Island Passage

As an update on my previous post , Harvey and Bob Weinstein, and their distributor MGM's Harry Sloan are releasing a Christmas slasher movie. Apparently a very lame Christmas slasher movie. A remake of a 1970s-era slasher movie. In light of their recent exploration of creating "Christian movies," there are two arguments to I anticipate: Don't give box-office money to these guys. They deserve to go broke. Pay to see their "Christian movies." They need positive reenforcement to make good movies. I, myself, tend naturally toward argument number 2. But in this case, the Weinsteins have taken up a stick with a nail in it and beaten me to argument 1.

Here are two stories that do not bode well : First, file this under the heading "HOLLYWOOD JUST DON'T GET IT" from Comingsoon.net : The Prodigal Son Works at Ikea? Variety reports that Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment have made a deal for Prodigal Son , a romantic comedy that Gigi Levangie Grazer will write with Mimi James. Brian Grazer will produce. The story revolves around a workaholic single woman who is set up on a date by her mother. Her date, a handsome, kind and caring carpenter who works at Ikea, turns out to be Jesus Christ, who's returned for Armageddon and settled in contemporary Los Angeles. "It's a love it or hate it idea, but we're not aiming to offend," Gigi Grazer told the trade. "He won't be having sex. It'll be a disarming romantic comedy, a story of unrequited love, sort of like 'Splash.'" Yow! Is this the price we pay for the de-mythologizing of Jesus!? It may be 'way past time to re...

An electoral map that lets you pit leading Democratic contenders against a few Republican contenders. I dispute it's accuracy on several grounds (it's 'way too early for these kinds of polls to make sense), but what fun! I'll be checking back on this sight throughout the primary season.

I, for one, welcome our Democratic Overlords : WASHINGTON — Famed pastor and best-selling author Rick Warren on Wednesday defended his invitation to Sen. Barack Obama to speak at his church despite objections from some evangelicals who oppose the Democrat's support for abortion rights. Obama is one of nearly 60 speakers scheduled to address the second annual Global Summit on AIDS and the Church beginning Thursday at Warren's Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif. But seriously, folks, the idea of inviting Barack Obama to speak to Conservative Evangelicals is a great one. It allows those Evangelicals to see the man and verify that he doesn't have horns or a bifurcate tail . It allows Obama to receive feedback from a conservative crowd, which is much better for us all than for him to be stuck in the Liberal echo chamber . The end result may be a contribution to the moderating effect in national politics. Speaking of Obama, a great observation on This Week with George was ...

Rich Lowry at National Review Online has a column on Barack Obama as the Anti-Hillary: ...After all this [hate for the names Clinton and Bush], who doesn’t hunger for a clean break? Thus the energy behind the possible presidential bid of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. He is the only presidential candidate from either party about whom there is a palpable excitement. And that is because everything about him says, “I’m not a Bush, I’m not a Clinton, and can we please talk about something else?” It will be manifestly good for the country if it elects a president in 2008 who doesn’t elicit yowling hatred from the other side... Hillary would have formidable assets in a 2008 race, but the timing could be against her. Maybe it’s too soon for another Clinton in presidential politics. On the Republican side, the most talented and accomplished Republican officeholder in the country, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, is sitting ’08 out precisely because of the baggage that currently attaches to his last name. ...

Sure it's early, but that's OK. James Lileks has settled the question : National issues do not have the usual appeal at the moment. It is hard to describe how little I care about presidential handicapping at this point. It’s going to be Guiliani / Rice v. Gore / Obama. Move along, please. That's not a bad guess. I don't think it'll be Gore, though. Maybe Clinton / Obama. I'm just saying...

I am a self-confessed Old Guy, so I like to actually travel to my polling place on election day to cast my vote. Today I dropped by on the way to work and encountered a uncrowded community hall, staffed by the lovely white-haired ladies whe are, to me, as certain a fixture of American Democracy as the Capitol dome. So some brief observations: When I showed my ID to the woman with the polling book list, I announced my address. The woman at the next table called out, "What house do you live in?" When I said that I was the next-door neighbor of G____, she said, "Oh yes! Your wife pet-sits dogs!" By our fruits are we known. I was half-way through marking my ballot when a woman who had come in after me went up to the poll workers and started asking questions about the candidates on the ballot. They told her several times that they could not, by law, do anything more than hand her the ballot. I called out to her that if she was too confused she could just copy my complete...

As if I didn't have enough on my plate, new books, articles, and blogs keep appearing. A new read (for me) is One Cosmos , a very funny and almost surrealistic walk through the mind of a thoughful supernatualist. So many words, so little coffee.

