Quick Reads
-William Seward in Cairo
-If Shakespeare wrote “The Big Lebowski” or “The Hokey Pokey”
-Prince is among the spectators who saw the Vikings beat the Cowboys 34-3
-Roger Ebert has a touching post about how he misses having dinner with friends.
Cousin Marriage
On the heels of the people of New Jersey voting to not legalize same-sex couples, this map was posted on True/Slant and a few other places. It’s one of those things that makes you wonder how people can look at inconsistencies and be okay with them. Or try to rationalize away something like cousin marriage while condemning same-sex marriage. Or ignoring it all-together.
Take a look below. New Jersey is one of the states highlighted in the bottom map
Now here’s another map that’s really a more detailed version of the map on top
Here’s the key:
Purple states have same-sex marriage
Green states have unions similar to marriage
Turquoise recognize same-sex marriages from elsewhere
Gray has no specific prohibition or recognition of same-sex couples
Yellow states ban gay marriage by statute
Orange states ban gay marriage in their constitution
Red states ban gay marriage and some/all other kinds of same-sex unions in their constitution
So. Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina Tennessee, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin all ban same-sex marriage in their constitution – but its okay to marry your first cousin.
*sigh*
Bill O’Reilly does what he does best – a lousy interview with Brit Hume. None of the tough questions he claims to ask all the time. But Bill has a blind spot with Brit, since they both at the same company.
No, Brit. It’s not because you’re a Christian. I don’t think you’re a pompous jerk because of some hatred of Christianity or Christians – which for the record I don’t have.
It’s because you brought up religion during a discussion about Tiger Woods and his troubles, which has nothing to do with any religion, let alone his. It’s because – whether you meant to or not – you say that Christianity is a better religion than Buddhism. And since you’re a Christian yourself, suggesting that someone you don’t know should convert for YOUR reasons and not theirs makes you a proselytizer.
The lengths you go to proselytize both on Fox News Sunday and especially here makes you a pompous jerk.
When Fox News covers Tiger Woods…
They always find something bigoted to talk about.
This discussion is a bit late in the Tiger Woods scandal, but Brit Hume has the solutions to Tiger’s problem (/sarcasm)
Yeah, Brit’s solution is that since Buddhism isn’t about compassion and mercy (from God), Tiger should convert to Christianity and he’ll be forgiven.
While Woods should take steps to be forgiven by the various people he’s upset (I don’t know how you do that with upsetting a wife and a number of mistresses), Hume is more concerned about his immortal soul.
Why? I don’t know. Tiger doesn’t owe Hume anything.
And knocking Buddhism, Brit? What did they ever do to you?
In the next decade, this must die
And what is “this?” Nile Gardiner has a piece in the Daily Telegraph about the top ten films of the last decade that promoted a “conservative” point of view. Meaning, in his words, the films that best advanced ideas like strong support for the military, a love for one’s country and a defense of capitalism/the free market.
Now, none of these things are intrinsically conservative. And none of the movies he lists are “guaranteed” to offend left-wing sensibilities like he claims.
Oh, and Nile Gardiner is not a film critic, he is a political commentator. So of course his reviews are going to be filtered through such a lens as well as a cartoonish depiction of all political terms.
His list is the latest in a long line of things where politics just doesn’t work. Children’s books like Why Mommy is a Democrat and Help! There Are Liberals Under My Bed are similar kinds of products. And I’m not linking to their Amazon pages because I don’t want copies of them to be sold.
Having a pundit make a top ten list based on their politics about culture they spend most of their time condemning is definitely something that should be banished in the coming decade. And since I’m all for freedom, I encourage that it be banished the freedom-est way possible: Everyone standing up and telling pundits who dare to do this something they’ve never heard before: You don’t know what you’re talking about.
How do you get things like this wrong?
A typo is explainable, this one just… (this was from the front page of today’s Pioneer Press)
Guy Benson
I haven’t heard of conservative Guy Benson before. Alternet has a blog entry about his “liberal friend.” ‘Cause every Republican has one. And every racist has one black friend.
Anyway, Benson has his own Wikipedia page. Much of the page has been vandalized by people in it for the lulz, but there are some things which are interesting and not made up.
For instance, Chris Hayes, the Washington editor of The Nation, wrote a profile of Benson which includes this tidbit:
Guy also managed to befriend the woman who ran the Fox News TelePrompTer, and every day in the lull before the show went on air, he’d go down to the studio, sit at the desk, and read through the entire Hannity & Colmes script off the machine. “Just to get practice,” he says, “using the TelePrompTer.”
Wait a minute…didn’t Hannity, Beck and other Republican drones make fun of Obama for using a teleprompter?
