Matt Yglesias

Orthodoxy and Brotherhood

Jamelle Bouie says I’m wrong about Christian orthodoxy and brotherhood:

At the very least, it’s contested. Biblical “literalists” notwithstanding, the Gospels aren’t particularly clear on the issue of solidarity. For every John 3:16 or John 3:36, there is a Matthew 25:40 — “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me’” — and a parable of the Good Samaritan. Both suggest that belief in Jesus’ divinity — or even the God of the Israelites — are ancillary to the question of “Who is my neighbor,” or in Bentley’s case, “Who is my brother?”

For a little bonus theology/metaethics, here’s Ned Resnikoff on how Sam Harris is like “No Labels.”

Robert Bentley’s Brothers

New Alabama Governor Robert Bentley explains that he’s totally colorblind in his worldview, because the only thing that really matters is your relationship to Jesus:

“There may be some people here today who do not have living within them the Holy Spirit,” Bentley said. ”But if you have been adopted in God’s family like I have, and like you have if you’re a Christian and if you’re saved, and the Holy Spirit lives within you just like the Holy Spirit lives within me, then you know what that makes? It makes you and me brothers. And it makes you and me brother and sister.”

Bentley added, ”Now I will have to say that, if we don’t have the same daddy, we’re not brothers and sisters. So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister, and I want to be your brother.”

I’ve seen Bentley taking some heat for this on blogs. And certainly it’s an impolitic thing to say. But isn’t it very orthodox Protestant Christian doctrine? Back in the day we used to have long-winded debates about whether or not progressive politicians need to talk about religion more, and I’ve always thought this is a reason to be leery of the idea. The coexistence of multiple robust but mutually incompatible faiths is one of America’s great strengths, but I’m not sure it actually withstands a huge amount of theological scrutiny. Everyone is ultimately happier when we let this sleeping dog lie.

Christians at War

Jeh Johnson is going to be getting some roundhouse condemnations for this:

Jeh C. Johnson, the Defense Department’s general counsel, posed that question at today’s Pentagon commemoration of King’s legacy.

In the final year of his life, King became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, Johnson told a packed auditorium. However, he added, today’s wars are not out of line with the iconic Nobel Peace Prize winner’s teachings.

“I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation’s military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack,” he said.

See Adam Serwer for the refutation in detail.

What I’ll observe is that this is a mere sub-set of the “Who Would Jesus Bomb?” problem in American public life. Martin Luther King was a Christian and a pacifist, and it certainly seems to me that any straightforward reading of the Gospel would support King’s views on these matters. But though Christians are common in the United States, pacifists are exceedingly rare. What’s more, in the US at least belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ is actually highly correlated with a tendency to embrace violent nationalism as an approach to the world. Consequently, people inclined to agree with the upshot of peace-loving Christian universalism of an MLK are relatively unlikely to embrace the Christian ethics that underly it, and vice versa.

The Case for Young Earth Creationism

Atrios: “The issue isn’t that so many people believe in creationism, it’s that they believe in Young Earth Creationism, and that basically scientists y’all MF lying and getting me pissed.”

I sort of see this the other way. There’s absolutely nothing in the scientific record that can disprove the possibility that the world is 4,000 years old. The scientific method makes certain claims about the state of the universe 4,000 years ago. Now assume that God created the universe—fossils and all—to look exactly like that 4,000 years ago. That’s obviously a religious hypothesis rather than a scientific one, but it’s consistent with the evidence and doesn’t anyone to believe in a scientists’ conspiracy or anything. Of course this would mean that God is perpetrating a massive conspiracy, which would be an odd thing for a just and moral God to do. But people believe God’s up to all kinds of odd stuff.

My Token Moment of Outreach to the Religious Right

Ross Douthat:

Christmas is hard for everyone. But it’s particularly hard for people who actually believe in it.

