The Commentariat -- April 6, 2015

Internal links & defunct video removed.

Afternoon News:

Isabel Kershner of the New York Times: "Whereas Israel's public diplomacy has so far focused on what many have said was an unrealistic demand for the complete dismantlement of Iran's potentially military nuclear infrastructure, Yuval Steinitz, Israel's minister of intelligence and strategic affairs, presented a list of desired modifications for the final agreement due to be concluded by June 30, that he said would make it 'more reasonable.'"

*****

Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post: "President Obama made a detailed case Sunday for a new framework agreement on Iran's nuclear program, calling it a 'once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see whether or not we can at least take the nuclear issue off the table' and potentially bring regional stability to the Middle East. Obama's comments were part of a major sales pitch launched by the administration Sunday in an effort to marshal public support for the tentative pact, even as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and congressional Republicans took to the airwaves to blast the accord. ...

... The New York Times interview is here. With video clips. (See also Annals of "Journalism," Ctd. below.) ...

... Tom McCarthy of the Guardian: "Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Sunday stepped up his attack on a nascent deal to curb Iran's nuclear program, calling the framework agreement announced in Switzerland last week 'a very bad deal'. The framework did not do enough to dismantle Iran's nuclear infrastructure, Netanyahu said, and world powers were making a mistake by offering Iran a path to sanctions relief without demanding more in return." ...

... David Atkins in the Washington Monthly: "As Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu continues to decry the landmark deal between the U.S. and Iran, more evidence is emerging that Israel's current leadership is alienating Americans in droves: '... Only 54% of Americans polled said that Israel is their country's ally, a decline from 68% in 2014 and 74% in 2012.'" ...

... Sandy Berger, former National Security Advisor to Bill Clinton, in Politico Magazine: "This is a good deal. We should not be distracted by talk of a better one. Enacting new, tough sanctions in an effort to force Iran toward a 'better' deal would mystify and alarm the rest of the world, isolating and weakening us. Such sanctions would crumble under their own weight -- amounting to, as Shakespeare said, 'sound and fury, signifying nothing.'"

Mike Barnicle in the Daily Beast: "Why do so many Republicans seem so angry all the time at so much around us? The fury of some like Ted Cruz is understandable. It's fueled by his massive ego and outsized ambition along with his personal belief that he is so smart and the rest of us are so pedestrian that he can manipulate opinion to win the Republican nomination for president with the support of the mentally ill wing of his party." Barnicle devotes much of his post to ragging on John Bolton, who never conceived a war he didn't like, although he never had any intention of actually serving in the military. Because hippies or something.

Eric Lipton of the New York Times on how Comcast pays the influential to influence the FCC. This is precious: "David L. Cohen, Comcast's executive vice president who oversees the company's sprawling lobbying and public relations program, said in an interview on Friday that he was proud of the job the company had done in campaigning for the deal.... He did not dispute that many of the voices supporting the deal received donations from Comcast. But he said he was offended by the suggestion that their endorsements had been made in return for the financial help." ...

... Another example of why Bob Menendez's favors-for-friends program fails to horrify me.

Paul Campos, in a New York Times op-ed, on the real reasons for the huge rise in the cost of a college education: while the conventional wisdom puts the onus on cuts in state funding: "In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s." (Because the number of students has exploded, per-capita public investment is down somewhat.) And it isn't highly-paid professors, either; "... the average salaries of the people who do the teaching in American higher education are actually quite a bit lower than they were in 1970." Campos puts much of the blame on vastly-growing administrations & overpaid administrators.

Paul Krugman: "Elections and politics.... The evidence suggests that the politically smart thing might well be to impose a pointless depression on your country for much of your time in office, solely to leave room for a roaring recovery just before voters go to the polls. Actually, that's a pretty good description of what the current British government has done, although it's not clear that it was deliberate."

Annals of "Journalism," Ctd.

You get one guess & one guess only as to the identity of President Obama's New York Times "interviewer." Here's the lede, which should constitute the only clue you'll need:

In September 1996, I visited Iran. One of my most enduring memories of that trip was that in my hotel lobby there was a sign above the door proclaiming 'Down With USA.' But it wasn't a banner or graffiti. It was tiled and plastered into the wall. I thought to myself: 'Wow -- that's tiled in there! That won't come out easily.'

