She knows that if Obama wins this year, her hopes of ever becoming president will vanish. She will be 69-years-old in 2016 and, unlike John McCain, who retained a special place in the popular consciousness thanks to Karl Rove's grand larceny of his initial run for high office, she won't be able to claim she was robbed the first time around. Her best bet would be to see Obama lose, thus vindicating her unheeded plaint that he was general election poison, and then run against the incumbent McCain in 2012, vowing to "take back the White House" after twelve years of Republican misrule.

Is it because there is always delight in the semitranslucent mystery, the flowing charshaf, through which the flesh and the eye you alone are elected to know smile in passing at you alone? Or is it because I can imagine so well the rest of the colorful classroom around my dolorous and hazy darling: Grace, and her ripe pimples; Ginny and her lagging leg; Gordon the haggard masturbator; Duncan the foul-smelling clown; nail-biting Agnes; Viola of the blackheads and the bouncing bust; pretty Rosaline; dark Mary Rose; adorable Stella, who has let strangers touch her; Ralph, who bullies and steals; Irving for whom I am sorry. And there she is there, lost in the middle, gnawing on a pencil, detested by teachers, all the boys' eyes on her hair and neck, my Lolita.

I find the budding scandal, as it were, of Ms. Miley Cyrus's photo spread in Vanity Fair to be as ridiculous as the fact that no one would touch V. Nabokov's manuscript in 1955 except The Olympia Press, Maurice Girodias's hothouse imprint located on the Isle of Wight, and future publisher of Valerie Solanas's S.C.U.M. manifesto, which would have made Humbert Humbert cackle. Now that the unfinished and malformed Original of Laura looks well on its way to being typeset, thanks to Ron Rosenbaum and Vladimir's spectral influence in his son Dmitri's decision-making, it seems as if the creator of Lolita is still needed to satirize American culture's titillated puritanism and faux outrage. A week ago I didn't know who Cyrus was ("Hannah Montana" sounds like an Orthodox right-wing militia), and now I know that she's three years too old to be ranked a proper nymphet but mature enough to milk an "I have sinned!" PR kerfuffle for all it's worth:

"I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be 'artistic' and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed. I never intended for any of this to happen and I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about."

As for those new fans in truck stop men's rooms and dentist's offices, Miley thinks this grape-juice tastes funny. What's more newsworthy, that Disney has some explaining to do to a phalanx of angry mommy bloggers or that the New York Times had to append this correction to its story about the whole pre-fab controversy?

A headline and an article on Monday about a Vanity Fair photograph showing the actress in a suggestive pose left the incorrect impression that she was bare-breasted. While the pose was indeed revealing, she was wrapped in what appeared to be a bedsheet; she was not topless.

Now how many eager beavers rushed right out and bought a copy of Graydon's glossy after running their eyes over the misleading headline?

Also, a word to the Cyrus household: Annie Leibovitz doesn't do wholesome.

After some routine slandering of scientists as having "acquired" the "authority" of Soviet commissars -- I await with interest the demarcation of ZiL lanes for the sole benefit of atheistical biologists heading for their country dachas -- I see this: "It is curious that so many scientists should have recently embraced atheism."

Now I recall why I disliked David's book so much. There was something like this on every page -- something that fires off the chain of reactions: Is it? ... What does this actually MEAN? ... Does it, in point of fact, mean ANYTHING? ... Oh, the heck with it!

What, in that particular sentence, does David mean by "recently"? Since the seventeenth century? Since that rash of atheist books came out a couple of years ago? The only clue David gives us is a list of physicists in the following sentence. It's a pretty random list, with a 200-year jump from Newton to Maxwell, so let's try to be a bit more systematic.

Bang on, boyo. The selection of the author here could not have been better. Derbs is a genuine Little Englander reactionary, and I don't mean that metaphorically. He's straight out of the Larkin mould, and carries with him all the same complications and contradictions that made the best 20th century postwar poet worth reading. Larkin had no use for religion, and made an art form out of fearing death because he knew it was the end (From "Aubade": "No sight, no sound / no touch or taste or smell; Nothing to think with / Nothing to love or link with / The anesthetic from which none come round.")

As it happens, Derb is on an anti-creationism tear lately, with a brilliant and hilarious take-down of Ben Stein's absurd documentary Expelled at -- wait for it -- National Review:

And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world -- that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he's not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: "Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!"

The "intelligent design" hoax is not merely non-science, nor even merely anti-science; it is anti-civilization. It is an appeal to barbarism, to the sensibilities of those Apaches, made by people who lack the imaginative power to know the horrors of true barbarism. (A thing that cannot be said of Darwin. See Chapter X of Voyage of the Beagle.)

He rightly calls Stein's claim that Darwinism was responsible for the Holocaust a blood libel on civilization, and he enlists Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling to his defense! The former was an High Church Anglo-Catholic who loved to remind people that if they thought he was nasty as he was, they should try imagining him without the kindling of humanity afforded him by his religion. Waugh would have had little time for cartoonish lab-coat theology; he would have seen it as a clumsy attempt at being "modern."

And frankly, more men of faith should look askance on pseudoscientific attempts to legitimize what is meant to be an act of supreme courage. Belief rationalized and falsely certified by later traditions requires that much less effort on the part of the believer. God-minding was never supposed to be so easy.

That Derb's polemic on behalf of secularism and science and sanity occurs in one of the most conservative magazines in America is, I think, worthy of the title "event journalism." So hat's off to Jewcy's house goy, to whom I dedicate this cut-and-paste job of "Church Going," Larkin's gorgeous hymn to an alien rite:

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new -
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

Yes, well, I believe the relevant Latin is de te fabula narratur -- the joke's on you:

For years we have heard that it was impossible, inconceivable, that states such as Syria, North Korea, Iran or Saddam Hussein's Iraq could ever co-operate with each other. We were told that Shiite Iran could never possibly ally with Sunni terrorist groups such as Hamas or al-Qaeda. Yet again and again, over the past half dozen years, we have witnessed just that. North Korea did help Syria. Iran and North Korea did exchange technology. Iran did subsidize Hamas. Al-Qaeda leaders did find refuge in Iran.

You know, it's almost like they form an axis or something.

Syria wasn't even in the original Iran-NoKo-Iraq troika, so I guess it's an alternate if one of the regulars can't live up to its mustache-twirling malevolence on the designated day. Unfortunately, Barack Obama's go-to man on nukes, Joseph Cirincione, last September sounded more like Seymour Hersh when he dismissed the possibility that North Korean scientists could be helping Syria build a plutonium processing facility:

"This [early news of the Syrian facility] appears to be the work of a small group of officials leaking cherry-picked, unvetted 'intelligence' to key reporters in order to promote a pre-existing political agenda. If this sounds like the run-up to the war in Iraq, it should. This time it appears aimed at derailing the U.S.-North Korean agreement that administration hardliners think is appeasement. Some Israelis want to thwart any dialogue between the U.S. and Syria."

