The Times reports that, in a 1997 letter, the Vatican instructed Irish bishops not to report pedophile priests to the police.
Why? Because, according to the letter, “The results could be highly embarrassing….”
The Vatican is spinning this document as no big deal, which it clearly is. And there are signs that the more things change…
Even now, however, the Vatican has refrained from imposing rules for the church worldwide that would mandate reporting clergy accused of abuse to civil authorities. The reason, Vatican officials say, is that in some repressive countries that are hostile to the Catholic church, government officials could use abuse allegations as a pretext to persecute Catholic clergy.
After I go and make myself root against a New York team—actually, not that hard when it’s the Jets—the Patriots choke!
As Dan Shaughnessy writes,
So this season goes down as a failure. It was a golden opportunity and it is gone. There are only going to be so many of these opportunities in the professional lifetime of Tom Brady. We all know the Patriots should have gone to Dallas.
Compounding the missed opportunity we have the emergence of the Jets. Make no mistake about it; the Jets are going to be a nightmare for years. Sunday’s shocker at Gillette is to the Jets what the 2004 American League Championship Series was to the Red Sox. Jet fans always are going to be able to throw this in the face of Patriots fans. Forever.
Yes! That is exactly right. The Patriots have allowed Jets fans to become even more obnoxious.
Which is saying something.
Dear God, help the Steelers to win. What kind of a planet could this be when teeming with insufferable, barely literate, prone-to-violence Jets fans?
To evaluate Alan Dershowitz’s claim that “blood libel” is a phrase that has assumed “broad metaphorical meaning,” I Googled the term.
The only use of “blood libel” that I could find that did not refer to the anti-Semitic slur came (sigh) in the once-great Wall Street Journal on January 10th, in a column by conservative Glenn Harlan Reynolds called “The Arizona Tragedy and the Politics of Blood Libel.”
So as the usual talking heads begin their “have you no decency?” routine aimed at talk radio and Republican politicians, perhaps we should turn the question around. Where is the decency in blood libel?
Which is obviously where Palin’s moronic ghostwriter got the phrase….
A shame no one called Reynolds out on this at the time.
Other than that, nope—can’t find a single use of the term in anything other than its specific meaning. What the hell was Dershowitz talking about?
(To be fair, there is this hilariously unconvincing list that a conservative at National Review dredged up, in which pretty much every example of the term is either in a context that acknowledges its original meaning or comes when it’s misused by conservatives…but there’s one use of blood libel by none other than the Boston Globe’s Alex Beam.
Mr. Beam, care to respond?
In any case, broad metaphorical meaning? I don’t think so.)
The Washington Post reports on how Sarah Palin’s use of the phrase “blood libel” overshadowed what she was trying to accomplish in her “don’t blame me” statement.
Palin drew swift, fierce condemnation from liberals and some Jewish groups.
“A particularly heinous term,” said David A. Harris, president of the National Jewish Democratic Council. It had additional resonance because the apparent target of the Tucson attacks was a Jewish congresswoman.
But wait—Palin had her defenders. One of whom was (sigh) Alan Dershowitz, whose desperation to be in the news truly knows no bounds. (The man who posts the death threats he receives on his office door would rather make news than be consistent. Or, rather, he is consistent that he’d rather make news.)
Liberal Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz told the blog biggovernment.com that blood libel has taken on “broad metaphorical meaning” and said there was “nothing improper and certainly nothing anti-Semitic in Sarah Palin using the term to characterize what she reasonably believes are false accusations.”
I’m not an expert on the subject, but that strikes me as absurd. Blood libel is, in fact, a phrase that you don’t hear very much, and when you do, it’s only (until now) in the context of the anti-Semitic slur. “Broad metaphorical meaning”? What a load of nonsense.
(And by the way, that website, biggovernment.com? Kinda scary.)
Here’s a sad and unfortunate twist to an already sad story—but can you believe it?
Palin officials confirmed a report by ABC News that Palin has received an unprecedented number of death threats since Saturday’s shootings and has been in conversations with security officials about the matter. They declined to provide further details.
Of course they didn’t—because further details probably don’t exist. I hate to be cynical (honestly, I do), but…I’m not buying it. The single-sourced ABC News story was probably leaked/planted by Palin people to make her look sympathetic, and it’s just a little too convenient to trust.
