The Bosque Boys

From The Telegraph, this story about Muslims prisoners gaining power in a British prison.

"Staff appear reluctant to challenge inappropriate behaviour, in particular among black and ethnic minority prisoners, for fear of doing the wrong thing," the report adds.

"This is leading to a general feeling of a lack of control and shifting the power dynamic towards prisoners."

Just under a third of the 500 prisoners at Whitemoor are Muslim.

And why would guards feel afraid of exercising adequate control over Muslim prisoners? The attitude of the report answers this question:

The concern about Muslim prisoners is in danger of leading to hostility and Islamophobia, the report warns.

I would say the insane political correctness of the bureaucrats is leading to increased hostility by the Islamic prisoners as they realize they can leverage fear of discrimination into power within the jail.

Bloody insane. Paging Richard the Lion Hearted, your people need you.

From The Telegraph, a UK paper full story here:

The Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, accused the Church of failing in its duty to "welcome people of other faiths" ahead of a motion at July's General Synod in York urging a strategy for evangelising Muslims.

However, his comments were condemned by senior figures within the Church. The Rt Rev Stephen Lowe, the former Bishop of Hulme and the newly appointed Bishop of Urban Life and Faith, said: "Both the Bishop of Rochester's reported comments and the synod private members' motion show no sensitivity to the need for good inter-faith relations. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs are learning to respect one another's paths to God and to live in harmony. This demand for the evangelisation of people of other faiths contributes nothing to our communities."

Bishop Nazir-Ali, born in Pakistan, is calling for the Anglican Church (Church of England) to evangelize Muslims in Britain. The Anglican establishment is accusing him of narrow-mindedness and lack of sensitivity. What would they have said to Jesus, when he told the eleven to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit?

A Christian communion that refuses proclaim that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and summon hearers to repentence and faith, is on its way out of Christendom. "Multiculturalism" and "tolerance" must bear distinctive meanings within the Church. As Christian citizens of pluralistic societies we tolerate other religions in the sense that we do not burn down their places of worship, imprison them for their beliefs, or discriminate in the workplace. But, "tolerance" for Christians must not imply that beliefs of other religions are also true in the way our faith is. Christians are multicultural in the sense of welcoming those of other cultures, and recognizing that believers can be Christians while being of another culture. But, respecting other cultures must not imply for Christians that all religious beliefs are equally valid.

Bernard Perlin, artist. Office of War Information poster, no. 26. 1943.

Not that I really care much anymore about Hillary--but can anyone doubt that the mainstream media continues to treat her like a red-headed stepchild (or, even more dramatic, like a Republican candidate in the general election)?

Now she is advocating the assassination of Barack Obama.

Get real guys. Interesting story on Politico about this era of hype over substance.

FYI: I mentioned the same exact incident back in an otherwise utterly forgettable March post: Political History 101.

In re Hillary, RFK, and Obama: much ado about not much in this case.

The Bigger Point: Get ready John McCain and Republicans. Our day is drawing nigh. And the storm of calumnious opprobrium will be intense.

What about John Hagee?

Although I subsequently pushed it to the back burner, I began this post last Friday, after listening to Fresh Air with Terry Gross (NPR), which re-ran (again) a 2006 interview with San Antonio-based, Pastor John Hagee. Several times during the break, an announcer explained that the segment was especially relevant considering Hagee's endorsement of McCain earlier this year.

Terry Gross's long-held fascination with Hagee centers around her fascination with "Christian Zionism," which purports to see recent Middle East history as the culminating events of a Christian eschatology as described in the apocalyptic writings of the Bible, most notably the Book of Revelation.

Yesterday, after some more recent and less-canonical revelations that Hagee had described Adolph Hitler (and I paraphrase) as part of God's plan to bring the Children of Israel back home to the Promised Land and the scene of the impending Apocalypse (fairly mild by Hagee standards), John McCain renounced the preacher's endorsement. Of course, McCain had previously actively courted Hagee's blessing (and gleefully accepted it when his advances proved fruitful on the eve of the Texas primary back in March).

