Hell hath no fury like a homosexual seemingly scorned. That seems to be the lesson learned by the media in the immediate aftermath of Barack Obama's announcement that he will have Rick Warren - pastor of the 20,000-member Saddleback megachurch in Lake Forest, California - deliver the invocation at his presidential inauguration next month. Warren is most famous for his bestselling book, "The Purpose-Driven Life," his godly attempt to imitate motivational speaker Tony Robbins, as well as the genuine good works he does in poverty-stricken corners of the world. Lately, however, he's been involved in less benign activities, namely the campaign to pass California's Proposition 8, the constitutional amendment stripping gays of their court-ordered right to marry. Pastor Rick represents the new face of evangelical Christianity in America in that he puts a friendly sheen on homophobia, delivering the requisite line that he supports "equal rights" for everybody and that some of his best friends are gay, he just doesn't want them to have the same rights as heterosexuals. Oh, and legitimizing their "lifestyles," he says, would be akin to accepting bestiality and incest.

Gay activists were understandably angered by this announcement, and they made that anger felt. Joe Solomonese, head of the Human Rights Campaign, the country's most prominent gay rights organization, issued a public letter to Obama calling his decision a "genuine blow to LGBT Americans." The denizens of the Huffington Post have been expressing their rage, and the popular gay blog Queerty went so far as to claim that Obama "spat on the gays." Adorable lesbian Rachel Maddow called it "the first big mistake of his post-election politicking."

Color me not outraged. In part because amidst all the righteous indignation (something that professional gay activists never seem to lack) over Obama's selection of Warren to deliver his inaugural invocation was his simultaneous choice of Joseph Lowery, a black pastor, civil rights leader and, important for the purposes of the controversy du jour, gay civil union supporter, to deliver the benediction, or news that Tammy Baldwin, the only openly-gay Congresswoman, was named an honorary co-chairman of Obama's Inauguration Committee. "I'll leave those who are upset to their calling," Lowery remarked when asked for his views on l'affaire Warren, suggesting that the perpetually-outraged gay Left might want to reconsider their behavior with what they claim their life's work to be. Did the dons of the gay lobby ever stop to question whether Lowery and Baldwin's presence on the dais would similarly upset the Bible-thumpers? Not for nothing did John Gallagher and Chris Bull call the gay movement and the religious right, "Perfect Enemies." More than one person has seriously suggested to me that the Reverend Fred Phelps, he of "God Hates Fags" fame, might actually be a plant on the gay rights lobby's payroll.  

Invocation, benediction, what's the difference? Apparently, a lot. "The person selected to deliver the invocation has the honor of serving as the spiritual representative for the entire nation," writes Leah McElrath Renna. Perhaps I missed it, but there is no "spiritual representative" of our constitutional republic, and Renna does her cause no bit of good by ascribing such official significance upon a private citizen like Warren, a man whom most Americans did not know about until gay rights activists raised such a stink, and upon further investigation sounds like a pretty nice guy not deserving of all the insults heaped upon him. The uproar over Warren has the detriment of confirming one of the worst stereotypes of homosexuals: hysteria. That's because Warren is the lowest common denominator of the socially conservative evangelicals. Up until the Proposition 8 fight, his political involvement extended to such hot-button, "culture war" issues as fighting African AIDS and poverty. Aside from the incest/bestiality slip (which was an effort, however clumsily executed, to make a slippery slope argument rather than a serious attempt at morally equating daughter/dog love to homosexuality) Warren has never really used his high public profile or pulpit to preach hatred of gay people, something that can hardly be said of the long list of Elmer Gantryesque charlatans the GOP has surrounded itself with over the past 30 years. Asked what was a "greater threat to the American family - divorce or gay marriage," Warren answered, "That's a no brainer. Divorce. There's no doubt about it," which makes him far more honest than most politically involved conservative evangelical preachers. Count me as being a member of the pragmatist gay camp (not to be confused with theater, dance or other camps), encapsulated by my friend Chris Crain, who writes, "It is a stroke of political brilliance to recruit a conservative megapastor in support of a president-elect who is arguably the most pro-gay, pro-choice and progressive in our history."

The problem for gay activists is that many Americans agree with Rick Warren when it comes to same-sex love. And these people, numbering in the over 100 million range, are not going to be budged in their views by hectoring activists who call them bigots (even though that's what many of them are). Now, I'm of the firm belief that these debates will be moot in 20 years, when the older generation kicks the bucket and the near-universally gay-accepting Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers take the reins of government. Whatever political victories they feel that they've won from Proposition 8 and the other marriage amendments across the country, the anti-gay forces of reaction in this country are gasping their last breath. The honest ones among them acknowledge this, if not publicly. We will hasten the day of gay equality by engaging respectfully with them and winning over the persuadable ones (many of whom, I bet, are followers of Warren), rather than calling them names.  

In that vein, gays would do well to store their gunpowder for the truly significant legislative battles that will no doubt be fought in the years ahead. Getting rid of the odious and national security-weakening "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" regulation, repealing the Defense of Marriage Act, passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and Matthew Shepard hate crimes law will all be possible over the next four years now that we have a Democratic president and Congress committed - at least on paper - to effecting these positive changes. If gays had given Obama some much-needed slack on Rick Warren, perhaps he'd feel a political debt to us when these truly significant issues come up for debate. But how sincere - or politically threatening - will gay complaints about administration foot-dragging on issues that actually affect millions of gay and lesbian people sound in light of the unwarranted outrage that's been generated over the guy who's going to deliver a two-minute reading that no one will remember? Attacking the President-Elect who campaigned as the most pro-gay candidate in American history over an issue as irrelevant as this one, I fear, makes us look like we're crying wolf. And we all know how that fable ended.

The New York Times featured a profile of Senator Joe Lieberman on Monday, in which, predictably, a bunch of unnamed political hacks huff and puff and vent their rage at the Connecticut Senator and the Vice Presidential nominee of the Democratic Party eight years ago. Midway through is this little attempt at revisionist history:

Mr. Curry had lunch with Mr. Lieberman in December 2005 and warned about the antiwar sentiment sweeping Connecticut. “This is not an argument over the capital gains tax,” Mr. Curry recalled telling him. “This is the biggest foreign policy mistake in the history of the country.” Mr. Lieberman, who often praised the defense secretary at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, shrugged off this advice. He saw the war as an epic struggle against Islamic terrorism; bombing Iran might not be a bad idea, either.

Actually, in October of 2003--a mere six months after the successful overthrow of Saddam Hussein--Lieberman called for Rumsfeld's resignation, long before it was fashionable. Here's what he said rather plainly on CBS News:

The uniform military feel deeply that he doesn't respect them, doesn't listen to them. The judgment about whether he stays or not is up to President Bush, but if I were president, I'd get a new Secretary of Defense.

Then there's the snarky, throw-away line stating that Lieberman came around to the belief, circa 2005, that "bombing Iran might not be a bad idea, either." Never mind the sneering tone: does Michael Powell have Lieberman on record (or even off) uttering anything along lines indicating support for "bombing Iran?" Lieberman has never called for the bombing of Iran. In fact, he delivered a speech at the Munich Security Conference last week in which he called for tougher sanctions so as to prevent military action. The assertion that Joe Lieberman thinks attacking Iran is "not a bad idea" is an outright lie. And it raises a question: why is establishment media now so keen on attacking anyone with views on military intervention to the right of Barack Obama's?

Related: The whole premise of this article is a factual error.