The Post added this comment:
On the video, Palin appeared more subdued than usual - drawn and older-looking, her eyes noticeably red.
Good! For two reasons. One, I hope all this is taking a toll on her; it should. She’s stirred up felings of hatred and anger in her followers, and that should weigh on her.
Two, I have this theory that as soon as Palin starts to lose her looks, her followers will drift away. It’s harsh, I know. (Hey, don’t blame me—I’m not the one who distributed those signs at the 2008 GOP convention, “Coldest state, hottest governor.“)
Writing for NYTimes.com, Robert Wright argues that hostile rhetoric can indeed incite violence—but the rhetoric he’s most concerned about isn’t the language of violence, it’s the language of otherness, of stigmatization.
….it doesn’t matter who Loughner got the [mind control] idea from or whether you consider it left wing or right wing. The point is that Americans who wildly depict other Americans as dark conspirators, as the enemy, are in fact increasing the chances, however marginally, that those Americans will be attacked.
In that sense, the emphasis the left is placing on violent rhetoric and imagery is probably misplaced. Sure, calls to violence, explicit or implicit, can have effect. But the more incendiary theme in current discourse is the consignment of Americans to the category of alien, of insidious other.
Wright mentions an incident I hadn’t heard of, in which California police stopped a man on his way to commit murder at the Tides Foundation, an obscure group railed against by Fox’s Glenn Beck, who called it part of a “Communist plot” to infiltrate American society.
Wright argues that, regardless of the mental state of Loughner and other potential assassins, the people dispensing the rhetoric bear some responsibility for what they do.
My own view is that if you decide to go kill a bunch of innocent people, it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re not a picture of mental health. But that doesn’t sever the link between you and the people who inspired you, or insulate them from responsibility. Glenn Beck knows that there are lots of unbalanced people out there, and that his message reaches some of them.
Of course he does—can you imagine the mail he must get?
Part of today’s challenge, Wright adds, is that modern technology allows demagogues to engage in such fear-mongering and stigmatization with greater ease and with greater distance from the consequences. (Note Sarah Palin, who still hasn’t spoken to a reporter regarding the Arizona shootings, just responded on Facebook.)
So don’t Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch bear some responsibility here as well?
Wright says yes, and I agree: How those two sleep at night is a mystery to me. And yet, I’m guessing that they sleep very well…
In a post on her Facebook page, “Palin” (which is to say, a ghostwriter) responds to criticism that her targeting of Gabrielle Giffords may have contributed to Jared Loughner’s assassination attempt.
Like many, I’ve spent the past few days reflecting on what happened and praying for guidance….
Is there a single person who believes that Sarah Palin was asking God—as opposed to her political advisers—for guidance?
I’m imagining the prayer here:
Dear God, could you help me out? See, I put a bullseye on this woman, and then—fuck!—some crazy guy shot her, and now everyone’s saying it’s my fault, and, well, shucks! I didn’t really want someone to shoot her. I mean, maybe a little. But not in the head! Now how am I going to run for president? Thank you o God for your guidance, and if you could renew my reality show too, that’d be awesome!
In typical narcissistic Palin fashion, she says nothing about praying for the people who were shot. She wants “guidance.”
The non-praying Palin continues:
President Reagan said, “We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.” Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them, not collectively with all the citizens of a state, not with those who listen to talk radio, not with maps of swing districts used by both sides of the aisle….
Only Palin would be cynical enough to resort to Reagan—an attempt to place her in the Reagan lineage, which is to say, an attempt to position herself for the 2012 election—while commenting on an assassination attempt. (‘Cuz, you know, someone tried to kill Reagan too, so if you quote him then it’s all good!)
In any case, it’s a red herring: No one is blaming “society.” Instead, people are discussing whether inflammatory rhetoric such as that used by Palin inspired a murderer’s act of violence.
Quite different.
There are those who claim political rhetoric is to blame for the despicable act of this deranged, apparently apolitical criminal. And they claim political debate has somehow gotten more heated just recently. But when was it less heated? Back in those “calm days” when political figures literally settled their differences with dueling pistols?
