Another Reason that the Bishop Robinson fiasco bothers me

From James Lilek�s blog:

This story has irritated me from the start, and it has nothing to do with Rev. Robinson�s sexual orientation. The guy left his wife and kids to go do the hokey-pokey with someone else: that�s what it�s all about, at least for me. Marriages founder for a variety of reasons, and ofttimes [sic] they�re valid reasons, sad and inescapable. But �I want to have sex with other people� is not a valid reason for depriving two little girls of a daddy who lives with them, gets up at night when they're sick, kisses them in the morning when they wake. There's a word for people who leave their children because they don't want to have sex with Mommy anymore: selfish. I'm not a praying man, but I cannot possibly imagine asking God if that would be okay. Send them another Dad, okay? Until you do I'll keep my cellphone on 24/7, I promise.

Who are you to judge? is the standard response, and I quote Captain James T. Kirk when asked the same question by Kodos the Executioner: who do I have to be? I�ll tell you this: my nightmare is losing my daughter. The idea of leaving her on purpose is inconceivable, and I don�t care if Adriana Lima drove up the driveway in a '57 BelAir convertible, tossed me the keys and asked me to drive her to Rio, it ain�t gonna happen. I made a promise when I married my wife, and I made another when we had our daughter. It's made me rather cranky on the subject of men who don't stick around. They're letting down the side. They're reverting to type. They're talking from their trousers.

I know, I know, his daughters love him & support him now. So what. Hitler�s dog went to his funeral. (No, that doesn�t make sense, but it�s my favorite wrench to throw in conversations this week.) If he�d cast off his family to cavort with a woman from the choir, I�m not sure he�d be elevated to the level of moral avatar � but by some peculiar twist the fact that he left mom for a man insulates him from criticism. It�s as if he had to do it. To stay in the marriage would have been (crack of thunder, horses neighing) living a lie, and nowadays we�re told that�s the worst thing anyone can do. Better to bedevil other lives with the truth than inconvenience your own with a lie. Right? If others are harmed in the short run, eventually they will be happy because you�re happier. Right?

Heard an interview with Rev. Robinson this afternoon, and he used a phrase that set my teeth on edge: he referred to partnerships as �life-intentioned.� A wonderful weasel word, that: intention. The escape hatch is built right in. It�s as if the intention to stay together is equal to the expressed promise to stay together. But it�s not. Everyone had a faithless lover who did you wrong, and usually blamed everything but free will. It just happened, you know. Wasn�t intending to cheat, but . . . it just happened, okay?

Couldn�t have said it better myself.

dpny

Demise of the Dems

I think I said this earlier in the week: The Democrats are toast. Now Hugo Gurdon of the National Post of Canada says essentially the same thing. Democrats, he argues, have pushed their extreme Left-wing agenda so vociferously � pro-gay everything, pro-abortion, etc � that they risk alienating a good chunk of the their traditional base: Catholics. Money graf:

Thus, we are at the point where the mutual exclusivity of the Catholic and Democratic views has become impossible for intellectually honest people to ignore. Many people of good conscience are therefore leaving the Church, and many people of good conscience will leave the Democrats.

Like I said, The Dems are in trouble. They can�t waffle and be a �pro-choice Catholic� and stay in office; the Vatican won�t let them. (Bet on ex-commincation for all pro-choice Catholic politicians coming soon to a parish near you). All the weasel-words they�ve been using � Mario Cuomo�s famous �I�m personally against abortion but understand that it�s the law� being the best example � won�t give them cover much longer. The hammer will come down.

dpny

Ah-nold!

When Hillary Clinton was elected senator of my state, New York, I cursed loudly and often about the stupidity of the body politic. Hillary was nothing but a celebrity; a woman famous for being the abused wife of the President.

�Ahhhhh,� people would say to me. �But she deserves this because Bill was so bad to her. And she cares about New York.�

It made me crazy. Care and celebrity don't equal competence. And that's what so irks me about celebirity politics. It cheapens the electoral process by making allowing celebrity to trump good ideas and experience.

That stated, I�m tickled to death to see Arnold Schwartzenegger stepping into the recall race in California. I have also developed a visceral hatred of spineless career politicians whose blow-dried looks and focus group-tested rhetoric are absolutely mannequin-esque. Incumbent Gov. Gray Davis has spent his entire career being a bloodless suck-up to every special interest grievance group in the state. Couple that with his total lack of nerve confronting the electricity crisis a few years ago (and his Socialist tendency to try to fix prices at the wholesale level) and you have the current state of California�s finances. Arnold, by not being a career politician � read �by not needing to raise money for re-election� � will have the backbone to attempt to do what he says he wants to do: lure businesses back to California that been chased out by confiscatory taxation and Byzantine business regulations. If you factor in that he�s recruited a lot of former Gov. Pete Wilson�s team that ran Sacramento, he might actually pull it off.

