Andrew’s Miracle Drug

Straight out of the “Holy-Shit-Did-He-Seriously-Just-Say-That” files comes this gem: the Democratic-controlled Congress of 2002 rushed President Bush to war with Iraq, according to Karl Rove.

At first, I thought that it seemed a little too soon to be engaging in this sort of crass revisionism. I mean, Trent Lott had the good sense to wait 54 years before claiming that the whole Dixiecrat thing was a good idea.

Then it dawned on me: this must be part of some effort to find a new career, a self-reinvention plan; to turn Karl Rove into MC Rove.

It all makes sense now.

Saturday, The Los Angeles Times asked whether Mitt Romney is “too perfect.” The article contains all sorts of over-wrought prose - the stuff that has no place in a newspaper, and that makes me want to vomit. Or burn the paper.

It seems to me that Mitt isn’t “too perfect” at all. Sure, he’s got the great jawline, the perfect hair, and ramrod posture.  It seems to me that what people don’t like about Mitt is that they can tell he wants to be perfect.

People have a pretty good “authenticity” radar. When someone runs away from their record and recorded statements, it doesn’t go unnoticed. When someone makes mean-spirited comments about their home-state, it kind of rubs people the wrong way.

Mitt’s problem isn’t that he’s too perfect. Mitt’s problem is that people recognize that he’s trying to be the “perfect” candidate, at least to the Republican base. And it’s not something he actually is.

I’m sure Mitt Romney is a good person. In fact, plenty of my fellow Mormon Utahns, including family members, insist that he is.

But a great candidate he is not.

Besides being on the wrong side of every important issue on the presidential agenda (war, torture, illegal imprisonment, gay rights, and that’s the short list) he has an uncanny knack for planting his foot firmly in his mouth.

Recently, Mitt Romney caused a bit of a stir by stating that he wouldn’t nominate a Muslim-American to serve in a high position in his Cabinet. What angered people, myself included, is that a religious test for office is coming from a man who has repeatedly said that his religion should be off-limits.

So Mitt and team are in damage control mode trying to spin their way out of this mess.

What Mitt doesn’t seem to realize is that he can’t have it both ways. Either answer the questions about your faith, and explain it honestly, or keep religion - yours, that of your future potential Cabinet members, etc. - or lack thereof, for that matter - completely out of the debate.

Or own you earlier statement and your bigotry. It has worked thus far for Giuliani.

A bit of a hubbub has been brewing for a few weeks in my neck of the woods.

Forced out its old digs by a massive redevelopment plan, the Blue Boutique, a lingerie store, is moving three blocks east.

This relocation, however, means that the store is now about 1/3 of a mile from Highland High School as opposed to its former 2/3 of a mile distance.

So many people are quite upset, including newly-elected Salt Lake City Council member J.T. Martin, who declared in what is sure to become a rallying cry for the ages, “I don’t care if you have one rubber penis or you have 15. If you have one you are a sexually-oriented business.”

Preach it, brother. Just one quibble - I believe they’re latex, not rubber, as latex is a more orifice-friendly material.

But I digress. I don’t blame my neighbors for being upset. But this a battle that is already lost. Blue Boutique has signed the new lease and they’ve been more or less forced out of their old location.

Second, their case would be a lot stronger if it was an elementary school or even a middle school the Blue Boutique was moving near. I don’t want to burst any bubbles, but by the time I was 14, I had seen images of merchandise the Blue Boutique offers and more on television, movies, etc., well before the advent of the Internet. Teens are going to find that stuff if they want to, and even if they don’t want to, they’ll probably have some exposure to sex stuff.

Finally, the kids who are curious enough to wander into Blue Boutique were probably already predisposed to do so. There are more kids, I’d venture, who have no interest in poking their head into a store like the Blue Boutique. Well, what about the few kids between the groups? Frankly, if they’re not already on the not-interested side, curiosity will probably get the better of them at some point.

So it’s a lost cause. But there is one encouraging thing, I think: most of these community activists, at least in my neighborhood, are the type of people who generally don’t get too exercised about anything, and people I’d never imagine I’d see holding picket signs.

I’d rather see people fighting a losing battle than not engaged at all.

With a couple of exceptions, I’ve never followed college football closely.

Those two exceptions were when some of my friends joined local collegiate teams, and when my alma mater, Utah, turned into a powerhouse for two all-two-brief years under Urban Meyer.

But other than that, I’ve been pretty uninterested in college football, and pro football for that matter. For one thing, the games are, in my opinion, long and dull.

But there’s another reason why I generally avoid following football - it brings out the worst in fans. This was illustrated this weekend, when the University of Utah played at Brigham Young University in what some local journalists have irritatingly dubbed “the Holy War” (yes, that’s precisely what fans on both sides need: to blow a game, for God’s sake, completely out of proportion and lose all perspective).

On Wednesday, the last work day of last week, emails were furiously going back and forth between BYU and Utah fans. The emails started out as some good-natured smack-talk by a BYU fan (at least inasmuch as there is “good-natured smack-talk”) and quickly devolved into an ugly scene of tribalism. I saw sides of co-workers that I never wanted to see.