I must have missed all the commentators talking about how many more “calm days” there were during Revolutionary times. Why are those words in quotation marks? Did someone actually say them? Or are they just-you know—made up? And then given the quotation marks to make it sound like lots of people have been using 1804 as a point of comparison. It’s fascinating to see how conservatives have inserted this straw man into the debate, attributed it to liberals, and then turn around and call liberals crazy for asserting something they never asserted in the first place.
But it is worth pointing out that dueling is now, well, illegal, and has been since the Civil War. (Shocker, the South was the last holdout.) And also that, in a duel, both parties are…what’s the word I’m trying to think of?… Oh. Armed.
In any case, most of the Founding Fathers to whom Palin turns for cover decried the practice of dueling.
Benjamin Franklin and George Washington were among the most prominent Americans to condemn dueling. Franklin called duels a “murderous practice…they decide nothing.” And Washington, who undoubtedly needed all the good soldiers he could get, congratulated one of his officers for refusing a challenge, noting that “there are few military decisions that are not offensive to one party or another.”
History! It’s all complicated and stuff.
Palin goes on to remind people that she’s already denied that she’s inciting people to violence. So it’s unfair that she has to do it again.
As I said while campaigning for others last March in Arizona during a very heated primary race, “We know violence isn’t the answer. When we ‘take up our arms’, we’re talking about our vote.
Here’s the actual clip of that. Do you find it reassuring? Like when she talks about “this B.S. coming from the mainstream media”?
I could go on, lamenting Palin’s use of the term “blood libel” to describe the criticism she’s enduring, for example. (History!)
As the Times points out,
Blood libel is typically used to describe the false accusation that Jews murder Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals, in particular the baking of matzos for passover. The term, which is centuries old, referred to anti-Semitism and violent pogroms against Jews, and her use of the phrase itself has caused the video to go viral, attracting criticism of her description of the controversy. Ms. Giffords, who remains in critical condition in a Tucson hospital, is Jewish.
Which is more offensive, I wonder—if Palin didn’t know what the term refers to, or if she did?
But you know what’s the really scary part? The massive string of adoring, reverential comments. Somewhere in that crowd of unthinking, unblinking admirers, there’s another Jared Lee Loughner in the works. Could it be the middle-aged white man who writes (exactly) this:
They are making me LOVE you.They are making me LOVE you.They are making me LOVE you.They are making me LOVE you.They are making me LOVE you.They are making me LOVE you.They are making me LOVE you.They are making me LOVE you.They are making me LOVE you.They are making me LOVE you.
The Washington Post reports that, yesterday, she delivered her first judicial opinion.
Like other rookie justices before her, Kagan drew a relatively noncontroversial decision for her maiden effort. The court ruled against a man who argued that an ambiguity in federal bankruptcy law allowed him to shield some income from creditors by claiming a monthly allowance for car payments, even though his car loan was paid off.
The lone dissenter? The kookier and kookier Antonin Scalia…
When I was a kid, I was fortunate enough to grow up in an old farmhouse in Fairfield, Connecticut—a special place. What young boy wouldn’t love a home with horse and cow stalls, a chicken coop, a creamery, and various other outbuildings filled with mysterious things to explore and places to hide?
But when I was in eighth grade, my sister and brother were away at school and there just wasn’t much point for a home with ten or so outbuildings on the property for my father, mother and myself.
So we moved into a still wonderful but more traditional home down the block, on Congress Street. There was one thing that I thought was particularly cool about it: The prior occupants were British director Peter Yates and his family, whom we knew a bit. Very exciting! Our house had been owned by the guy who directed Bullit and Breaking Away!
Unexpectedly, I saw in the paper yesterday that Mr. Yates (as I knew him) had died.
Mr. Yates was nominated for two Academy Awards for directing, for “Breaking Away” (1979), an underdog-triumphs story in which four local teenagers in Bloomington, Ind., take on a privileged team of bicycle racers from Indiana University; and for “The Dresser” (1983), an adaptation of Ronald Harwood’s play about an aging theater actor and his long-serving assistant, which starred Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay. (Both films, which Mr. Yates also produced, were nominated for best picture as well.)
I’ve lost touch with his children, Miranda and Toby, since the old days. But my thoughts are with them.
Here’s the trailer for Breaking Away. Couple things: First, trailers were weird back then. (This trailer completely mischaracterizes what I remember as a pretty dark and gritty film.)