The leftist response to this, judging from how Talking Points Memo, et al. have alighted on Damascus's similarly themed "nothing to see here, folks" denials of wrongdoing, is to say that even if the Assad regime were guilty, it's all the fault of the Bushies for creating an atmosphere of plausible deniability after their Iraq caper. No one now believes the official intelligence -- except of course when it gives Iran a clean bill of health, or otherwise thwarts the "hard-liners" from arguing anything that could be used to make a case for military intervention.

What a shame, too. Had Israel not destroyed Syria's almost-completed reactor, we would have had another rogue state with WMD for the White House to confront in a cowboyish manner, demonstrating yet again its blatant disregard for negotiation and dialogue. Think of all the missed editorials and blog posts, then weep.

File this in the Shit Where You Eat Department. My other digital stomping ground, Pajamas Media, has run a rather silly piece by one of the cleverer sophists of the Intelligent Design movement (do I mean to say 'moment'?), David Berlinski. A trained mathematician with a doctorate from Princeton and author of the just published The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions, Berlinski is a high-profile member of the Discovery Institute, a religious think tank that sets upon Darwin's theory the way lions used to set upon Christians, and whose primus inter pares David Klinghoffer has had multiple outpourings in these pages, most recently comparing evolutionism to Nazism.

Slate's inestimable David Engber recently profiled Berlinski in a series of pieces about the conspiracy-mongering paranoids of pseudoscience:

Berlinski's radical and often wrong-headed skepticism represents an ascendant style in the popular debate over American science: Like the recent crop of global-warming skeptics, AIDS denialists, and biotech activists, Berlinski uses doubt as a weapon against the academy--he's more concerned with what we don't know than what we do. He uses uncertainty to challenge the scientific consensus; he points to the evidence that isn't there and seeks out the things that can't be proved. In its extreme and ideological form, this contrarian approach to science can turn into a form of paranoia--a state of permanent suspicion and outrage. But Berlinski is hardly a victim of the style. He's merely its most methodical practitioner.

What distinguished Berlinski from the pack is that he is not a believer himself; only an enemy of what he sees as belief's arrogant opponents. As one of his book jackets says, his ambition is to "turn the scientific community's cherished skepticism back on itself." He doubts the Big Bang could account for the origins of the universe, and he is unimpressed with the fossil record as a document of man's development into the lowly, febrile creature you see in the mirror each morning. So Berlinski is more of a fellow traveler and jujitsu artist of Intelligent Design than a true keeper of the flame.

I should add that my friend and fellow Nabokovian Ron Rosenbaum, who is the kind of literary journalist I want to be when I grow up, has called Berlinski "that rara avis, a True Skeptic, one of the most provocative--and
courageous--of contemporary writers and thinkers. To me, Mr. Berlinski
is a genuine intellectual hero." Now Ron has met the man in the flesh and so may have glimpsed a gem-like flame I keep missing in my investigations of Berlinski's scholarship. I should also admit that I'm capable of little commentary on advanced calculus beyond the Barbie-like assertion that it's "hard," but I do know something about logic and the fashioning of an intellectual argument. I can also affirm that Steven Pinker, one of Berlinski's foils, is not a fraud, nor does he present his theses as "dogmatically established, beyond the purview of doubt." Pinker recognizes that science still has much more to learn than it has to teach, but, unlike Berlinski, he does not believe existing epistemological lacunae are sufficient explanations for the existence of the divine.

Insane moral equivalence seems to be a trademark characteristic of this latest Great Awakening of cranks and fantasists, and Berlinski provides a good example at Pajamas, likening atheist scientists to Soviet commissars:

The commissars having vacated the scene, it is the scientific community that has acquired their authority. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Stephen Weinberg, Vic Stenger, Sam Harris, and most recently the mathematician John Paulos, have had a look around: They haven't seen a thing. No one could have seen less. It is curious that so many scientists should have recently embraced atheism. The great physical scientists -- Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein -- were either men of religious commitment or religious sensibility.

This comes as a kind of evidence against interest throat-clearing before introducing a supposed snatch of "gotchas" in the new Ben Stein-produced documentary Expelled, which is to Intelligent Design what Michael Moore was to Saddam Hussein, and which makes much the same case as Berlinski does here -- that practitioners of junk science have been hounded like Zionist-Trotskyist-CIA-deviationists out of the workers' paradise of the scientific community. Did you know that if asked Richard Dawkins can't certify for 100% certain that there is not a prime mover in the universe? Q.E.D. there is one.

I'm not sure if Berlinski knows less about science or about Communism, but I certainly know more about the latter than he, so let's begin there.

It is of course untrue to say that the Soviet citizenry believed the Politburo to be "infallible;" it had been indoctrinated to believe that under Marxism-Leninism the Party itself was infallible and greater than any one man or collection of men. The Russian word for this was Partiinost, and it is why high-ranking Communists were routinely purged without any threat posed to the larger totalitarian system that produced and replaced them as interchangeably as cogs. One might make the case that Stalin was, in the popular imagination, an unerring supreme leader, but that historical observation comes at the expense of religion, not materialism. Indeed, many scholars of Russian political history have traced Stalin's personality cult back to the time of Golden Horde. The autocratic political imprint left by the Mongolian conquerors of infant Russia was then fused with Byzantine Caesaropapism, which is why the czars were not just secular heads of state, but godheads anointed and certified by the Eastern Orthodox Church. (As Peter the Great was given to remark when told Russia needed a holy Patriarch, Russia already had one -- himself.)

As for classical Marxism, apart from being so greatly at odds with the messianic or ecclesiastical tradition, it was, as the French philosopher Raymond Aron once put it, a "Christian heresy;" a political movement that foreordained Providence on earth, where class took the place of sin. An apter comparison for Berlinski to have made, then, would be between the Soviet commissars and the clerisy during the Inquisition, both in terms of the brutal methods of interrogation employed and the interrogators' core objectives. (Dr. Dawkins's very participation in a shambolic documentary like Expelled is proof of his willingness confront and challenge adversarial thinking, a willingness which the commissars and the priestly agents of Torquemada were not known for sharing.)

Communism, it must also be said, was not favorably disposed to the kind of science understood and practiced by the atheists Berlinski cites. One need only look at Lysenkoism or some of Stalin's sillier linguistic theories to see how vulgarized and ideologized science was in the former Soviet Union -- the Baconian method of inquiry and trial and error never had a fighting chance. Nor would anyone trained even at the elementary level in the philosophical underpinnings of that method fail to spot the problem with a question like this:

"[W]hat reason do we have to suppose that God might not exist?"

One can't prove a negative proposition, and the burden of providing evidence still falls to Berlinski and his contrarian cohort. Why should we suppose God does exist? Mention of the awe and mystery of the universe only begs the question.

As for Albert Einstein, he was once asked if he believed in the divine and replied, "I believe in Spinoza's god," which is as polite an admission of atheism as anyone has ever given. Unless of course believers wouldn't mind replacing "God" with the word "Nature" as the great Jewish sage was tellingly given to do -- after being excommunicated by a rather commissar-like Dutch rabbinate.