In a sense, of course, there’s no better time to be a Christian than the first 25 days of December. But this is also the season when American Christians can feel most embattled. Their piety is overshadowed by materialist ticky-tack. Their great feast is compromised by Christmukkwanzaa multiculturalism. And the once-a-year churchgoers crowding the pews beside them are a reminder of how many Americans regard religion as just another form of midwinter entertainment, wedged in between “The Nutcracker” and “Miracle on 34th Street.”

I don’t spend a lot of time agreeing with the Christian right about things, but the whining about the secularization of Christmas is a point I sympathize with. If Christmas were more properly religious, then I think people would have absolutely no trouble recognizing why a secular Jewish person might be not-so-excited about it. Then we could move on with our lives. But the transfiguration of Christmas into a largely secular observance has created a dynamic where lack of enthusiasm for the holiday presents itself as a character flaw—you’re a “grinch” who’s not participating in the “holiday fun” and “Christmas spirit”—in an awkward way. And yet to me no amount of tacky commercialization can really secularize a holiday that has “Christ” right in the name and that’s timed to commemorate the birth of Jesus.

Something they did at my high school that I actually thought was clever was gin up a fake late-December non-sectarian celebratory occasion called Candlelighting that happened on the day before the winter solstice. If I got to have my way about everything, we’d follow that lead. There’d be a big national secular holiday where the idea is to have fun and brighten the darkest day of the year with presents and whatnot. Then separately, Christian people who want to engage in a religious observe of Christ’s birth would do so. Jews could let Hanukkah sink back into obscurity and observe our real holidays.

Texas Republicans Fight About Immigration: Are Latinos a Menace, or “Natural Allies” Against “Muslim Immigrant Invasion”

Immigration hasn’t traditionally been a sharply partisan issue. The GOP presidential nominees in 2000, 2004, and 2008 all ran on pro-immigration platforms, as did their Democratic opponents. Conversely, many members of congress from both parties were hostile to immigration. You saw more pro-immigration sentiment among Democrats, but strong pro-immigration and pro-immigrant political cultures existed inside the GOP, and especially in its Texas and Florida branches both of which had been pretty successful over the years in winning Latino votes.

But since the 2008 election, conservatism has taken an increasingly cramped and xenophobic view of the world, leaving some on the pro-immigration right somewhat isolated. My colleague Andrea Nill identifies the fascinating case of Steven Hotze, a right-wing Texas activist who’s trying to defend a Latino-friendly posture for the GOP in terms of the idea that increased Hispanic migration provides a bulwark against the perils of Muslim immigration:

The majority of the Hispanic culture in America is Christian, pro-family, pro-life and pro-free enterprise. Sounds like they would make great Republicans to me. Let’s go recruit them!

Gentlemen, it seems that the real problem we face is the Muslim immigration invasion of America. The Hispanics are our natural allies against the Democrats and Muslims.

Nill counters that “it would make more sense for Latinos in the U.S. to stand in solidarity with the Muslim community against the racist vitriol and anti-immigrant rhetoric coming from the Republican party rather than allowing themselves to be used as a political wedge.”

Indeed, I would suggest that the progressive voting record of the Jewish community in the United States indicates that the “divide and conquer through bigotry” approach has some real limits. The tendency is for vulnerable minority groups to prefer to affiliate with coalitions based on ideas of tolerance and pluralism. But it is true that over time we could plausibly see the “whitening” of a great many American Hispanics in the face of some other Other and their entry into the conservative coalition. Indeed, part of the Texas political tradition is the fact that in the Jim Crow Era people of Mexican ancestry were granted official “white” legal status. This doesn’t happen, though, if conservatives persist in racist attacks on Latinos, as seen in both Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings and much of their recent immigration related rhetoric. Certainly I’ve found that my own emotional response to those events has actually surprised me somewhat and in a weird way it was the Sotomayor hearings more than anything else from the 111th Congress that actually made me personally angry.

Bias in the French Labor Market

A researcher named Claire Adida recently conducted an interesting experiment on bias in the French labor market. She constructed three CVs of single female 24 year-olds with two years of higher education and three years of secretarial or accounting work experience and sent them out. The difference is that one was constructed to seem like the CV of a Muslim of Senegalese ancestry, one to seem like the CV of a Christian of Senegalese ancestry, and one to seem like the CV of a white person.

