The Nappy Cat Chronicles

“Look out, God–behind You!”"Nothing’s the same since Julie started those wars.”

“The New World has that New World smell.”

“We, the jury, find the defendant cute as a button.”

“Shoot him again, Mr. President. He doesn’t mind.”

“Yummy plague!”

“I claim this land in the name of Phyllis T. Brunell.”

“Let the ant-shaving begin!”

“No man is so tall as when he stoops to help kill a child.”

“That was no lady, that was Iraq.”

Source: Marshall Sella in Created In Darkness By Troubled Americans: The Best Of McSweeney’s Humor Category, 2004, p. 224.

Via Right Wing Watch, this one from Tony Perkins’ Family Research Council (FRC) hurts:

The Democratic Leadership is rushing to the floor this week H.R. 1424, the Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act. The bill would place a massive new government mandate on private businesses to provide healthcare coverage for mental illness. Of even more concern, though, is the fact that rather than limit the coverage mandate to severe and debilitating illness, the bill uses the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) as the basis for identifying conditions that must be covered. Among the more troubling diagnoses incorporated into DSM-IV are:

• Circadian rhythm sleep disorder (jet lag type);
• Caffeine intoxication;
• Sibling relational problem;
• Substance-induced sexual dysfunction;
• Gender identity disorder;
• Necrophilia;
• Transvestic fetishism; and
• Pedophilia.

Under H.R. 1424, employers offering group coverage would be required to provide benefits related to these and similar diagnoses included in DSM-IV. In addition, the bill provides no conscience clause for employers who have religious or moral objections to covering the psycho-sexual disorders, including those noted above [emphasis mine].

I’ve found that, for a reason unknown to me, some people are against mental illness diagnoses until a family member or the family suffers from the effects of a diagnosable mental illness. After a bit of mulling, they pour over their options like hot cheese on Panera’s French onion soup.

Physical illnesses like Alzheimer’s and diabetes do not fall within politically or religiously correct boundaries. Mental illnesses are the same. Incidentally, FRC President Tony Perkins has a son named David. If David were to ever come out as a homosexual, it’s very likely that Mr. Perkins would want his son to engage in the “fix the gayness in you” therapy know as reparative therapy. FRC’s position on homosexual

FRC does not consider homosexuality an alternative lifestyle or sexual “preference”; it is unhealthy and destructive to individual persons, families, and society. Compassion–not bigotry–compels us to support the healing of homosexuals who wish to change their destructive behavior.

alludes to this sort of treatment. A “sibling relational problem” that is causing distress is obviously not as high as homosexuality on the FRC disorders-needing-treatment hierarchy. But, maybe that’s the point.

(On the left: Bill Donohue. On the right: John Hagee.)

The vile President of the Catholic League, Bill Donohue, took on the equally vile evangelical pastor John Hagee after Hagee endorsed the 2008 Republican nominee John McCain. From Greenwald’s interview with Donohue:

If someone said to me: who is the biggest anti-Catholic bigot in the evangelical community, I would say: hands down, John Hagee.

This is Hagee’s take on the Catholic Church:

Adolf Hitler attended a Catholic school as a child and heard all the fiery anti-Semitic rantings from Chrysostom to Martin Luther. When Hitler became a global demonic monster, the Catholic Church and Pope Pius XII never, ever slightly criticized him. Pope Pius XII, called by historians ‘Hitler’s Pope,’ joined Hitler in the infamous Concordat of Collaboration, which turned the youth of the [sic] Germany over to Nazism, and the churches became the stage background for the bloodthirsty cry, ‘Pereat Judea’…. In all of his [Hitler's] years of absolute brutality, he was never denounced or even scolded by Pope Pius XII or any Catholic leader in the world. To those Christians who believe that Jewish hearts will be warmed by the sight of the cross, please be informed-to them it’s an electric chair. (pp. 79-81)

The Roman Catholic Church, which was supposed to carry the light of the gospel, plunged the world into the Dark Ages…. The Crusaders were a motley mob of thieves, rapists, robbers, and murderers whose sins had been forgiven by the pope in advance of the Crusade…. The brutal truth is that the Crusades were military campaigns of the Roman Catholic Church to gain control of Jerusalem from the Muslims and to punish the Jews as the alleged Christ killers on the road to and from Jerusalem. (p. 73)

Unfortunately for Hagee, although he’s correct about the Catholic Church’s desire to destroy that which was a danger to its existence, at the end of the day Hagee is a dogmatic wackjob. His take on the Harry Potter series:

“As millions of people anticipate the release of the latest Harry Potter book and film, we’re reminded once again of Satan’s ongoing attempt to deceive and destroy. The whole purpose of the Potter books is to desensitize readers and introduce them to the occult [emphasis mine].”

Donohue is absolutely no exception:

On October 13, 2005, he appeared on NBC’s Today Show. While on the show he asserted that the crisis was “a homosexual scandal, not a pedophilia scandal”.

It’s my hope that these two strikingly similar looking obese white men (see above) eat each other or something.

Regarding this blog post, the Politico reports:

“If it insulted people, that was not the intent,” Outlook editor John Pomfret told me this morning, calling the piece “tongue-in-cheek.”

Ms Allen’s article is imbued with sarcasm. That’s obvious. I initially thought that it was too over the top to be serious. I mean, how could someone with such a prominent vocabulary commit such a glaring relativist fallacy. You can get away with hating people for being wrong. It’s harder to get away with arguing that the people you hate are wrong because you hate them and you are right.