In a previous post , I quoted Rick Garnet on the conservative conspiracy : ...he can only report that they advanced their cause in those years by founding magazines and think tanks, seeking funding for both, associating with conservative forces within the Catholic Church, and forging ties between conservative Catholics and conservative Evangelicals. This is all very cunning, I expect, but I believe the customary term for such methods is "democratic politics" There is a very readable column in The Nation about Progressive Democrats trying to emulate this consarned, newfangled technique: The time had come for the donors to think differently about how to spend their money, just as conservatives had done forty years earlier when they launched a counteroffensive against liberalism and pushed the Republican Party far to the right. The meeting was led by Rob Stein, a former official in the Clinton Administration, who'd spent the last year and a half developing a PowerPoint p...

Wretchard notes over at The Belmont Club: One of the more curious gaps in popular history is the lack of a first rate account of the Spanish Reconquista , the name given to the 800 year campaign by Christian kingdoms in Spain to expel Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. Writing a dramatic history of the Reconquista is hard because it went on for so long. So long, in fact, that both sides had changed character over the intervening 8 centuries, one side morphing from the tribal Visigoths to the kingly state of Ferdinand and Isabella and the other going through a succession of Islamic regimes. There is, of course the The Poem of the Cid which I haven't read, and the movie El Cid which I have seen. However, the most exciting and dramatic fictionalization of the Reconquista I have encountered is The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay. I wait eagerly for the movie version .

Back in the late 1980s, there was a fascinating political indicator. It became very easy to tell which Republicans had presidential ambitions by listening to their "Come to Jesus" stories. What I mean is, everybody on the Republican bench was going around Lions and Kiwanis meetings giving much the same old rubber-chicken speeches of yesteryear, but adding a section where they described the moment they had become "born again." It was startling to read transcripts of Bob Dole, Alexander Haig , and many more telling how they had (figuratively) walked down that sawdust trail. Well, what is old in new again. John Kerry has trotted out his redemption story, and he's not alone : Kerry is the third high-profile Democrat to give a reflective, deeply personal speech on religion and politics in recent weeks, following Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) and Robert P. Casey Jr., the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania. The addresses fit into a broader effort by lib...

Mirror of Justice , provides a snippet of an outtake of a review of Damon Linker's book " The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege ." ...If I follow Linker's story—stripped, that is, of its bombast—it goes rather like this: There is a group of articulate and influential thinkers in America who believe firmly in liberal democracy and free markets and things of that sort, but who also believe that the principles underlying modern democratic order are derived from a long history of European Christian thought regarding human authority. They are, moreover, convinced that the notion of the inherent dignity and worth of every human being is grounded in something older than liberal tradition. They also think that an impermeable "wall of separation" between public policy and private faith is an extra-constitutional and misguided principle. They believe that the lives of the unborn ought to be protected in law, and that the Supreme Court's decisions pronouncing...

I don't think I am alone in feeling that I have become trapped in some kind of Bizarro World . Three items: The Pope calls Islam violent . Muslims attempt to prove the Pope wrong by murdering a nun . Grand Mufti Sheik Mohammed Rashid Kabbani: "T he pope's remarks emanated either from ignorance and lack of knowledge or were deliberately intended to distort Islam. Reason is the substance of Islam and its teachings ... Islam prohibited violence in human life." Maybe the Grand Mufti Sheik could spend a few moments to condemn his co-religionists from murdering helpless women. I really don't think that this kind of behavior can be accomodated. I don't think that you can blame the rest of the world for the loony, murderous acts of these people. We must condemn it. We must not excuse it. We must not say that it is in any way justified.

I'm having to mediate a dispute between Blogger Beta and the corporate firewall. So here are some blog posts that have been langushing.

Of the anniversary of 9/11, James Lileks writes about the upcoming movie The Path to 9/11 : Just so you know: 9/11 reset the clock for me. All hands went to midnight. I'm interested in what people did after that date, and if the movie shows that before the attack one side lacked feck and the other was feck-deficient, I don't worry about it. It's like revisiting Congressional debates about Hawaiian harbor security in November 1941. Y'all get a pass. The Etch-A-Sketch's turned over. Now: what have you said lately? And on pessimism in our culture: The news is never good. If the economy's up, there's an expert on hand from the Institute of the Possible Downside warning about unforseen pressure on the bond market, softening housing, hardening tensions, turgid wage growth, and explosive release of inflationary pressures. Have a cigarette. Was it bad for you? TV news gives me the same impression, which is why I avoid it. All those earnest faces. Good evening, we...