Gwen Sharp explains:

The three chosen names were Khadija Diouf (an easily-recognizable Muslim first name, while Diouf is well-known as a common last name in France’s Senegalese community), Marie Diouf (to represent a Christian Senegalese name), and Aurélie Ménard (a common French name with no particular religious associations). To highlight the religious differences, “Khadija” had worked at Secours Islamique, a non-profit, “Marie” had worked for Secours Catholique, another religious non-profit, and “Aurélie” hadn’t worked for any religious-affiliated employers.

The fictional CVs were then sent out to employers who listed secretarial and accounting jobs with a national employment agency in the spring of 2009; the jobs were matched in pairs based on industry characteristics, size of the employing company, and the specific position. Every position was sent a copy of the CV for Aurélie; for each matched pair of jobs, one got Khadija’s CV while one got Marie’s.

Being perceived as Muslim seems to carry a significant cost:

My casual-ish impression is that in 2010 racism is generally a bigger problem in Western Europe than in the United States. We’re obviously far from perfect in this regard, but progressives can I think legitimately count substantial progress in fighting bias as a major achievement and the European experience as illustrating the fact that the challenge is a non-trivial one.

Post-Jewish Zionism

I got the sense talking to people on both sides of the Green Line that grassroots activists in Israel and Palestine haven’t totally caught up with the evolution of Israel politics in the United States. It’s still the case that if you gaze over at Capitol Hill your typical strongly pro-Israel politician is a Jewish liberal such as Henry Waxman or Anthony Weiner who may feel some dissonance between their general political views and heavily militarized Israeli nationalism. But stories like this one from Rachel Slajda reflect the shape of things to come:

A legal attempt to stop the construction of a mosque in middle Tennessee is getting expensive. The preliminary hearing has dragged on, with several days of testimony stretching over more than a month. The county has added $50,000 to its litigation budget to cover expected defense costs and is warning that that number could go up.

So who’s funding the plaintiffs — three local residents who don’t have access to taxpayer money?

Their lawsuit is being supported, in part, by a Christian Zionist group called Proclaiming Justice to the Nations. PJTN hired, and is paying, one of the two lawyers for the plaintiffs.

The point here is that PJTN’s views on Israel are just part of a larger worldview that casts Muslims and Islam as the enemy. You see a secular version of this in Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders’ strong support of Israel. To Israel’s advantage, these are people who won’t even be nominally interested in whether or not Israel adheres to human rights norms or other dictates of humane conduct. To Israel’s disadvantage, however, these are people for whom the conflict with the Palestinians isn’t a problem to be solved. Instead, on this view the whole point of Israel is to wage war against Muslims and peace would render the state superfluous.

Anti-Anti-Racism

My friend Dave Weigel writes that Juan Williams “has instantly become a sort of icon for conservatives angry about media bias.”

I think that’s a pretty naïve read of what it is conservatives are angry about. What we’re seeing is episode one million in the American conservative movement’s passionate attachment to the cause of anti-anti-racism. Relatively few conservatives are interested in expressing racist views, but virtually all conservatives are united in the conviction that anti-racism run amok is ruining the country and almost no conservatives are interested in combatting racism. You normally see this in a black-white context, but increasingly over the past two years it’s emerging in a Muslim-Christian context. The central conservative passion when it comes to these bias issues is the bizarre notion that it’s hard for members of the majority group to get a fair shake and then unwarranted suppression of alleged anti-minority views is a much bigger problem that actual bias against minority groups.

Knowledge and Privilege

It’s interesting to learn from Pew that Jews and Atheists are more knowledgeable about religion than other groups. It’s especially interesting to see that this is a pretty robust result “even after controlling for levels of education and other key demographic traits (race, age, gender and region), significant differences in religious knowledge persist among adherents of various faith traditions. Atheists/agnostics, Jews and Mormons still have the highest levels of religious knowledge, followed by evangelical Protestants, then those whose religion is nothing in particular, mainline Protestants and Catholics.”

