Monk

Maureen Dowd has another piece on the Catholic scandal, relating how the Vatican's response is still to circle the wagons:

Father Gabriele Amorth, the chief exorcist for the Holy See, said in Rome that The Times’s coverage of Pope Benedict, which cast doubt on his rigor in dealing with pedophile priests, was “prompted by the Devil.”

“There is no doubt about it,” the 85-year-old priest said, according to the Catholic News Agency. “Because he is a marvelous pope and worthy successor to John Paul II, it is clear that the Devil wants to grab hold of him.”

It is tempting to shoot back that the Devil already seems to have a good hold on the pope, but that is probably a cheap shot. After all, no one is saying that Ratzinger/Benedict molested or raped any children, and he apparently has instituted a lot of reforms that should make it much more difficult for such abuse to happen in the future on such a wide scale. He arguably has just been too trusting and protective of his robed colleagues. Even so, he is definitely not aligned with his better angels and raising the moral stature of Christianity's flagship institution. In the end, though, nothing is likely to come of this, except a lot of embarrassment for the Church, and the Church is well used to that.

^Just worry about falling into your own embarrassment!^

Hey, I don't even like boys. At least not in that way.

^Sure, but I would hate to see what happens if a young teen girl fell into your sweaty clutches, such as that bosomy little latina that used to run around this neighborhood.^

But for the grace of God! Not that there is any real need to worry. Even the stray dogs keep away from me. Ah, but in my mind's mind, in my lonely world of one, I suppose I make even Humbert Humbert blush. At least I'm not a priest.

^Even the Catholic Church has standards.^

And I'm sure they don't blush easily.

Ms. Dowd is still beating the newspaper horse, as though she is really afraid that she is going to be out on the streets any month now. In this discussion she shares an interesting analogy:

Senator Kerry’s hearing tried to determine, in a metaphor that was whipped to death, whether there was any way to shut the barn door now that the ink-stained horse has gotten out into the virtual pasture (making readers pay for content now that they’ve gotten used to getting it free online).

David Simon, the creator of “The Wire,” who worked for 13 years as a Baltimore Sun reporter, testified that “high-end journalism is dying,” and when that happens, and no one is manning the cop shops and zoning boards, America will enter “a halcyon era for state and local political corruption.”

He said he thought the horse could be lured back into the barn. “I work in television now,” he said, “and no American, for the first 30 years of television, paid anything for their rabbit ears. Now they pay $60, $70 a month for better content.”

Of course, the Times actually tried this, and I was even one of the saps that paid (such being my devotion to the bosomy and witty Maureen Dowd), but it obviously didn't work. Presumably, you would have to get all the major papers and periodicals to agree not to let their stuff go online for free, but while the biggest players might easily sign onto that deal, the relatively weaker players would have their eyes set on moving in for the kill.

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Frank Rich also makes a hearty cry for the need to pay for reporters and journalists. He makes the pointed argument that we shouldn't be fooled by the pleasure of easy opinion writing, and that it is with professional journalists that scandals like Enron and the government's warrantless wiretappings are cracked:

We can’t know what is happening behind closed doors at corrupt, hard-to-penetrate institutions in Washington or Wall Street unless teams of reporters armed with the appropriate technical expertise and assiduously developed contacts are digging night and day. Those reporters have to eat and pay rent, whether they work for print, a TV network, a Web operation or some new bottom-up news organism we can’t yet imagine.... Whatever shape journalism ultimately takes in America, make no mistake that in the end we will get what we pay for.

Now that information transmits so easily and freely, I suppose there is less incentive to spend a lot of time and energy digging for it. Bloggers, much less LJers, doubtlessly are a poor substitute, though I venture to wager that we will always be as effective as ever at catching celebrity upskirts.

Ross Douthat comes out with his debut column for the Times with a breathtakingly provocative concept: that Dick Cheney should have been the Republican candidate for president last year, so that real conservatism could have been given it's trial by ordeal, and the G.O.P. could have gotten it out of its system if it got drubbed:

“Real conservatism,” in this narrative, means a particular strain of right-wingery: a conservatism of supply-side economics and stress positions, uninterested in social policy and dismissive of libertarian qualms about the national-security state. And Dick Cheney happens to be its diamond-hard distillation. The former vice-president kept his distance from the Bush administration’s attempts at domestic reform, and he had little time for the idealistic, religiously infused side of his boss’s policy agenda. He was for tax cuts at home and pre-emptive warfare overseas; anything else he seemed to disdain as sentimentalism.

If today's column is any indication, it looks like Douthat is at least going to be more sparky than Bill Kristol was.

I was thinking about posting something on Krugman's Nobel prize, and Maureen Dowd affords me a delightful enough opportunity. And the column is all in English! Maybe she was drawing enough complaints to be more mindful of we aspiring State U. types. There is mostly more Palin stuff, but I'm pretty fixated on that cultural discussion myself.

It's too bad she didn't mention the recent little battle between Christopher Buckley and "National Review". He endorsed Obama, and they pressured him to leave the magazine that his own father, the William F. Buckley Jr., started. I'm sure she would have reported it with more wit and elan than I just did.

( Dowd )

Thomas Friedman of the New York Times gets a pie in the face:


And he's kind of a liberal guy, albeit in a Fortune 500 kind of way. I trust they would never try this on Maureen Dowd!

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If by hiring on William Kristol as a columnist, the Times was hoping to add a more stridently conservative voice to its largely liberal roll call, then they can more justifiably declare MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, judging by his first column today. Who else in the Times would mock Obama?

( Kristol )

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Well, hallefuckinglujah, the Times announces that they will stop charging for their website. Don't let Monk complain that he didn't get anything for Christmas, because Santa came early this year!

Maybe I can even get my chicken fried rice today, after all!! :)

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My lovely Maureen Dowd is still away, on vacation they say, but it has been so long that I'm starting to wonder if this is just a cover story and she may have suffered some terrible and mortal accident, and maybe the paper is afraid of seeing a lot of subscriptions cancelled.

In any case, here is a pleasant, heartwarming Easter message from a guest columnist, giving Christian counsel to President Bush on the War on Terror. I'm not sure what the practical application is, aside from being less promiscuous about torturing and attacking, but I thought it is worth keeping - kind of uplifting.

( An Easter Sermon )

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“I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care, either.”

-- Arthur Sulzberger

Mr. Sulzberger is the publisher of the New York Times, and I just think this is a nice indication of how the world is changing. Forward and onward, brave new world! Besides, printed papers are so dirty, and you cannot copy & paste.

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Well, at least Bob Herbert is writing this week. That's fifty dollars well spent! Dowd and the gang have apparently taken a Christmas break, which helps to make things feel a little more like death around here. The ChessMaster 9000 may have saved us the spoilage of a razor blade and a very messy bath tub.

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