On September 11, 2001, the world champion chess player Bobby Fischer had this to say:

This is all wonderful news...I applaud the act. The U.S. and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians, just slaughtering them for years. Robbing them and slaughtering them. Nobody gave a shit. Now it's coming back to the U.S. Fuck the U.S. I want to see the U.S. wiped out.

In addition to accusing Gary Kasparov of being a former KGB agent and a "crook," Fischer also had these delightful observations about Jews:

The Jews are a "filthy, lying bastard people" bent on world domination through such insidious schemes as the Holocaust ("a money-making invention"), the mass murder of Christian children ("their blood is used for black-magic ceremonies"), and junk food (William Rosenberg, the founder of Dunkin' Donuts, is singled out as a culprit).

Fischer died last week at the age of 64, and he'll probably be remembered for his radical views as much as his prowess as a chess champion. His ravings about Jews came to mind as I had just published excerpts from Ron Paul's newsletters on The New Republic website in which Fischer was praised as an "American hero." A cursory investigation reveals who might have been responsible for such passages.

The historian Ronald Radosh sent me the following email last week, recounting his experiences with Murray Rothbard, one of the leading lights of American libertarianism and an intellectual guru to Ron Paul:

You probably know that at one point I co-authored a book with Murray Rothbard that the Von Mises institute has now scanned and put on the web. I had been good friends with him and used to see him a lot during the so-called "left-right" alliance he forged in the 60's. At that point the concentration was on the Vietnam war. I broke with him and indeed never saw him again a few years later. He started to publish a mimeographed newsletter (oh those days before xerox copiers, blogs and the web) that had a very limited circulation. He would give me copies. I wished I had saved them. They were viciously anti-Semitic (even though he was born Jewish he converted and became a Baptist) and anti-Israel. That had never come through when I was associated with him, and I was stunned. He had some crazy analogy that I can't quite remember that put Cambodia and the slaughter there with Israel. I think he took a Chomsky like attitude towards Pol Pot and argued in print that those attacking Pol Pot and the Cambodian slaughter were doing so in order to gain sympathy with Israel through the back door.

For more on Rothbard's extreme anti-statism -- so extreme that it is indistinguishable from far-left anti-Americanism -- check out the CATO Institute's Tom Palmer, who has been tracking the "fever swamps" of the libertarian movement for years.

Repulsive comments such as the ones above, according to Rothbard -- in an essay published in a collection entitled, "The Irrepressible Rothbard" -- are at worst, "not Politically Correct." Rothbard had immense admiration for Fischer, a strange person to admire. But the two men had one thing in common; they were both Jews who had tried to erase any sense of their heritage, a severing that manifested itself in the form of self-hating anti-Semitism.

Slate has republished a 2005 essay by Melonyce McAfee in praise of Kwanzaa. Acknowledging that the holiday is "made-up" (without really getting into what this means), McAfee nonetheless concludes that her mother's decision to celebrate it was a positive one because "it brought my family together." That's all well and good -- but there are certainly ways of bringing the family together that don't involve paeans to Marxism, black nationalism and hating whitey.

McAfee makes only passing mention of the man who founded Kwanzaa, Dr. Maulana Karenga, né Ronald Everett. In her family-focused narrative, the man who created the holiday and his reasons for doing so are of negligible importance. She suspects, however, that readers are at least somewhat familiar with the radical origins of Kwanzaa, but dispatches this criticism with mockery, criticizing those "the naysayers who mock Kwanzaa as a pseudo holiday, created to annoy white people and kept alive to peddle cards and kente cloth."

In a serious discussion of Kwanzaa, however, the holiday's founder--and his ideology--deserve a little more than mere passing mention. Karenga came to prominence in the 1960's when he founded the United Slaves Organization (US), a group more radical than the Black Panthers, on the UCLA campus. The outfit was little more than a political cult and Karenga possessed all the traits of a political cult leader: megalomania, paranoia, and an inclination to lash out violently against his opponents, a black nationalist Joseph Smith if you will. All these traits were on display during a May 9, 1970 incident in which Karenga ordered the torture of two women he believed to have been an informant (Karenga himself allegedly beat the woman with an electrical cord). Here is a newspaper account:

According to a Los Angeles Times account of testimony published at the time of the trial, Karenga and the other men forced the women to remove their clothes, and beat them with an electrical cord and a karate baton. The men put a hot soldering iron in one woman's mouth and against her face, and they squeezed one woman's big toe in a vise, the Times reported. Karenga's former wife, Brenda Lorraine Karenga, testified he sat on one woman's stomach while another man forced water into her mouth through a hose, according to the Times.

"Vietnamese torture is nothing compared to what I know," Karenga allegedly told the women, the Times reported Oct. 7, 1970, shortly after Karenga's arrest.

Jones said during the trial that Karenga initiated the attacks because he suspected her and Davis of trying to poison him with "crystals."

But it's not just the violence which renders Kwanzaa a dubious "holiday;" many traditional Judeo-Christian celebrations are rooted in acts of violence, Chanukkah being an example (though that violence was arguably righteous, as opposed to Karenga's attempt to re-enact Hostel). It is Kwanzaa's separatist, Marxist ideology which ought to give African-Americans pause before embracing it. Here are the 7 principles celebrated during Kwanzaa:umoja, or unity; kujichagulia, or self-determination; ujima, or collective work and responsibility; ujamaa, or cooperative economics; kuumba, or creativity; and imani, or faith. "Creativity" and "faith" are wonderful things to celebrate, "cooperative economics" not so much. They haven't worked so well in Africa, to be sure.

Rick Rosendall explains how Kwanzaa opposes the American creed here, working in arguments by one of the greatest, yet under-appreciated, 20th century figures, Bayard Rustin:

Our destinies are inextricably intertwined by our shared history. Whether they like it or not, the heritage of white Americans contains African threads; and whether they like it or not, the heritage of black Americans contains European ones. You do not shed the European portion of your heritage merely because you take an Afrocentric name, nor do you give up your stake in the greater society of which you remain a part. In addition to colonialism (which existed in Africa before the white man came), Western heritage includes free markets and individual liberties, as well as the idea that all men are created equal.

Rejecting that idea four decades ago as a sham, Karenga and other radicals adopted a revolutionary posture and an Afrocentric program. In doing so they repudiated integrationists like civil rights strategist Bayard Rustin, who pointed out that Black Studies "will hardly improve [black students'] intellectual competence or their economic power." In the campaigns by Karenga and his comrades to "Buy Black" and create autonomous communities, the language of liberation was a poor substitute for development capital. As Rustin wrote in his 1970 essay "The Failure of Black Separatism," "The call for community control in fact represents an adjustment to inequality rather than a protest against it."

Karenga is your garden variety racial-nationalist thug, a mix between Louis Farrakhan and Amiri Baraka. But this doesn't matter to McAfee, who simply wants people to understand that Kwanzaa was "a way to bring our ragtag family together and nudge us away from the false idols and commercial trickery of the holiday season." Yes, the principle of "cooperative economics" may disavow the obsession with merchandise that have come to mark the holiday season, but Kwanzaa is not lacking in the "false idols" department, black nationalism and Marxism being two pretty major gods that failed. McAfee should at least have the honesty to reconcile the actual reasons the holiday was created -- and, I imagine, the reasons why whatever few actual adherents it has celebrate it today -- with whatever beneficent characteristics she imputes to it and lay off implying that its critics are somehow crypto-racists.

Last, and least, is the faux-holiday's obvious ripoff of Chanukah that makes Kwanzaa just plane lame: 7 days instead of 8, but the candelabra is still there.