However,  after reviewing her previous attempts, I determined that her aforementioned argument is, indelibly, her style. As proof I direct you to this WaPo opinion-editorial. Ms Allen asserts:

In fact, when I contemplate the concept of “dying well,” I can’t avoid the uneasy feeling that it actually means “dying when we, the intellectual elite, think it is appropriate for you to die.”

And then, without the slightest regard for the irony, Ms Allen asserts:

Furthermore, according to a 1990s study by the National Institutes of Health, even when patients have living wills, if those wills contain directives with which doctors and hospitals disagree (such as, I myself suspect, prolonging the patient’s life instead of terminating it), many doctors simply ignore the patient’s desires.

Hilariously, she’s completely ignorant of the fact that those “intellectual elites,” for whom her disdain is made palpable, proliferate every “National Institute.” I feel sorry for Ms Allen. Not only did those nurses bother her but, also, one of her doctors is obviously going to end her life against her wishes.

So, it’s obvious that Ms Allen is sardonic and bothered and the WaPo got caught with its pants down. Her article is, hopefully, a eulogy–albeit a premature eulogy–to the sort of narcissistic and self-contained journalistic structure in which people like Ms Allen thrive.

I wake up this morning and I find this wonderful example of what passes as modern opinion-editorializing in my reader inbox:

I can’t help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women — I should say, “we women,” of course — aren’t the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Women “are only children of a larger growth,” wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?

I’m not the only woman who’s dumbfounded (as it were) by our sex, or rather, as we prefer to put it, by other members of our sex besides us. It’s a frequent topic of lunch, phone and water-cooler conversations; even some feminists can’t believe that there’s this thing called “The Oprah Winfrey Show” or that Celine Dion actually sells CDs. A female friend of mine plans to write a horror novel titled “Office of Women,” in which nothing ever gets done and everyone spends the day talking about Botox.

We exaggerate, of course. And obviously men do dumb things, too, although my husband has perfectly good explanations for why he eats standing up at the stove (when I’m not around) or pulls down all the blinds so the house looks like a cave (also when I’m not around): It has to do with the aggressive male nature and an instinctive fear of danger from other aggressive men. When men do dumb things, though, they tend to be catastrophically dumb, such as blowing the paycheck on booze or much, much worse (think “postal”). Women’s foolishness is usually harmless. But it can be so . . . embarrassing.

Take Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign. By all measures, she has run one of the worst — and, yes, stupidest — presidential races in recent history, marred by every stereotypical flaw of the female sex. As far as I’m concerned, she has proved that she can’t debate — viz. her televised one-on-one against Obama last Tuesday, which consisted largely of complaining that she had to answer questions first and putting the audience to sleep with minutiae about her health-coverage mandate. She has whined (via her aides) like the teacher’s pet in grade school that the boys are ganging up on her when she’s bested by male rivals. She has wept on the campaign trail, even though everyone knows that tears are the last refuge of losers. And she is tellingly dependent on her husband.

This article is written by vapid anti-feminist and religious conservative Charlotte Allen. To be fair, her article appeared here with the title “Why do women cling to pre-feminist stereotypes?” before it was published nationwide by the WaPo with the title “We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?” Still the substance of the article is quite unappealing. Ms Allen dresses herself in the “feminism is the new oppression” independent woman garb. But, in actuality, she dons a black suit and tie: She is a misogynist and a pot to someone’s kettle.

Take this article on Harvard University President Lawrence Summers for instance:

Even if you’re not up on the scientific research - a paper Mr. Summers cited demonstrating that, while women overall are just as smart as men, significantly fewer women than men occupy the very highest intelligence brackets that produce scientific genius - common sense tells you that Mr. Summers has got to be right.

Unless you’re at Harvard. There, the professoriate - quickly joined by academics and media intellectuals from all over the country - has deemed Mr. Summers’ mild references to innate sex differences to have been so outrageous as to deserve severe censure.

The reason? The statements violated the central tenet of feminist ideology: that the two sexes are intrinsically identical except for a few superficial physical characteristics and that any perceived differences between them can be blamed on sex discrimination and social conditioning [emphasis mine]. Scientific evidence to the contrary be damned; a feminist professor in Mr. Summers’ audience announced that his remarks made her feel as though she was “going to be sick.”

Of course men and women are different. Ms Allen makes it clear in her most recent article that men’s mostly phyiscal idiosyncrasies are “cavemanish” and women’s mostly emotional idiosyncrasies are “embarrassing.” Unfortunately, Ms Allen doesn’t seem to be aware that if you take away a woman’s estrogen–the hormone that produces the “embarrassing” emotional idiosyncrasies–the woman becomes a man. Now that is the equivalence that Ms Allen believes is so unnatural.

However, I’m not proposing that there aren’t some thinkers in the social sciences that ignore the biological and neurological differences and truly believe that, absent social conditions, men and women would obtain equal amounts of achievements in the same fields. But, Ms Allen likes to argue that biological and neurological differences between men and women produce those social conditions. Therefore, the social conditions are an acceptable fact of life.

What both sides miss, and the reason why I refer to her as a pot to someone’s kettle, is that biology, neurology, and social conditions interact to such a degree that it is nonsense to posit which came first, which has the strongest relative influence, and which should receive the strongest relative deference. It is also unacceptable to believe that the three variables are immutable.

To finish, let’s return to Ms Allen’s “lots of women are dumb but I’m not” article. Ms Allen ends with the following advice:

So I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can make a house a home.) Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts’ content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim.

I agree: Ms Allen should relax and enjoy being a woman and all of the emotional idiosyncrasies. However, although she believes that women scream and swoon at an embarrassingly high degree and frequency (men do those things to a quieter and lesser degree when watching sports), she should appreciate the fact that way down deep, women are, relative to men . . . kind of different.