president and this is what I want" arrogance." J. Podhoretz the Corner

One of the the biggest reasons Bush was elected and re-elected was in order to restore the Supreme Court to some semblance of constitutional sanity.

Thus far he has allowed his lower court appointments to be filibustered without a fight, and now he has chosen two people to serve on SCOTUS whom no one can be certain about regarding their temperments and spines.

More and more President Bush reveals himself to be a man seriously out of his depth. Granted that most men would be out of their depth in his office, but Bush's problem seems to be the same as his father's. He lacks "the vision thing". He doesn't seem to understand what it is his party stands for and what people elected him to do.

Conservatives like myself try to admit, "well, at least he's been resolute on the war on the Islamofascists" but privately we all grumble that he does things like keep warning Syria to be nice or else he'll warn them again to be nice. What happened in Fallujah the first time after the murder of the security men there was a travesty of war and a horrific blunder.

It seems as if Bush just doesn't follow through. We have a Republican majority in both Houses yet what's been done? Tort reform? One bill and then nothing. Tax relief? One major bill early in his first term and then nothing. Regulation reform? Nothing. Oil from Alaska? Nothing. Repeal of the Endangered Species Act? Nothing. Illegal immigration? Nothing.

I have complained before, but on a day to day basis, we have no real idea what Bush is up to, wants to accomplish, or is doing to advance the conservative agenda. For all we know, he might be playing solitaire on his computer all day long.

I am coming to wish that the next few years will fly by and that we can try and elect someone who cares, who "gets" it, whom we can see working in a positive and public way on our agenda.

It's really too late to hope that Bush will wake up and realize that leadership leads. He resembles his father more with every passing day. An ineffective and uninterested man.

Someone once said that Bush senior became President simply because he thought he deserved to be. Bush fils seems to act as if he wanted to be President because his father was.

Update

Marvin Olasky has much to say about Meirs that is heartening in many respects for a Christian, but still leave many questions up in the air as to her legal fitness.

2005-10-03T10:45:00.000-07:00

The Genius of me

Want to make millions of dollars? Here you go. Simply create a new suit of cards. Besides Spades, Hearts, Diamonds, and Clubs add Triangles and invent a whole series of games from that.

Or simply add a new order to each suit such as Emperor above Kings. Above Emperor you could add Demi-Urge or something. And God above them all.

Think about it. A fortune can be made from all that may follow from such a creation or addition to the card universe. I wonder if you can patent such a thing?

2005-10-02T23:04:00.000-07:00

It doesn't get better than this

How often have I mentioned that crackpottedness increases with age but is everywhere, too? Well, lots of times.

Here's a Hollywood Halfwit further exposing a brain on drugs:

"They were inept. The were inadequate to the task, and they lied," Sutherland charged.

"And they were insulting, and they were vindictive. And they were heartless. They did not care. They do not care. They do not care about Iraqi people. They do not care about the families of dead soldiers. They only care about profit."

At one point during the session, Sutherland started crying: "We stolen our children's future... We have children. We have children. How dare we take their legacy from them. How dare we. It's shameful. What we are doing to our world."

Help, I've fallen and I can't get up. Oh, my sides are aching.

2005-10-01T20:25:00.000-07:00

Via Right Nation

2005-10-01T19:57:00.000-07:00

Today's Quote:

"Experience proves that the man who obstructs a war in which his nation is engaged, no matter whether right or wrong, occupies no enviable place in life or history. Better for him, individually, to advocate "war, pestilence, and famine," than to act as an obstructionist to a war already begun. The history of the defeated rebel will be honorable hereafter, compared with that of the Northern man who aided him by conspiring against his government while protected by it. The most favorable posthumous history the stay-at-home traitor can hope for is--oblivion."

U.S. Grant

via WFAN at Right Nation

2005-10-01T18:52:00.000-07:00

There'll always be an England (not)

Tony Blair's England is this:

Porcelain pigs offend Muslims

LEICESTER -- Police here in central England seized a collection of porcelain pigs from a house's window sill after Muslims complained that they were offensive.

"I just couldn't believe it, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry," Mrs Nancy Bennett, the owner of the 17 miniature pigs, told the Sun tabloid newspaper.

The porcelain figures were held at the local police station, while Mrs Bennett was threatened with prosecution if she replaces the collection. Her house is located in the same street as the city's main mosque, meaning that Muslim worshippers often passed by her front window where the pig figurines were on display.

"Muslims find pigs highly offensive," explained police officer David Griffiths. "That is why the complaints were made". -- Sapa-AFP

via Relapsed Catholic

And would you like to be fired for eating a BLT because of the bacon in Florida? There's more here, also, about the banning of Piglet and children's books that have pigs in them.

2005-10-01T17:09:00.000-07:00

Soldier Angel

I applied many months ago at Soldiers' Angels to adopt a soldier.

Surprising enough to me, I got a woman in Iraq in a Quartermaster Company.

I began writing to her letters that I hoped would amuse her about my ridiculous travails with birds in my neighborhood and how helpful government can be (that's a joke, son).

Rather than Care packages which she didn't need so much, I sent her movies they might not have seen. It turns out that they get a lot of bootleg movies of the newest releases, so I try to find more obscure films which she might enjoy. I buy used DVDs at Amazon and they send them right off to Iraq. (I hope that buying them used doesn't make me sound cheap. They're just as good as new and it means I can send her more of them.)

I just got a postcard from my soldier and she announced that she re'upped for another 5 years.

Amazing. She misses home, has a few more months left to her deployment, but she signed up again. Are these not the greatest people? God bless 'em. Each and every one of them.

You know when you see the nutballs parading around their ugly selves as they insist they support the troops that it's not very likely they're sending care packages or charming letters to help keep their spirits up.

I was a bit apprehensive when I applied for a soldier -- not knowing how I'd come off, if they even wanted to hear from an old fart like me, or if hearing from a stranger could give them any lift, but boy, I am so glad I took the chance.

I try to write droll letters as James Lileks might write them, and I'm doing okay because she says I'm funny. I can't tell you how relieved I am that my attempts at humor are pleasing someone in her situation.

I'm not going to publish them here because I write them for her and they're private (don't worry, I let my wife read them). Not everything has to be broadcast to the world.

Anyway, I just want to encourage others if they have a desire to help out in that way that it's a great morale booster for the troops to hear from us.

I really feel like my ability to write is being put to a higher purpose than spouting off my opinions hither and yon.

2005-10-01T10:36:00.000-07:00

The Nation's Business

Since when does what a radio or TV talk show host say in passing, even a venerable Republican one such as Bill Bennett, become the concern of the President of the United States?

Mr. President, Mr. President!! Johnny just called Billy a poopy head!! Make him stop it, Mr. President!!

"The president believes the comments were not appropriate," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.