Just a few weeks ago, I criticized Desmond Tutu for one of his chronically outrageous statements about the Middle East. Of more interest to me, however, was that many use the "he's Desmond Tutu" line as if it that were in and of itself sufficient to defend him against charges that his rantings about the Jews and Israel are borderline anti-Semitic (not to mention how self-defeating and historically ignorant it is for him to compare the South African freedom struggle -- which never had serious elements worshipping a cult of death or calling for the wholesale genocide of its enemies -- to the Palestinian cause). I wrote:

Desmond Tutu is indeed a man of great stature; his criticism of the African National Congress for its unforgivable policies in support of Robert Mugabe and its AIDS denialism, as well as his calls for African Christians to be more accepting of homosexuality, have been exemplary and courageous. But he's not perfect, and happens to have rather odious views about the Middle East. I feel no amount of intellectual inconsistency embracing him for his honesty on Zimbabwe, AIDS and gays, while simultaneoulsy finding his words about Israel and Jews outrageous.

Lest my interlocutors at the time felt this avowal was a cop-out, I'll take this moment to praise Tutu for his latest moral declaration: lashing out at the Anglican Church for its "obsession" with gays. The years-long rift and coming split in the Church between its liberal, Western wings and the culturally conservative global south has not been lost on Tutu:

"Our world is facing problems -- poverty, HIV and Aids -- a devastating pandemic, and conflict," Tutu said.

"God must be weeping looking at some of the atrocities that we commit against one another.

"In the face of all of that, our church, especially the Anglican church, at this time is almost obsessed with questions of human sexuality."

"If God as they say is homophobic I wouldn't worship that God."

Dem's fighting words. Contrast Tutu with Peter Akinola, the Archbishop of Nigeria, who has to compete with Muslims for African converts (which is not to suggest that he doesn't believe the homophobic hatred he regularly spews) and has called homosexuality a "chronic aberration." No word yet on whether African Anglicans plan on matching the head of the Ugandan Muslim community's plan for a gay island.

With boy pundit Matthew Yglesias, it's difficult to discern where the attempt at serious political analysis ends and sheer buffoonery begins. Or, perhaps I mean where the sheer buffoonery ends and the attempt at serious political analysis begins. The dilemma is on full display in this post from yesterday.

First read the post, which is thankfully brief. Yglesias's premise is that the Clinton administration was doing a fine job tackling international terrorism until the Bush administration came into power. This contention -- while debatable -- is significant only insofar as Yglesias wishes to cast doubts on his own sanguine assumptions about the competency of the Clinton administration (perhaps this will this merit him an "Yglesias Award" nomination, inexplicably doled out by Andrew Sullivan for those writers daring to express views at odds with their own political constituencies). Yglesias links to a 6-year-old news story about Clinton's then-outgoing United Nations Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who, in final statements to the world body before the inauguration of George W. Bush stated that containment of Hussein, "while it is far from satisfactory," was nonetheless necessary, expressed frustration with Hussein's refusal to allow weapons inspectors into the country, and promised that the administration of George W. Bush, like that of his father, would also have to deal with the lingering problem of the Ba'athist regime in Baghdad. There's really nothing here that's in the least controversial or was ever disputed by knowledgeable observers, except, perhaps, by the likes of Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Ron Paul, and, it now seems, Matthew Yglesias.

To Yglesias, Holbrooke -- now a senior foreign policy advisor to Senator Hillary Clinton and a sure bet for Secretary of State should she become president -- is damaged goods because, like nearly everyone else at the time (including, one should note, Yglesias himself), he believed that Saddam's "willingness to be cruel internally is not unique in the world, but the combination of that and his willingness to export his problems makes him a clear and present danger at all times." This statement does not at all indicate support for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent occupation of Iraq (again, which Yglesias supported). It's merely a boilerplate expression of the policy of the Clinton administration (under whose watch the Iraq Liberation Act, making "regime change" United States policy, passed overwhelmingly in the House, unanimously in the Senate, and was enacted into law).

Though he doesn't come out and say it, this is a not-so-subtle attempt on Yglesias's part to retroactively group Holbrooke in with the evil-doers, the neo-cons, admission into whose fold today requires little more than "frequently call[ing] attention to the unprovoked aggression of despotic regimes (e.g. Iran and Syria), the violation of human rights in other countries, and advocates the moral superiority of democratic countries in international affairs." (Holbrooke, at least in the excerpts cited by Yglesias, is only guilty of the first two offenses). The word "neo-con" is now used by the net-left to describe anyone to their immediate right who doesn't agree with them. Yglesias's entire schtick is that the entire Beltway "foreign policy community" is a corrupt lot whose supposedly consensus opinions have proven a disaster for the country; his simplistic, uninformed, and self-aggrandizing view of how American foreign policy is formed groups people like Richard Holbrooke and Frank Gaffney into the same boat and assumes that nothing less than a Jacobin, intellectual purge and the subsequent elevation of Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, LaRouchite Robert Dreyfuss and their ilk to prominent positions in the liberal punditocracy and the return of Zbigniew Brzezniski into the State Department will cure Washington's poisoned think-tank and diplomatic cultures and bring American foreign policy back on track.

For too long, journalists (myself included) have taken Yglesias seriously; we've treated him as someone whose writings actually merit measured and contemplative responses. Perhaps this due consideration is given to the fact that Yglesias has a perch at The Atlantic. But even bloggers (as opposed to actual journalists, who, you know, actually do things like travel abroad or pick up the phone before opining about international affairs) ought to have an elementary understanding of history and logic. The proper way to treat Yglesias is demonstrated by the indefatigable New York Sun national security reporter Eli Lake, who does not suffer fools lightly, in a comment to said post:

Matt,

How can this be? Everyone knows the neocons pressured the CIA and lied to the American public to start a needless war for Israel. Everyone knows that the State Department and the CIA knew, just knew, that Iraq was no threat whatsoever. I mean the only explanation is that Holbrooke must have been a neocon. But if he's a neocon, well what was he doing in the Clinton administration that was paying so much attention to the real threats to America? Maybe you and Matthew Duss could explain all this to[o].

Eli

By Yglesias's reasoning, anyone who expressed views similar to those of Richard Holbrooke in 2001 (meaning almost the entire Democratic Party foreign policy establishment and many liberal journalists, including Yglesias), is not "prescient" and their views on foreign policy ought be discounted. This is obvious nonsense, and I'm not sure if Yglesias is even aware that he's writing himself out of the bounds of respectable debate with such ruthlessly unforgiving historical revisionism. But this is what the vaunted "Reality Based Community" has become; a band of useful idiots better known as what Lake calls "The Credulosphere," whose collected writings, if they were a film, would be anthologized as "Say Anything."

Whatever his intent, Yglesias's logic demands that we stop listening to him. Maybe he'll just follow his own advice, make our lives easier, and stop pontificating.

Last weekend at an impossibly crowded Manhattan gay night club -- the Britney loud, the heat unbearable, but the boys beautiful -- I remarked to a friend that it felt like being in a concentration camp.

I was reminded of this astute (if, admittedly, distasteful) comparison upon reading about the solution Uganda's Sheikh Ramathan Shaban Mubajje suggests for his country's homosexual problem:

He told journalists at a press conference on Friday that he had recommended to the country's President at a meeting last week that all gay people should be sent into exile on an island in Lake Victoria.

"If they die there then we shall have no more homosexuals in the country," he added.