Wretchard comments on some re-thinking of the War on Terror: The genuine tone of amazement in the WSJ is a reminder of how poorly understood the military role of the War on Terror has been, especially in Iraq... The point is that from the beginning the Administration's War on Terror was never primarily military; it was always -- even from the days of the First Fallujah campaign -- fundamentally a political war and continues to be to this day, as the continued existence of Moqtada al-Sadr illustrates. ...The military's prosecution of a politico/military campaign can be viewed as an attempt to compensate for the failure of other aspects of American power (diplomatic, development and informational) to project themselves into the field. It's a Band-Aid to compensate for the absence of institutions which America, if it were truly an imperial power, would have had. But America will never have a BBC, which was itself the evolutionary product of Imperial Britain. Yet America has ...

Via Day at a Glance : Anglican dean compares terrorist bombers to the 'violent passion' of Jesus The Anglican Communion - seen by many Christians as being a sort of Huffington Post of Christendom - apparently has added another clerical eccentric to its ranks. After a series of well-publicized rifts, including some led by bishops who deny the Resurrection and at least one who is a practicing homosexual, the latest controversial pronouncement comes from the Rev. Canon Philip Gray, chaplain to the Bishop of Blackburn, who compared the actions of the London tube bombers to Jesus: We cannot simply ignore the violent passion of Jesus cleansing the temple with whips. We are never told of the collateral damage possibly resulting from his actions. In the Christian tradition we rejoice over the passionate commitment and bloody deaths of numerous martyrs. We need to consider deeply the fact that the same religious passion and spiritual single-mindedness lies at the heart of a London bomb...

The Constant Reader will know that I trace the decline of the Democratic Party to 1968. However, the recent crack-up of the party has a more proximate cause. The declining trend in the Democratic Party from 1968 to 1998 forced a crisis. The result of that crisis was the election of George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000, the Republican gain in Congressional seats in 2002, and the re-election of G.W.B. over John Kerry in 2004. The trend led to the crisis; the crisis led into the crack-up. So what were the trend, the crisis, and the crack-up? The trend was the Democrats gradualy slipping from being the majority party. The crisis was the collapse of the Clinton Presidency. The crack-up was the descent of the left-wing of the Democratic Party into conspriacy theory paranoia. David Limbaugh's new book, Bankrupt: The Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy of Today's Democratic Party , Mr. Limbaugh dissects the decline of the Democratic Party and discusses the trend, the crisis, and the crac...

As a follow-up to the story about the kidnapped journalists being freed , Mark Steyn muses on the importance of the conversion itself: It's striking how, for all this alleged multiculti sensitivity, we're mostly entirely insensitive to other cultures: We find it all but impossible to imagine how differently they view the world. Go back to that video in which Fox's Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig announced their conversion to Islam. The moment the men were released, the Western media and their colleagues wrote off the scene as a stunt, a cunning ruse, of no more consequence than yelling "Behind you! He's got a gun!" and then kicking your distracted kidnapper in the teeth. Indeed, a few Web sites seemed to see the Islamic conversion routine as a useful get-out-of-jail-free card. ...for the Fox journalists and the Western media who reported their release, what's the big deal? Wear robes, change your name to Khaled, go on camera and drop Allah's name hither...

I awoke this morning to the good news that Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig, the two kidnapped American journalists had been freed, were unharmed, and preparing to return home. Always one to find the ant at the picnic, I am troubled by one aspect of there captivity. It is contained in two terse, disjunct paragraphs in the New York Times coverage: Earlier today, their captors delivered a video showing the two men in long Arab robes reading lines from the Koran to indicate their conversion. Mr. Centanni said the men were forced to make videotapes decrying American policies and converting to Islam. “There were times I thought I’m dead, but now I’m not,” he said. I am not an expert on Islam, but as I understand it, forced conversions are valid conversions. From such a viewpoint, I ask three questions: 1) Are the conversions of Mr. Centanni and Mr. Wiig considered "valid" by CAIR and other moderate Muslim groups in the United States? 2) If these conversions are invalid, will we hear ...