And when Guy goes to Bush’s second inaguration in 2005…
The group passed the time pointing out particularly goofy signs: a picture of a pig with the word war scrawled across, or one that read U R NOT PRESIDENT! Guy asked, “Is that sign directed to the 260 million Americans who are actually not the president?
“This,” he pronounced, “really solidifies the loony left image.”
Benson better not embrace the birthers, or else this quote will come back and haunt him. I promise.
Thirty, twenty, even ten years ago, a passionate young partisan like Guy would most likely be majoring in political science and angling for a job on Capitol Hill. But media is where it’s at for today’s conservatives. “Politics involves a lot of compromise,” says Guy. “So let’s say I were to run for Congress and during the primary I was asked about my positions on the death penalty or gun control, which differ from the party. I’d be faced with the choice of being honest and disqualifying myself from contention, or fudging the answer and compromising my principles. I’m not conservative enough on some issues to survive a primary and too conservative on other issues to win a general election.” He paused. “Not that I’ve thought about this a lot.
“Plus,” he added, “I feel like opinion shapers are rarely politicians.”
The scary thing is that a lot of people who would in any other universe take political science are instead taking broadcasting courses, since shaping opinion is more important than governing. Yeah there’s compromise in politics but in a diverse democracy of 300 million people, not everyone is going to agree on everything, least of all on details.
The Old Scout loses a badge
Garrison Keillor is often funny when he makes fun of the close-knit midwest. His show has great music and the sketches (especially “Guy Noir”) are funny tributes to old-time radio theater. His fiction can also be good, like in WLA: A Radio Romance. I also agree with a lot of his politics, which he described in Homegrown Democrat (although I have my problems with it).
Having said all that, I have a significantly lower opinion of the old scout after he wrote his weekly column that appears in the Baltimore Sun (it will run in the Strib on Sunday). It feels like someone venting long-restrained complaints at an inopportune time.
The whole thing starts going wrong when he criticizes Ralph Waldo Emerson, of all people.
[Emerson] preached here at the First Church of Cambridge, a Unitarian outfit… and [he] tossed off little bon mots that have been leading people astray ever since. “To be great is to be misunderstood,” for example. This tiny gem of self-pity has given license to a million arrogant and unlovable people to imagine that their unpopularity somehow was proof of their greatness.
I’ve never heard of such people, and I hope to never meet them. I’ve also never heard of such people justifying themselves with that quote. I also don’t like calling a church an “outfit.” It makes it sound like it’s part of a mafia conspiracy, which Keillor builds on later in his column. What he also conveniently forgets is that in the same paragraph that Emerson says that quote, he says an even more famous gem: “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
And all his hoo-ha about listening to the voice within and don’t follow the path, make your own path and leave a trail and so forth, encouraged people who might’ve been excellent janitors to become bold and innovative economists who run a wealthy university into the ditch.
This is something I’d like Keillor to explain a little bit more. That last bit about economists is a reference to Lawrence Summers taking part of Harvard’s endowment and investing it in the stock market, with the end result being the investment losing $1 billion in value. And Summers, who is now the director of the National Economic Council, did not become an economist because he read that quote from Emerson. Chances are he became an economist because that’s what his parents were and he is a nephew of Kenneth Arrow and Paul Samuelson, both of whom have won the Nobel Prize in Economics.
But never mind that. Summers is also Jewish, which becomes important in Keillor’s column later on.
Unitarians listen to the Inner Voice and so they have no creed that they all stand up and recite in unison, and that’s their perfect right, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite “Silent Night.” If you don’t believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn “Silent Night” and leave ours alone.
I wonder if I should tell him. Nah, he’s livid with rage over Unitarians. How could Unitarians provoke such anger? I don’t know. Keillor’s been on good terms with them for the longest time.
This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism, and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck.
No, Garrison. What you’re doing is cultural elitism. It is astounding that someone like Garrison Keillor would take a swipe at Jewish guys like that. When carolers knock on his door and they sing “White Christmas” does he have the same fits? (‘Cause, you know, it was written by Irving Berlin, a Jew)
Christmas is a Christian holiday – if you’re not in the club, then buzz off. Celebrate Yule instead or dance around in druid robes for the solstice. Go light a big log, go wassailing and falalaing until you fall down, eat figgy pudding until you puke, but don’t mess with the Messiah.
More cultural elitism. Non-Christians celebrate Christmas too and while earlier in this column it seemed like Keillor was okay with Unitarians celebrating Christmas, but I guess he changed his mind half way through.
He then goes into how Christmas is perfect and it doesn’t need improvements. Well, Garrison, nobody is saying that these things are “improvements.” This is just their own contribution to all the wonderful things that Christmas is. And you’re not a curmudgeon for saying these things. You’re a mean-spirited old man who deserves to spend at least one more Christmas in Norway with the flu.
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