Regarding Obama and the crusades, the check engine light comes on early in Dreher’s latest column at AmCon.
If you wait long enough, Ross Douthat will write what needs to be written, and do it better than you ever could.
Oy. As you might expect Ross Douthat thinks the Crusades got a bad rap. And he is right, in the limited sense that no complex system ever exists to do pure evil. Guess who instituted the first anti-tobacco campaign backed by solid public health epidemiology. Here’s a hint: he loved dogs. You can count on Douthat to side with reflexive manicheans who have a Rain Man episode at the faintest hint of moral complexity. These folks snap to offense much too fast to grasp that Obama was clearly speaking about the Crusades as understood by Muslims. He wants Christians to remember their history but he also wants to tell Muslims on the fence ‘I hear you, but…”, with the fundamental point being that anyone can behave that way but here in the civlized world choose not to (let’s keep the obvious rejoinder stashed away in a black site for now). As one would expect from a law professor Obama uses this construction quite often.
On the other hand I think Dreher grasps the point just fine. After giving Douthat his due (and more tongue than necessary) he pivots to a slightly different perspective – quoting Bill Moyers on southern lynchings, in an essay Moyers re-posted at Daily Kos – to make the exact opposite point from Douthat. This comment from Dreher seemed rather arch for a guy ostensibly agreeing with Douthat.
In the EJI report is a photo of a 1919 clipping from a Jackson, Miss., newspaper reporting on a planned lynching in Ellisville, one that the Mississippi governor absurdly claimed he was powerless to stop. The paper reported that the Rev. L.G. Gates, a Baptist pastor from Laurel, Miss., was headed to Ellisville “to entreat the mob to use discretion.”
Oh, for the days when leading Christian pastors entreated lynch mobs not to stop in the name of God, but instead, to use discretion.
I could probably persuade you that Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote that. It does not leave much wiggle room for people like Ross who want to quibble with Obama’s narrative. Not that I agree with everything he says, or his comment policies, but Dreher has a subtle mind. Certainly subtler by some margin than cardinal Douthat and AmCon lets him speak it without getting excommunicated.
One is given to understand that the column uses same argument structure that Obama used, likely to get through to Douthat and his fans without evoking the lizard brain defense reflex that Obama did. I hope it works, even if my cardiologist shoots me a worried glance any time someone writes “…as always Megan McArdle said it best…”, or similar.
Baud
Huh?
Zinsky
I think it is a decent column from a conservative propaganda machine. Kudos to Dreher.
WereBear
Ross Douthat is the peak of their intellectual communication?
Ladies and gentlemen, I rest my case.
EconWatcher
With all respect, your last paragraph needs some work. Not clear who “the guy” is in the second sentence; if it’s Dreher, then the reference to Dreher in the next (third) sentence doesn’t make sense.
ETA: Your “On the other hand” paragraph needs some work too.
Or, as Baud more succinctly put it: “Huh?”
Betty Cracker
@Zinsky: Seconded. I wouldn’t have thought Dreher capable of that. I was wrong.
Schlemazel
I stopped caring days ago. This is another tempest in a urinal pot that will disapear with Obama’s next Katrina. Time to move on and prepare fot 2016
Betty Cracker
Baud & EconWatcher: Shorter: Dreher is right, for once!
Tim F.
@EconWatcher: Awright, fine, I proofread it. Should make more sense now. It’s early and the dog was crying to get out.
ThresherK
Interview today. Wish me luck.
(I’m such an introvert I’m not sure I’m comfortable telling supportive strangers on the internet about this. If you’re thinking, “He must mind meld with technology”, you’re right.)
Betty Cracker
@ThresherK: Best of luck!
Southern Beale
If you wait long enough …. 50 monkeys with typewriters will give you a Shakespeare sonnet.
Iowa Old Lady
By now you’ve probably all seen the news about the shootings of 3 Muslim students at Chapel Hill:
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/11/us/chapel-hill-shooting/index.html
I’m reading that as I listen to Chris Hayes from last night talking about crap like whether Obama lied about opposing gay marriage. God, who cares.
Morzer
So did Saruman, allegedly.
EconWatcher
@Tim F.:
No disrespect intended! I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.