News comes of the disintegration of the Christian Coalition : Three state affiliates have severed ties with the Christian Coalition of America, one of the nation's most powerful conservative groups during the 1990s but now buffeted by complaints over finances, leadership and its plans to veer into nontraditional policy areas. "It's a very sad day for our people, but a liberating day," said John Giles, president of the coalition's Alabama chapter, which said Wednesday that it was renaming itself and splitting from the national organization. The Iowa and Ohio chapters took similar steps this year. Giles said he and his Alabama colleagues have "a dozen hard reasons" for the action but would elaborate on only one: a perception that the coalition's leadership was diverting itself from traditional concerns such as abortion and same-sex marriage to address other issues ranging from the environment to Internet access. Giles predicted further defection...

I am going to be reading Night Blotter regularly for the a while. The author, who styles himself as a New York City cop*, has a close-up view of Rudy Guliani and has determined to follow his presidential campaign. From his first Rudy posting : As some readers may have noted, I predicted w/o reservation that Giuliani is not only going to run for U.S. President, he is going to win. Nonetheless, there is a lot of road between now and 2008--and fascinating road it is--particularly since many of those involved have their roots in the NYPD. As someone who has watched many of the New York characters who are soon going to assume the national (and international?) stage, I'm going to endeavor to track Rudy's candidacy as it develops (a bit) on the site, for a simple reason: While many NYC cops dislike Rudy because he was very tough on salary negotiations, he "gets" the terrorism issue--he is no Jonathan Zimmerman (see Friday's blog post). Rudy is socially somewhat liberal,...

Big thanks to Taleena over at Sun Comprehending Glass for pointing out this great review by Ross Douthat on the current crop of "Theocracy Mongers." She quotes a few paragraphs and encourages the Constant Reader to, "As always, read the rest." This is good advice. I have several friends who have ben reading and passing around Kevin Phillips's American Theocracy and gushing over its accuracy and truthfulness. Hmmm.... One of the life lessons that I have learned through the years is to check out what people in media and letters say against my direct knowledge of a subject. I recommend this as an exercise for the Constant Reader. Whether your area of expertise is arts, sciences, law enforcement, garbage collection, or enviromental law, read the general press coverage of events in that area and compare that coverage with your certain knowlege of the facts. Charitably, one can say that issues are often simplified to the point of being incorrect; uncharitably one...

I switched on the news this morning and saw a report about Joe Lieberman's defeat to Ned Lamont in the Connecticut Democratic party primary. The news anchor blabed on over a repeating loop of Joe coming out of a polling booth and Ned standing on a stage at his victory party, almost lost in the press of people trying to crowd up against some success, hoping that some of that success will rub off on them. There, behind Ned's right shoulder was Al Sharpton; behind his left shoulder was Jessie Jackson. Two race-baiters who have between them have never won any elective office. Though this is a blow for President Bush's Mideast policy, this may also be the high-water mark for the resurgent anti-war left. John McLaughlin points out this victory's surprising fragility: These Connecticut Democrats were opposed to the war and unfavorable to President Bush by about a 4 to 1 ratio. Joe Lieberman stood up to the antiwar radicals Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and found out he can’t ...

A topic much discussed in conservative circles a few years back was the dynamism of the Evangelical church in Latin America. Back then National Review had cover artwork showing Billy Graham in a sombrero. (Discerning Evangelicals knew that the Latin American Billy Graham was Luis Palau .) Here is a link to an example of that dynamism coming to the United States: Spreading the Word--Fast A new system makes church membership grow exponentially. BY ANDREA TUNAROSA Friday, July 28, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT At one of his recent Sunday services at the Heavenly Vision Center in the Bronx, N.Y., the Rev. Salvador Sabino asked all the "leaders" in the room to rise. He was shocked to see an elderly woman named Sonia among those who stood up. She was one of the quietest people he had ever known--he had once even wondered whether she was mute. Mr. Sabino then asked: "Will all the heads of a cell rise?" The woman remained standing. He later found out that, despite her withdrawn p...

The Constant Reader knows that I have many reservations of the validity of "Global Warming." However, noted theologian, presidential candidate, gym monkey , and ur-idiotarian Pat Robertson seems to be making the connection between this week's weather and global climate change: VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. -- The Rev. Pat Robertson said he hasn't been a believer in global warming in the past, but this summer's record-breaking heat is "making a convert out of me." On his "700 Club" broadcast, Robertson said, "It is getting hotter, and the icecaps are melting and there is a buildup of carbon dioxide in the air." Switching sides on an issue that divides evangelical Christians, Robertson said, "We really need to address the burning of fossil fuels." The religious broadcaster told viewers, "If we are contributing to the destruction of this planet, we need to do something about it." That just about tears it.