Related in Jewcy: Philosopher and biologist Sahotra Sarkar explains that "'Intelligent Design' Creationism is an Immoral Fraud."

Jonathan Rauch of The Atlantic has written an intriguing essay on the Burkean conservatism of John McCain, most of which I find astute:

As eclectic a reformer as [McCain] has been in the Senate, he has been consistent in his incrementalism. Though he was known to sound hot-headed on campaign-finance reform, his legislative work produced a reform that was mostly modest in its aims and that mostly attained them. He has been an old-fashioned budget balancer, not a newfangled supply-sider. He defends his global-warming efforts as gradualist and as modeled on emissions-trading systems that have already been tested. In the presidential primaries, he showed little interest in grandiose promises.

Where I think the analogy flounders is in its almost total disregard for the one policy to which McCain has been and will be forever tethered -- the war in Iraq. Of this seismic event, Rauch correctly observes that Edmund Burke, though a foe of tyranny, would have blanched at the "[forcible] uprooting the authority structures," with the attendant promise that "a mini-America [would] spring forth." The short way of putting this would be to say that regime change is an intrinsically revolutionary project, and the prescient critic of revolution would almost certainly have opposed it. The bringing of parliamentary democracy to a hitherto autocratically ruled country -- and a non-Christian one -- riven by religious sectarianism and besieged on all sides by aggressive neighbors would have struck Burke as a headlong folly "built upon a theory" and anathema to the hard lessons of patience and experience. He was a man of the law-and-liberty tradition, par excellence, and to him Iraq would have been a darker shade of France.

Burke favored and facilitated the American Revolution in his capacity as a member of the House of Commons not because he thought it was a radical endeavor but -- and here is where he agreed with his future celebrated antagonist Thomas Paine -- it was the timely and logical conclusion to a long-frayed colonial relationship. The metropole had denied fundamental rights to its faraway subjects and thus forfeited the right to rule them.

The revolution in France was different, according to Burke, because it made a vice of abstraction and cant (talk of "Liberty" and "The Rights of Man" being cover for the sanguinary activities of the godless mob), and because it attempted to upend the ancien regime without due consideration of the consequences for the future, or due reverence for the institutions of the past. Also, it was only the beginning: Burke disdained the term "French revolution," which implied an isolated event. The revolution, rather, was now "in" France but could very well spread beyond its borders and engulf all of Europe -- as indeed it did, in denatured or counterrevolutionary form, under the generalship of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose advent Burke predicted with uncanny exactitude. His greatest fear was that domestic sympathy with the Jacobin cause would lead to a similar cataclysm in England, and it is worth remembering that he wrote in his masterpiece polemic in 1790 in response to Dr. Richard Price, a Unitarian minister and leader of London's Revolution Society, which had called for solidarity with the French National Assembly and the followers of Danton.

Well before Thermidor and the executions of King Louis and Marie Antoinette, Burke had observed, "The spirit in [the revolution] is not impossible to admire; but the old Parisian ferocity has broken out in a shocking manner. It is true, that this may be no more than a sudden explosion... But if it should be character rather than accident, then that people are not fit for Liberty, and must have a Strong hand like that of their former masters to coerce them."

To the contemporary reader, such a pronouncement prefigures one underlying trope of the current antiwar sentiment in America, which believes the Iraqi -- not to say "Arab" -- character is unfit for representative government and requires a strongman to keep it in check. McCain's paeans to the universal longing for democracy and freedom, themselves echoes of President Bush's rhetoric, would have had struck the wrong chords in Burke's overcautious ear. History and peoplehood mattered to him profoundly, and it was with the utmost disappointment that he took stock of the blood-stained chaos to which a "a nation of gallant men...men of honour, and of cavaliers" had since descended.

In the post-Thermidor period, and shortly before his death, Burke wrote a series of Letters on a Regicide Peace, in which he warned the Pitt government not to enter into a treaty with the Directory of France, which was headed by morally bankrupt men who were still apt for war:

"Whatever were the first motives to the war among politicians, they saw that in its spirit, and for its object, it was a civil war; and as such they pursued it. It is a war between the partisans of the ancient civil, moral, and political order of Europe against a sect of fanatical and ambitious atheists which means to change them all. It is not France extending a foreign empire over other nations: it is a sect aiming at universal empire, and beginning with the conquest of France. The leaders of that sect secured the center of Europe; and that secured, they knew, that, whatever might be the event of battles and sieges, their cause was victorious."

Thus does the forefather of modern conservatism warn against his country's involving itself in a fratricidal foreign dispute hijacked by a sect of messianic participants who dream of world conquest... McCain's thoroughgoing argument for not quitting Iraq is based on this same minatory premise, where Al Qaeda is a stand-in for the "sect of fanatical and ambitious atheists," and the grim aftermath of the country's implosion would surely affect the United States.

There is at least one more irony in comparing Burke to McCain. The 18th century Irishman was not merely defending the church in France out of an a fortiori defense of monarchy as being inextricable from divine right. Apart from his general esteem of the ecclesiastical tradition, Burke was acutely concerned with the denomination of church in question. His mother was a Roman Catholic and his father, as Conor Cruise O'Brien has brilliantly argued, was in all probability something of a "closeted" one, too. Richard Burke may well have been confirmed to the Protestant Established Church of Ireland only to protect his legal practice and to indemnify himself and his family against England's viciously anti-Catholic Penal Code. Burke fils spent the better part of his political life agitating for Catholic rights and suffering no small amount of obloquy and persecution for it. He at one point lost his Parliamentary seat in Bristol following the passage of the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, which was the fruit of his singular labors. Burke was also personally blamed by the psychotic Lord George Gordon, imago and populist egger-on of the anti-Catholic riots which swept London in 1780 and bore the aristocrat's name.

In short, then, he was well attuned to the anti-Papist subtext of the banners of 1789. The Revolution Society was after all founded to celebrate England's Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which the Catholic King James II was ousted in favor of his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch Protestant husband William III. Here is O'Brien:

"This particular combination of defending 1688 while attacking Roman Catholicism hurt Burke deeply, for it hit him along a fundamental fault line in his political personality. Burke was a Whig, and thus ex officio committed to the principles of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, including the Protestant succession. But at the same time he was disqualified from sharing the feelings of normal English Whigs toward that Revolution: Burke needed to play down its anti-Catholic elements. When the Revolution Society played up the latter, Burke suffered and needed to strike back."

As the descendant of a long line of Scotch-Irish Protestants, McCain hasn't the motive or inclination to wed his philosophy to so covert an "agenda" for the safeguarding of a religious minority. Rauch mentions that Burke would have found more to choose among the current crop of Democratic candidates for president than he would the highly radical movement conservatives who have never gelled to McCain because he is too temperate and respectful of old, if imperfect, state institutions -- he is a "liberal," in other words, in the classical sense of the term. We may look skeptically on this proposition as well. But it is true that the president whose arraignment over his publicly suspected religion Burke would have instantly responded to with solicitude and dread was a Democrat: John F. Kennedy. And here it may be worth recalling the most forgotten point of Burke's biography: He was never a Tory but a Whig.

