29th
June
2006
$600,000 and $1.25 will get you a bagel and cream cheese
posted by hedgehog in Uncategorized |But it won’t get you a good review from Andrew Bacevich. He reads liberal hawk Peter Beinart’s new The Good Fight so we don’t have to:
The Good Fight is insipid, pretentious and poorly written. At points it verges on incoherence. As history, it is meretricious. As policy prescription, it is wrongheaded. Beinart has perpetrated his fraud twice over.
I just wish Beinart would set me up with one of those $600,000 advances. For that kind of dough, I’d happily be insipid, pretentious and almost incoherent. Hell, I do it here for free.
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a couple years ago in a discussion of the bush administration’s cons (foreign negatives) and cons (domestic deceptions), i dug out the whole text of niebuhr’s serenity prayer:
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
enjoying one moment at a time;
accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
that I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
forever in the next.
Amen.
and this quote from 1950:
If the ministers of our great urban churches become again the simple priests and chaplains of this American idolatry, subtly compounded with a few stray Christian emphases, they will merely add one more dismal proof in the pages of history that a religiously sanctified self-idolatry is more grievous than its secular variety. This is how the gospel becomes a salt that has lost its savor.
The gospel cannot be preached with truth and power if it does not challenge the pretensions and pride, not only of individuals, but of nations, cultures, civilizations, economic and political systems. The good fortune of America and its power place it under the most grievous temptations to self-adulation. If there is no power and grace in the Christian church “to bring down every high thing which exalteth itself against the knowledge of God,” the church becomes not merely useless but dangerous.
We Protestants speak critical words about the idolatrous pretensions of the Roman Church. But some of these pretensions are actually more plausible than this miserable identification of the “laws of God” with a particular form of democracy….
which makes me now want to suggest that the bushies give themselves a new talking point: “we focus on representative government over there, so we don’t have to have it here.”
Posted by hibiscus
What a fantastic quote. Maybe someone should go nail it to the door of a church .
Posted by hedgehog
I can never decide if I like the word meretricious or not. On one hand it sounds great, and is a elegant way to say “he’s whoring himself out.” On the other hand, perhaps because I read a fake Latin play starring Auricula Meretricula once, it reminds me that I’m not entirely comfortable with the comparison of prostitution with selling one’s honesty and character and talent for a wretched reason. It’s an insult to prostitutes.
Nice quote hibiscus. I had to look up the biblical verse referenced: 2 Corinthians 10: For though we walk in the flesh, we don’t wage war according to the flesh; 4 for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but mighty before God to the throwing down of strongholds, 5 throwing down imaginations and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God,
Interesting.
Posted by Saheli
yeh niebuhr was one of those fruitcakes who believed in separating church and state for the good of the church .
Posted by hibiscus
Yeah, me too, actually. Partially, anyway.
Posted by Saheli