And I’m embarrassed to admit that I couldn’t restrain myself. I jumped into the fray. So it wasn’t just in others that this stupid rivalry brought the worst out, it was in me, too.

Like thousands of other bloggers, I’ve had my thoughts the past few days centered on gratitude. I’ll spare you my list of things and people for which I’m grateful - there are plenty such lists out there in the blogosphere, I’m sure.

But I do want to ask you, kind reader, and myself, what it means to be grateful.

Is making a list of things and people for which one is grateful, whether publicly posted on the internet, privately uttered in prayer, or semi-publicly spoken of around the dinner table, a sufficient way to express gratitude? While I’m sure that this is healthy exercise, it seems a step or two too short.

Is thanking mom or dad for being a great parent enough? Is it enough to thank a spouse for being so good and kind? Again, both worthy activities, but perhaps a little too easy.

Gratitude, I think, is more than just an expression of thanks - gratitude ought to be expressed in our lives - in the way we speak to, relate to, respond to, etc., our benefactors.

And so, every Thanksgiving, I feel a tinge of guilt. I remember how much I have to be grateful for, for whom I’m grateful and to whom I am grateful,  and realize how poorly I show my gratitude.

So once again, I resolve live my life in such a way that my gratitude is evident to those for whom and to whom I’m grateful.  I don’t doubt that I’ll feel the same guilt at Thanksgiving in 2008, but perhaps I’ll have made some small improvements.

How did we get to the point where we torture people? What has happened to us? Have we ignored Nietzsche’s warning and become the monsters we were fighting?

Senator John McCain stood up to denounce torture two years ago, “This isn’t about who they [terrorists] are; it’s about who we are.”

But even if we ignore the moral argument against torture, does it work? Even if we can justify it by calling the tortured “enemy combatants,” does it produce any valuable intelligence?

Scott Horton asks all these questions and more at Harper’s. It’s a long post, but well-worth reading if you are troubled by our move to torture.

Apparently overstock.com CEO and voucher pimp Patrick Byrne didn’t get my memo. Yes, Byrne is back in the news, this time stating that Referendum 1 wasn’t an IQ Test, but an “insanity test.” Which Utah failed, of course.

While I have to admire Byrne’s dogged efforts to alienate 65% of Utahns, I am annoyed at his persistence use of, for lack of a better term, bullshit. In an op-ed in today’s Tribune, Byrne writes:

Thus, for example, the 2007 National Assessment of Education Progress shows Utah’s white eighth-graders rank 38th in the nation in math, 39th in writing and 41st in reading. That is, Utah’s white kids rank at the lowest 20 percent mark of their peers in a country which is itself 25th out of 30 industrial countries. Taken together, this suggests that Utah’s white children are in the bottom 5 percent internationally.

Yet in the very same paper, that claim is completely refuted:

Utah eighth-graders are better at math than those in the Slovak Republic but trail Estonian pupils, according a new report that compares Utah students with those around the globe.
If Utah were a country, it would rank 10th in math and ninth in science compared with 46 countries, according to an American Institutes for Research report released last week.

Oh, and the data used in the AIR report? Same data that Byrnes claims to be looking at.

Shouldn’t a newspaper article, even if it is an op-ed, be based on, you know, facts? It’s one thing to make dodgy assertions based on evidence you don’t understand. It’s a completely other thing to make dodgy assertions that are proven to be b.s.

For the last time - go away, Byrne.

I was going to comment on Greg Curtis’ ridiculous assertion that “voucher opponents should thank him,” but Voice of Utah already did, and how could I improve on VoU’s commentary?

Every once in a while, when I want to feel the rage and raise the ol’ systolic/diastolic, I’ll visit the Deseret Morning News opinion page online or pick up the hard-copy at my parents’ or school. The sheer level of bigotry, groupthink, and reactionaryism displayed by the letters to the editor is amazing, frustrating, disappointing, and enraging all at once. The letters tend to vary between those who excoriate the DNews for only reporting “bad news” in Iraq or displaying their bigotry against whatever minority group is currently in the news. Once every three of four days, probably, a letter is published that was either written as a joke or by someone living in a bunker in Beaver with a tinfoil hat, like this one, calling Governor Huntsman a “liberal environmentalist” (which is, of course, a bad thing to be).

But today, the DNews really let me down. I was ready to get all ragey, but all the letters were reasoned, and in some cases, even contrary to the standard DNews‘ letter position. Take, for instance, the “headlines” of these letters: “Economy dives under Bush,” “Obama worth watching,” “word ‘liberal’ hijacked” and “One-party rule not good.“

Wow. So the DNews is now accepting letters from minority (in Utah) points of view?

Fortunately, the rest of the editorial page never disappoints. Walter Williams begins an op-ed piece with the sentence, “An important component of the leftist class warfare agenda is to condemn President Bush’s tax cuts for the rich.” So much ass-holery in that sentence, so little time.

The DNews‘ editorial board also takes the time today to bring us “Good News from Iraq” - violence levels are down. Of course, what they don’t say is that violence is down only to 2006 levels, and that even the “violence is down” metric should be taken with a grain of salt.

Great work, Joe Cannon. Great work.