According to the New York Times, Barack Obama's new strategy in the wake of a double-digit defeat in Pennsylvania is to ignore Hillary Clinton's persistent presence in the race and focus squarely on John McCain. Obama's chief campaign strategist David Axelrod was quoted as saying, "There is a sense of urgency about the time we're losing and a sense of urgency that we not savage each other to the benefit of Senator McCain." Indeed, Clinton's name occurred only once in Obama's concession speech Tuesday night, whereas McCain's occurred six times. In other words, Obama has begun presenting himself as the presumptive nominee immediately after losing his once famed momentum and also, judging by the cable television networks' coverage of his latest defeat, the media-blessed heir apparency. McCain and Clinton should be hugging themselves with glee to behold this ill-starred move.

Read more here.

Everything that has come out of the Judd Apatow comedy industrial complex is a variation on the theme of romantic implausibility. A sexually inexperienced man-child who collects action figures will win the heart of a lissome granny (The 40 Year-Old Virgin). A financially insolvent porn database stoner will impregnate a buxom E! reporter (Knocked Up). Two homoerotically bound high school nerds will win the hearts and loins of two precocious cuties who would almost certainly be fucking college guys, with nary a computer-generated Kelly LeBrock in sight (Superbad).

The premise of Forgetting Sarah Marshall is so shopworn that the movie has no right to be as entertaining as it is. Jason Segel's Peter Bretter is a soundtrack musician for a silly Law and Order-type crime drama in which his girlfriend, the eponymous Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell) stars. She dumps him while he lolls around naked and confused in their modest L.A. home, and the first fifteen minutes or so of plot development are devoted to Peter's coping mechanisms: weeping uncontrollably, eating cereal by the cubic meter, and sleeping around with mute-orgasming models and sadomasochistic bar skanks (nice work if you can get it). He decides to take a holiday in Hawaii to get his mind off his recently departed beloved, but, lo and behold, Sarah's booked the same trip with her new English rock star boyfriend, Aldous Snow (Russell Brand), lead singer of my favorite band name in ages, Infant Sorrow. Peter spends about the next fifteen minutes bearing inconsolable witness to their public displays of lewdness. Were it not for an unfathomably kind and unspeakably beautiful hotel concierge, Rachel (Mila Kunis, whose bath water I'd gladly drink), Peter would have likely hanged himself by his lei.

Read more here.

How did McAuliffe get his number? First, by adding all votes for Hillary Clinton in the illegitimate Michigan and Florida straw polls to her total, second, by adding zero of the uncommitted votes in the illegitimate Michigan straw poll to Obama's total, and third, by throwing out estimates of popular support in the Iowa, Nevada, Maine, and Washington caucuses.

Assuming that non-Hillary Clinton supporters can see without difficulty that the McAuliffe math is preposterous, the rest of this goes out to Hillary's ardent supporters, who are latching onto McAuliffe arithmetic, and are already firmly latched onto the type of argument of which the McAuliffe math is a token.

Dear Clinton Supporters,

The reason that the McAuliffe math is preposterous is that the (non-question-begging) motivation for the first step is (clearly and flagrantly) inconsistent with the (non-question-begging) motivation for the second and third. Say that "letting the voices of the people be heard, man" trumps everything, including the procedural rules Michigan and Florida violated, the necessary conditions of electoral legitimacy, and manifest unfairness to the Michiganders and Floridians who didn't vote because the elections didn't count. Then the democracy-and-rainbows principle trumps everything, also including the difficulty of assigning a precise number of Michigan uncommitted votes to Obama (it'll be more than the 120,000 vote Clinton lead under McAuliffe arithmetic) and the difficulty of measuring popular support in caucus states.

Alternatively, say that this is not 'Nam, this is voting, there are rules, and you can't just give Obama the likely number of votes cast by his supporters in Michigan, or count estimates of popular support in non-reporting caucus states even if the estimates are fairly precise, because procedural fairness prohibits it. Then there are rules, such as the rules that govern electoral legitimacy, and elections that don't meet minimal standards of legitimacy aren't legitimate, and can't become legitimate because lots of people show up to vote. Do you know why nobody argues that elections in Russia or Cuba are legitimate just in case they have record turnout? Because that would be fucking retarded.

According to the principle that motivates step one of the McAuliffe math, don't do steps two or three. According to the principle that motivates steps two and three, don't do step one.

So if each of the steps of the McAuliffe math is motivated, the result is a (clear and flagrant) contradiction. No contradiction is true. Therefore at least one of the steps is unmotivated. So, Clinton supporters, you've got a tri-lemma: (1) You can argue for a contradiction. Or, (2) you can argue for an unmotivated manipulation of the primary and caucus results. Or, (3) you can junk at least one of the steps of the McAuliffe math and accept that Obama is in the lead, that he won't lose the lead, and that all donating money to Hillary Clinton accomplishes at this point is helping a woman much richer than you pay off her loan. If you opt for (1), good luck with that, you're a ridiculous person, and you probably shouldn't be voting. If you opt for (2) you're scarcely better off than you would be if you argued for (1)†, you're likewise ridiculous, and you likewise shouldn't vote.

If you opt for (3), congratulations, unlike your candidate and her staff, you can put two and two together. Well done. Do you see how crazy the people still inside the cocoon look from the outside?

Love,

Dan

† There are literally uncountably infinitely many possible manipulations of the primary and caucus results, of which uncountably infinitely many produce a lead for Hillary Clinton, uncountably infinitely many produce a lead for Barack Obama, uncountably infinitely many produce a lead for Mike Gravel, and uncountably many produce no determinate leader. (That's not an exhaustive profile.) For example, if you only count states Barack Obama won, Obama's lead in both delegates and popular votes is massive; mutatis mutandis for Clinton. If you only count Gravel voters, Gravelmania is sweeping the Democratic party. Also, if you only count states that are yellow on Wikipedia's US map, or only the total number of commonwealths won, or only count the average elevation of states won by each candidate, or only the total number of years voters for each candidate have lived, or total X chromosomes possessed by each candidate's supporters, Hillary Clinton is killing it. But if you only count states named for French and English monarchs, only count the total student loan debt of each candidate's supporters, or only count membership totals in facebook support groups, Obama's coasting.

In terms of literary or intellectual rallying points, geography has always seemed to me the least persuasive. Doree Shafrir's article "The Brooklyn Literary 100" in the New York Observer only underscores my prejudice against thinking that enough writers occupying a neighborhood does a "community" make. She begins like this:

The idea of a Brooklyn literary "scene" is one that has become so ingrained in the city's consciousness that, in true Brooklyn style, it has now become fashionable to consider writerly Brooklyn in an ironic manner, to comment on the ridiculousness of the idea that a place can, in fact, be said to help define a literary community.