... Your answer here: Tom Friedman, because everything Tom Friedman writes is about Tom Friedman -- even an interview of the POTUS

Paul Farhi & Rees Shapiro of the Washington Post: "A months-long investigation into a flawed Rolling Stone magazine article about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia has concluded that the story reflected failures at virtually every level, from reporting to editing to fact-checking. In a 12,000-word report that reads like a reportorial autopsy, a three-person team at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism called the November article 'a story of journalistic failure that was avoidable.... The magazine set aside or rationalized as unnecessary essential practices of reporting' that would likely have exposed the story as dubious." ...

... Sheila Coronel, Steve Coll & Derek Kravitz write the Columbia U. Graduate School of Journalism report, published in Rolling Stone: "'A Rape on Campus' -- What Went Wrong." ...

... Here are statements, via the New York Times, by Sabrina Erdely, the author of the Rolling Stone story, & by Theresa Sullivan, president of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

NEW. Anchorman! Frank Rich: "For all the histrionics, [the Brian Williams] incident of media blood sport was much ado about not so much. The network-news anchor as an omnipotent national authority figure is such a hollow anachronism in 21st-century America that almost nothing was at stake. NBC's train wreck played out as corporate and celebrity farce rather than as a human or cultural tragedy because it doesn't actually matter who puts on the bespoke suit and reads the news from behind a desk."

Presidential Race

The Former Most Interesting Man in Politics. Karen Tumulty & Robert Costa of the Washington Post: "When the presidential buzz began building around Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) a couple of years ago, the expectation was that his libertarian ideas could make him the most unusual and intriguing voice among the major contenders in the 2016 field. But now, as he prepares to make his formal announcement Tuesday, Paul is a candidate who has turned fuzzy, having trimmed his positions and rhetoric so much that it's unclear what kind of Republican he will present himself as...."

Alan Rappeport of the New York Times: Jeb "Bush ... was born in Texas and hails from one of America's most prominent political dynasties. But on at least one occasion, it appears he got carried away with his appeal to Spanish-speaking voters and claimed he actually was Hispanic. In a 2009 voter-registration application, obtained from the Miami-Dade County Elections Department, Mr. Bush marked Hispanic in the field labeled 'race/ethnicity.'" Here's the form. ...

... Jessica Roy: "When contacted by the Times, Bush's spokesperson had no idea why he'd listed himself as Hispanic, which is probably the first honest response ever elicited from a spokesperson."

NEW. Jason Zengerle of New York writes what is billed as "a sober assessment" of Hilliary Clinton's chance to be our next POTUS.

Jonathan Topaz of Politico: "Gary Hart has serious reservations about a Hillary Clinton candidacy. The prospect of a billion-dollar Clinton campaign 'ought to frighten every American,' he said in an interview with Politico, and Democrats would be better served by a competitive primary that forced her to speak in more depth about the issues.... The post-Citizens United campaign finance environment has sullied the presidential process, he said, benefiting establishment politicians who cater to financial backers."

Beyond the Beltway

Kansas Legislators Think up New Ways to Harm Poor Families. Arthur Delaney of the Huffington Post: "Kansas welfare recipients will be unable to get more than $25 per day in benefits under a new law sent this week to Republican Gov. Sam Brownback's desk by the state legislature. The bill also prohibits welfare recipients from spending their benefits at certain types of businesses, including liquor stores, fortune tellers, swimming pools and cruise ships.... 'This provision makes it nearly impossible for a recipient who does not have a checking account to pay rent,' Liz Schott of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said in an email. 'Moreover, it actually takes money from the pockets of poor families since they will need to pay 85 cents for each additional withdrawal after the first one in a month, and often more with ATM transaction fees.'"

Brandon Rittiman of KUSA Denver: "The [Colorado] Department of Regulatory Agencies determined that a Denver bakery did nothing wrong when it refused to write anti-gay words on a cake. In the ruling released Friday, the Colorado Civil Rights Division rejected the argument that Azucar Bakery discriminated against the customer's religion when it refused the order in March 2014. The state ruled that the cake shop had every right not to make the cakes on the grounds that the message on the cakes would be 'derogatory.'"

News Ledes

Guardian: "Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's fate now moves to the hands of a jury, after a vehement and emotionally charged closing statement from the prosecutor in the Boston bombing trial on Monday."

New York Times: "The Rev. Gardner C. Taylor, a grandson of slaves who took over a Baptist pulpit in Brooklyn in 1948, when overt racism defined much of American life, and became an influential voice for civil rights and one of the nation's most eloquent churchmen, died on Sunday in Durham, N.C. He was 96."

