The Commentariat -- May 25, 2014
Internal links removed.
Tim Noah of NBC News: "... there's no reason to believe veterans' wait times to see a VA doctor exceed, on average and to any significant degree, non-veterans' wait times to see a private-sector doctor. Inadequate access to health care is a VA problem. But it's a national problem, too."
Two Salon columnist, Andrew O'Hehir here & Elias Isquith here, take Glenn Greenwald's side against Michael Kinsley & George Packer who critique Greenwald's book (and personality).
Has Cake, Eats It, Too. AP: "Robert Gates, the new president of the Boy Scouts of America, said Friday that he would have moved last year to allow openly gay adults in the organization but said he opposes any further attempts to address the policy now.... 'I would have supported having gay Scoutmasters, but at the same time, I fully accept the decision that was democratically arrived at by 1,500 volunteers from across the entire country.'"
Jodi Rudoren of the New York Times: "Pope Francis called 'urgently' on Saturday for a 'peaceful solution' to the Syrian crisis and a 'just solution' to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as he started a three-day sojourn through the Holy Land at a time of regional turmoil and tension."
Eric Lach of TPM: "The creationist Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky. plans to unveil a new attraction this weekend: a world-class Allosaurus skeleton. But unlike other museums, where dinosaur skeletons are used to 'indoctrinate our kids with belief in evolution,' according to the institution, the Creation Museum's skeleton will serve as 'a testament to the truths found in God's Word.'" Via Steve Benen.
News Ledes
New York Times: "Pope Francis inserted himself directly into the collapsed Middle East peace process on Sunday, issuing an invitation to host the Israeli and Palestinian presidents for a prayer summit at his apartment in the Vatican, in an overture that has again underscored the broad ambitions of his papacy."
New York Times: "With their country caught in a fierce tug-of-war between Russia and the West over a new security order, Ukrainians elected Petro O. Poroshenko as president on Sunday, turning to a pro-European billionaire to lead them out of six months of wrenching turmoil, including a continuing separatist insurrection in the east."
Los Angeles Times: "Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department officials Sunday identified the first three victims of the Isla Vista rampage, each found fatally stabbed Friday night inside an apartment not far from the UC Santa Barbara campus. Now, all the attacker's victims have been identified, and they were all UCSB students." The Times currently has several related stories on its front page.
AFP: "Afghan President Hamid Karzai was offered a meeting with President Barack Obama at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul but declined, a US official said Sunday."
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Reader Comments (6)
Hesitate to say something nice about him here, but for a change Douthat has some sensible things to say, this time about the Tea Party, its appeal, origins, effects and possible legacy...that is, until he runs into the impossible job of making three of the possible 2016 Presidential candidates sound credible...but I don't fault him for that failure. Even Superman couldn't do it.
legacy.http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-tea-party-legacy.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0
Robert Gates. Boy Scout. It figures.
@Re: Creationists. Their logic, or lack thereof, escapes me. Arguing with them is pointless, because they always refer back to Genesis and shoehorn whatever cockamamie theory they're peddling into it.
What scares me is the number of people who swallow their BS. S
I submitted the following to the Times in response to "The Power of Political Ignorance." It might be a bit shrill, but I think it is on point:
Our media strain to reach sunny conclusions from gloomy evidence. See Ross Douthat's phoned-in endorsement of the Know-Nothing Party in today's edition.
It pleases many to think that the critical votes that gives one candidate a win are those of the vaunted "moderates" who think more deeply about the issues than do partisan riff-raff like ourselves.
However, there is no middle ground between war and peace. There is no middle ground between climate disaster and acting with celerity to address climate issues. There is no middle ground between those who would treat the historically ostracized as the humans they are and those who would maintain the xenophobic, homophobic, aggressively racist points of view from which lynching disrespectful black people was regrettable but necessary and driving gay kids to suicide or even killing them was merely doing God's work.
After all, if you hate certain people and believe in a deity, you must customize your deity to mirror your hatred or yourself suffer the guilt and shame that accompany such hateful emotions.
So, in the midst of our own Cultural Revolution, in which erudition and science have not been in such disrepute since Pol Pot decided to kill all the educated people in Cambodia, our press has performed acrobatically trying to pass off zealots like Ted Cruz (and his charming father) as if they were give-and-take participants in the national dialogue.
When the low-information voter splits his vote, the press can take a bow.
Excellent, Jack. Well said.
Jack: Well said! Thanks for sharing it.
And if the Right's attack on "erudition and science" mounted with nary a demurrer from the national press, did not have a clear endgame in sight, witness the new Thai military government's arrest/detention of professors and intellectuals for a glimpse of our own future, if the Cruzers and his cadre of know-nothing haters continue to have their way.
Extracts from my own comment to the Times in which I might have been a bit shrill, too.
"....The Tea Party amalgam is an expression of discontent from those who don't like the way the country is going, their growing sense that events are out of their control. To that degree, the Tea Partyers are correct. They are. But the changes they do not like have little to do with our own government. They arise from international demographic and economic forces over which individual nation-states hold little sway. International corporations and the financial sector are both more powerful than any one individual government, even our own. They are free to benefit from the world's resource scarcity, using the geographic fiction of national barriers as a means to profit without paying taxes. Because they are not tied to any one nation, they have no compunction about dislocating workers and inequitably distributing resources and the wealth derived from them, thereby tearing hundreds of communities' social fabric to shreds.
Unfortunately the TP's reaction to all this is grounded in a misunderstanding of history and a constricted vision of our future.
(I would add here that constricted view would simply eliminate anything they do not like or understand, and that's a bundle.)
The government they have been schooled to hate may be ineffective, but it is not the problem."