That idea is ridiculous, as most things defined in an "ironic" manner tend to be. We don't speak of a plumbing community or an attorneys' scene, and so the implication here is that those who live by their pens and laptops somehow share a common sensibility, even if they do all hang out at the same bars. Yet what connects Paul Auster to Jonathan Safran Foer other than mortgages in Park Slope? It's not as if National Book Awards or gushy write-ups in the Times are dispensed like MetroCards at the Bergen Street 2/3 stop (it only seems that way sometimes).

Modernism may have hit a high mark in the Paris of the 1920's, but again, as to the differences in style and talent between, say, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, one of them might as well have spent the louche interwar years in Papua New Guinea. Saul Bellow once had an apartment in my hometown of Forest Hills, Queens, which was the birthplace of David Horowitz and is the current residence of fired Page Six reporter, gossip novelist, and book party pugilist Ian Spiegelman -- writers all, but strangers bound by zip code alone.

Still, when it comes to the life of the mind, we do tend to think in terms of cartography, if only as shorthand for a more complicated area of congruence. "New York" became the preferred prefix before "intellectuals" because of the ethnic and cosmopolitan associations with "the city," which, in the thirties, referred to the bustling, Gentile-occupied island of Manhattan exclusively. In the cultural imaginations of the radical sons of Jewish immigrants who grew up in various parts of the Bronx and Brooklyn, the city constituted a separate country to which they all yearned to gain admittance. If they wound up on the Upper West Side it was because it was cheap back then. But the New York Intellectuals never especially agreed or got along with one another; they founded Partisan Review to prove it.

The truth is, writing is a depressingly solitary activity. Discussion and debate in cafes and salons may provide germs of inspiration, but the maddening spadework is up to the lone individual when the Starbucks XM radio and the clangor of familiar company die down. This is why some of the best essays and novels of the last century have been composed in disordered flights from tyranny and stultification, or in states of isolated squalor. The Adventures of Augie March got done in various ports of call in Europe. Orwell eschewed the cocktail party. Koestler's Rubashov worked out his theory of history in between bouts of commissar interrogation, while his author worked him out in a Spanish prison cell.

Whenever I hear of a "scene" or supposed congeries of great artists and minds, I'm reminded of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. Adam and Nina sit on the deck of a boat party to which absolutely everyone who's anyone is invited:

"Can't you just see the ghosts?" [Mrs. Hoop] said to Lady Circumference on the stairs. "Pitt and Fox and Burke and Lady Hamilton and Beau Brummel and Dr. Johnson" (a concurrence of celebrities, it may be remarked, at which something memorably might surely have occurred). "Can't you just see them-in their buckled shoes?"

Lady Circumcumference raised her lorgnette and surveyed the stream of guests debouching from the cloak-rooms like City workers from the Underground. She saw Mr. Outrage and Lord Metroland in consultation about the Censorship Bill... She saw both Archbishops, the Duke and Duchess of Stayle, Lord Vanburgh and Lady Metroland, Lady Throbbing and Edward Throbbing and Mrs. Blackwater, Mrs. Mouse and Lord Monomark and a superb Levantine, and behind and about them a great concourse of pious and honourable people... people who had represented their country in foreign places and sent their sons to die for her in battle, people of decent and temperate life, uncultured, unaffected, unembarrassed, unassuming, unambitious people, of independent judgment and marketed eccentricities, kind of people who cared for animals and the deserving poor, brave and rather unreasonable people, that fine phalanx of the passing order, approaching, as one day at the Last Trump they hopes to meet their Maker, with decorous and frank cordiality to shake Lady Anchorage by the hand at the top of her staircase. Lady Circumference saw all this and sniffed the exhalation of her own herd. But she saw no ghosts.

"That's all my eye," she said.

Tom Stoppard owns the patent on English dramatization of 19th-century Russian revolutionaries. But the Irish one belongs to Oscar Wilde, whose flop of a first play, "Vera, or the Nihilists," was loosely based on the story of Vera Zasulich, about whom a new unconventional and thoroughly tantalizing biography has been published. In Wilde's drama, a comely peasant girl discovers her brother, sent off to Moscow to train as a lawyer, has been arrested and dispatched to Siberia for joining a revolutionary cadre of Nihilists. She later joins up with this same group and falls in love with an unlikely member, the disguised Czarevitch Alexis, whose sympathies are with the people against his paranoid and tyrannical father, Czar Ivan.

Wilde depicted the bloody-minded throng of rebels as he would any mob; for them a rush to judgment was reason in itself, and means and ends were as confused as the grammar of their many turgid manifestos. (Of particular note is that the "Wildean" character in this play is Prince Paul, one of the Czar's wittiest and most opportunistic ministers who sells out to the enemies of his erstwhile court.) Yet there was no mistaking the socialist republican playwright's own sympathies in this cri de coeur loosed by his lovelorn and politically fraught protagonist:

O God, how easy it is for a king to kill his people by thousands, but we cannot rid ourselves of one crowned man in Europe! What is there of awful majesty in these men which makes the hand unsteady, the dagger treacherous, the pistol-shot harmless? Are they not men of like passions with ourselves, vulnerable to the same diseases, of flesh and blood not different from our own? What made Olgiati tremble at the supreme crisis of that Roman life, and Guido's nerve fail him when he should have been of iron and of steel? A plague, I say, on these fools of Naples, Berlin, and Spain! Methinks that if I stood face to face with one of the crowned men my eye would see more clearly, my aim be more sure, my whole body gain a strength and power that was not my own! Oh, to think what stands between us and freedom in Europe! a few old men, wrinkled, feeble, tottering dotards whom a boy could strangle for a ducat, or a woman stab in a night-time. These are the things that keep us from liberty.

Vera goes on to assassinate the governor of Archangel, shortly before Michael, another member of her radical groupuscule, kills the Czar himself-mainly to impress her since he's had a thing for her ever since their shared peasant youth. Then, in a highly un-Russian and all-too-Shakespearean twist, she commits suicide rather than plunge a dagger into the heart of her beloved, who now wears the Imperial crown with the intent to emancipate his subjects, release all political prisoners from jail or exile, and usher in an age of democracy from the steppes to the taiga. Vera thus violates the "oath" she pledged to Nihilism never to pardon monarchy and always to fight for the revolution. (That Nihilists had such an oath to begin with was an irony tailor-made for Wilde, and later the Coen brothers.)