An Easter Message to the Scripturally-Challenged

Marriage is between one man and one woman. – Jesus, in some mysterious, unspecified scriptural passage, because …

… The biblical texts do not support the frequent claim that marriage between one man and one woman is the only type of marriage deemed acceptable by the Bible’s authors. – Robert R. Cargill, Hector Avalos & Kenneth Atkinson, biblical scholars

First, we should all understand that the New Testament gospels are works of fiction, written decades after the period during which Jesus was supposed to have lived. There is no historical record or contemporaneous account of Jesus, and there is no particular reason to think he was an actual person living in the early part of the first century C.E. The fabulous Jesus is based on numerous models – real and fictional – so it is not possible to know what “Jesus said” about anything.

One of the aims of the gospel writers was to provide “rules to live by” for diaspora Jews whom the Romans had driven from Palestine and for other followers of an emerging faith. Thus, the authors of all three synoptic gospels – Mark, Matthew and Luke – have Jesus discuss divorce, which for centuries had been a contentious issue among Jews, with some accepting divorce rather readily – thanks especially to Roman influence – and others finding it unacceptable, except in cases of a wife's infidelity.

Although the gospel writers themselves did not perfectly agree, the remarks regarding divorce which Matthew attributed to Jesus are the most commonly cited:

Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, 'Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?'

'Haven’t you read,' he replied, 'that at the beginning the Creator “made them male and female,” [Genesis 1:27] and said, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh” [Genesis 2:24]? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no man put asunder.'

'Why then,' they asked, 'did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?'

Jesus replied, 'Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for [her] sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.' [Matthew 19:3-9]

Of course, many of today's Christians ignore this particular pronouncement of Jesus. But even in the first century, wealthy Jewish men were polygamous, and Jesus does not condemn the practice here or elsewhere.

Women were chattel, and the primary purpose of marriage was not God-sanctioned true love but the conveyance of property from one generation to the next. Although Jewish men commonly took only one wife because they could not afford to maintain more, there was no taboo against their having sexual relationships with concubines or other women. A wife, on the other hand, had to remain faithful to her husband to ensure that the husband's property passed to his natural sons and not to the sons of the wife's lover. That is why Matthew permits divorce in the case of a wife's “sexual immorality.” When Matthew says, “... let no man put asunder,” he means “man.” Just as one of the Old Testament commandments prohibits the coveting of a neighbor's wife, the New Testament prohibits the taking of another man's wife. What is “immoral” about such an affair is not the sex part but the possibility a man will impregnate the wife of another man & allow his own son to inherit the other man's property.

I would add that Matthew's rule was a liberal one. Divorced women were considered “throwaways,” and unless the divorced woman's family agreed to take her back or support her, she was destined to become a beggar or a prostitute. The majority of divorced women died destitute – and young. By prohibiting men from casting off their wives, which Matthew characterizes as “hardhearted,” Matthew's Jesus was speaking up for women's rights in a culture where women had few legal rights.

That said, here is where Matthew gets interesting. And just how interesting Christian fundamentalists don't want to know. In Matthew 19:10, the disciples say to Jesus, “If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry.”

Jesus replied, 'Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others — and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.' [Matthew 19:11-12]

The term “eunuchs” here refers not only to castrati – “eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others" – but also to celibate men – “those who choose to live like eunuchs” – and, first and foremost, to gay men – “eunuchs who were born that way.”

(Matthew doesn't mention lesbians, but I suspect that is because even educated Jewish men of the time were fairly ignorant of women's sexuality.)

The Jesus of the gospels does not describe marriage as being “between one man and one woman.” And, in Matthew's story, Jesus affirms that male homosexuality is natural: some men, he says, are “born that way.” Nowhere in the New Testament is there a prohibition against same-sex marriage. In a same-sex union, there would be no natural heirs, so there was no need to define a set of rules for such a marriage.

There is no reason we should cement our morals in a first-century timewarp. But those who prefer this pretense – at least when they find it convenient – should at least know what the text they pretend to cite actually says. It does not say what they claim it says.

A Message from Barbarossa

Hello. it's Bob Hicks aka Barbarossa (with Marie's kind permission) back for another round of fundraising for the fight against ALS. I wouldn't ask again were it not for the fact that I still have ALS and there's still no cure and still nobody knows what causes ALS.  Through the kind generosity of RC'ers, I raised over $1500 toward my final total of around $3200 in 2014. Doing what I can keeps me going.


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