But after seeing this blogged in a lot of places this afternoon, it took until I read Jamelle Bouie to see something really insightful about this:

All that said, let me speculate a bit. To me, it’s no surprise that the highest scorers — after controlling for everything — were religious minorities: atheists, agnostics, Jews and Mormons. As a matter of simple survival, minorities tend to know more about the dominant group than vice versa. To use a familiar example, blacks — and especially those with middle-class lives — tend to know a lot about whites, by virtue of the fact that they couldn’t succeed otherwise; the professional world is dominated by middle-class whites, and to move upward, African Americans must understand their mores and norms. By contrast, whites don’t need to know much about African Americans, and so they don’t.

Likewise, religious minorities — while not under much threat of persecution — are well-served by a working knowledge of religion, for similar reasons; the United States is culturally Christian, and for religious minorities, getting along means understanding those reference points. That those religious minorities can also answer questions about other religious traditions is a sign of broader religious education that isn’t necessary when you’re in the majority. Put another way, there’s a strong chance that religious privilege explains the difference in knowledge between Christians and everyone else.

That seems right on. I would add that members of culturally dominant groups can often manifest a certain blindness about what’s happening inside their own cultures. My experience has generally been that American Christians aren’t fully aware of the religious significance of the US Postal Service delivery schedule or how convenient it is for “everyone” that extra time off is located in late December.

Anti-Feminism as a Vocation

Isaac Chotiner and James Downie are both appalled by Christine O’Donnell’s view that lying is always wrong, even if you’re lying to hide Anne Frank from the SS. I agree that this is an odd precept, but it seems worth observing that O’Donnell does have Immanuel Kant on her side and he specifically tackles the “murderer at the door” case in his essay “On a Supposed Right to Lie From Altruistic Motives.” You can see Christine Korsgaard’s “The Right to Lie: Kant on Dealing With Evil” (PDF) for a sympathetic treatment of the Kant/O’Donnell viewpoint.

I would further add that from a Christian perspective, I don’t think the Kantian view is all that problematic. When you lie you’re doing something wrong, and you’re not really serving any kind of greater good because the sin still exists in the heart of the murderer and for the truly innocent death is only a small penalty as it brings you closer to God. I take it that most nominally Christian people in America (of which I am not one) reject this line of argument, but that mostly goes to show that people tend not to fully think through doctrines of heaven and hell to which they’re formally committed.

A perhaps more interesting take on O’Donnell comes from Michelle Goldberg who observes that the “Mama Grizzly” phenomenon isn’t really all that new and women have long played an important role in the populist conservative grassroots essentially because they’re best-positioned to undertake a performance of traditional family values. The paradox, of course, is that once you’re doing this performance for a mass audience you’ve negated the underlying conceit:

In a 1995 New Republic article about the new crop of right-wing women representatives, Vern Smith, Linda Smith’s husband, explained, “One of the reasons we got into politics, we wanted to preserve some of the traditional lifestyle we’d grown up with. It’s funny, with Linda away, we end up sacrificing some of that traditional family life to pass on some of that heritage to our children.”

As it turns out, many smart, ambitious conservative women don’t enjoy the traditional lifestyle much at all. Beverly LaHaye, the founder of Concerned Women for America, where Christine O’Donnell worked during the 1990s, is archetypical in this regard. In The Spirit Controlled Woman—the same book in which she asserts “Submission is God’s design for women”—LaHaye writes that as a young housewife, she felt insecure, unfulfilled, and afraid to speak in public. “After all,” she asked, “who wants to hear what a young woman has to say whose only accomplishments in life were having four successful pregnancies and keeping a clean house?” By becoming an anti-feminist activist, LaHaye was able to escape the kind of dull misery and ennui that Betty Friedan identified in The Feminist Mystique.