OzarkHillbilly
@Betty Cracker: Stopped clocks and all that.
Professor
But, but somebody killed Dr Tiller (the Baby Killer) in the name of the Christian ‘God’. Moreover, somebody went to a Sikh Temple and killed all those Sikhs at prayers in the name of the Christian ‘God’.
Morzer
@Iowa Old Lady:
To make matters even more joyous, the killer claims to be an atheist, which will no doubt inspire the usual right wing crazies to foam at the mouth about the need for Christian values.
Tim F.
@EconWatcher: honestly, I always arreciate helpful criticism. When I’m bleary even good ideas can come out sideways.
brantl
His due is a turd in his solipsistic punch bowl. If there is a bigger liar in the conservative clown commenter corral than Douthat, I have not had the misfortune to meet him. Douthat is constantly full of shit. I suspect he lies in his sleep, just to stay in practice.
Morzer
What Douthat loves is the romance of the crusades, rather than the sordid reality of men out of their minds on anger, fear, cheap wine and, in a good number of cases, the chance to loot, rape and pillage. When the First Crusade took Jerusalem, they butchered just about every one in the city, including a large number of Jews and Christians of various non-Catholic persuasions. When the Fourth Crusade took Constantinople, they butchered and raped a vast number of Orthodox Christians (as well as Jews, Muslim merchants…). There’s a certain consistency to the Crusades and it’s hardly admirable. As for the Crusader kingdoms, they spent much of their time quarreling with each other, breaking peace treaties on the plea that oaths sworn to infidels didn’t count and generally abusing the indigenous (still largely Christian) population in any way that they could get away with. Meat-heads with swords would probably be an over-generous assessment.
Elizabelle
@brantl: I liked the crabs in last night’s toilets (B Cracker thread) more than Douthat.
Will not read him or Brooks. Sophists and fabulists, both.
Chet
@Morzer:
Another glorious Lost Cause.
Villago Delenda Est
Well, subtle in pretty much the same sense as Vizzini in The Princess Bride, in that he uses the phrase “religious liberty” in the same way Vizzini used “inconceivable”.
ThresherK
@Morzer: Romance of battle? Douthat needs a good shot of Thomas Cole.
Joey Maloney
I’m sorry, I have a lot to get done before the heat death of the universe.
debbie
@Morzer:
Perhaps they butchered to the beat of a lovely madrigal, as in this scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-zRtT5jPLA
Plenty of romance to be had there.
D58826
OT but this from the Daily Beast. On huffington as well. Lets see how much play it gets esp. from Faux news
Terrorism anyone?
danielx
Could we have, like, an ETA on that?
Golf clap.
Dreher shows at least a modicum of intellectual honesty and consistency, which is considerably more than I’ve grown to expect from your average conservative talking head.
Edit: not that showing more honesty and consistency than Eric Bolling requires a great deal of intellectual heavy lifting.
Summer
@Iowa Old Lady: The university alert system sent out the names at 3 a.m. Such terrible and shocking news.
Morzer
@danielx:
Give Dreher 5 minutes and he’ll be remixing the old “Christians are the real victims of gay bigotry” cocktail for anyone gullible enough to drink it.
Tim F.
@danielx:
I think by now he knows that the whole crunchy con idea holds up about as well as peak wingnut, so joined the exiles at AmCon. Pat Buchanan might be grampa screwloose in a lot of ways but he won’t fire you for speaking your mind.
Amir Khalid
From what I’ve read about the Crusades, it doesn’t seem that they were such a great thing for the Christian world either.
Aimai
@EconWatcher: yes. I couldnt understand your last pararaph or who was speaking for whom.
Gator90
@Amir Khalid: Nor were they a day at the beach for the Jews.
Helmut Monotreme
The people for whom the crusades were a day at the beach, is a mighty short list. Perhaps the gravediggers guild enjoyed them, possibly the people who made weapons and armor managed to come out ahead, few others did. Everyone else got a heaping helping of misery, slaughter plague and plunder.
