Entries from February 2008 ↓

Christianity Today online has dusted off an interview with the recently-deceased William F. Buckley from 1995, featuring his advice to Christian activists. The interview shows his own Christian faith, as well as points like these:

What frightens people most about the Religious Right is the rhetoric that is sometimes used. There ought to be some thought given, for example, as to how you formulate your antihomosexual position: it should be more pastoral than vitriolic….

If, at the end of a broadcast by Pat Robertson, fewer people are disposed to Christianity than were before he came on (I’m not saying that is the case), then that would be awful if that were so….

Whatever you want to say about the anti-abortionists, you have got to at least say this: Theirs is the most disinterested act of humanitarian concern since the Emancipation Proclamation. They are not talking about protecting their own child, they are talking about protecting children….

Thomas Aquinas once was asked, “If the public view was that a famine was imminent, would you be justified in charging injurious prices for your grain, knowing that a relief wagon of grain was coming?” Thomas said yes, you would, but it would be wrong. A Christian would not do that.Certain things which the market authorizes simply in terms of law are unchristian and ought not to be done.

The big issue today has to do with the fidelity of marriages. The tendency now to leave your wife because you have an infatuation with a younger woman of tenderer flesh is an enormous temptation. It’s carnal, and it’s also easy to justify with all the solipsistic reasoning that we hear today. That is about the gravest offense that a human being can commit, to throw away a wife.

You know how the mint is putting out quarters featuring all of the 50 states. Now the territories will also get a quarter, as will Washington, D.C. The District of Columbia turned in a proposed design that featured the slogan “No taxation without representation.”

See, the District of Columbia has no representatives in Congress, and yet its population has to pay taxes, which violates that old revolutionary principle. Many D.C. activists go so far as to demand statehood, so that the Milwaukee-sized city of 600,000 would have as many senators as California. (My solution is to shrink the district to just cover the federal buildings, so that all of the residential areas are in Maryland or Virginia. And if that is too radical, though I suspect eliminating Washington would make for a popular political cause, we could just make a provision allowing residents to register to vote in either of those states.) So resentful Washingtonians put that slogan on their license plates and want it on their quarters.

The mint, unfortunately, vetoed the slogan. Setting aside D.C.’s claims, wouldn’t it be cool to have a pocketful of quarters that say, “No taxation without representation”?

(On serious issues, my policy positions are based on my deeply-held convictions. On less important issues, I go by whatever position is funniest.)

England’s royal family may be returning to its chivalric roots. Prince Harry, the third in line to the throne, is a military officer who has been fighting in hot combat in Afghanistan. His unit has killed some 30 Taliban.

[Who can identify the allusion in the title of this post? How else is that allusion appropriate, considering Prince Harry’s earlier frivolous past?]

UPDATE: Because of the publicity, Prince Harry has been pulled from action and is back in England. Now al-Qaida is calling for his assassination.

Iran ‘number one world power’: Ahmadinejad:

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared on Thursday that Iran was the world’s “number one” power, as he launched a bitter new assault on domestic critics he accused of siding with the enemy.

“Everybody has understood that Iran is the number one power in the world,” Ahmadinejad said in a speech to families who lost loved ones in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.

“Today the name of Iran means a firm punch in the teeth of the powerful and it puts them in their place,” he added in the address broadcast live on state television.

So what are you going to do with the extra day that you have been given this year?

I believe that February 29, which we only get once every four years, should be a holiday. And I’m not just talking about Little Orphan Annie’s birthday (which was how her creator explained how she was still a kid after decades in the funny papers). It should be a day on which we contemplate time as God’s gift, a truly extra, gratuitous day. It would be like a national snow day, in which people don’t have to go to work. (After all, if you have an annual salary, you are not being paid for today. Think about it.) But it shouldn’t be a time of going out for some big vacation, either (and the government should NOT tamper with the calendar by trying to move February 29 to Monday). Just stay at home and do nothing in particular.

Any other ideas for what we could do with this holiday? What we should call it or how we should celebrate it?

There is an old custom of women getting to propose to men during Leap Year. Women could do that or take other initiatives. I could see making it a holiday in honor of women, though we wouldn’t want the feminists to take it over. But how else should February 29, a day that only comes around once every four years, be celebrated?

Mark Steyn, the Canadian conservative, brings together insightful punditry and devastating humor. That is to say, he is a true satirist. For a sample of what a good writer he is, consider his description in a piece on fall of the house of Clintonof Bill Clinton’s famous televised walk to the stage to receive his party’s nomination:

Bill Clinton understood a crude rule of show business — that, if you behave like a star, there are plenty of people who’ll treat you like one. The apotheosis of this theory was his interminable ambulatory entrance down mile after mile of corridor at the 2000 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, when Slick Willie finally out-Elvised Elvis — or, more accurately, out-Smarted the opening sequence of Get Smart. Apparently, no-one had thought to tell him to try to get within four miles of the stage before the introductory video ended. He was, by my calculations, outside the men’s room on Corridor G27, Sub-Basement Level 6 of the Staples Center. As he began the long, long, lo-oo-oo-oong televised walk to the podium the crowd watching the monitors cheered — and, 20 minutes later, after he’d strolled down the first three or four windowless tunnels of attractive luminous drywall, hung a left by the water cooler, taken the emergency stairs, cut across the stationery closet, moved smoothly through the boiler room and had still only reached the Coke machine on Sous-Mezzanine Level 4 and there was at least a mile and a half between him and the stage, and the Democratic activists out in the hall were beginning to figure they could get dinner and a movie and still be back in time for the last third of his walk-on, they were nevertheless still cheering. In effect, President Clinton dared them not to cheer. Tom Jones wouldn’t have risked it. Engelbert Humperdinck would have balked. But, after eight years of talking the talk, Bill walked the walk. In the hall, the delegates’ hands were raw, bleeding stumps, but the Slicker knew that if he started his entrance in Idaho those Dems would cheer him every step of the way.