The real Vera was not so successful in her attentat, nor was she ever so soft or conflicted as her theatrical counterpart. In the Moscow Times, Virginia Rounding reviews Ana Siljak's Angel of Vengeance: The "Girl Assassin," the Governor of St. Petersburg, and Russia's Revolutionary World:

Comrades of Vera, but not Vera herself, now ended up at St. Petersburg's House of Preliminary Detention, a model prison based on London's Pentonville, where political prisoners were detained prior to their trials and where occurred the event that sparked Vera's decision to assassinate the city's governor. Trepov had arrived unexpectedly one day for an inspection, been horrified by the lax regime he found in place and, almost as a reflex action, ordered one of the inmates, a man called Bogolyubov, to be flogged. Such treatment was normally never meted out to the young intellectuals held in the "Prelim," and riots ensued. Vera herself had never met Bogolyubov, but she decided to avenge him anyway, and to become a martyr for the revolution in the process.

Siljak recounts the story of Vera's trial in detail and with a lively sense of drama. In his summing up, the judge asked the jury to consider not only whether Vera had shot Governor Trepov (about which there was really no doubt), but also whether she had intended to kill him. It took only 30 minutes for the jury, sympathetic to Vera's stated aim "to prove that no one should be sure they are beyond punishment when they violate human dignity," to clear her of all charges. Pandemonium broke out, and the stunned Vera found herself cast in the role of heroine and founding mother of Russian terrorism.

Siljak's book is unconventional because its climax -- Zasulich's attempted murder of Trepov and her subsequent trial -- are treated as a narrative post script on hundreds of pages of historical backstory. The author is more concerned with the intellectual-political firmament out of which Zasulich fell to earth and into bloody immortality.

Left out of Rounding's review is that after Zasulich repudiated terrorism and retired to Geneva, she joined the editorial board of a vibrant little Russian exile newspaper called Iskra, the "Spark." The rest of the masthead included Georgi Plekhanov, father of Russian Marxism and coiner of the term "dialectical materialism;" Julius Martov, the future ill-starred head of the Menshevik Party; and Vladimir Lenin. (Trotsky joined later).

Zasulich was thus the knot that bound two tendencies of Russian revolutionism: the frayed disorder of Nihilism and the taut organization of Bolshevism. She was a disciple of Sergei Nechaev (1847-1882), the disaffected student cum terrorist high priest of the so-called Raznotchinsky or "Generation of the Sons." They were the violent upstarts who, impatient with top-down reform or a milder form of village socialism, set about undoing the humane legacy of great radicals and moralists like Alexander Herzen and Vissarion Belinsky. Together with his comrade Peter Tkachev -- who later prefigured the strategies and tactics of Leninism -- Nechaev drafted the Program for Revolutionary Action, which defined the role of the "professional revolutionary" as that of a self-abnegating agent of social upheaval; the member of a hive, in other words, in which the individual was utterly and completely subordinated to the revolutionary collective.

Nechaev fled Russia in 1869 in order to drum up money and support for a non-existent revolutionary committee of which he was the self-proclaimed head. Though he had disavowed all ties to kith and kin, he was charismatic and intelligent enough to prey upon the gullibility of a few sympathizers. The historian E.H. Carr, in his brilliant, tragic history of the Herzen family, The Romantic Exiles, summarized Nechaev's short but influential life like this:

He deceived everyone he met, and when he was no longer able to deceive, his power was gone. His audacity was unbounded; and he carried personal courage to the extreme limit of foolhardiness. He is an unparalleled and bewildering combination of fanatic, swashbuckler, and cad.

Chief among his admirers and dupes was Mikhail Bakunin, whom he met in Switzerland. Nechaev persuaded the shaggy mastodon of anarchism to revert to a colder, steelier course of revolution. Bakunin's politics was the stuff of clownish whimsy, yet he had a rare ability to raise resources for his many fool adventures (Herzen was an indulgent, if wary, benefactor in this regard). Now that he had a vicious machiavellian guiding his actions, Bakunin could do great harm indeed. He and Nechaev co-wrote the famous "Catechism of a Revolutionary," which hymned destruction for its own sake and famously began:

The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion - the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose - to destroy it.

Bakunin eventually extricated himself from this doomed friendship and claimed "[t]he man of [his] dreams turned out to be a figure from a nightmare." But while back in Russia, agitating for yet another phantom cadre, this one with alleged cross-continental reach, Nechaev managed to ensnare the next generation of intelligentsia in his flame-and-steel messianism. His rhetoric captivated the young Zasulich, who said she was made to feel weak against the older outlaw's decisiveness: "He could and would act - wasn't he the ringleader of the students? ... I could imagine no greater pleasure than serving the revolution. I had dared only to dream of it, and yet now he was saying that he wanted to recruit me...."

Nechaev murdered his own comrades, most notoriously I.I. Ivanov, who refused to truckle to his authority. Ivanov's body was discovered days later in a lake, and Dostoevsky fictionalized the event in The Devils. No doubt this eagerness to devour his own contingent lent legitimacy to Nechaev's historical status as an ideological godfather to Bolshevism. Ironically, he was anathematized in the Soviet Union when Stalin had his name erased from the Russian "family tree" -- because surely there was no room on any of its branches for a mendacious killer and impostor. Soviet psychologists might have termed this "projection," and the great Russo-Hungarian historian Tibor Szamuely (about whom I wrote for TNC last October) concluded:

It is one of the minor ironies of the Russian Revolution that the final destruction of Nechaev's reputation should have occurred at the height of the Great Purge of 1936-1938: an event which he would probably have wholeheartedly approved, conducted in accordance with the principles he himself had formulated. The possessed had devoured their prototype.

Zasulich opposed the October Revolution, having become something of a moderate Marxist in the decades prior to her demise in 1919. Trotsky wrote of her that she "remained to the end the old radical intellectual on whom fate grafted Marxism. [Her] articles show that she had adopted to a remarkable degree the theoretic elements of Marxism. But the moral political foundations of the Russian radicals of the '70s remained untouched in her until her death."

So of the parturition of the totalitarian monster that engulfed Russia in the 20th century, Zasulich acted as both midwife and failed abortionist.

UPDATE (4/22): Aha. Writing columns in prestigious newspapers about presidential candidates' passover statements isn't just the MO of talentless hyper-partisan hacks. It's also a word-count pumper for talentless sactimoniously non-partisan hacks. Now granted, Richard Cohen is a man who typed 759 words arguing that there's no value to studying math, looked at those 759 words, and decided he wanted to publish them in a column space so prominent he could be sure a good chunk of the newspaper reading nation would know he'd typed 759 words arguing that there's no value to studying math. In other words, expectations are pretty low.

Even so, here is something rare and, in its way, wonderful. Cohen avers:

[T]he solemn task of the next president to restore that trust [in government]. John McCain could do it. He's an honorable man who has fudged and ducked and swallowed the truth on occasion -- about the acceptability of the Confederate flag, for instance -- but always, I think, for understandable although not necessarily admirable reasons. Barack Obama could do it. We are learning that he, too, can do the F's -- fudge, fib or forget...

But with Clinton, it's a different story.

When Clinton lies in order to get elected, she invalidates her fitness for the job. Makes perfect sense.