Another in a series of efforts by liberal media people trying to understand, portray, and make money from conservatives: 'Ally McBeal' Star to Play Conservative Pundit in New TV Series NEW YORK ABC reportedly has huge hopes for a new series to air this fall called "Brothers & Sisters," which will follow the hit "Desperate Housewives" on the schedule. Calista Flockhart, best known as Ally McBeal, plays a conservative radio host turned TV pundit. Others in the high-powered cast include Patricia Wettig, Rachel Griffiths, Ron Rifkin and Sally Field. Flockhart recently explained, "I really want to go back to work. It just seemed like the perfect time and the perfect project." Asked to describe the pundit, producer Ken Olin (formerly a star of “Thirty Something’) said, "She's not Ann Coulter. She's not insane."Writer Jon Robin Baitz added, "No, I think she's a thoughtful conservative. She's ideologically, in some respec...

I have just returned from a brief trip through the highways that comprise the "Cascade Loop," a delightful drive through alp-like peaks in northern Washington state. This is the first real vacation that I've had in many years and its occasion caused me to return to this review of my all-time favorite travel book, which I consider the funniest book in the English Language: Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the Dog) , by Jerome Kappa Jerome, is a pure delight. Through repeated re-readings it never, never palls. Written as a travelogue serial for a magazine at the turn of the century (1898 must be specified as we have past the turning of another century), the book takes the framework of a road story and hangs upon it a series of misadventures, remembered anecdotes, and observations about life. I have been told that since it's first publication, it has never been out of print. The three men are George, Harris, and J. (Jerome himself). All three work in The City (Lond...

I grew up in Southern California and saw (and still see) the idolization of motion picture actors as the kind of déclassé thing that is done by tourists who buy maps to the star's homes, and dream about encountering their big-screen heroes walking down the street in Hollywood. Hollywood is an industry town; and the industry is movies. When I was a teenager, my goal wasn't to to be a movie star, it was to play horn in a studio orchestra. So why are people whose main talent is pretending to be other people so celebrated? John Adams in a letter to Thomas Jefferson defines the basis for aristocracy: The five Pillars of Aristocracy, are Beauty, Wealth, Birth, Genius and Virtues. Any one of the three first, can at any time over bear any one or both of the two last. Rick Brookhiser comments that this applies to Hollywood stars: The stars of Hollywood have beauty, and genius of a kind. Hence they are aristocrats in a media age. Which reminds me of the scene in Back to the Future whe...

Yesterday was the 81st anniversary of the Scopes trial. American Heritage is running a 20 question quiz on the "trial of the century." What is amazing is not what you don't know--it's what you know that ain't true. Q. So what you're saying is that Inherit the Wind , Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's 1955 play based on the Scopes trial (which was made into a film in 1960), in which a defeated character based on Bryan breaks down and cries on the witness stand, is alternative history? A. Exactly. The only difference is that if someone writes a play in which the South wins the Civil War, everyone knows it's fiction. With Inherit the Wind, all too many people seem to think it's fact. Inherit the Wind has become an iconic movie in American culture. It tells the story of the 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial" that repudiated creationism and freed educators across the land to freely teach Darwinian evolution. Except that it didn't. Scope...

So what do we hear from Democratic "netroots" regarding a Southern culture? (a key to implementing the "Southern Strategey" as described by Dave "Mudcat" Saunders ) Why, let's listen in : The Peckerwood era in the south were good ole days for southerners, or at least as good as it got after Lee's crying uncle and throwing in the towel to the hated Yankees. They still had the Negroes to kick around and could freely exercise their domestic version of Apartheid, (`least till dose meddlin' hippie college boys began stickin' dere noses where day didn't belong and stirrin' up a ruckus) until that long avowed day when the south would rise again, and rising is just what it is doing in 2005 with the help of Jesus and the GOP (Good Ole Peckerwoods)... This is the reality of the situation: deep south bible belt whites, mainly poor, increasingly hostile and always Republican now own a disproportionate amount of political power in America and ...

The Constant Reader will know that I have a bone to pick with Democrats who put on Christianity like a magic hat to try and convince us dumb old fundamentalists that they, too, get this "God thing." Well, the Democrats have one national figure who "gets it." Barack Obama gave a very thoughtful speech the other day: For some time now, there has been plenty of talk among pundits and pollsters that the political divide in this country has fallen sharply along religious lines. Indeed, the single biggest "gap" in party affiliation among white Americans today is not between men and women, or those who reside in so-called Red States and those who reside in Blue, but between those who attend church regularly and those who don't. Conservative leaders have been all too happy to exploit this gap, consistently reminding evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their Church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that relig...

