But there’s more than a passing resemblance between this narrative [Animal House] and classic right-wing populism. Like “Bluto” Blutarsky rallying his fraternity to ruin the homecoming parade, crafty conservatives have been riling up middle America for decades against champagne-sipping limousine liberals. The boys in Animal House aren’t, say, fighting tooth and nail for a living-wage ordinance. These mostly privileged young men are fighting for their right to party—a libertarian cause if there ever was one. And consider that the villain in Wedding Crashers is a Kennedy clone, a cultured environmentalist who hides his woman-hating ways behind earnest platitudes. ~Reihan Salam

I salute Reihan for suffering through Fletch again so that the rest of us can be reminded of just how much we resent Chevy Chase for that (and Ishtar) to this day.  He also has to be the only one–ever–to align John Belushi with the politics of the Southern Strategy.  As for the political message of Wedding Crashers, I leave that to Michael, since this is more his area than mine.  Besides, I don’t even like weddings.

Ms. Kizenko’s article bothered me a great deal, more than I thought this sort of argument would bother me.  The thing is that I came into ROCOR as a convert out of a desire to find a Traditionalist Orthodox jurisdiction, one that was firm on ecumenism and as faithful to Church Tradition as possible, so I sympathised with the skepticism and reservations of those who feared the worst from a reconciliation with Moscow.  I could appreciate the perspective of Old Calendarist friends who believed that the Synod was making a terrible mistake.  In the end, however, I could see nothing that should have stood in the way of reconciliation.  Having made my spiritual home in the Russian Church Abroad, I am not going to become one of these spiritually nomadic people chasing after super-akribeia.  If ever there was a legitimate need for oikonomia for the pastoral care of the Orthodox people and their spiritual well-being, it was the case of the alienation of the two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church.  This was alienation created by the political interference of the Soviet government in the management of the Church–it would hardly do to perpetuate this alienation out of excessive fear of Putin’s authoritarianism. 

There is no sense in Ms. Kizenko’s article that the spiritual welfare of the Russian Orthodox flock should come first or that the Russian Orthodox Church exists not to counter the Putin regime but to preach the Gospel and provide the spiritual medicine in the hospital of salvation.  Pastorally, reconciliation was the only sane thing to do, especially as more and more immigrants from Russia came to Diasporan communities with baptisms from churches under Moscow’s jurisdiction.  Over the years there have been some cases of Russian immigrant faithful, validly baptised, being denied communion because of the rift between Moscow and the Synod.  That was becoming an intolerable and unsustainable situation, and moreover there was no fundamental issue requiring continued separation.  This division was a wound that needed to be bound up, poison that needed to be expelled.  Wisdom required oikonomia, accommodation, and there are as many examples of our Fathers among the Saints who have practised oikonomia as well as pursuing akribeia as the circumstances required.  Without serious impediments, reconciliation had to happen and was indeed already long overdue (coming 16 years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union).  Westerners and Russian Orthodox outside Russia should not allow their opposition to the policies of the Putin regime, which are and ought to be irrelevant to this discussion, blind them to the greater pastoral needs of the Orthodox Church.

Indeed, it was Mr. Putin who first made overtures to the Church Abroad in September 2003, when he met with its leadership during a visit to New York. The church merger is only the most recent of his successful attempts to appropriate symbols of Russia’s prerevolutionary and anticommunist past along with Soviet ones. ~Nadia Kizenko

Via Rod

This is simply untrue.  Talks between the Synod and Moscow predated Putin’s administration and they certainly predated his visit to New York.  By the time I was baptised in January 2003, reunion was already being widely discussed in the Synod.  It is true that reconciliation negotiations continued and perhaps even intensified in the past seven years, and it is true that Putin has supported this reconciliation (obviously doing so for his own purposes), but it is frankly insulting to all the bishops in the Synod to claim that Putin could have somehow masterminded the consent of the bishops of the Church Abroad.  Bishop Gabriel of New York expressed strong reservations about the reconciliation in the past, yet even he did not finally oppose it. 