As it happens, I agree that her mendacity does indeed exceed that of her rivals in unappealing ways. But to understand it as categorically different from what they do, or uniquely disqualifying --- to duck and fudge basic requirements of logical consistency in order to cash out an op-ed that makes good on a (I'm guessing) hackneyed pre-fabricated analogy --- why, along with Kristol's weekly excrescence, it's enough to make you think staff billing at the Times or Post is a function of something other than merit.

This last objection actually (though unintentionally) raises an important point, namely that there is a vast difference between what I have written about the church's leaders, and what Hagee has said --- a distinction professional thought-policemen like Bill Donohue bombastically elide in attempting to shut down factual, justified criticism of the RCC. Dan Koffler's criticism of the Catholic Church ≠ John Hagee's criticism.

Permit me a moment to spell out the content bracketing each side of that inequality, and then see what that will teach us.

Here are three things that are different (i.e. non-identical): (1) the set of beliefs that compose normative Catholic religion; (2) the membership of the church's official clerical staff; (3) ordinary lay Catholics. All of that's uncontroversial, I hope. Now, with the help of Leibniz's law, a standard axiom of practical reasoning, we can draw a few inferences.

This is Leibniz's Law:

∀x∀y x=y ⇒ ∀F F(x) ⇔ F(y)

which is equivalent to

∃F∃x∃y [(F(x) ∧ ~ F(y)) ∨ (~F(x) ∧ F(y))] ⇒ x ≠ y

In English, if "two" things are identical, every property "one" has is a property "the other" has (symbols get around those awkward locutions). Equivalently, if there is a property such that one thing has it and another doesn't, those things aren't the same.

What can we learn from this? We take as given that (1) ≠ (2) ≠ (3) (I'd be happy to explain why, though I'd hope it's obvious). Let's rename (1), (2), and (3) 'Bernard', 'Joseph', and 'Karol', respectively. If P is the property of being criticized by me, P(Karol) ⊅ P(Joseph), P(Karol)⊅ P(Bernard), P(Joseph)⊅P(Karol), P(Joseph)⊅P(Bernard), P(Bernard)⊅P(Karol), and P(Bernard)⊅P(Joseph). That's because they're not the same thing. (The horseshoe with the line through it is a sign for "does not imply.")

So applying a standard axiom (Leibniz's law) to an uncontroversial premise (Bernard ≠ Joseph ≠ Karol) shows that criticizing Bernard (Catholic beliefs) doesn't imply criticizing Joseph (Catholic officials) or Karol (lay Catholic people), mutatis mutandis for each combination. (Please keep these names and their definitions in mind. I'll need to use them frequently, and prefer to avoid serial repetition of cumbersome descriptions.)

("Q: Isn't that obvious? Why draw out these points at such length and with resort to symbolic logic, Dan?" A: It seems obvious to you and me, but people, especially media people, especially media people who are Bill Donohue or in some way influenced by Donohue's censorious edicts, frequently do deny all that, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly. So the idea is to demonstrate what's at stake denial --- conformity of one's beliefs to reality, a standard axiom we all need and use to get by, classical logic, intellectual honesty, or some combination thereof; take you pick. Okay, let's go on.)

Now you'll notice in the original post on Benedict, I criticized both Bernard (rather playfully, as I hope is apparent) and Joseph (rather more substantively), but left Karol alone. Because I have nothing against Karol. In fact, I happen to think that Catholics and Jews have certain strong cultural similarities that ought to be explored more, and I'm not the first person to say so. (Buck Mulligan calls Stephen Dedalus a "jesting jew jesuit" in Ulysses, for example.) However, I find Bernard generally pretty silly, as I find most bodies of religious dogma, except in cases where they're used to do harm to people, and then indignation becomes a more dominant reaction than amusement. As in the case, for example, of Joseph, a set whose members include some unknown (but known to be quite large) number of rapists who wear or have worn priestly robes, as well as a smaller but still significant number of non-rapists who found out about all the rapes and snapped into action protecting the rapists from the law, in many cases shuffling them into new hunting grounds with at least the general sense, if not a firm quantitative belief, that the recidivism rate for rape is quite high. Once you pop, you can't stop, as they say.

Among Joseph's members, also, is the inner circle of John Paul II's Curia in the last years of his reign. While there is some evidentiary support to the idea that JPII was not in a sufficiently salubrious state to continue managing the affairs of the church, and so he might in fact not be culpable, his cabinet, if you will, led by Cardinal Ratzinger, designed, promulgated and vigorously and with great organization and discipline upheld the policy of protecting rapists from the law. And the rationale for that flagrantly felonious policy (to name one of its many features) --- namely guarding against the embarrassment that defrocking rapists or at least removing them from active responsibility for the well-being of irresistably sexy teenagers and pre-teens (cuz who knows what questions might be asked then) could cause --- also provided a rationale for the derivative policy of proffering known rapists with a regular tithe of virgin boyflesh, the default option for "dealing" with the "problem."

Only after the sheer volume of rapes overwhelmed Joseph's leaders capacity to control information and brought the whole machine crashing down, did Joseph shift policy, to one of (still sort-of grudgingly) cooperating with the law (and demanding gratitude for doing so), all the while blaming their unforgivable crimes on gay people for having the unmitigated gall to live without being miserable, tormented, ashamed of themselves, and as close as one can get to the brink of suicide without jumping over (because God disapproves of that). That's the sort of compassion only soi-disant pastors, shepherds of a flock, or spiritual fathers to a congregation can provide.

Those are the facts. The facts can't be anti-Catholic; they're just facts. If you believe as I do, that ethical judgments have propositional content and function in our systems of belief as other judgments do, adding a category of moral entailments to less controversial rules of logical and causal entailment, then we have an obligation to believe the totality of facts as we understand it and also hold whatever beliefs might be entailed in one of these three ways by our other beliefs. So, if you believe, as I do, that raping children is wrong, that someone who becomes aware of a case of child-rape is obligated to report it to the appropriate authorities, that failing that she is obligated not to prevent the authorities from becoming aware, or if they are, from serving justice, and that even failing that obligation, she is still obligated categorically not to go out of her way to prepare the rapist with a several-course sampler of young boys to rape; and if you believe, as you must if you're honest and not hallucinating, that Catholic officials from Ratzinger on down violated all those obligations hundreds if not thousands of times over, then the conclusion you're obligated to draw is _____________________ (this is an invitation to print out the page and fill in the blank; don't worry, your conclusion doesn't make you a bigot, as I'll explain momentarily).