The good Sheikh's views on the existence of homosexuals is actually quite intriguing: he seems to think that if society gets rid of the current crop of fags, then homosexuality itself as a feature of the human condition will suddenly disappear. This reading on the origins of homosexuality seems to posit that homosexuality is akin to a disease like leprosy -- something one cannot choose to have, but once isolated from the larger community, will disappear. But how does homosexuality afflict a community in the first place? If it's like a disease, it must have a root? Is not, therefore, a corollary to this contention the condition that homosexuality is a feature of human nature, and will continue to exist despite the Ugandan government's best efforts to exile whatever gays they can lay their hands on? The Sheikh's solution appears paradoxical. Unless, of course, he believes that homosexuality is a "choice" (the product of dreaded Western influences), in which case the gay island will need to be constantly replenished with those "choosing the gay lifestyle." But this would seem to negate his stated belief that the death of present-day homosexuals would end the problem of gay existence itself.

Anyways, his idea is not as novel as it may seem. After all, Fire Island and Ibiza are pretty much gay islands, though they're seasonal tourist destinations, not latter-day Birobidjans.

In Uganda, homosexuality is "against the order of nature" and the country's Muslims (at 12%) rival their pious Christian fellow-travelers in their support for state-sanctioned oppression of gay people.

In response to the gay rights press conference Muslim youth belonging to the Tabliq movement announced they plan to set up 'Anti-Gay Squads' to fight homosexuality.

Wonderful: Youth gangs to wander the streets looking for gays to bash. Just what a dirt-poor, culturally backwards African country needs its young people doing.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan rants on about the supposed "Christianists," explicitly equating American evangelicals to Islamists. Please point me to the major, recognized American Christian leader (Mujabbe is the leader of Uganda's Muslims) calling for the literal extinction by force of homosexuals. And show me the gangs of Christian thugs organized by church leaders to locate gays and maim them. The worst we have in the States are the "ex-gay" summer camps, which awful as they are (and which should probably be shut down by the government as a form of organized child abuse), are a night at SBNY compared to what the Islamists want to do to me. Muslim clerics of this sort are a dime a dozen and constantly try to one-up each other in their fanatical calls for the genocide of gay people.

Sam Boyd has issued a lengthy non-response response to my post criticizing his calling Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in my mind (and in the minds of many others) "The Bravest, Most Remarkable Woman of Our Times," a "dangerous fanatic." However, he avoids debate on this subject to instead attack me for something I wrote on contentions about two disturbing endorsements Barack Obama received in the past several weeks. Since Boyd doesn't want to engage in a debate about his outrageous and scurrilous slandering of this woman, I'll respond to his scattershot and largely incoherent defense of the racist thug and Robert Mugabe fan Charles Barron and Donnie "the gays want to 'kill our children'" McClurkin's endorsment of Barack Obama for president.

A few quick things of which to dispense:

• As for Charles Barron, the most Boyd can muster is that he's "rather unpleasant." He then chides me for linking to a piece I wrote about Barron as my "source on Barron's faults." Sam should do some reading on New York City politics before commenting so impetuously about Charles Barron, but here's some other stories about his endorsing the assassination of one of his Council colleagues and his hosting Robert Mugabe in Council chambers.
• Boyd writes that my "casual dismissal of Jesse Jackson as a 'racial huckster' is extra special classy." Not sure what he's getting at here, but if it's an attempt to say that Jesse Jackson deserves anything more than "casual dismissal" from serious people and that he isn't a "racial huckster," then Boyd's just beyond the reach of rational discussion. Charles Barron, by the way, makes Jesse Jackson seem like Bayard Rustin.
  

Matthew Yglesias joins the pile-on, and while the post is more grammatically coherent than his usual, fobbed off prose, it still makes no sense so there's nothing I can really offer in reply.

While we're on the subject of presidential endorsements, I already see that liberals at Tapped and elsewhere are making hay over Pat Robertson's endorsement of Rudy Giuliani. They should. It's slimy. And you can argue all you want that Obama's association with Barron and McClurkin mean nothing (I'd actually contend that the views of Barron and McClurkin are far more reprehensible than those of Robertson), but don't simultaneously criticize the Robertson endorsement as spelling Giuliani's conversion to the religious social agenda. You can't have it both ways.

Finally, neither Boyd, Yglesias, or anyone at the Prospect has responded to my queries about Robert Dreyfuss, the magazine's "Senior Correspondent" on national security and foreign policy, who is a disciple of Lyndon LaRouche, or about their magazine's hawking his LaRouche-published book on its website. This reticence is understandable, considering how embarrassing it must be to have such an individual as a colleague at your place of employment. But that won't stop me from bringing it up.

Over the summer, I implored "Old Rosie" to come back. You remember her: "The Queen of Nice" who shot Koosh balls into her studio audience. The closest we ever came to learning about her sex life (thankfully), was her ridiculous crush on Tom Cruise. (What do you call a couple in which both partners are beards? Hirsutism Extremis?) O'Donnell's transformation from the lovable voice of the soccer moms into certifiable nut-case and poor-woman's e.e. cummings (a change which happened to occur not long after she announced herself to be a lesbian), did the homosexual agenda no good, I argued:

LIFE IN THE closet can be hellish. It contorts one’s true self. Some go so far as to blame being the closet for ethical misbehavior (see Jim McGreevey, who likewise did a grave disservice to gays by conflating his criminality with his homosexuality), and there is no question that living in the closet is a psychologically unhealthy lifestyle. But what are the many housewives, (who know few — if any — gay people in their personal lives), watching “The View” supposed to think when they see the famous lesbian Rosie O’Donnell claim that 9-11 was an inside job? What are they to think of the Rosie who, before she came out of the closet, was a rational human being?

Of course Rosie should have come out of the closet. But she did not simultaneously have to become a Truther.

Now we learn that MSNBC, high off the fumes provided by Keith Olbermann's relative success as an evening talk-show host (despite his regular pounding by Bill O'Reilly in the ratings), is in talks with the Countess of Crazy about her hosting a political gabfest. The most that can be said about this move is that at least the show will feature only one obnoxious yenta as opposed to several. The Times completely glosses over why her hire would be so controversial:

During the nine months she spent on “The View” before departing abruptly last spring, Ms. O’Donnell raised viewership notably. She did so while lamenting the unabated casualties of the Iraq war and advocating the right to gay marriage, among other positions.

O'Donnell's views on the Iraq war and gay marriage are hardly on the fringe of political opinion, rather, its some of her "other positions," to which the Times does not even allude, that are so off-the-charts nutty: that 9/11 was an inside job, that the Bush administration was behind the Iranian capture of British soldiers last spring and that American soldiers are terrorists.

Popular Mechanics responded to her allegations, which is kinda like Albert Einstein explaining particle physics to a grape.

Ruminating to the New York Observer about his party's prospects come 2008, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman Chuck Schumer dropped this prediction:

Bombing Iran, says Chuck Schumer, would be a big political loser for Republican candidates in 2008.

“It would change the landscape against them, big time,” Mr. Schumer, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said about a scenario in which the Bush administration launches a military attack on Iran before leaving office. “I don’t think they are likely to do it, because they are so weak—not because they are chastened—but I also think it is very likely to be a negative political for them.”

Now, far be it from me to offer sound political advice to the man who engineered a remarkable victory for Democrats in the Senate in last year, picking up six seats (his aid in ending the political career of George Allen is reason alone to consider his tenure as DSCC chair a success), but is Schumer here indicating a belief that presidential administrations should determine grave foreign policy decisions based upon whether or they will be net "negative" or "positive political" for them? Or is he just blaming the Bush administration for this sort of cynical calculation? If short-term political viability was the utmost concern of the Bush administration (and Congressional Republicans), would not the president have removed all American forces out of Iraq a long time ago? The crass, score-keeper way in which Schumer discusses matters of war and peace is unsettling.

