New York Times’, Frank Rich, Announces Gay Bashing at the Smithsonian!

It is likely no  human being carries a better profile of the mindless,  feely, feely of pain of those who he cares to feel pain about with such sanctimonious fervor than Frank Rich, opinion distributor for the New York Times.  He needs to be read regularly to discover the shallows of his thoughts and soul.   

He writes as a partisan  politician   Most folks know used  grease  when they see  it, so I’m not sure he could get elected unless, of course,  he lived in a gerrymandered section of San Francisco or New York City.

Frank Rich likes himself very much for his ‘good’  deeds, generally a  good first step for a lefty going into  politics.   As with so many leftists he  thinks through his  feelings, which usually means he can’t think at all, at least in the realm of problem solving.   He understands plagues are bad.  He believes his political opponents not only are indifferent to  plagues, they cause them. 

He suffers.  His wife suffers.   They seek solace. They are thinking about AIDS.   He describes his pilgrimage.   What a high minded, sensitive, understanding, tolerant, devoted to others, “Christian” human being is this  sanctimony filled man!……..Lefties still put up their Christian show whenever convenient.   

Mr. Rich wants to write ‘deep’…..as a tolerant lefty should.   His mother loved the vastness of the cathedral although she was Jewish.   Altar pieces are mesmerizing if they have a message dedicated to Mr. Rich’s politics.  

Mr. Rich is sensitive to expressions of grief and fury, who expresses them, and how and where they are expressed.  He apparently liked a gay guy’s entry in a particular exhibit organized by the Smithsonian.   Its artist  was the lover of  another artist who had died 30 years ago of AIDS and named his piece,   ”A Fire in My Belly”, a  “cryptic, 11 second cameo….a crucifix is beseiged by ants that evoke frantic souls scurrying in panic  as a seemingly impassive God looked on.”….in his own words below.  

God apparently didn’t behave as he should have in this case.

According to Mr. Rich, a certain Mr. Donohue, who isn’t even in Catholic pay, but wrote ‘Catholic” at his website maneuvered to have this cryptic crawling of ants thing removed from the Smithonian sponsored exhibit……titled, apparently “Hyde/Seek”, but now, according to Rich, a censored version. 

Well….read it for yourself…..Mr. Rich calls his work, Gay Bashing at The Smithsonian:  I’d call it, “A Lefty at Work!”

“EACH Aug. 4, my wife Alex and I visit a church to light candles for two people we loved who both died tragically on that day two years apart — my mother, killed at 64 in a car crash, and Alex’s closest friend from graduate school, killed by AIDS at half that age. My mother was Jewish but loved the meditative serenity of vast cathedrals. Alex’s friend, John, was a Roman Catholic conflicted by a religion that demonized his sexuality. Our favorite pilgrimage is to an Episcopal church, Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, not as some sectarian compromise but because of its AIDS chapel, a haunting reminder of the plague that ravaged that city’s population, especially its gay men, some time ago.

What helps give us some solace is the chapel’s mesmerizing altarpiece. It was the New York artist Keith Haring’s last completed work in the weeks before his death by AIDS at age 31 in 1990. Titled “The Life of Christ” and radiant in gold leaf, it crowns its anguished panorama of suffering with a pair of angels ascending to heaven — all rendered in Haring’s whimsical, graffiti-inspired iconography. Even as he was succumbing to a ruthless disease that had provoked indifference and cruelty rather than compassion from too many of his fellow citizens, Haring, somehow, could still see angels. You needn’t be a believer to be inspired by the beauty of his vision.

Not every artist struck down by AIDS could hit so generous a note. Such was the case with David Wojnarowicz, a painter, author and filmmaker, who, like Haring, was a fixture of the East Village arts scene in the 1980s. When his mentor and former lover, the photographer Peter Hujar, fell ill with AIDS in 1987, Wojnarowicz created a video titled “A Fire in My Belly” to express both his grief and his fury. As in Haring’s altarpiece, Christ figures in Wojnarowicz’s response to the plague — albeit in a cryptic, 11-second cameo. A crucifix is besieged by ants that evoke frantic souls scurrying in panic as a seemingly impassive God looked on.