"Q: But doesn't your holding of beliefs consistent with reality and the basic moral intuitions of normal decent human beings make you no better than John Hagee, who calls the RCC 'the Anti-Christ' and 'the Whore of Babylon'?" A: Nope, not really. References to the RCC as "the Anti-Christ" in league with "the Whore of Babylon" are very, very old, very, very traditional tropes of a system of bigotry that was once, and not all that long ago unfortunately, pervasive among religiously observant American and (some, but fewer) English Protestants, according to whom the RCC was a Satanic conspiracy to poison the religion of Jesus Christ, place the Devil in people's hearts, minds, and souls where God ought to be, and just generally do really awful things. By this same line of thought, individual members of the church were thought to be mindless zombie slaves of the Pope, whose claims to being humans entitled to rights and dignity were dangerous tricks to subvert decent Christian faith (though on occasion, their humanity could be restored by conversion), and who engaged in unspeakable atrocities. (Much like the conspiratorial atrocities Jews are so well known to have engaged in; I said Jews and Catholics were a lot alike, didn't I?) Because Catholic faith was seen not simply as one fact among many about a person's identity, but a singular fact that rendered all others moot, and that entailed having an innate nature inferior to that of real Christians, anti-Catholic bigotry, like comparable anti-Semitic bigotry of past generations, and like anti-Muslim bigotry today, was a quasi-racist form of hate. For example, the Catholicism of the Irish, who might be the lilliest people on earth, prevented them from being counted as "White" along with the Anglo-Saxons, Scottish, Welsh, Ulster Irish and Scots, Germans, and Dutch who composed the original population of our republic.

That's the system of beliefs Hagee participates in when he talks about the church as the anti-Christ or invokes the Whore of Babylon. Are things becoming clear now? There is a particular language of antipathy towards Catholicism (the beliefs), the Roman Catholic Church, and the membership of the Roman Catholic Church --- all three of Karol, Joseph, and Bernard --- with a meaning and purpose clearly and precisely rooted in centuries-old traditions, that is every bit as unforgivable as antisemitism, racism, and bigotry towards gay people. But it is a horrific fallacy to conclude, in light of that, that any criticism of Bernard and Joseph, in language utterly distinct from that wretched tradition, constitutes anti-Catholic bigotry. And indeed, in practice, that position is not one that can be arrived at both a) honestly and b) in full possession of the facts, so someone who takes that position is either c) dishonest or d) uninformed. My sense, although I have not done the survey research to prove it, is that c) and d) are easily combinable in practice (they're obviously not logically incompatible), so that the claim that criticism of Catholic beliefs and Catholic officials on factual grounds utterly unrelated to the horrible canon (if you will) of bigoted tropes, nonetheless constitutes bigotry, let alone constitutes bigotry on a par with the bigotry of John Hagee, tends to be a product both of lack of education, and a dishonest effort at pious bullying, whose purpose and effect I'll return to momentarily.

One last sidebar: I referred above to the suggestion that widespread child-rape and Joseph's systematic campaign to whitewash the rape, protect the rapists, and, when justified by the PR needs of the church, to procure the rapists with new victims, is just a Catholic issue. As a Jew, I was told, I should not insert myself into Catholic concerns; and readers will undoubtedly have heard the same proposal in many other non-Catholic communities. How shall I put this? Because of my preferences in the presidential campaign, over the past few months, the past month especially, I have been exhorted repeatedly to reject, denounce, or reject and denounce people who are not my candidate. It gets wearying. So permit me a tu quoque. The view that Jews (or substitute your own background) shouldn't care about children being raped by Catholic priests, because (yes?) Catholic priests aren't Jews, is a despicable affront to morality, and anyone who holds that view has a moral faculty so badly warped that discussion with her, at least in the absence of significant treatment with a therapist and perhaps a psychiatrist, is a pointless waste of time. All that one can do is exclude such people (by democratic and liberal means, of course) from occupying positions in which the decisions they make can affect anyone but themselves.

But I digress. This little jaunt, through a bit of formal logic, a bit of history, and a bit of current events, seems to have established some fairly dramatic conclusions, including: A) Whatever hesitations one might have about offending people, the belief that Joseph's members, including the current pope and the upper strata of his hierarchy, participated in shocking moral offenses to which severe criminal statutes apply, is a belief an honest, logically consistent, factually informed person whose moral intuitions are non-pathological, is compelled to hold. B) There is, completely unrelated to (A), a historical tradition of quasi-racist anti-Catholic bigotry, instances of which, like John Hagee's statements, any person whose moral intuitions are non-pathological will abhor. C) The belief described in (A) is not a part of the tradition described in (B), and what's more, there is no viable honest, logically consistent, factually informed argument to show that (A) is a part of (B).

Now here's the big inductive leap. D) In cases where someone, say Bill Donohue, asserts that (A) is a part of (B), and the failure is not one of logical consistency or possession of factual information, then it must, by (C), be a failure of honesty (though nothing rules out anyone failing two or all three conditions for assenting to (C)). What does that failure of honesty consist in? A specific political agenda, I say, namely terrorizing justified critics of the Catholic church into a cowed silence, for fear of being branded a bigot and consequently ostracized in liberal society. The rhetorical toolkit of political correctness provides the means, and liberals' own training at being sensitive to politically correct concerns provides the conditions, for the intimidation to succeed. This agenda carries the obvious immediate consequence of denying justice to many scores of victims of rape, as well as the long-term consequence of shielding the RCC and other religious organizations from the sort of scrutiny that would and should have much sooner exposed the rapes and the hierarchy's auxiliary support in perpetrating them. Would you like to know what happens to children in the Church of Scientology? I sure would; it seems fairly well-established by public domain knowledge of the Co$'s practices that exposing children to them is child abuse under any reasonable understanding of what constitutes child abuse. But say so in public, and Scientologists will call you a bigot, and perhaps attempt to sue you or worse, and are happy to rely on the support Bill Donohue's censorious precedents provide them. As this last example shows, I hope, apart from the intrinsic costs to a liberal order of constraining the range of speech, and therefore of thought, acceptable within it, there are practical costs --- real physical and emotional suffering --- too.

[T]he Pontiff has utterly mis-stated the nature of the clerical pedophilia scandal. The scandal is not the presence of pedophiles in the church, but the institutionalization of child-rape by the knowing protection and even promotion (by non-pedophiles) of those who are guilty of it. The most grievous offender in this respect is Cardinal Bernard Law, currently an honored figure at the Vatican. This expression of contempt for the victims makes the Pope himself a direct accomplice in the very atrocity that he affects to denounce.

That's the right thought, but wrong on specifics. Bernard Law, the former Archlizard of Boston, merely aided and abetted serial rape in greater Boston and environs. The church's policy of covering up rapes, stonewalling investigators, and moving rapists to new parishes with fresh supplies of seraphic young flesh (because who'd want to get a hold of a barely pubescent boy who's already been spoiled?) was catholic in scope, and came straight from John Paul II's Curia. Specifically, from the powerful leader of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the successor institution to the Inquisition, a certain Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, whose name mysteriously vanished from the broadsheets at just about the time Benedict was elected. (I'm pretty certain of that timing, but you can check Lexis Nexis if you don't believe me.)

Whoever he was and wherever he's gone off to, that guy was "the most grievous offender" in the church. Bernard Law was just the Oasis of enabling child-rape, to Ratzinger's Beatles. Still, Pope Benedict was nowhere near the scene at the time, so his bafflement over the whole affair is understandable.