CSotD: Sunday Potpourri
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It doesn’t matter where we begin today, since it’s really a grab bag, but Chip Bok’s cartoon made me think, so we’ll start there.
I brushed off the Bloomberg part. I’m glad he admitted that “Stop and Frisk” was a bad policy, but I don’t take his candidacy seriously and it doesn’t seem anyone else does, either.
But the idea that Chik-Fil-A had to drop its contributions to anti-LGBTQ hate groups in order to stay in business was a head scratcher. I had heard nothing of failing sales or a successful boycott or anything similar.
Granted, a lot of progressives refuse to eat there because of the company’s politics, but if Chik-Fil-A is seeing a slide in sales, it’s probably because Popeye’s and KFC have both brought out chicken sandwiches.
Still, the “dis my religion” thing rang a bell because I just saw some nincompoop on social media defend her hateful take on Christianity by quoting Leviticus 18:22 — “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.”
Which is the Old Testament, first of all.
Jesus — y’know, the guy Christians claim to follow — never addressed homosexuality. You’d think he’d have said something if it bothered him.
More than that, I’d be willing to bet any amount of money that this woman does not follow Leviticus much farther than that one passage. (Well, maybe that one book, which is mostly about incest.)
The other People of the Book — Jews and Muslims — follow Leviticus in bleeding animals so that the meat is kosher or hallal. I don’t know of any Christians who do, or who avoid eating pork for religious reasons, which Leviticus also commands.
And, BTW, I assume Chik-Fil-A pays its workers at the end of each shift, since Leviticus 19:13 says “Do not defraud or rob your neighbor. Do not hold back the wages of a hired worker overnight.”
This thing of singling out specific actions by cherry-picking 3,000 year old rules for communal life in the desert is nonsense.
It’s not a matter of “believing” or “not believing.”
It’s a matter of either following the Book in its entirety or admitting that you are doing whatever you want and looking for justification later.
“I was following the rules,” doesn’t work if you only follow the ones you like.
And it doesn’t always work anyway: Consider Matthew 12, in which Jesus and his disciples were walking through a field on the Sabbath and some of his people reached out and stripped a few grains to eat.
The Pharisees reproached him for letting them break the Sabbath by “harvesting,” but Jesus basically told them to get a grip, concluding with “If you had known what these words mean, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’ you would not have condemned the innocent.”
Go thy way and sin no more.
Asshole.
Those Troublesome Ukrainians
Speaking of following the spirit rather than the letter, Kal Kallaugher came up with this delightful explanation of Trump’s innocence.
One of the “This-Ain’t-Watergate” realities is that a lot of people thought Nixon’s aides had acted without his permission, until the tapes were released, which is when the dominoes began to fall.
Trump is a damn fool in terms of what he tweets, but I’d be surprised if he ever put anything about bribing the Ukrainians in print, or recorded his conversations in the Oval Office.
If the whole thing falls apart and, as David Rowe suggests, his henchmen may be starting a long, interlocking journey off the cliff, Trump believers will cling to the notion that, just as Henry II complained about Becket but wasn’t ordering a murder, Trump certainly didn’t want his stalwarts to — gasp! — commit a crime!
There were several times I turned off the hearings, one of which was when Jennifer Williams and Alexander Vindman were on the stand, and Congressman Ratcliffe (R-Tx) tried to make the point that “raising an issue, even one that you thought was unusual, is different than making a demand.”
Williams parried the point, Vindman noted that, in the military, everything from a senior officer is a command, and Ratcliffe tried to make hay on the “fact” that they couldn’t agree.
All I could think of was:
“Dad, can I borrow the car.”
“I notice that the lawn hasn’t been mowed.”
Not a command. No, not at all. No “quid pro quo,” either.
Synchronicity
And this morning, Sherman’s Lagoon inadvertently offers a cartoon for Brian Kilmeade, who believes that telephones only work if you’re close enough that you can hear each other without them.
And now, the sports
I can’t help this poor guy in Tank McNamara.
I moved to Colorado in 1972, at a time when the Broncos were so pathetic that, after one particularly ghastly game in 1973, a fellow watching at home decided he couldn’t take it anymore, put a pistol to his head and pulled the trigger.
But he was as inept as his football team: The bullet deflected off his skull, followed across and under his scalp and exited on the other side.
Still, the games sold out, and one of the traditions of the time was that, when attendance was announced at each game, the fans would boo the no-shows.
The team eventually improved, however, and, by the time I moved back East, they were so good that they very rarely lost.
Except in Super Bowls. First year I was back East, the Redskins tromped them 42-10. Two years later, they went back to the big game and lost 55-10.
So I switched allegiance to the Buffalo Bills.
Football fans just fell out of their chairs laughing.
These days, I live in Patriot country but follow the Houston Texans, because when you watch a Texans game, you know it’s going to be interesting but you have no idea who’s going to win.
That’s what makes sports fun. Rooting for a winner is for 10-year-olds. It’s boring and pointless.
It’s for the kind of clueless knucklehead who, when he retires, moves from Arizona to New England.
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