What theological and moral issues are at stake?  Note that Ms. Kizenko does not elaborate, presumably because she either does not know or cannot explain.  Those are the only issues of any consequence that should prevent the reconciliation of the two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church.  Unless there are credible arguments about some serious error into which Moscow has fallen, there is nothing more to talk about.  Communism as a state system is finished; the Soviet Union is no more; Sergianism and collaboration are things of the past.  Ms. Kizenko must know this.  Indeed, it is not possible for her to not know this, yet she persists in encouraging precisely the kind of fractiousness and discord among Russian Orthodox outside Russia that she holds up as a major challenge for our bishops.  That she does so in a paper well-known for its hatred of Russia and all Orthodox nations is all the more unfortunate.  It is depressing to see the extent to which some people will take their obsession with Putin-bashing.

A Parliament’s job is not only to legislate but to debate, to inquire, to hold to account and to understand. It is time for Government to become more efficient and more creative in the way that decisions are made. Our job in this Chamber is to lead and to persuade, not to impose unnecessary burdens on business, communities and individuals. ~Alex Salmond, First Minister of Scotland (via Alex Massie)

Massie correctly reminds us that all of this might be just so much empty talk, but what refreshing and unexpected talk it is.  Massie also writes about Ron Paul, one of the few sensible elected representatives around.

By the way, Senator Obama, it’s a ‘flak’ jacket, not a ‘flack’ jacket. ~John McCain

Indeed.  A “flack jacket” is what the admiring media fans of McLieberman wear.

The survey’s finding that 70% of American Muslims favor a bigger government rebuts the conventional wisdom that the entrepreneurial nature of immigrant populations makes them a natural fit for the fiscally conservative approach that characterized the GOP (pre-W). ~George Ajjan

Ron Paul and Michael Scheuer teach Giuliani (the one who supposedly knows so much about terrorism and national security) a thing or two.

“Blowback,” as it’s called, is a controversial thesis, but it does explain why Osama bin Laden goes after America and not, say, Switzerland.

This is a favorite rhetorical trope of anti-interventionists: If only we had a neutral foreign policy like Switzerland, terrorism would never have come to our shores. But it’s simply not true that Switzerland has never suffered an attack by Middle Eastern terrorists. ~John Tabin, responding to Jim Pinkerton

Via Clark

It’s also simply not true that Jim Pinkerton (or any other realist or non-interventionist) claimed any such thing.  Way to tackle that straw man!  As the quote makes clear, Pinkerton is talking about Bin Laden.  You may have heard of him–a tallish fellow, long beard, bad attitude, lots of money.  When Al Qaeda hits targets in Switzerland (or Sweden or Norway or San Marino), maybe then Tabin will have a point.

In Kevin Smith’s Clerks, the lead characters discuss the morality of the assault of the unfinished second Death Star in Return of the Jedi. One character, arguing that independent contractors were unjustly killed in the attack, equates the Rebel Alliance to “left-wing militants.” But if the Anchorhead sequence is taken as canonical (there’s disagreement among fans on this point), it’s hard to cast the Alliance as a leftist movement in any conventional sense. The Rebellion, in fact, is a radically libertarian undertaking. Thirty years after Star Wars captured the world’s imagination, it’s past time that the Rebels’ fight for economic liberty was celebrated in those terms. ~John Tabin

Just so we’re all clear on this: it is good for libertarianism to be associated with the fictional violent attacks of insurgents against an empire (Tabin seems to be suggesting that the Galactic Empire invited these attacks), but it is bad for libertarianism to actually have a real presidential candidate espousing relatively mild criticisms of the neo-imperial policies of our own government.  In other words, libertarian principles are fine for fantasy universes, but undesirable in the real world.  I might even agree with this assessment of the value of libertarianism in certain cases, but it is an awfully strange thing for an avowed libertarian to say.

It occurs to me that if you want to make a pro-life argument against this new birth control pill that evidently suppresses a woman’s menstrual cycle, you do not under any circumstances refer to it as a pesticide.  The reasons should be obvious, since it is the nature of a pesticide to kill pests, which is not the association any pro-lifers want to make when they are talking about contraception.

Via Tapped