And Enkidu said unto Gilgamesh "Lo, magic bulls are one thing, but these Republicans speweth magic bullsh!t."
Dana Milbank asks the really pertinent Duggar question: why was every GOP candidate fawning over these people to begin with?
Rick Santorum no longer digs the Duggars. ... Santorum’s response contrasts dramatically with that of another 2016 contender, Mike Huckabee, who enjoyed the Duggars’ support in his 2008 bid but didn’t run in 2012. After the news broke (and Josh Duggar apologized), Huckabee posted a message on Facebook to "affirm" his support of the Duggars. "Good people make mistakes and do regrettable and even disgusting things," he wrote, calling Josh Duggar’s response a "testament to his family’s authenticity and humility."
Why the divergence in opinion? Perhaps it has something to do with Huck’s victory in the Duggar Primary. Several candidates had sought the famous family’s favor, as evidenced by the photos (mostly from Josh Duggar’s Twitter stream) of Duggar with Huckabee, Santorum, Ted Cruz, Rick Perry, Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, Bobby Jindal and Scott Walker. But this month, before the scandal broke, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, Josh’s parents and stars of “19 Kids and Counting,” endorsed Huckabee over their 2012 pick, Santorum.
This is the real scandal.
The lesson is that you can be forgiven anything if you have a reality show and decent audience ratings. And being the flagship of an extreme faction in the party doesn't hurt.
I don’t join in the schadenfreude on the left over the latest case of hypocrisy among family-values conservatives. Nor do I take any delight in the discovery that the Duggars, who find immorality in homosexuality, abortion and out-of-wedlock sex, have more disturbing questions of morality in their own home. What’s troubling is that the Republican presidential candidates have been so worshipful of the Duggars in the first place. The political issue is not what Josh Duggar did as a teenager but why so many who seek the nation’s highest office feel the need to woo people so far out on the ideological extreme.
Kathleen Parker gives her take on the Duggar dustup.
... "19 Kids and Counting," which puts literate people in mind of a baby goat factory that under similarly procreative practices would prompt charges of animal cruelty. Human offspring are children, accurately speaking, not kids. And 19 of them isn’t just a brood but a sideshow.
As most know by now, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar are the prolific parents in this mysteriously popular TLC show. They left to God the number of babies they would bring forth — and God is clearly not counting.
Recently, even the least-interested among us learned that their oldest, Josh, sexually preyed upon five underage girls, including some of his little sisters, 12 years ago when he was a teenager. ...
Into this perverse auto-da-fé have waltzed two Republican presidential candidates, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, presumptively the two most devout Christians among the — hey! — 19 likely Republican presidential candidates. Numerologists? Both men have been political favorites of the Duggar family, though Santorum has now begun distancing himself.
Parker then wanders into how millennials are more secular, which is relevant, then takes a huge side-jump into how the Muslims are growing at Duggar-ish rates and may soon be... well, still a low single digit percentage of the population, but bigger! It's a side note worthy of Ross Douthat.
Speaking of which, come right inside...
Ross Douthat and the prospects of real old-fashioned biblical marriage.
The shift on same-sex marriage has captured the headlines, but the change is much more comprehensive: In just 15 years, we have gone from being a society divided roughly evenly between progressive and traditionalist visions to a country where social conservatism is countercultural and clearly in retreat. ... Oh, and one more thing: The acceptance of polygamy has more than doubled.
... polygamy has already become more mainstream than even a slippery-sloper like myself once expected. The suburban plural marriage on HBO’s “Big Love” seemed like a fantasia when the show first aired, but thanks to the magic of reality television (which has produced three polygamist-themed shows in the last five years) we know not only that such families exist, but that their lives can be turned into bourgeois-seeming sitcom fodder as easily as any other arrangement.
Next up, how are we doing on marriage to dime store turtles and inanimate objects, because once you allow two adult human beings to engage in the same kind of legal arrangement that other pairs of adult human beings have enjoyed for centuries, all bets are off!
Frank Bruni on all the voices that want to kill the Department of Education.
In a Republican presidential debate during the 2012 campaign, it wasn’t just on the list of “three agencies of government” that Rick Perry famously promised to eliminate. It was one of the two that he succeeded in naming before he stopped short, forgetting the third.
And it finds itself once again in Republican presidential candidates’ cross hairs, all the more so because of Common Core standards, supported by the education secretary, Arne Duncan, and cited by many excessively alarmed conservatives as a federal takeover of curriculum.
... most of these politicians have called for the downsizing of the education department. A few have followed Perry’s lead and said that they want it dead and gone. That’s the position of Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio has signaled a willingness to consider the department’s elimination.
Bruni goes on to talk about how Democrats like Patty Murray don't want to kill the Department of Education. She just wants to make it pointless. The next time someone pulls out one of those lists to scream that students from many other nations do better in math, science, or what have you, ask them, "do you think those countries follow national standards for education, or do they let every school district do their own thing?"
