I spent the weekend taking a holiday from blogging. But that doesn’t mean I spent the weekend away from the laptop or the internet.
It should have been a slow time. Everyone should have been stuffing themselves with turkey and gorging on football. I bet Charles Rangel wishes he limited his weekend activities to such benign pursuits. In an interview yesterday, Rangel echoed John Kerry’s notorious opinion of our troops. As Allah points out, given the length and context of Rangel’s remark, the “botched joke” defense will be even more untenable than it was in Kerry’s case:
I want to make it abundantly clear: if there’s anyone who believes that these youngsters want to fight, as the Pentagon and some generals have said, you can just forget about it. No young, bright individual wants to fight just because of a bonus and just because of educational benefits. And most all of them come from communities of very, very high unemployment. If a young fella has an option of having a decent career or joining the army to fight in Iraq, you can bet your life that he would not be in Iraq.
Elsewhere, Andrew Sullivan continued his perverse campaign to shred the last remaining thread of his once stellar reputation. Confession time: I used to be a big Andrew Sullivan fan. One of the things I loved about his blog was the way his decency and kindness shined through on a daily basis.
But over the last couple of years, Andrew has become so convinced of his own infallibility and moral perfection that he sees nothing wrong with spewing bile, engaging in distortions and indulging in demagoguery whenever he’s of a mind to do so. In short, Andrew seems to have decided that the s**t emitted by his modem doesn’t stink. He’s wrong. It does stink. A lot.
Andrew spent the long weekend being lamentably prolific. The piece that will be most remembered and most obviously destined for infamy is his investigation into the undergarments worn by Mormons. After successfully soliciting his readership for images of the undergarments in question, Andrew in the next post insisted, “I mean no disrespect.” Nevertheless, in a later post he concluded his investigative series by commenting, “From several Mormon readers, the answer seems to be: yes, their undies are sacred.”
The fact that Andrew would casually engage in mocking a major American religion and its practitioners while perhaps not even realizing that he’s doing so gives us a good indication of where his head is these days. It’s becoming increasingly ironic that the great Orwell quote, “To see what is in front of one’s nose is a constant struggle,” sits atop Andrew’s blog. As he has surrendered his analytical skills to his passions and his rages, Andrew doubtlessly doesn’t understand how much he continues to humiliate himself.
Or, to put it another way, will this tiresome man ever run out of sharks to jump?
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