A Brief Snap

| 17 Feb 2015 | 02:12

    One of the Smith family's rites of passage long ago was an option given to my four brothers and me upon turning 13. When that day arrived, along with permission to drink coffee, we could stop going to church and Sunday school. My parents weren't particularly religious. Mom was a lapsed Catholic still bitter about the cruel nuns at her parochial school in the 1920s. Dad always worked on Sundays and often dismissed the idea of heaven and hell with a curt, "When you're dead, you're dead." But they thought no harm could come from their five sons reading the Bible, bowing our heads in prayer and suffering through interminable sermons.

    Not surprisingly, all of us chose to keep an open calendar on Sundays.

    I thought about this last weekend when the four of us attended the wedding of a lovely woman, whose 11-year-old is a classmate of our son Booker. The embarrassing paucity of knowledge the boys possess in all matters theological was highlighted when Nicky, fiddling with the top button of his dress shirt, asked me when the priest was going to appear to get the show on the road. With a roll of the eyes, I told him we were sitting in the pews of a Presbyterian church and that the fellow in charge was called a reverend. He looked at me like I was nuts, then asked if that meant that the ceremony would be shorter. In fact, it was fairly brief, and it was a pleasure to see the young flower girls and hear an older teenager sing a Christian hymn with an angelic voice that reminded me of Emmylou Harris when she was briefly hooked up with Gram Parsons in the early 1970s.

    At one point, however, during a suitably saccharine sermon about the joys of family and the explosive growth of love that results from matrimony, I had a Daily Kos moment, and it was all I could do from growling even louder than the cellphone that one guest didn't mute. The rev was recounting a square dance the night before. It was apparently a very jolly occasion. Members of both clans engaged in rousing rounds of DoSaDo's, and "men and women were dancing, women and women, men and men, all united in mutual joy."

    Thiswas out of character, for I have no beef with same-sex frolicking, threesomes or quintets, prostitution or gay marriage. Sen. Rick Santorum's 19th-century views on sex is one reason it doesn't bother me he's going to get whupped next year by pro-life Democrat Robert Casey Jr. It was, in retrospect, as I chastised myself, a visceral reaction to all the bile in the political environment. The day before, I'd read James Bowman's media column in November's New Criterion, and perhaps it was his equally symbolic protest against the critics of "intelligent design" that triggered my irrational feeling of utter disgust for anything supported by the left wing.

    Bowman, a confirmed "Darwinist" since high-school biology-agreement here, andeven the silly phrase "intelligent design" as opposed to "creationism" reminds me of janitors called a "sanitation engineers" it doesn't bother me if both are discussed in schools-nevertheless has recoiled at all the idiotic rhetoric from liberals on the subject.

    Bowman writes: "The Intelligent Design people are thus beginning to look to me a bit like President George W. Bush, who has been so viciously and so unfairly execrated for so long by the sort of right-thinking media types who consider Maureen Dowd a wit that I now regularly have to stifle the urge to cry him up as the greatest president since Lincoln."

    Until recently, I hadn't taken the media's bait of red state?blue state and nothing in- between very seriously, but the last month has gotten the better of me. It has little to do with the over-analyzed off-year elections. The GOP didn't do well, and the only positive result was that Virginia's hapless Republican gubernatorial candidate Jerry Kilgore couldn't defeat his Democratic opponent on a platform that demonized immigrants and waffled on the tax hikes passed by the current governor Mark Warner. And reading that New Jersey Republican Doug Forrester blamed Bush for his defeat to the sleazy Senator Jon Corzine, saying, "Katrina was the tipping point," rather than look in the mirror and realize that not only did he lose a U.S. Senate race three years ago by a larger margin-when Bush was more popular-but also gave voters no hope of property-tax relief was one more example of egotistical politicians.

    No, it's the drumbeat, day after day, in Congress, the media and entertainment industry, of very stupid ideas.

    Bush has difficulties aplenty, mostly self-inflicted, as he's been an ostrich most of this year. He still hasn't vetoed a bill despite about 100 opportunities. He's allowed Congress to run up spending while ignoring tax reform and failing to articulate to the American public the necessity of Social Security reform. Granted, his Veteran's Day speech, finally a forceful comeback to the grandstanding Democrats who say the administration "lied" in its many valid reasons for invading Iraq, was a start, but whether that was a one-off or not is anybody's guess.

    We'll know if Bush is serious about his remaining three years if he continues the attack on opportunistic Democrats. A good start would be to sack Scott McClellan, his tongue-tied press secretary, who makes predecessor Ari Fleischer seem like Shakespeare. Additionally, maybe it's time to let Dick Cheney-who looked older than Robert Byrd in a photo in last Saturday's Times-step down and get Rudy Giuliani or John McCain in as veep. I don't care for either man, but the prospect of seeing Cheney in every single Democratic campaign ad next fall is a strong incentive for the Vice President to do a Harriet Miers and take a powder.

    I understand that there's nothing to be done about the media-besides, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is currently in worse shape than Bush-but another nauseating scene that the President could've pounced on was the Senate inquisition of oil executives who've recently made profits for their companies. Morons like Barbara Boxer (as well as Republicans Judd Gregg and Bill Frist) try to shame these businessmen into agreeing that a "windfall profit tax" should be their penalty for delivering a bottom-line profit that averaged 7.7 percent in the second quarter of 2005. As the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby pointed out on November 13, any number of companies-Microsoft (33.2 percent), Coca-Cola (21.2 percent) and Bank of America (28.3 percent)-posted more robust profits. Maybe there should be a retroactive "windfall tax" on all the media conglomerates that registered enormous profits not even a decade ago, before the Internet messed up their balance sheets.

    There is one observer of President Bush who made this statement in the December issue of Esquire, even though it applied to himself: "I always figure when somebody goes after your motives, they're on their last leg, because they actually think you're doing something good that's gonna have good consequences. Attacking somebody's motives is the last refuge of somebody's who's on the short end of the stick.?I have never though [Bush] wasn't sincere. That is, in general he's done what he thinks is right."

    That was Bill Clinton, on the record, in a story by Joe Conason.