But since Schumer brought it up and fashions himself such a keen strategist, let's take a look at the actual numbers, shall we? According to a Zogby poll published last week, 52% of Americans said they would support a military strike against Iran in order to prevent it from gaining nuclear weapons. Lest one think that the poll somehow indicates a right-wing preference, 41% of Democrats would support one a strike and 21% of all those polled believe that Hillary Clinton is the candidate best equipped to deal with the Iranian threat, more than any other candidate.

I offer this poll not by way of saying that Schumer should emulate the cynicism he seems to accuse the Bush administration of exhibing by rallying Democrats in support of a strike, but to point out that his vaunted knowledge of the electorate and how to win is a bit over-hyped (that 52% number will only increase, by the way, as the Iranians progress in their nuclear program and as Iraq's political situation continues to stabilize). Americans want to hear how the Democrats propose to stop Iran from gaining nuclear weapons, not the score-keeping of a campaign strategist whose ultimate interest is picking up Senate seats. Casting aspersions on the administration by insinuating that -- were it to seek authorization for strikes against Iran -- such a move would be predicated entirely upon a desire to boost GOP poll numbers hardly instills confidence in the political party that has long lacked voter trust when it comes to issues of national security. Indeed, the fact that Schumer brings up such crude motivations at all suggests that he is the one willing to play politics with national security. 

My buddy Chris Crain, former editor of the Washington Blade, expresses disappointment with my latest column in said newspaper, which accused Barack Obama of employing a Nixonian "Southern Strategy" to win over black, socially conservative southern voters by refusing to disassociate with gospel singer Donnie McClurkin, who says that gays our "trying to kill our children" and says that the Lord rescued him from homosexuality. The Obama campaign had invited McClurkin to head up its "southern gospoel tour" event in South Carolina. Chris writes:

C'mon Jamie… Don't you see a wee bit difference here? Even if you accept that Obama selected McClurkin (which he didn't) as part of a calculated ploy to play to homophobes (which it wasn't), the huge difference here is that Nixon's political positions fit his strategy. He was no friend to African Americans or civil rights.

I'll certainly concede that there's more than a "wee bit of difference" between the tactics of Nixon and Obama, as the former's were far-reaching had a long-lasting effect on the tactics of the Republican Party. But just because the analogy does not fit perfectly (as few analogies do) does not mean that a comparison of sorts simply can't be made at all. Is the intent -- cynical vote-getting -- behind Obama's double-dealing much different than Nixon's coded appeals to southern whites? Obama says he supports gay rights but is perfectly willing to have a man like McClurkin front for his campaign. And while Nixon was without question an old-fashioned bigot (heaping hate on not just blacks, but gays and especially Jews in hours upon hours of tape-recorded White House conversations) who employed questionable tactics in the 1968 presidential race, it's just not true -- as Chris asserts -- that "he was no friend to African Americans or civil rights." Nixon, whipping boy of all liberals past, present and for far into the future, significantly expanded affirmative action programs in the federal contracting business and substantially increased the number of women and African-Americans in his administration.

Chris also draws attention to "Hillary's Donnie McClurkins," the anti-gay black preachers Eddie Long and Harold Mayberry, asking why gay activists have not raised more of a fuss over the Democratic frontrunner's glad-handing with first-rate homophobes. He's absolutely right, and his point illustrates what I've been saying for a long time: Democrats think that by mouthing support for "gay rights" they can get away with associating with the most vile of bigots. Liberals and gays apply a double-standard when it comes to the Left's homophobia and it's long past time that gays -- and, more importantly, all people of good conscience -- say enough is enough.

None of this is to say that gays -- or anyone supportive of gay equality for that matter -- should withhold support from Obama because of this one incident. Similarly, however, I would expect liberals so critical of Richard Nixon to acknowledge that while the man was a crude bigot, he also supported policies to increase opportunities for women and blacks. What's ultimately more important; what the man said in private or did in public? Indeed, Obama actually seems to have a better record on gay rights than any other mainstream presidential candidate. What this sorry episode does demonstrate, however, is two important points; the first being that while some in the media are touting Obama as the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, Obama has shown that he has little trouble adopting the cynical triangulation tactics of the Clintons -- apologizing if he offended anyone but giving a platform to someone who uses it to denigrate gay people. This, again, does not make Obama a bad leader, but it ought to disillusion those who somehow think that electing him will cure the country of its partisan ills.

Secondly, and more importantly to those concerned with electing a Democrat in 2008, is that the McClurkin episode demonstrates the remarkable ineptitude of the Obama campaign. It has been amateur hour for the past two weeks. I can't imagine the tough-as-nails warriors in the Clinton campaign enduring a scandal like this for more than 15 minutes before dealing with the problem decisively by dumping McClurkin.

That's how The American Prospect's Sam Boyd characterizes Ayaan Hirsi Ali, more accurately described (IMHO) by the Jerusalem Post's Caroline Glick (and seconded by Ron Rosenbaum) as "The Bravest, Most Remarkable Woman of Our Times." Anne Appelbaum recently called her "possibly the greatest womens' rights activist of our time," (the only quibble I have with Applebaum is that the question is not up for debate, she is the greatest womens' rights activist of our time), praise which earned Boyd's ire. In response to Ali Eteraz's latest missive, could you ask for a better example of the stark divide between the "decent" and indecent left?

Does Sam Boyd believe that Ayaan Hirsi Ali killed Theo Van Gogh? How about Pim Fortuyn? Does she represent a threat to anyone's security? How is Hirsi Ali -- who suffered genital mutilation, child abuse, indoctrination in a totalitarian ideology -- a "dangerous fanatic?" In the minds of leftists like Boyd (whose slandering of Hirsi Ali is even less charitable than Ian Buruma's "enlightenment fundamentalist" smear), the irrational, murderous, religious-inspired rage of fanatical Muslims (or any non-white, non-Western fanatic) can always be laid at the feet of the West. Robert Mugabe may have gone to far, but can you really blame him after so many years of British colonialism? And aren't the death threats against Ali at least understandable? She's a dangerous fanatic!

There's plenty of room to disagree with Hirsi Ali. I happen to believe that there is a peaceful, non-threatening version of Islam that is practiced by millions of people every day. I don't agree with Hirsi Ali when she says that "there is no moderate Islam" and advocates shutting down Muslim schools in the United States. But you know what? She knows a hellva lot more about Islam that either me, Sam Boyd, Ali Eteraz or anyone else opining in the blogosphere, and though I happen to disagree with her based upon my own understanding of Islam, I am not going to call this most courageous of 21st heroines a "dangerous fanatic."

Most importantly, whatever her views on Islam, they in no way impair her credibility as a feminist, her record as which, after all, is the subject of Applebaum's praise. This is a distinction that Boyd seems incapable of understanding.

Perhaps the folks at The American Prospect can enlighten us as to who the real "dangerous fanatics" are in addition to Ayaan Hirsi Ali; after all, they even have a Lyndon LaRouche groupie on their senior staff to aid them in that quest.

My co-blogger Ali Eteraz has published a thoughtful critique to my post in defense of the word "Islamofascism" to describe the Islamic fascist enemy. But he does not provide much in the way of argument to oppose the use of this admittedly provocative (but entirely correct) word, other than fault my defense as "unsatisfactory."