However, yesterday, McCain announced:

"Obviously, I find these remarks and others deeply offensive and indefensible, and I repudiate them. I did not know of them before Reverend Hagee's endorsement, and I feel I must reject his endorsement as well."

Hagee's retort:

"You can all go to Hell" (again I paraphrase).

What does it mean?

First and foremost, John McCain doesn't know his rear end from his elbow when it comes to matters of faith. If you are looking for somebody that understands that "old time religion," you may need to get yourself another boy. To John McCain, pastors John Hagee, Jerry Falwell, Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, James Robison, and James Dobson are all the same guy. Back in 2000, scorning these fellows was part of his political strategy. They were "forces of evil" and "agents of intolerance." But 2008 brought a new game plan: suck up to these "right-wing religious nut balls" (you guessed it--another paraphrase).

The John Hagee benediction was a conquest of expediency--but not the product of much individual forethought.

The conversation might have gone this way back at McCain HQ:

McCain aide: "John Hagee is on the phone ready to endorse your candidacy."

McCain: "Who's he again?"

Aide: "The preacher from Texas who thinks the return of Jesus is imminent."

McCain: "Doesn't help me."

Aide: "He is the guy who thinks Katrina was the judgment of God on New Orleans for condoning homosexuality."

McCain: "Again. You gotta narrow it down some."

Aide: "He has a 19,000 member congregation in San Antonio and can be seen and heard on over 200 TV and radio stations."

McCain: "Praise the Lord. You mean my good friend, Brother Hagee. Why didn't you say so in the first place?"

Bottom Line: the Hagee endorsement does not tell you much about John McCain's theology--but the entire sordid affair probably tells us more about politics than we want to know.

One other thought: for forty-plus years I have been hanging out with right-wing religious zealots--but, in all my life, I have never met one who was actually itching for Armageddon. The only time I ever hear about Christians who are mapping out the Final Cosmic Battle at Megiddo Junction, they are always on shows like Fresh Air. But I meet a lot of liberals who assure me they are ubiquitous.

George Bush has chosen Southern Methodist University, in the Dallas area, as the site of his presidential library. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth further south on I-35 when Baylor University learned it had lost the competition to host the library.

From the time that SMU began to compete for the library, some faculty, students, and assorted Methodists, begin a counter-campaign to oppose any link between George Bush and SMU.

While locating the library at SMU is probably a done deal, a group of diehard Methodists is still fighting to prevent it. Story here.

I am beginning to think that Bush hatred may be stronger than the Reagan hatred I remember from the 80s.

An anonymous English Professor is asking some sensible questions about his own progressive assumptions:

"America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns."

"Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it—try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn’t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades."

"For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college."

"I am the man who has to lower the hammer."

UPDATE: Follow the related discussion here.

Apparently, the Roberts court has achieved just too darned much consensus. After decades of griping about a heavily politicized and divided court, the New York Times now complains about the dearth of 5-4 decisions. Astounding but entirely predictable.

Former New York mayor Ed Koch seems to think so.

What do you think?

"Like many left-leaning academics, Anita Clair Fellman, Director of Women’s Studies at Old Dominion University, found Ronald Reagan’s landslide election in 1980 puzzling and troubling. Convinced that modern liberalism reflected the heart and soul of America (at least since Goldwater’s resounding defeat in 1964), feminist scholar Fellman wondered how Reagan’s rhetoric of individualism resonated with so many Americans. Could there have been a strain of individualist, anti-statist political thought lurking in America’s heartland? If so, where did it come from, and how had it been nurtured? In her search for causality, she recalled the endearing series of Little House books written in the 1930s by Laura Ingalls Wilder."

"Fellman argues in her new study Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Impact on American Culture that Wilder’s books not only present a version of American pioneer history with an inchoate individualism, but do so intentionally in an effort to inculcate generations of children with a traditionally conservative view of American history. Indeed, the popularity of Wilder’s books and their ubiquitous presence in American homes and schools serve as the major vehicle for the dissemination of what Fellman egregiously terms 'extreme individualism.'"

Read Dedra Birzer's provocative review of Fellman's book here.