If Democrats were asking me (which they are most certainly not) they'd be listening to Dave "Mudcat" Saunders . One of Mudcat's myriad cris de coeur (besides the lament that Democrats "have no testosterone" and are unable to "get through the culture" of the South) is that his party can't count. "Politics is about addition, that's all it is. It's not difficult," he says, giving me a primer on Mudcat math. "If I go get a white male," he asks, "how many votes do I get?" One, I reply. "No," he says impatiently, "I get two. Because I just took one away from Republicans." It is the most elegantly simple precept, he says, one that could end the Democratic drought, and yet they don't see it because they think targeting Bubba males alienates their base and smacks of racism. "No it doesn't," he says. "My African-American friends want to win as much as I do. . . . Democrat...

It's become a common observation among conservatives to note that Richard Hofstadter's essay, " The Paranoid Style in American Politics ," more and more closely describes what is happening among the warring factions of the Democratic party. Hofstadter's comments about conservative criticisms of the Korean war now apply to Liberal criticisms of the Global War on Terror: ...Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination. In the end, the real mystery, for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position but how it has managed to survive at all. The group that was the banner carrier for the paranoid politics about which Hofstadter wrote was the unhinged John Birc...

Mona Charon muses on the reasons she is a conservative and quotes one of the finest bon mots I have ever read. ...He has reminisced about moving to Washington in the 1960s. Paraphrase: “I was a young, brash Barry Goldwater conservative. But in the intervening years, I’ve matured and grown and moved steadily to the right.”

After suffering a stoke, publisher Jim Baen has died. While I will write more later, David Drake has written a wonderful obituary . UPDATE: Just Barking Mad reminds us that Jim remembered when he was a young soldier: The final, and perhaps the most important thing to me, is that Jim never forgot the serviceman. Once a lowly private on the Bavarian border Jim would later send tens of thousands of first run books to soldiers, seaman, airmen and Marines around the globe at no expense to them. Naturally there were some who decried this a publicity stunt. I know that it was not…Jim cared. He was honored when they thanked him. Letters from service members took place of pride on his website.

It's like falling through the looking glass. Howard Dean likens 2006 to 1968 : "We're about to enter the '60s again," Dean said, but he was not referring to the Vietnam War or racial tensions. Dean said he is looking for "the age of enlightenment led by religious figures who want to greet Americans with a moral, uplifting vision." . . . Baby, the last thing the Democratic Party wants is a to be led by a religious figure with a moral vision. Alternating between references to the "McCarthy era" of the 1950s, which he accused the Bush administration of reviving, the decade of the 1960s and the current era, Dean explained that he was "looking to go back to the same moral principles of the '50s and '60s." Man, are we back to that 50s "Happy Days" nostalgia again? That was a time that stressed "everybody's in it together," he said. "We know that no one person can succeed unless everybody else succeeds....

Christopher Hitchens has written about the silence of the Peace Movement when it comes to actually..., you know..., doing something more that pounding drums . ...may I propose some ways in which those who don't want to be associated with Michael Moore, George Galloway, Ramsey Clark, and the rest of the Zarqawi and Saddam apologists can make themselves plain? Here are four headings under which the anti-war types could disprove the charge of bad faith. He lists the four things: Promote the ban on land mines. Human shields to protest the tageting of Iraqi civilians by terrorists. Reaffirm the condemnation of sanctions against Iraq. Re-start the drive to allow homosexuals to serve in the US armed forces. I don't have much to say about number four. This seems to be kind of tacked onto the whole Iraq thing, like a senator placing an earmark for his home state in a highway appropriations bill. But look at number one. Remember Princess Di? Patron saint of the tabloid? She was making ...

Russell Cobb over in Slate writes about the appearance of cracks in what is usually seen as a monolithic American Christian Nationalism. In this article he counters the alarm-crying of cultural observers such as Kevin Phillips and Michelle Goldberg . I have written about my own differences with the National Association of Evangelicals over their stance on Environmental issues. What astonishes me is that anyone who has 1) any knowledge of church history and 2) access to a newspaper would conclude that Christians--especially American Christians--would be able to form some sort of long-lasting, all-encompassing political coalition. The branch of the church that seems to have observers such as Michelle Goldberg exercised is the Fundamentalist/Evangelical branch of Protestant Christianity. Let's take a look at this unity: Christianity hasn't been monolithic since, oh...at least seven years after its founding when the Apostle Peter baptized a Roman commander , scandalizing wha...