O’Donnell is just the apotheosis of this trend, “an anti-gay activist with a lesbian sister … a family-values champion who is single, childless, and sharing a house with a man.” I would only add to Goldberg’s insights that there’s perhaps a connection here to an even older legacy of religiously-inspired women’s political activism in America that’s associated with the temperance movement, campaigns against prostitution, and other kinds of moral reform.

Peretz: Muslims Are Indifferent to Human Life and Therefore Unworthy of First Amendment Protection

New Republic Editor in Chief Martin Peretz:

But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.

I for one am thrilled that the First Amendment gives Peretz the right to offer his racist views up for public consumption, but it’s unfortunate that a number of very good writers seem to see no problem with the fact that their work goes out under a masthead nominally edited by this character.

Obama’s Porkilicious Taqiyya

Obama at Ben's Chili Bowl with DC Mayor Adrian Fenty

Steve M at No More Mr Nice Blog falls for the White House spin hook, line, and sinker:

Anyone remember when candidate Barack Obama was getting grief for going to Philadelphia and sampling expensive Spanish ham? Doesn’t sound like something a secret Muslim would eat — nor is the honey-baked ham the Obamas served along with the turkey last Thanksgiving. The half-smoke he got at Ben’s Chili Bowl a couple of weeks before Inauguration Day is a sausage that’s half-pork, half-beef. Oh, and the beer at that beer summit didn’t quite comport with the teachings of the Koran, did it? But all that was just weaving a web of deceit, right?

I’ll admit that for a long time my own views were along these lines. After all, the very first time I met State Senator (and US Senate candidate) Barack Obama we were at a hotel in Boston (I believe it was the Westin Copley Place) on line at a breakfast buffet fighting for the tongs to grab some bacon. But then I learned all about taqiyya which proves that counter-evidence to the “secret Muslim” thesis only demonstrates how far the conspiracy goes.

Today in Nazi Analogies

Treating income earned as a partner in a private equity firm the same as ordinary labor income is like invading Poland:

President Obama and the business community have been at odds for months. But in July the chairman and cofounder of the Blackstone Group, one of the world’s largest private-equity firms, amped up the rhetoric. Stephen Schwarzman—the leading John McCain supporter in a firm that, in 2008, gave more money to Obama—was addressing board members of a nonprofit organization when he let loose. “It’s a war,” Schwarzman said of the struggle with the administration over increasing taxes on private-equity firms. “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

Newt Gingrich, meanwhile, takes the view that building a mosque in Lower Manhattan “would be like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum.”

So on the one hand you basically have Schwarzman making a mountain out of a molehill, suggesting that his effort to increase his take-home pay is analogous to a world-historical struggle over the future of human freedom. On the other hand you have Gingrich saying that the Islamic religion is on a par with Nazism and that Muslims worldwide are collectively responsible for the actions of a few dozen individuals. I’m going to say that Schwarzman is the winner here. He’s being grandiose and tasteless, but his basic point—this is a big deal for private equity managers and they intend to fight very hard to keep their taxes low—is perfectly cogent. Gingrich, by contrast, is just being loathesome and odious.

A Couple More Thoughts on Cordoba House

To illustrate that the whole world hasn’t gone mad, here’s a nice Josh Barro post in NRO about why conservatives are nuts on the Cordoba House question. Except as a conservative he doesn’t call anyone “nuts” or accuse any of the bigots and opportunists of bigoted opportunism. Which is how it goes. Anyway, read his post.

The other thing is that over the weekend some kind of hair-splitting distinction opened up between the idea of publicly and forcefully acknowledging the legal and constitutional right of the organizers to place their community center at 51 Park Place in Lower Manhattan and supporting construction of the mosque. I sort of see what the distinction is. People have the right, legally speaking, to go stand on the sidewalk outside my office and scream obscenities at me when I go to lunch. But I really wish they wouldn’t do that, and I think sensible people would condemn the decision to behave in that manner.