Rather, Eteraz lists a plethora of academics and academically-affiliated individuals who stand four-square against Islamism as a way of challenging my secondary charge that large segments of the left are insufficiently concerned with the threat it poses to our way of life. I too, however, could just as easily make a list of feckless, terrorism-apologists at American universities, beginning with the execrable Joseph Massad, a prominent disciple of Edward Said, who is very much considered (or, at least, considers himself) a man of the left and was defended as such several years ago when Columbia's Middle Eastern Studies department made national headlines for its anti-Israel faculty. "Why honor him by pretending that he's 'the left?'" Eteraz asks. I agree, but he should be asking that question to the post-colonial theorists who very much populate the academic left and fawn over him and his truly sinister work, blurbed his book, and the prestigious University of Chicago Press which published it.

The problem with this whole debate, of course, is one over nomenclature, what Eteraz characterizes as my having "little focus on keeping the terms 'the left' and 'liberals' straight." I plead guilty to over-generalizing, and perhaps from now on we should differentiate between the Hitchens's and Massad's by employing Michael Walzer's language of the "decent" (and its corollary, the "indecent") left. But for every Haleh Esfandiari he throws down on the table, I'll match him with a Joseph Massad and raise him a Hamid Dabashi (and I've got the entire Columbia University MEALAC department in my hand). To respond to my argument about the troubling state of the anti-totalitarian left with a list of a handful of anti-totalitarian leftists does not negate the existence of the problem.

It goes without saying that David Horowitz is a blunt object, but he nonetheless has an important message about Islamic fascism, as much as liberal smart-asses like Max Blumenthal and Josh Marshall would like to ridicule it. One of Andrew Sullivan's readers put it well:

There are many people on college campuses as prestigious as Harvard and Yale, that genuinely hope that the Islamofascists in Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world prevail, just to poke a finger in America's and the West's eye.

Perhaps like so many leftist[s] do, they don't think past their intentions and their feelings to what outcomes would actually take place if say, Iraq became a nation state ran by the equivalent of a Taliban. They of course would claim that they are violently against "fascism," but wouldn't dare apply that term to a non-white, non-Western group.

There is a sickness as vile and nihilistic as the Islamofascists themselves. Whether or not they consciously support the beheaders and bus bombers, they for all practical purposes do support the Islamofascist enemy. I don't think Horowitz's comment is out of line in the least.

This element exists on the left, and it's bigger and more influential than Eteraz would care to admit. It's up to him and other decent men of the left to ensure that it does not grow.

Read Kirchick's Original Post and Eteraz's Reply to it.

I don't really get the point of the "Mr. Gay International" tournament (where's the "Mr. Straight International" competition), but feast your eyes upon the current holder of the crown, Mr. Nathan Shaked of Tel Aviv.

Mr. Shaked is a 37-year-old lawyer (Jewish mothers, he's a keeper). A little on the old-side for such a competition, but the gym-chain owner is an Iron Man competitor and makes Israel look pretty darn good.

Next month, Shaked will be touring Great Britain at the behest of the country's Zionist Federation. And what better way to show off Israel's liberal society. The status of Israeli homosexuals vis a vis their brethren anywhere in the Muslim world (save the courts of the rabidly homosexual Saudi royal family) is one of many examples proving why the whole "oasis of liberty in a sea of repression" line that Palestinian apologists love to ridicule as hyperbole is anything but. Unfortunately, however, the visit is raising some cackles from the usual, religious-right quarters.

But Rabbi Barry Marcus, who holds the Israel brief in the Chief Rabbi’s cabinet, said the “absolutely repugnant” move is a case of “an organisation that should embrace everybody alienating a large section of the community”. He predicted, and said he favoured, a boycott by the religious community of the ZF.

Rabbi Marcus said that he does not object to gay individuals taking a role in communal life, but does oppose the use of mainstream communal organisations to present favourably a lifestyle which, he says, contravenes Jewish law.

It's funny how religious-types frequently say that they are being "alienated" by society for its acceptance of homosexuals, when the objective result of their own homophobia is that an entire class of people is subjected to second-class citizenship. What I really want to know is, where do these ultra-Orthodox Jews find the chutzpah to tell anyone else how to live? In Israel, they eat up huge amounts of state money, producing huge families that they can't pay for themselves, and don't contribute anything to the country's defense. In Britain, with their calls for a religious boycott of the Zionist Federation, they don't seem to lack any gall either. Mr. T at Harry's Place writes:

What is reassuring is that the Zionist Federation evidently isn't in the pockets of a small number of self-appointed, and bigoted, religious "community leaders", and isn't planning to give into their qualms.

Last seen preciously explaining why "[t]he discussion of [Che] Guevara is still divisive and complicated, years after his death, and it should be," the good folks over at Campus Progress have launched a jihad on use of the word "Islamofascism." They've been prompted to do so by David Horowitz's "Islamofascism Awareness Week," a right-wing roadshow that the former left-wing radical is taking to college campuses across the country. Anyways, it would be nice if liberals expressed as much outrage over actual Islamic Fascism as they have at David Horowitz's supposed exploitation of it for his own, nefarious political purposes.

The first (of many) errors in the piece is its authors' (Annika Carlson and Sarah Dreier) attempt to label the use of "Islamofascism" a "conservative smear tactic." It's true that many of those who use the word are "conservatives," but it was neither originated by conservatives nor is there anything inherently "conservative" about it's use." Christopher Hitchens, no conservative he, wrote about "fascism with an Islamic face" to describe the September, 11th terrorist attacks. Paul Berman is also a popularizer of the term. The authors attack Stephen Schwartz (a Jewcy contributor) without bothering to mention that the man is himself a Muslim and a scholar of Islam. But, alas, he is brushed off as a writer for the Weekly Standard, and thus his thoughts can be discarded.

Carlson and Dreier also take issue with the fact that "the term Islamofascism is offensive to Muslim Americans." Boo-hoo. There's nothing remotely offensive in the use of this phrase unless one is an intended target of its wrath, in which case, you're already offended by America's lascivious culture. Simply put, Muslims who are not themselves fascists -- who do not believe in the imposition of Sharia law, the stoning of women, the beheading of gays, the abolition of secularism -- have a duty to distinguish their peaceful Islam with that of the type that's trying to destroy Iraq and acquire nuclear weapons.

There's a lot of this walk-softly, lets-hold-hands type of stuff in the essay, and the best case for the continued use of the "Islamofascist" descriptor comes, unsurprisingly, from Christopher Hitchens. He was not responding to the Campus Progress piece in particular, but likely anticipated the liberal reaction that would likely follow from Horowitz's deliberately provocative campus outreach project. Hitch first points out that the Left has never had a problem using the word fascist to describe its political enemies (and I'll add that "fascist" flows from liberal lips today like shit from a goose when describing the Bush administration), particularly when referring to the ties between the Catholic Church and right-wing, authoritarian governments in Latin America, Spain and the Balkans. It appears then, that the Left's aversion to use of "Islamofascism" has much to do with the simple fact that Islam is a non-Western religion, supposedly comprised of the wretched of the earth, and thus, a different standard must apply to its most fanatical adherents, whose real motivation must, at "root" be a legitimate anti-imperialist impulse (for the most sinister and perverse form of this sort of thinking, see my essay on Columbia University professor Joseph Massad's rationalization of Muslim state homophobia as just that).

Read Ali Eteraz's Reply to this post, and Jamie Kirchick's Counter-Reply. 

Singapore will forever occupy a distinct and sexually enticing place in the minds of many a Gay American. I was only a 4th grader at the time, but I distinctly remember the caning of Michael Fay, who received the brutal punishment for vandalizing some cars with spray paint. To be sure, I'm not a fan of S&M, but there was still something darkly sexual about the whole affair. Mercifully for Fay, the Singaporean president at the time, Ong Teng Cheong, reduced from 6 to 4 the number of times the bamboo stick would strike Fay's 20-year-old ass.

