After two days of meetings at the United Nations, the Bush administration came away with no new pledges of international troops or funds to assist with the securing and rebuilding of Iraq. White House officials hastened to say that this wasn't a failure because the administration never actually tried to recruit new aid. "The president did not come here to ask people for troops," one unnamed aide said. If you don't actually try, the reasoning seems to be, then you… Read more
I keep a close watch on this heart of mine
September 25, 2003 By Fred Clark 4 Comments
Suzanne Fields of The Washington Times wonders why Johnny Cash’s deep Christian faith is widely respected, while President Bush’s is viewed with suspicion. After all, she says, both “were strongly influenced by the evangelistic preaching of Billy Graham.” That’s true. But it’s about the only similarity one can draw between the two. George W. Bush views himself as God’s hand-picked president — a cowboy in a white hat. He couldn’t be more different from the Man in Black. Look at… Read more
Friedman, Will and Rumsfeld
September 25, 2003 By Fred Clark 4 Comments
Something strange happened last night on the op-ed pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. I suspect the work of pranksters who somehow hacked into the system. At the Times these mischief-makers deleted Tom Friedman's column — perhaps the next installment of his "because we could" argument for war on Iraq — replacing it with what appears to be a column by Arianna Huffington. Over at the Post, meanwhile, the hackers supplanted George Will's next attempt to… Read more
Hide the beer, the pastor’s here
September 24, 2003 By Fred Clark 23 Comments
"It is a mistake to think that Christians ought all to be teetotallers; [Islam], not Christianity, is the teetotal religion." — C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity In this intriguing article in New York magazine, Craig Horowitz explores the strange alliance between pro-Israel Jewish groups and conservative American evangelicals. Without realizing it, Horowitz relates one howling faux pas from Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, founder of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews: "More and more Jews see the Evangelical community as a… Read more
How (not) to win friends and influence people
September 24, 2003 By Fred Clark 5 Comments
From Dana Milbank in today's Washington Post: Just before [French President Jacques] Chirac addressed the assembly, Bush and his top aides — Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John D. Negroponte — left the hall. Chirac sat with the French delegation during Bush's speech and politely applauded. Classy. They could have at least left Negroponte behind — it's his job to be there, after all. Milbank also notes… Read more
Happy Birthday
September 24, 2003 By Fred Clark
I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. … Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic… Read more
Who said this?
September 24, 2003 By Fred Clark 4 Comments
"Writing/Talking about music is like dancing about architecture." I first read this in the liner notes to something from Laurie Anderson (United States — I think). I recalled her attributing it to Steve Martin. Since then I've also seen it variously attributed to Frank Zappa, David Bowie, David Byrne, Robin Hitchcock and Elvis Costello. Googling provides little guidance — "dancing about architecture" gets some 12,100 hits. Eventually you find your way to this page, where Alan P. Scott does his… Read more
The hobgoblin of small minds
September 23, 2003 By Fred Clark 5 Comments
Thanks to Buzzflash I find this item from the Australian press. Aussie investigative reporter John Pilger cites both U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice arguing — in early 2001 — that Saddam Hussein's Iraq does not pose a threat to his region or to the world. "Hmm," I think, "This is strong stuff. Pilger's really been doing some digging." But then I learn — via Atrios, via Lean Left — that the Powell speech… Read more
Carnac the Magnificent Business Journalist
September 23, 2003 By Fred Clark 3 Comments
Via Romenesko I came across this transcript of a discussion of one of my journalistic pet peeves, what “On the Media” host Bob Garfield calls “single factor analysis”: Every trading day, reporters at the Associated Press, Bloomberg, Reuters, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and a dozen other news organizations are expected to distill millions of discrete financial decisions and divine a single motivating factor! Some days it’s a Commerce Department report on business inventories. Sometimes it’s a jump in… Read more
In the sweet by and by
September 23, 2003 By Fred Clark 9 Comments
The birthdays in the previous post are from Dr. Mac's Cultural Calendar, which also notes that today, Sept. 23, is also in a sense the birthday of a peculiarly American version of Christianity. On this day in 1667 in Williamsburg, Virginia, a law was passed barring slaves from obtaining their freedom by converting to Christianity. Consider what the implications of this were for these Christian slaves and the Christians who bought and sold them. How could these Christians read together… Read more
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