But when it comes to matters of religion, I think this distinction gets a bit confusing. I’m after all not a Muslim. And if pressed, I’d have to say that I think Islam is a false doctrine. It’s not the case that there’s is no God but Allah, nor is it true that Mohammed is his prophet. If everyone collectively decided that nobody should ever build a mosque anywhere again, that would be fine by me. Which is just to say that people simply don’t actively support the construction of other people’s religious monuments. Yu don’t expect Jews to stand up and applaud the construction of new Mormon temples, but I do expect them to acknowledge the right of Mormons to build temples and to stand up to demagogues who would try to abridge that right. And this is what we have going on in Lower Manhattan today. A completely legitimate undertaking that’s being stymied out of a mixture of geographical ignorance, a slanderous attribution of collective responsibility for 9/11 to all Muslims, and political opportunism. On the other side are people standing up for non-discrimination and religious freedom.

There’s no real need to introduce dozens of new layers of nuance into it.

Douthat on Gay Marriage

Ross Douthat explains that opposition to gay marriage is about trying to uphold a certain kind of ideal of marriage:

This ideal holds up the commitment to lifelong fidelity and support by two sexually different human beings — a commitment that involves the mutual surrender, arguably, of their reproductive self-interest — as a uniquely admirable kind of relationship. It holds up the domestic life that can be created only by such unions, in which children grow up in intimate contact with both of their biological parents, as a uniquely admirable approach to child-rearing. And recognizing the difficulty of achieving these goals, it surrounds wedlock with a distinctive set of rituals, sanctions and taboos.

The point of this ideal is not that other relationships have no value, or that only nuclear families can rear children successfully. Rather, it’s that lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support.

I think one could dispute that, but let’s grant it. The natural thing to observe is that very little of our current legal architecture of marriage has much to do with this. Actual marriages in 21st century America aren’t required to be lifelong or monogamous. Douthat concedes as much:

Or at least, it was the Western understanding. Lately, it has come to co-exist with a less idealistic, more accommodating approach, defined by no-fault divorce, frequent out-of-wedlock births, and serial monogamy.

So at this point we’re upholding an ideal of lifelong heterosexual monogamy by legally requiring the heterosexual part, but not the lifelong or monogamous part. The unfairness of such a standard seems both obvious and overwhelming.

And the solution seems to me to be fairly clear—a separation of religious and quasi-religious ideals of marriage from the civil/legal aspects of marriage. You should have a defined legal state, that could be called “marriage” or “civil union” or “civil marriage” or whatever else we want that’s recognized by the state on a non-discriminatory basis. And then religious groups can also have whatever kind of ceremonies with whatever attendant status they like. If the Catholic Church doesn’t want to perform marriages for gay couples or allow divorced people to remarry, good for them.

But as Douthat’s piece makes clear, the status quo is really a cop out. Instead of holding heterosexuals up to a rigorous standard of conduct—no divorce, harsh & unforgiving attitude toward infidelity—we’re going to discriminate against the gay and lesbian minority and then congratulate ourselves on what a good job we’re doing of upholding our ideals.

The Anti-Mosque Movement

Laurie Goodstein has an excellent piece making the point that anti-Cordoba House sentiment is just part of a broader tide of anti-mosque sentiment around the country:

In Murfreesboro, Tenn., Republican candidates have denounced plans for a large Muslim center proposed near a subdivision, and hundreds of protesters have turned out for a march and a county meeting.

In late June, in Temecula, Calif., members of a local Tea Party group took dogs and picket signs to Friday prayers at a mosque that is seeking to build a new worship center on a vacant lot nearby.

In Sheboygan, Wis., a few Christian ministers led a noisy fight against a Muslim group that sought permission to open a mosque in a former health food store bought by a Muslim doctor.

On one level, there’s nothing new about this. Anti-Catholic sentiment used to be a major force in American life and Catholic values were seen as potentially inimical to liberalism, democracy, and the American way of life. But what’s noteworthy, as I’ve been saying, is that anti-Islamic politics seems more mainstream now than it was in 2002 or 2003. There are various factors playing into that, but ultimately I think it won’t turn around until we see falling unemployment and rising hours and compensation.