But Steyn has turned his satire on Muslims, and so he is being dragged before Canada’s human rights courts. Read this account of his case and mourn the way Western civilization, in the name of its own invention of multi-culturalism, is repudiating its liberties, persecuting its defenders, and committing cultural suicide.

Shopkeepers in England, annoyed by adolescents loitering around their stores, are installing a new device called the Mosquito. It emits an ultra-high pitched annoying noise—”eeeeeeeeek”–that people over 25 cannot hear. It drives away the kids while adults, with their deteriorating hearing, remain unphased. Read this: Merchants in Britain Give Young Loiterers an Earful.

Yes, some people in England are claiming that the device constitutes age discrimination. Still, young people have had their own version of the Mosquito for some time that drives away adults. It’s called rap music.

But still, isn’t the Mosquito a great invention? Don’t you just want one? I can imagine many other uses. I wonder if Mosquito technology could be applied to all boom-boxes and car stereos, once the windows are opened, so that only young people could listen to their music despite their good-hearted impulse to share it with the rest of us.

William F. Buckley, the influential conservative writer, intellectual, and raconteur, is dead at 82.

Go to National Review Online, which he founded, for a wide array of tributes.

Naming something is the first step to dealing with it. Thanks to Terry Mattingly for teaching me a new word: Flexidoxy.

Every Saturday, journalist David Brooks and his family can choose between three services at their synagogue in Washington, D.C.

Rabbis lead a mainstream, almost Protestant, rite in the sanctuary. Then there is an informal “Havurah (fellowship)” service led by lay people, including a 45-minute talk-back session. The erudite leaders often pause to explain why the Torah’s more judgmental and dogmatic passages don’t mean what they seem to mean.

Finally, throngs of young adults pack the wonderfully named “Traditional Egalitarian” service, which features longer Torah readings, a rigorous approach to liturgy and what Brooks called a “somewhat therapeutic” seminar blending spirituality and daily life.

“It can get pretty New Age-y,” said Brooks, at his Weekly Standard office. “It’s as if you’re in an Orthodox shul and then Oprah Winfrey comes on.”

It was a rabbi in Montana who gave Brooks the perfect word — “Flexidoxy” — to describe this faith. This is what happens when Americans try to baptize their souls in freedom and tradition, radical individualism and orthodoxy, all at the same time. One scholar found a Methodist pastor’s daughter who calls herself a “Methodist Taoist Native American Quaker Russian Orthodox Buddhist Jew.”

Barack Obama has a lot of things going for him, but once his positions get scrutinized, he may have trouble getting the votes of the masses. For example, he has an unusually extreme, even for liberals, Anti-Gun Stance.

A discussion about guns has broken out in the comments, but I’d like to raise some questions. How could anyone–let alone a former professor of Constitutional Law like Obama– think the 2nd Amendment is just to protect the gun-owning rights of hunters and skeet shooters?

Did the founders think “militias” were groups of guys who went out on hunting trips? Or a club devoted to SKEET SHOOTING? Doesn’t the reference in the 2nd Amendment to a “militia” suggest that an armed populace is to be a safeguard against enemies foreign and domestic? While the 2nd Amendment certainly protects hunters and skeet shooters, isn’t its major purpose to give citizens the right to use weapons to defend themselves?

Young people today know hardly anything about history, literature, or Western culture. We knew that, but study proves it. Among the findings,

Among 1,200 students surveyed:

•43% knew the Civil War was fought between 1850 and 1900.

•52% could identify the theme of 1984.

•51% knew that the controversy surrounding Sen. Joseph McCarthy focused on communism.

I’m positive my students here at Patrick Henry College know all this stuff. What amuses me is the way they often draw a blank at pop cultural references. Ask them about Britney Spears, High School Musical, and similar staples of the adolescent universe, and you often just get a blank stare. They WILL, however, tell you all about Homer, Dostoevsky, and deToqueville.

Michael Kinsley has written a hilarious take on the New York Times story about John McCain: McCain and the Times: The Real Questions. A sample:

Many readers of last week’s New York Times article about McCain, including me, read that article as suggesting that Sen. McCain may have had an affair with a lobbyist eight years ago. The Times, however, has made clear that its story was not about an affair with a lobbyist. Its story was about the possibility that eight years ago, aides to McCain had held meetings with McCain to warn him about the appearance that he might be having an affair with the lobbyist.

This is obviously a much more important question. To be absolutely clear: the Times itself was not suggesting that there had been an affair, or even that there had been the appearance of an affair. The Times was reporting that there was a time eight years ago when some people felt there might be the appearance of an affair, although others, apparently including Sen. McCain himself, apparently felt that there was no such appearance.

Similarly, I am not accusing the New York Times of screwing up again by publishing an insufficiently sourced article then defending itself with a preposterous assertion that it wasn’t trying to imply what it obviously was trying to imply. I am merely reporting that some people worry that other people might be concerned that the New York Times has created the appearance of screwing up once again.

What I wrote was that some people had expressed concern that the Times article might have created the appearance of charging that McCain had had an affair. My critics have charged that I was charging the Times with charging McCain with having had an affair. Such a charge would be unfair to the New York Times, since the Times article, if you read it carefully (very carefully), does not make any charge against McCain except that people in a meeting eight years ago had suggested that other people eight years ago might reach a conclusion — about which the Times expressed no view whatsoever — that McCain was having an affair.

The piece goes on and on, creating level after level of possibilities of appearances.