Roger Moore
@Helmut Monotreme:
Maybe not a day at the beach, but they solved a major problem for Western Europe. Western Europe had only adopted primogeniture relatively recently, and that meant it had a surplus of younger sons who were unlikely to inherit. Their main hopes in life were either for their older brothers to die or to steal some land from somebody else. Without the Crusades as a dumping ground for those younger sons, they would have been stirring up trouble closer to home, and the history of Western Europe during that time would have been even bloodier and more violent.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@Morzer:
So It’s the usual conservative thing — Dreher is a Crusades skeptic because he converted to Orthodox Christianity and can now see himself in the Crusades, and not on the winning side.
RoonieRoo
I hate read Dreher a lot. He does to the occasional really good post. But he will follow that up, very shortly, with something about the evil liberals, the fascists gays or the stupid feminists. He actually has quite a bit in common with Sully in the hysteria that he wraps himself up in and his complete and utter obsession with sex ( for Dreher, sex is icky and proof of the downfall of society).
celticdragonchick
@Morzer:
This.
Also, he will panty siffing those tricksy trangendered women again…
Fuck Dreher.
Chris
Yeah, this is the other reason why they fly into a fury whenever you compare the crimes of Islam to the crimes of Christianity. It’s not that they think the two are incomparable or deny that the latter ever happened. It’s that they’re okay with latter.
Chris
@Roger Moore:
This would make the Crusades exactly the same thing for Christian Western Europe that the 1980s anti-Soviet jihad was for the Saudis. They were hoping the zealots would go off and do work that served the Kingdom’s interests instead of causing unrest at home, and hopefully get killed before they ever had a chance to return.
Didn’t work out. Too many of them came back.
Roger Moore
@celticdragonchick:
I too find it suspicious that the Christian crimes he’s willing to condemn are conveniently past. Yes, they’re more recent than the Crusades, but they can at least be presented as something that’s done with and now purified out of Christianity. I doubt he’d be so forthright if you pointed to Christians in Uganda- vigorously backed by Americans- trying to impose capital punishment for homosexuality.
Chris
@Helmut Monotreme:
Ultimately, the crusades weren’t even a day at the beach for their perpetrators – they were a complete failure at pretty much whatever you consider their goal to be. They didn’t ultimately come out of it with any conquered Muslim land, since the Muslims kept taking it back, and they certainly didn’t take Palestine “back.” Even from the point of view of the European kings and popes, it’s debatable – yes, the Crusades got rid of troublesome knights in the short term, but in the long term they also fueled the growth of the Knights Templar to a state-within-a-state status that made the powers-that-be so uncomfortable, they ultimately had them all Order 66’d.
Gretchen
I used to read Dreher regularly. He has good discussions in comments. But his stubborn insistence that his religious freedom is in serious danger because of gay marriage, birth control mandates and the like finally got to me. He quite simply doesn’t get the distinction between religious freedom and imposing your religious beliefs on people who don’t share them. At all
celticdragonchick
@Chris:
They worked insofar that the Moors were pushed out of Spain and the Ottomans were pushed out of Austria and most of eastern Europe. Basically, both sides ended up with a stalemate until the Ottoman Empire collapsed.
Chris
@celticdragonchick:
I wasn’t aware the Reconquista was considered part of the Crusades, but according to Wikipedia it was given that status by the Papacy. I stand corrected, then. One success.
Stopping the Ottomans at Vienna? I didn’t know that was considered part of the Crusades either.
celticdragonchick
@Chris:
The Holy League and the Holy Roman Empire alliance that relieved the Ottoman siege of Vienna was not a Crusade per se, but it is a difference without a distinction. It was a Catholic military force (and a formidable one. The Polish Hussar cavalry charge that broke the Ottoman Army remains the largest cavalry charge in history) constituted specifically to do battle with Muslim armed forces (who in this case had been encroaching into Christian kingdoms for quite some time).
celticdragonchick
@Chris:
Yeah. Scottish nobles (including relatives of mine most likely) on crusade to take Robert the Bruce’s heart to Jerusalem ended up helping Spanish knights, and that is as far as the Scottish Crusade proceeded. Spain erected a memorial to Spanish/Scottish friendship at the battle site about 10 years ago.
heckblazer
@Chris: There were also the Albigensian Crusade and the Northern Crusades. There’s a reason you don’t meet too many Albigensians or Prussian pagans these days.