Amare Stoudemire: Good for the Jews?

The world of Jewish sports fans has been roiled for a week now by speculation around New York Knicks acquisition Amare Stoudemire’s trip to Israel and Twitter-born hints of Jewish roots. The Wall Street Journal delivers the clearest explanation of the situation that I’ve seen:

Mr. Stoudemire said it was his family’s dedication to biblical scripture and his attendance at Sunday school that planted the seeds of an affinity to Judaism that he says has grown over the past decade. While he doesn’t consider himself religiously Jewish, he said he feels spiritually and culturally Jewish. [...]

Mr. Stoudemire’s interest in Judaism coincides with a stepped up relationship over the past three months with Idan Ravin, a private trainer who works with NBA players. Mr. Ravin says Mr. Stoudemire’s Hebrew comes from lessons in recent weeks with Mr. Ravin’s Israeli mother, a teacher in a Jewish school in Washington, D.C. Mr. Ravin, who accompanied Mr. Stoudemire on the trip, said Mr. Stoudemire is a quick read on foreign languages, and he speculates the skill is linked to his ability to decipher an opposing defense.

Not nearly good enough for the Law of Return, but should be good enough to serve as a marketing aid in the NYC market.

Bush and the Cordoba Initiative

Writing about the Cordoba Initiative controversy, Kevin Drum says “For once, I really do miss George Bush. The damage he did to the American cause in the Muslim world is incalculable, but at least he never countenanced this kind of lunatic bigotry.”

I think that’s very true. But here’s the thing: George W Bush isn’t dead. He’s alive and well. If he wanted to stand alongside Mayor Bloomberg and do a press conference, I’m sure people would pay attention. Perhaps he’s observing a kind of ex-presidential courtesy and staying out of things. But Dick Cheney hasn’t shied away from inserting himself into political controversies. He could stand up for old fashioned Bush-Cheney values of start lots of wars but steer clear of explicit anti-Muslim bigotry. But he doesn’t want to. Nor does his daughter Liz. Karl Rove was the architect of the Bush administration’s messaging and I see him on Fox News all the time. He, too, could stand up for the approach to conservatism we remember from the Bush era. But he doesn’t want to either.

Now why is that? I couldn’t quite say. But at a minimum it’s indicative that they don’t have a very strong commitment to either the principle of non-discrimination or the strategic conceit that the conservative vision of a “war on terror” is something other than a civilizational struggle with Muslims. It’s too bad. But it is what it is, and that’s not a vanishing from the scene of Bush-era officials it’s their abdication in the face of a line of argument they won’t pursue personally but don’t seem personally disgusted by or anything.

Newt Gingrich Clarifies Thoughts on Mosque Exclusion Zone, Questions Remain

Ever since Newt Gingrich took the position that it should be impermissible to build a mosque “near ground zero” because that’s how they would handle this in Saudi Arabia, I’ve been wondering how big the Mosque Exclusion Zone is supposed to be. All of Manhattan? The whole of New York City?

According to Eric Kleefeld, Gingrich clarified his thinking somewhat last night on Greta Van Susteren’s show indicating that the northern boundary of the Exclusion Zone lies somewhere south of 59th Street:

“You know, there are over a hundred mosques in New York City. I favor religious freedom,” said Gingrich. “I’m quite happy if they’d come in and said, ‘We want to build a community center near Central Park, we’d like to build a community center near Columbia University.’ But they didn’t. They said right at the edge of a place where, let’s be clear, thousands of Americans were killed in an attack by radical Islamists.”

So the zone is clearly meant to mark out some kind of specific element of lower Manhattan. My recollection of the actual events of 9/11 were that the National Guard set up barricades along 14th Street (inconvenient for my 12th Street-based family) that people weren’t allowed to cross except for a one-time opportunity for folks to get to their houses. So maybe in honor of the day, we should say no mosques south of 14th Street since, after all, the good people of Greenwich Village, SoHo, etc. are well-known fans of Gingrich, Palin, and their brand of xenophobic militarism.