The predicament of a woman who has Tommy tattooed across her tailbone and ends up marrying Jack is not unlike the predicament of a nation run by ideology instead of common sense. According to current vogue in politics, this woman should not flip-flop from Tommy to Jack, even though Tommy is in jail for raping her kid sister. (more…)

The CNN crawl this morning declared the Flip-Flop Wars. Barack Obama had changed course about campaign finance, deciding not to limit himself to a federal contribution, and John McCain had decided offshore drilling is okay after all.

The more important issue is the press’ mindless acceptance of the received boobism that changing one’s mind, one’s position about issues, is bad. Anyone who embraces this mania du jour doesn’t hold out much promise as a leader. Anyone incapable of course corrections in response to changing circumstances is a meathead.

And yet the press maintains its ludicrous flip-flop watch as if it were a national security alert. If we elect those who never change their minds and never alter course we deserve what we get. The notion of flip-flop is bogus. It panders to ideologues. But insistence on inquiring and flexible minds in our leaders is essential. The press confuses integrity with ideology.

If Alexander the Great had not been what our feckless press is calling a flip-flopper he would have been Alexander the Loser. —DM

The glory of Christianity is its gospel of love, charity and compassion, so why do condemnatory histrionics from the pulpit about family values, abortion and homosexuality dominate news of Christendom while the pulpit’s deafening silence about a church-going society that allows insurance adjusters to make a mockery of its dearest tenets is met with complimentary silence in the media? (more…)

It’s interesting how eager both the left and the right wings are to pull the trigger on Scott McClellan, the former White House spokesman, who has written a book confirming many of our worst suspicions about the Bush Administration.

If he knew his bosses were lying about Iraq and Valerie Plame, the CIA undercover agent whom they treacherously outed, why didn’t he speak up, save thousands of lives, dollars and damages? That’s what many of his critics of the left and right are yowling. (more…)

(This is the latest transcript of Hot Copy my regular podcast for The Student Operated Press)

One of the reasons I cherish The New York Times is its institutional eye for the easy-to-overlook and profound. The March 27th front page features a story by Brian Stelter called Finding Political News Online, Young Viewers Pass It Along. It may prove to be the most significant story of the first fifty years of the century, and to its credit The Times put it on the front page.

The story is about the socialization of news and imagery, not in the political sense, but in the sense that sharing news and imagery has become part of the way we socialize with each other. We like a blog post, a news story, an essay, an image, a poem, a quotation, and next thing you know it’s whizzing around the world to friends and family. What we’re accustomed to calling news is becoming as personal and intimate as a jewel box or a pack of baseball cards. (more…)

Hickory dickory dock, Pillory Clinton is determined to turn back the clock, now borrowing $6.4 from herself in her Energizer Bunny effort to convince us we’re not ready to elect an African-American. That’s her message. She can disguise it with talk about Barack Obama’s inexperience and empty eloquence, but the message is we’re not ready to put racism behind us.

This quintessential power elitist and Washington insider will seemingly pillory the Illinois senator for anything she thinks will stick, including his so-called elitism, which is a scintilla of her own. In the name of giving us a real choice, she has buried the real issues under a heap of non-issues, such as her guileful gas tax holiday and the Jeremiah Wright flapdoodle. In the guise of being ready on Day One to take over she has demonstrated not only a startling hubris and pettiness but Washington dirt-mongering as usual. (more…)

Calling for Iraq’s militias to disband, whether it’s our call or the Baghdad government’s, may be like King George or the Continental Congress calling on the states to disband their militias. Lots of luck with that.

Iraq’s separate sects, peoples and provinces have far less in common than the original thirteen states.

Seen in this context, the debate over how long to stay in Iraq looks very different from the debate the press has framed. The picture we’re getting is that if we leave there will be chaos, genocide and further threats to our domestic security, and therefore discussion about leaving is political blather. (more…)

America is haunted by The Other, by otherness. The fastest approach to an understanding of this is to consider the photographs of the people we send to Washington. They don’t look like our demographics. They look northern European.

We look for The Other to determine who we don’t want in our churches, our neighborhoods, our schools. Worse yet, we look for The Other to determine who should not be helped by our hard-earned tax money. Much of our historic resentment of taxes is actually an unwillingness to provide public help to people unlike us.

In our quest for The Other we have at times considered Asians as well as Italians, Jews, Greeks and other Mediterranean people as non-whites, and today we are inclined to consider Arabs and Hispanics in the same light, whereas at least 47 percent of our Hispanic population identifies itself as white. (more…)

For six days the new American-trained Iraqi army was unable to wrest control of the southern oil port of Basra from Moktada al Sadr’s Shi’ite militia. Then Mr. Sadr suspended the battle and demanded concessions.

That’s the news. We’ve all heard it. But something is buried in the news that calls into question all the claims by George Bush and John McCain and Dick Cheney and others that the surge is working: senior Iraqi officials had to go to Iran to negotiate the end of fighting with Mr. Sadr. (more…)

The next time a politician or pundit says anything about Iraq, anything at all, ask yourself if you have ever heard him say that Iranians have historically regarded Shi’ism as a deterrent to Arabization?

If you haven’t heard anybody who sounds knowledgeable talking about this, then you have no reason to think him knowledgeable.

We may not have liked Saddam Hussein, but unless we intended to hand over most of Iraq to Iranian influence, we should have thought twice before invading. Iran’s quarrels with the Arabs far outweigh its quarrels with us. (more…)