Whatever one thinks of the erotic undertones of being beaten on the behind with a bamboo cane, surely the Singaporean government just turned off a huge potential tourist market by deciding to retain its ban on gay sex. Thankfully, at least for breeders, anal and oral sex is now legal.

The Singaporeans, if anything, are good businessmen. Surely they know about the billions of dollars that are to be made from the gay tourism industry? Here is a very wealthy Asian island city-state frequented by many a businessman and just a hop, skip and a jump from Bangkok, that other sex capital. For a view into gay life in Singapore (where, at least, the leader does not go around proclaiming the non-existence of homos), it's advisable to defer to Sir Ian McKellan, who recently traveled to Singapore to perform King Lear.

Makes one pine for the Headline News of the 90's, when our attentions were drawn to dramas like the football star who murdered his wife, the white trash figure skater who had her nemesis beaten with a pipe, and the distraught lady who cut off her husband's Johnson.

Perhaps you missed it, the case of the "Jena 6." These were the 6 black high school students from Jena, Louisiana whom national race hucksters like Al Sharpton, the NAACP, and the mainstream media attempted to turn into the Chicago 7 or the Guildford 4. Last December, they beat the living daylights out of a white student. Yet in a bizarre (and ultimately all-too-predictable) rendering of the story, the usual suspects swept in and turned this incident into the next Selma. Nearly 20,000 people gathered there last month to protest, and it is this incident that led Jesse Jackson to claim that Barack Obama was "acting white" for not joining him in the usual race-baiting hysterics.

The source of the left-wing ire about the Jena 6 was an incident earlier last year in which black students at Jena High School sat under what was alleged to be a "whites-only tree," only to find three nooses hanging from said tree the next day. What followed was a series of tit-for-tat incidents between black and white students, leading ultimately to the violent beating of Justin Barker, age 17.

I had suspected that there was something fishy in the liberal media's telling of this story (see Stanford Law School Professor Richard Thompson Ford's dispassionate analysis of the story in Slate), which is why I was a bit perturbed to see the Human Rights Campaign, the country's leading gay rights organization, take the side of the Free the Jena 6 protesters several weeks ago. If there was any "gay angle" to this series of events (and there isn't) it would be an expression of sympathy with the white student randomly set upon by 6 students and beat beyond unconsciousness simply because he was white. According those who support "hate crimes" legislation, this is a hate crime, unless they wish to retroactively change the definition of the proposed law so that only blacks can be victims and whites perpetrators. Change, furthermore, Barker's sexual orientation to homosexual, and you have the prototypical gay bashing. But no, the Human Rights Campaign, ostensibly a non-partisan organization, apparently wants some chits with the "black" and "progressive" "communities" and decided to cast any concern for the truth of the matter to the wind and join in this ridiculous spectacle.

Well, as with the Duke case, the situation in Jena was not what Al Sharpton and the perpetually over-earnest American Prospect (which is always seizing upon faux-incidents like the "Jena 6" to call for a "national conversation" about race, labor, or purple ponies) made it out to be. In yesterday's Christian Science Monitor of all places, Craig Franklin, an editor of the local Jena Times newspaper, offers a short and devastating analysis of the "distorted story of the Jena 6." He wrote the piece mostly as a response to the "hundreds" of calls his paper has received from national media looking for an accurate version of the events that took place. To put it bluntly, nearly every single aspect of this story has been sensationalized and mis-reported by mainstream media outlets." In fact, I have never before witnessed such a disgrace in professional journalism," Franklin, a career journalist, writes.

One might hope that Jackson, Sharpton, the Prospect, the Human Rights Campaign and everyone who shuttled down to Jena and back to have their photo taken would apologize to the people they slandered -- as in the Duke case -- and perhaps exercise a little more restraint the next time The Big Story That Exemplifies The Need For A National Conversation On Race comes over the transom. Don't count on it.

Al Shanker, former president of the American Federation of Teachers, was one of the great labor heroes of the 20th century. He came from hearty immigrant stock, was a product of public schooling, and understood the importance of universal, public education to instill American civic values. As Arch Puddington writes in a brief review of Richard Kahlenberg's biography of Shanker, Tough Liberal:

Shanker always regarded the American public school as a key institution of democracy--the one place where different groups might come together to learn what it means to be American. Without it, he believed, America would devolve into a balkanized society with few common ideals.

Jeff Jacoby, who has the unenviable job of regularly publishing troglodytic denunciations of what Bill O'Reilly characterizes as the "secular progressive agenda" on the op-ed page of the Boston Globe, (the sort of journalistic real estate where such broadsides are least appreciated), yesterday made the case for abolishing public schools. Jacoby has never been a particularly original columnist, usually taking his cues from better known conservative scolds. This is unfortunate, considering that the staid Boston media scene -- so heavily invested with holier-than-thou, old-school liberals -- could really use more intelligent, independent conservative/libertarian voices, especially since the death of the inimitable David Brudnoy to AIDS three years ago. A friend refers to Jacoby as "the poor man's Charles Krauthammer," but this column is more reminiscent of David Gelernter's 4-month-old Weekly Standard cover story, "A World Without Public Schools." Take your ideas where you can get 'em.

Jacoby, an Orthodox Jew and a political conservative, does not like the fact that in public schools "the only views and values permitted are the ones prescribed by the state." For this week's outrageous example of crazy Massachusetts liberalism gone awry, he chooses an incident from several years ago in which the parents of a second-grader in Lexington, Massachusetts--birthplace of the American Revolution, a fact not lost on the nuttier-than-Snickers home-school movement--had a very public conniption over the fact that their son's teacher read a picture book to the class in which a prince marries another prince. The parents brought their case all the way to federal court, but they had no ground on which to stand: gay marriage is the law in Massachusetts, and, as the Reagan-appointed judge ruled, the state is “entitled to teach anything that is reasonably related to the goals of preparing students to become engaged and productive citizens.” One would presume that Jacoby would not take issue with the teacher reading a book about racial harmony (though his contention that "Americans differ on ... the reverence due the Confederate flag" as a rationale to oppose government involvement in education casts doubt), and since both miscegenation and same-sex marriage are legal in Massachusetts and same-sex couples live in Lexington and send their children to public school, it is entirely appropriate--indeed, expected--that teachers would help their students understand the different types of families that form their community.

For conservatives, the answer to this conundrum is actually quite simple: if you don't like having your children learn about households with gay parents, move to another state where gay people don't have the right to get married (currently 49 out of 50) or adopt (like Florida or Mississippi). Opponents of gay marriage lost in Massachusetts, and, in the instance Jacoby describes, they have been hoisted on their own petard. Odd, then, that conservatives who so frequently complain about gays and other dangerous social liberals using the courts to get their way would bring a federal case over a picture book.

To make the case for abolishing public schools, Jacoby starts his column by citing what he describe as a "ringing endorsement of parental supremacy in education."

"We are opposed to state interference with parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children as an infringement of the fundamental . . . doctrine that the largest individual liberty consistent with the rights of others insures the highest type of American citizenship and the best government."

From where did this "leave us alone" sentiment emerge? Why, the 1892 Democratic Party platform! Jacoby tells us. "Thus in a little over 100 years, the Democratic Party - and much of the Republican Party - has been transformed from a champion of "parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children" to a party whose leaders believe that parents "don't get to impose" their views and values on what their kids are taught in school." This is quite a metric--"over 100 years"--for describing the supposedly rapid and devastating downfall of American civilization. The country has changed a lot since "a little over 100 years" ago, I'd argue mostly for the better, but Jacoby seems to disagree.