The New York Times explains the lucrative business of not running for president. Wink
The problem, spawned by the Supreme Court’s misguided Citizens United decision, is exemplified by Jeb Bush’s brazen strategy of personally raising scores of millions of dollars for his custom-tailored, supposedly independent super PAC, Right to Rise. Mr. Bush insists that this coordination is perfectly legal because he has not yet formally declared that he is running for president. As a candidate, which he obviously is, he should have to keep his distance from the super PAC, which can raise unlimited-dollar contributions while his own formal campaign would be limited to raising donations of a few thousand dollars per donor.
Mr. Bush’s cynical pretense has netted him the largest dollar haul of the campaign so far, with a reported take of $100 million in super PAC money this year to put him ahead of his rivals. Tactics like his “nondeclaration” have laid bare the Federal Election Commission’s abdication of its responsibility for policing campaign abuses. The bipartisan commission has been rendered “worse than dysfunctional,” in the words of its chairwoman, by party-line standoffs that invite further collusion between candidates and deep-pocketed donors.
It's especially nice for Bush that he's continued to be not a candidate even though he's said that he's running. Apparently it doesn't count until the non-candidate says it counts. Which is kind of like running in a race where you can go as far down the track as you want before shouting "Go!"
Sheldon Whitehouse on Big Oil and Big Coal (which is no longer so big).
Fossil fuel companies and their allies are funding a massive and sophisticated campaign to mislead the American people about the environmental harm caused by carbon pollution.
Their activities are often compared to those of Big Tobacco denying the health dangers of smoking. Big Tobacco’s denial scheme was ultimately found by a federal judge to have amounted to a racketeering enterprise. ...
The shape of the fossil fuel industry’s denial operation has been documented by, among others, Drexel University professor Robert Brulle. In a 2013 paper published in the journal Climatic Change, Brulle described a complex network of organizations and funding that appears designed to obscure the fossil fuel industry’s fingerprints. To quote directly from Brulle’s report, it was “a deliberate and organized effort to misdirect the public discussion and distort the public’s understanding of climate.” That sounds a lot like Kessler’s findings in the tobacco racketeering case.
And sadly, it still works all too well. Though I wonder how many of the folks who buy into the industry-generated "confusion" are also avid watchers of the Duggar's TV show.
Leonard Pitts on police acting like police.
On March 6, Matthew Kenny, a police officer in Madison, Wis., shot and killed an unarmed 19-year-old black man named Anthony Robinson, Jr. who, he said, had attacked him. The shooting triggered days of peaceful protests. An autopsy found a cocktail of illicit drugs in Robinson’s system. Earlier this month, District Attorney Ismael Ozanne, who is black, cleared Kenny of wrongdoing.
Though the story isn’t new, what is, is the response from Police Chief Michael C. Koval. In his blog, he anticipated civil disturbances and offered those who might “make a principled decision to get arrested” a helpful menu of charges so they could distinguish between acts that would get them fined and those that would get them jailed and stick them with criminal records.
Impressively, he acknowledged the systemic bias plaguing people of color and the fact that police have been part of the problem. “I am not going to absolve law enforcement for whatever role we have played in being complicit in the calculus of racial disparities.”
Not, if that acknowledgement can make it to people's trigger fingers...
Molly Worthen and... anti-theology?
I’d come for Sunday Assembly, a godless alternative to church founded in London in 2013. A cheerful woman with a name tag stood and promised a crowd of about 40 people “all the fun parts of church but without any religion, and with fun pop songs.” The band led us in secular “hymns” like “Walking on Sunshine” and “Lean on Me.” The day’s guest preacher, a Ph.D. candidate from Duke, described his research on bonobos and the biological roots of our species’ instinct to help one another — the “seeds of a nature that is good,” he told us.
Is this what secular humanism — the naturalist worldview that many nonbelievers embrace and religious conservatives fear — looks like in practice? In one sense, secular humanism is a style of fellowship intended to fill the church-shaped void, but it is also a strand of the liberal intellectual tradition that attempts to answer the canard that godlessness means immorality. ...
Most Christians, especially evangelical Protestants, would find the outlines of Sunday Assembly familiar: hymns and a worship band; a sermon; afterward, coffee hour. (The organization attracts a mix of recovering believers and people who have never been religious.) The meeting last month even featured a ritual that echoed the ancient Christian practice of the Passing of the Peace, the moment when congregants reconcile with one another, often by shaking hands. Instead, the Assembly leader asked us to turn to our neighbors for a quick thumb-wrestling match.
Worthen asks more serious questions in her piece, but it let me wondering this: where is the nearest Sunday Assembly for me? Sounds like fun.