A Second Hand Conjecture

Ramadan always means new soap operas in the Arab world. I learned today it also means not even thinking about masturbation. A small thing to you perhaps, but in a repressive sexual society where the curves of the female figure are a matter of imaginative mystery, this is a serious lifestyle sacrifice for young men.

For me, Ramadan always means sharing a cigarette on a dirty floorboard outside Cairo. I’d offered my driver my last smoke in the midst of the holy month when he’d picked me up from a camel train. I’d held it out with an appeal that God was after all merciful. Tobacco is haram, forbidden, during the daylight hours of Ramadan. He’d stared at it for a long time. ‘Western devils and their temptations’ might have been in his thoughts. Finally he said “Yes. But not here.”
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I’d heard that Hitch addressed the situation in Zimbabwe in his introductory remarks at the Freedom Fest 2008 debate with Dinesh D’Souza, but I hadn’t seen the video of it until today. It’s worth a watch.

The subject of the debate itself wasn’t Zimbabwe, but the general subject of conflict and religion. If you’ve seen one D’Souza/Hitchens debate on God and man, you’ve seen everything that follows this clip, so I’ll only post the first part.

Hitch takes the opportunity to examine his marginal complicity in fostering the Western mythology of Robert Mugabe as a heroic anticolonial guerrilla leader resisting Rhodesian tyranny. A Western moral investment that Mugabe has been trading on ever since, to the unbelievable misfortune of his people.
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Well, Mr. Obama has finally quit that ludicrous Chicago institution known as Trinity United Church of Christ. His membership had survived Rev. Wright, but was ultimately done in over the visiting Rev. Michael Pfleger’s bizarre self-hating white guilt trip, and radicalized political rally in sacred masquerade.

Having seen the deranged, obscenely ideological sermons of Wright and then Pfleger, it may be that conservatives are experiencing for the first time in national politics what the left has endured for decades: the insufferable and corrosive experience of seeing clergy involved in brutish political editorializing from the pulpit, done allegedly under the sanction of God, for and toward His rather famously unpredictable purposes.

Perhaps there might then be a collective recognition in this country that aggressively involving the church in politics isn’t such a swell idea. Perhaps even a deeper understanding that God –who by His nature rules only through decree– might not be such a logical source for consultation in a democracy, which rules through consent of the governed.

Too much to hope for, I know. But one can dream of a better day. Even in an era where the preacher pirates in the Evangelical social conservative movement hold a cutlass at the Republican party’s throat every election. And thereby a patently preposterous, explicitly theocratic ignoramus like Mike Huckabee, can experience significant support within that party for its vice presidential nomination.

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photo: Steve Kaiser

Have you ever taken a moment to read some of the many Huckabee blogs that have sprung up over the past months? They’re really quite strange. For instance, here is a snippet from a Blogs 4 Huckabee post on Ann Coulter’s infamous endorsement of Hillary Clinton:

If the Democrats win, the American people will flock to the Party of God. As it is, 8 years of moral, sensible government have made the American people complacent, and ripe for the lies and distortions of a deviant candidate like Hitlery.

As usual, Coulter’s one of the smarter analysts out there. (I do wish she’d strap her chest down, but otherwise I also find her a very moral, and very alluring, woman.) Where I tend to disagree with her is her failure to endorse Brownback. I’m not sure America can stand 4 years of Hitlery, even if it’s followed by another 2 decades of Republican dominance. We’re still languishing under a recession caused by Bill Clinton; do we really want a Hitlery recession added onto that? We’ll be in the Great Depression in no time if we keep letting Democrats rule us.
(Blogs 4 Huckabee)

Probably the most disturbing element of this is his using the term “Party of God” in a sincere and supportive way to describe the GOP. “Party of God” in Arabic is literally “Hezbollah.”

But where do you even proceed from there? Moral yet alluring? A recession caused by Bill Clinton in 2008, Ann Coulter as the smartest “analyst,” with her only fault being a failure to endorse Sam Brownback of all things? Yes, this is pretty much beyond criticism, and well into the realm of opinions which are simply too bizarre to seriously comment on.

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photo: Foxicat

Looks like the liberation theologist won the Kansas caucuses with a substantial 67% of the vote. Earlier today at CPAC, Huckabee had suggested that miraculous intervention by the Almighty would eventually deliver him the GOP nomination. You have to take that as literal belief when it comes to Huckabee. He also pledged to remain in the race. Something that wasn’t altogether well received by CPAC, as Sharon Soon recounts: “Half the crowd gets on their feet, holding up ‘I Like Mike’ signs that were placed on every chair before his speech. Notably, though, there were many scattered in the audience who refused to stand or even clap.” Good for them.

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Add another unsettling dimension to Mike Huckabee’s rather bizarre views on the Constitution: he apparently subscribes to the judicial pragmatist interpretation of a Living Constitution. Imagine the notion of an open constitution into which you can read any unwritten right, although this time not practiced by social liberals (as we’ve grown accustomed to), but instead by a committed theocrat, determined to inject “God’s standards” into the document. An unwelcome development.

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Video clip of Mike Huckabee arguing that “what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards.” Hmm. Is that really in accord with anyone’s notion of Founders intent? I know committed social conservatives who do not share such a false and extreme view of the Constitution. Aside from that, can you imagine this kind of rhetoric in the context of a general election? Automatic defeat.

H/T: Pamela Leavey

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