One wonders what other elements of the 1892 Democratic Party platform Jacoby would like to uphold (remember, this was back when racists predominantly voted Democrat). He writes as if it is somehow hypocritical, or desultory, for the Democratic Party to change its position on a topic 100 years later. What kind of argumentative tactic is this? It's either incredibly--almost brazenly, horrifyingly--reactionary, or moronic. But it's hardly the first time Jacoby has played a game of Surprise! with his readers. Just a few months ago, in a particularly lame brief for "intelligent design," he asked if Cambridge University would today hire a "theology-and Bible-drenched individual" who "forecast the date of the Apocalypse" and calculated that the world was created in 3988 B.C. "Of course not!" us wise-thinking, egghead Massachusetts liberals answer, and that's the answer he expects us to give. But, we're wrong, for Cambridge did hire such a man, such a backwards hayseed; he actually turned out to be no less a scientific genius than Sir Isaac Newton. So there! Jacoby exults. Except Newton was appointed to a Mathematics chair in 1668. And he also believed in alchemy. This is not to say Newton wasn't brilliant, but we admire him today in the same way we admire the slave-holding founders of the country: as men of their time, emblematic of the prejudices of their era.

What era does Jeff Jacoby want to live in? Who knows? Or, rather, who cares? His smarter-by-half, high-school debating tactics would be cynical were they not so stupid..

For some time now, I have been a member-in-good-standing of the Facebook group: "Che Guevara is a PENDEJO." Here is the group's description:

For anyone out there who's sick of seeing Che Guevara shirts being worn by idealistic college students and/or simply hates Che Guevara or any other communists for that matter.

We also invite anyone who's sick of hearing "naw man, you got it all wrong, Castro was an asshole but Che had the right idea."

If you're slightly amused by the irony of a Marxist t-shirt being sold and worn in a capitalist system, feel free to join as well.

I was immediately reminded of my association in this august body upon reading Robert Scheer's latest in The Nation (which has a thing for Cuban commies), offering a critical appraisal of Guevara's ideology (apparently it was more sophisticated than "Murdering the bourgeosie," as I had always assumed it to be) and explaining how his CIA-orchestrated assassination has actually proven fortuitous for the left because it turned him into a martyr for the new generation of Latin American leftist leaders to extol. This sentence is emblematic:

Che was restless in post-revolutionary Cuba because his anarchist temperament caused him to bristle at the emerging bureaucracy.

You gotta hand it to Scheer: "Restless" is a pretty good euphemism for "killing people with whom you disagree." Even better is Scheer's whitewashing Guevara's capricious violence as some sort of response to the ineffectiveness of the new Cuban revolutionary government's "emerging bureaucracy." Che's actually a do-it-yourself anti-statist conservative!

One can excuse certain elements of the Left's embrace of totalitarian murderers like Che Guevara because these sorts of folks have always had a hard time coming to grips with thugs preaching a "progressive" ethos. Bashing the Left for loving Che is nothing new. But more troubling among the apologists for Guevara (and the Cuban revolution, more generally) is the lack of acknowledgment of what the Cuban Communists did to homosexuals--that other, oppressed minority which supposedly owes its salvation to the Left, along with the "working classes."

In 1960, just a year after coming to power, Guevara's glorious revolution established forced labor camps (actual gulags, not the fake one of Amnesty International's imagination) for any and all assortment of undesirables. This is how Alvaro Vargas Losa tells it (his article is entitled, by the way, "The Killing Machine," which confirms Scheer's impression that Guevara was indeed just "restless" with the ineffectiveness of the Cuban government's ability to violently suppress dissent):

This camp was the precursor to the eventual systematic confinement, starting in 1965 in the province of Camagüey, of dissidents, homosexuals, AIDS victims, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Afro-Cuban priests, and other such scum, under the banner of Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción, or Military Units to Help Production. Herded into buses and trucks, the “unfit” would be transported at gunpoint into concentration camps organized on the Guanahacabibes mold. Some would never return; others would be raped, beaten, or mutilated; and most would be traumatized for life, as Néstor Almendros’s wrenching documentary Improper Conduct showed the world a couple of decades ago.

The Communist Cuban regime's treatment of homosexuals was most famously recounted in Reinaldo Arenas's Before Night Falls, the film version of which cast Johnny Depp as a transvestite who smuggled Arenas's prison diaries off the island via his amazingly stretchable...well, you get the picture.

Scheer offers a few drips and drabs of qualified criticism about Che's legacy. "Fortunately," he writes, Latin America's new crop of leftist thugs "differ from Che in preferring the ballot to the gun," (just wait until Hugo Chavez loses an election). But you know the left is lost when it is still able to glorify and explain away the crimes of a murderer of homosexuals.

Fascist Isolationist: Charles Lindbergh It's doubtful that Barack Obama would like to be compared to Charles Lindbergh, but over at the Guardian's "Comment is Free" blog, Mark Schmitt attempts to resurrect ol' Charlie and groups not only Obama alongside the pro-Nazi isolationist but oddly, himself as well.

As Schmitt explains in his piece, the origins of this grouping lie in what he sees as Obama's principled refusal to wear an American flag lapel pin because doing so, according to the junior Senator from Illinois, has become "a substitute for I think true patriotism..." There's an element of truth in this sentiment, and I don't for a minute doubt Obama's patriotism. I think his decision not wear the pin, however, is morally and politically obtuse, as 1) it only provides fodder for the right-wing smear machine, but, more importantly, 2) even if you do believe that patriotism has been hijacked by the political right (which, to some degree, it has) that in no way obviates your ability, or, dare I say--your duty--to express your own patriotism. Obviously, wearing a lapel pin is not the only way to do that, but it's a small way, and nor does it automatically associate you with those people whom you believe are cheapening patriotism. But Schmitt thinks otherwise, and calls for the actual taking down of American flags, the removal of pins, in other words, throwing out the legitimately patriotic baby with the jingoistic bathwater.

But onto the heart of the matter, which is Charles Lindbergh. Following a bloggingheads.tv discussion Schmitt did with David Frum (he of "axis of evil" fame), Frum later remarked on another webisode that he was afraid that the Bush administration and conservatives in general has been driving people on the left, like Schmitt, to embrace views akin to "Charles Lindbergh." Of this comparison, which other liberals have found to be odious (even if they can't spell his name correctly), Schmitt writes:

Some people found comparing me to Lindbergh offensive, given that Lindbergh in the 1930s was "a notorious isolationist Hitler-fancying anti-Semite." Perhaps I should have been offended, but I wasn't, because I assumed Frum was referring mainly to Lindbergh's isolationism and his opposition to US entry into World War II as a prominent member of the America First committee.

So Schmitt would have been offended had he thought Frum meant to compare him to "a notorious isolationist Hitler-fancying anti-Semite," but he's not offended because he believes Frum was merely comparing him to Lindbergh for the latter's opposition to entry into World War II (Schmitt, methinks, fancies the "notorious isolationist" part, not the "Hitler-fancying anti-Semite" aspect of Lindbergh). Frum's comparison may have been totally unfair--but Schmitt doesn't seem to think so; he has no problem being compared to Charles Lindbergh, as long as it's just the isolationist Lindberg, not the anti-Semitic Lindberg. Glad we got that out of the way.

There are not many journalists or politicians who come to mind as being radical enough in their view to warrant comparison to Charles Lindbergh (Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul and Justin Raimondo immediately come to mind) and the few that do are on the political right. I never thought I'd see the day when someone on the Left would have no problem being associated with Lindbergh-esque isolationism. But it's good to see that Schmitt is at least being honest.