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Mel Gibson: “How’d that happen?”
Editor, political commentator and sex advice columnist Dan Savage loves to take apart what he calls the HTH defense: “How’d that happen?” As in, “I wound up in bed with my wife’s best friend, how’d that happen?” Savage always retorts: It happened because you wanted it to happen and you allowed it to happen, so stop pretending otherwise. Mel Gibson
Demonizing Israel’s children
I regret not commenting on this until now. On July 23 I received an email from someone in the jazz community rightly expressing dismay at the unfolding events in Lebanon. I have no reason to doubt this person’s good intentions. But one of the enclosed links directed the email recipients to this page. [Warning: the images are extremely graphic.] The
Chavez in Iran
Excuse my tardiness, but since I commented on Hugo Chavez’s visit to Belarus the other day, I’d be remiss not to mention his uncritical embrace of the president of Iran, a Holocaust denier and antisemite. [Update: Excuse me again, but I missed this account, wherein Chavez is quoted as follows: “Israel is perpetrating the same acts against the Lebanese that
A note from Shalom Lappin
I received this communication from Shalom Lappin in regard to a post from July 20: “Several of the comments on your blog cast doubt on the chronology of events that I give in my post on Normblog concerning the current conflict in Lebanon. In particular, they insist that Hizbollah did not initiate large scale shelling of Israeli towns and villages
Qana
There’s nothing I can say about the horror in Qana, other than it’s the indirect and direct result of U.S. policy — indirect in that the U.S. continues to frustrate efforts toward a ceasefire, direct in that the bomb that fell on the building on Qana was in all likelihood American. To the U.S., immediate ceasefires are worthless, but immediate
Mel Gibson’s passion
Alcoholism is correctly referred to as a disease, but in this case may it prove to be a cure — a cure for the delusion that Mel Gibson had no antisemitic agenda in making “The Passion of the Christ.” Memo to Jewish “leaders” and pundits on the right who signed on to Gibson’s whitewash campaign around the film: Just look
The silence of the libs
There’s been talk about the reluctance of the big liberal bloggers (Daily Kos, etc.) to take on the Israel/Lebanon issue. Sullivan thinks they’re “wimping out.” Kos insists, “we’re stuck with a war that will not end in any forseable [sic] future. It doesn’t matter what we bloggers say.” Kevin Drum notes: “The conflict is fantastically complex, and the partisans on
Sophistry
I overheard an impassioned argument about Israel/Lebanon the other day. The person on the left argued that Israel’s assault was “no different” than the terror practiced by Osama bin Laden. It’s odd — I was less than half a mile from ground zero on 9/11 and I don’t recall seeing any leaflets dropped from the sky, warning us of the