Hujar died in 1987, and Wojnarowicz would die at age 37, also of AIDS, in 1992. This is now ancient, half-forgotten history. When a four-minute excerpt from “A Fire in My Belly” was included in an exhibit that opened six weeks ago at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, it received no attention. That’s hardly a surprise, given the entirety of this very large show — a survey of same-sex themes in American portraiture titled “Hide/Seek.” The works of Wojnarowicz, Hujar and other lesser known figures are surrounded by such lofty (and often unlikely) bedfellows (many gay, some not) as Robert Mapplethorpe, John Singer Sargent, Grant Wood, Thomas Eakins, Georgia O’Keeffe, Andy Warhol, Andrew Wyeth and Haring. It’s an exhibit that would have been unimaginable in a mainstream institution in Wojnarowicz’s lifetime.

The story might end there — like Haring’s altarpiece, a bittersweet yet uplifting postscript to a time of plague. But it doesn’t because “Fire in My Belly” was removed from the exhibit by the National Portrait Gallery some 10 days ago with the full approval, if not instigation, of its parent institution, the Smithsonian. (The censored version of “Hide/Seek” is still scheduled to run through Feb. 13.) The incident is chilling because it suggests that even in a time of huge progress in gay civil rights, homophobia remains among the last permissible bigotries in America. “Think anti-gay bullying is just for kids? Ask the Smithsonian,” wrote The Los Angeles Times’s art critic, Christopher Knight, last week. One might add: Think anti-gay bullying is just for small-town America? Look at the nation’s capital.

The Smithsonian’s behavior and the ensuing silence in official Washington are jarring echoes of those days when American political leaders stood by idly as the epidemic raged on. The incident is also a throwback to the culture wars we thought we were getting past now — most eerily the mother of them all, the cancellation of a Mapplethorpe exhibit (after he died of AIDS) at another Washington museum, the Corcoran, in 1989.

Like many of its antecedents, the war over Wojnarowicz is a completely manufactured piece of theater. What triggered the abrupt uproar was an incendiary Nov. 29 post on a conservative Web site. The post was immediately and opportunistically seized upon by William Donohue, of the so-called Catholic League, a right-wing publicity mill with no official or financial connection to the Catholic Church.

Donohue is best known for defending Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitism by declaring that “Hollywood is controlled by Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular.” A perennial critic of all news media except Fox, he has also accused The Times of anti-Catholicism because it investigated the church pedophilia scandal. Donohue maintains the church doesn’t have a “pedophilia crisis” but a “homosexual crisis.” Such is the bully that the Smithsonian surrendered to without a fight.

Donohue’s tactic was to label the 11-second ants-and-crucifix sequence as “anti-Christian” hate speech. “The irony,” wrote the Washington Post art critic, Blake Gopnik, is that the video is merely a tepid variation on the centuries-old tradition of artists using images of Christ, many of them “hideously grisly,” to speak of mankind’s suffering. Those images are staples of all museums — even in Washington, where gory 17th-century sculptures of Christ were featured in a recent show of Spanish sacred art at the National Gallery.

But of course Donohue was just using his “religious” objections as a perfunctory cover for the homophobia actually driving his complaint. The truth popped out of the closet as Donohue expanded his indictment to “pornographic images of gay men.” His Republican Congressional allies got into the act. Eric Cantor called for the entire exhibit to be shut down and threatened to maim the Smithsonian’s taxpayer funding come January. (The exhibit was entirely funded by private donors, but such facts don’t matter in culture wars.) Jack Kingston, of the House Appropriations Committee, rattled off his own list of exaggerated gay outrages in “Hide/Seek,” from “Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her breasts” to “naked brothers kissing.”

It took only hours after Donohue’s initial battle cry for the video to be yanked. “The decision wasn’t caving in,” the museum’s director, Martin E. Sullivan, told reporters. Of course it was. The Smithsonian, in its own official statement, rationalized its censorship by saying that Wojnarowicz’s video “generated a strong response from the public.” That’s nonsense. There wasn’t a strong response from the public — there was no response. As the museum’s own publicist told the press, the National Portrait Gallery hadn’t received a single complaint about “A Fire in the Belly” from the exhibit’s opening day, Oct. 30, until a full month later, when a “public” that hadn’t seen the exhibit was mobilized by Donohue to blast the museum by phone and e-mail.

The Post’s Gopnik has been heroically relentless in calling out the Smithsonian and the National Portrait Gallery for their capitulation. But few in Washington’s power circles have joined him, including the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents — a gilded assembly of bipartisan cowardice that ranges from Senator Thad Cochran, Republican of Mississippi, to Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont. This timidity has been particularly striking given that the city’s potentates gathered to bestow the Kennedy Center Honors last weekend on the choreographer Bill T. Jones, whose legendary artistic and personal partnership with Arnie Zane came to a tragic end when Zane was killed by AIDS at age 39 in 1988.

