Taste the rainbow

Last updated on: September 26, 2016 at 11:28 am by Fred Clark

Taste the rainbow 2016-09-26T11:28:47-04:00 Fred Clark

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• So the first presidential debate of this election is tonight and the big question on everyone’s mind is whether or not Donald Trump can pretend to be something other than Donald Trump for 90 minutes.

This is the first time we’ve ever approached a presidential debate with genuine suspense over whether or not a major-party candidate was going to call his opponent the c-word. The realization that he very likely might ought to be disqualifying, but in the world of cable “news,” it’s just as likely he’ll be hailed as presidential if he restrains himself and “only” calls her the b-word.

• Jose Fernandez was an incredible pitcher who found and gave joy in the game. Even watching him stymie my favorite team — he struck out 59 in 47 innings against the Mets — was a beautiful sight to see. The 2013 rookie of the year was killed along with two others in a boating accident over the weekend. He was 24.

• I’ve read the Gospel of Mark dozens of times start-to-finish, but I can’t say that in any of those times I noticed either Mark’s dubious geography of the “Sea of Galilee,” nor the way the other gospels clean up after it. Paul Davidson has a good discussion of all of that here: “Did Mark Invent the Sea of Galilee?” — including a fascinating discussion of Mark’s literary use of the lake as a “sea” to address themes from the Hebrew scriptures and possibly also from The Odyssey. “There is little doubt that all the authors of the New Testament learned to read and write Greek through extensive study of Homer,” Davidson writes, and now I’m going back to re-read what I’ve read all those times before (both Mark and, if I get ambitious, Homer).

• In normal times, a prominent politician openly advocating for war crimes would be a big story. Their (literally) atrocious comments would be discussed and denounced for days, and every future mention and appearance of that politician would be prefaced and framed by, “This is the guy who called for war crimes.” And any campaign associated with such a person would spend weeks recovering from the damage.

These are not normal times, and so former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s advocacy of war-for-plunder and his glib dismissal of any moral or honor-based checks on the conduct of war got buried in the surrounding noise of equally abysmal statements by the candidate he’s stumping for. “It’s a war,” Giuliani said. “Until the war is over, anything’s legal.” (For context, he was defending Donald Trump’s claim that the United States military should “take the oil” from any country where our troops are at war. Genghis Khan, call your office.)

Here’s hoping that after the fog of election season dissipates, remarks like these from Giuliani won’t be forgotten and the enthusiastic advocates of war crimes will be disgraced and dismissed as such, as they should be.

Rudy

• Speaking of disgraceful people who need to be dismissed … Eric Metaxas is still a very silly man, and he’s doubling down on his Trumpism. Metaxas has been playing footsie with Ann Coulter, endorsing her Trump-doesn’t-go-far-enough calls for mass deportations and religious tests on immigrants. Yet Metaxas, whose claim to fame is Bonhoeffer cosplaying, insists that Trump and his brownshirt brigades are the only thing that can prevent the coming tyranny of the gay-stapo.

“Could it be that the Globalist Progressivist PC Fascism of Obama/Hillary is the Nationalist Fascism of the 30s in Happy Rainbow Colors?” Metaxas asks. Alan Jacobs stirred things up recently by asking whatever became of the [white] Christian public intellectuals. The answer is that the tribe replaced them with dim gobs like Metaxas who imagine that railing against “Progressivist PC Fascism … in Happy Rainbow Colors” is suitably Christian and intellectual. Homophobia and Random Capitalization does not make one an intellectual. Or a decent human being.

• And while we’re on the subject of very silly, hateful people whose opinions shouldn’t matter … Brian Tashman rounds up “5 Predictions Made by Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Defenders.” These are calamities that Louie Gohmert, Bryan Fischer and The Liar Tony Perkins assured us would certainly happen after DADT was repealed five years ago. These things didn’t happen. One might conclude that Gohmert, Fischer and Perkins are not trustworthy.

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