And that would be a good thing. Watch for Arnold poll numbers to come out this weekend and scare the hell out of the Democratic Party, causing them to become hysterical.

dpny

As a former Episcopalian
I find this disturbing, but amusing anyway.

I don�t really understand it. Christianity has religious edicts that are, in essence, like a club's by-laws. Join the club, agree to and abide by the by-laws. Want to become an officer of the club? Really adhere to and believe in the by-laws. Execute them faithfully. Be one of the order.

While I actually support the creation of some mechanism for gay civil unions � after all, how can it be all that different from any other corporation � the Church of my youth selling out both the Old and New Testaments for the silver pieces that are Political Correctness is too much.

I can now see myself in some sort of Orthodox Church � the real old time religion.

Unlike most folks who take August off, I took off July from blogging. I�m back and rearing to go.

Predictions?

Nothing boils my ass like people who make predictions, then don�t stand behind them. Chris Matthews famous line that this invasion will go off like ��Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Desert One, Beirut and Somalia in the history of military catastrophe,� should be used to pound his head into mush. The brazen stupidity of a guy who has his own show is truly amazing. Still, after the fact, he makes no bones about being wrong. Indeed, in the week before Uday and Qusay Hussein were dispatched directly to hell, he was bloviating on Don Imus� nationally syndicated program about how George Bush lied to us by inserting those 12 words concerning Niger and uranium in the State of the Union speech. He then proceeded to get all worked up � demanding a Watergate like inquisition as to how the "American People" were mislead into war.

Dave�s rule of politics number 14: anytime a politician / journalist / talking head uses the term �American People� they don�t give a damn about the American people and are, instead, grinding a political ax.

Earth to Chris: your 15 minutes are almost over. You�ve milked your tenure in Jimmy Carter�s (failed) presidency for about as much as can be hoped for. Just get out.

That stated, my prediction for the Dow has come to pass, peaking at about 9300, before skidding sideways (and slightly down) for about a month. Shortly after Labor Day, it will be off to the races.
The Euro peaked at $1.19 about a month ago, and is down now to $1.12 Watch it slide to par with the buck.
Natural Gas prices are about 10% off where they were when I wrote that they would come down.

Now, why can�t Chris Matthews just admit he was wrong and concede.

Will she or won�t she?

Dr. S and I had a long discussion one Sunday morning about Sen. Hillary Clinton and whether or not she�ll run for president. Personally, I�d love to see it. It would allow for the biggest blowout in US Presidential Election History. And it would permanently marginalize both Bill and Hill for the foreseeable future. I said that the only way she�d run is if there was a hint that Rudy Guiliani wants she Senate seat. Then, she�d have to bolt for the Presidential run rather than get mowed down by the Rudy juggernaut.

Now that Howard Dean as made the covers of both Time and Newsweek, the chattering classes have decided that Hillary must jump in to �save the Democratic Party� from certain annihilation. Now, before anybody takes this stuff as truth, you have to break this into two halves:

1) Will Hillary run?
2) Does the Democratic Party need saving?

As for Hillary, I�ve already answer that question to my own satisfaction: she�ll never run if there is even the slightest possibility of her losing. The only reason she ran for Senate in New York, is that it was a close to being appointed senator as she could get. The late Pat Moynihan gave her his blessing, then promptly died. With a solidly Democratic electorate, she would probably coast to victory against anybody who ran against her. She has to appear invincible.

As for the second question, the answer is a bit more strained. The Democratic Party as it is currently constituted, is not ideological coherent in any sense. It�s pro-choice on abortion, but anti-choice on anything else. It has no economic policy to speak of. It has to military or foreign policy standards of any note. Any criticism of any of it's constituent grievance groups is considered "hate speech" � a blantantly fascist attempt to squelch free speech. In short, the Democratic Party in America is nothing more than a collection of battling grievance groups, united in their blind rage at the Republican Party in general and George Bush in particular.

Guess that never really got over losing in 1994 to Newt and company.

Nevertheless, if things go as I have written in these pages � and the Republican take 50 to 50 in 2004 � watch for the death of Democratic Party. The party of Thomas Jefferson will be replaced by the Greens, which is at least consistent in their ideology. Indeed, if Ralph Nader were smart, he�s run full tilt for president starting now, and kill off the Democrats as a Presidential party now and for the foreseeable future.