It still seems an unwritten rule in establishment Washington that homophobia is at most a misdemeanor. By this code, the Smithsonian’s surrender is no big deal; let the art world do its little protests. This attitude explains why the ever more absurd excuses concocted by John McCain for almost single-handedly thwarting the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” are rarely called out for what they are — “bigotry disguised as prudence,” in the apt phrase of Slate’s military affairs columnist, Fred Kaplan. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council has been granted serious and sometimes unchallenged credence as a moral arbiter not just by Rupert Murdoch’s outlets but by CNN, MSNBC and The Post’s “On Faith” Web site even as he cites junk science to declare that “homosexuality poses a risk to children” and that being gay leads to being a child molester.

It’s partly to counteract the hate speech of persistent bullies like Donohue and Perkins that the Seattle-based author and activist Dan Savage created his “It Gets Better” campaign in which gay adults (and some non-gay leaders, including President Obama) make videos urging at-risk teens to realize that they are not alone. But even this humanitarian effort is controversial and suspect in some Beltway quarters: G.O.P. politicians and conservative pundits have yet to participate even though most of the recent and well-publicized suicides by gay teens have occurred in Republican Congressional districts, including those of party leaders like Michele Bachmann, Mike Pence and Kevin McCarthy.

Has it gotten better since AIDS decimated a generation of gay men? In San Francisco, certainly. But when America’s signature cultural institution can be so easily bullied by bigots, it’s another indicator that the angels Keith Haring saw on his death bed have not landed in Washington just yet.”

Further comment:  Note how many items are marked in blue.  Mr. Rich is noted for underscoring in blue.  The purpose is, of course, to give his readers the impression he follows up his statements with evidence, proof that he is writing “truth”.

Take him up on his underscorings in blue.  Mr. Rich is a model American Lefty whose kind has owned the American air for decades.   At last its staleness  is being exposed  to the sunlight and fresh breezes of truth!

Did You Forget Guantanamo Is Still Open for Business Despite Obama’s Grandstanding?

This article, “Gitmo Follies” was written by Andrew C. McCarthy and published at National Review Online:

“Attorney General Eric Holder is dismayed over Congress’s refusal to cough up funds that would allow the Obama administration to close down Guantanamo Bay and transfer the 170 fire-breathing jihadists still detained there to the United States — where, he insists, they’ll be kept under lock and key.

P. J. Crowley, the State Department’s assistant secretary for public affairs, is dismayed, too. He claims that federal judges are ordering the release of fire-breathing jihadists in droves, purportedly requiring that we free them out from under lock and key — whereupon they return to the anti-American jihad at an alarming clip, a totally predictable outcome Mr. Crowley says the Obama administration totally predicted.

Do these guys ever talk to each other?

Just to recap, the Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, is extremely sensitive about Gitmo. Yes, the facility is a perfectly secure, offshore military detention center that has safely yet humanely sidelined hundreds of trained terrorists whose highest ambition is returning to the business of killing infidels. But the detention center has been the source of ceaseless sniping by our great friends in the “international community,” which can make for testy times at high tea, a fact that is of apparently greater importance than neutralizing jihadists.

Thus did the Bush administration agree with these friends that Gitmo should be closed. As is his wont, President Obama exacerbated his predecessor’s mistake with an ill-advised promise to shut the place down, notwithstanding the absence of any plan for disposing of the terrorists lodged there. Egged on by the State Department, which bears the brunt of the aforementioned sniping, both administrations made lunatic agreements under which various countries accepted dribs and drabs of Gitmo’s murderous population.

To the layman, untutored in the wiles of statecraft, it seemed a terrible idea: springing enemy fighters, even as war was still raging, when they could have been kept on ice in the Caribbean sunshine. But don’t fret, the diplomats told us, we have Grade-A precautions in place. One of those turned out to be a Saudi rehab program in which scholars of Wahhabism, the official ideology of both Riyadh and al-Qaeda, will convince the jihadists that they have jihad all wrong. And the diplomats omitted mention of the bribes and blandishments the Obama administration has offered such powerhouse allies as Kiribati, Slovenia, and Belgium, to take some of the jihadists off our hands.

Now the intelligence community tells us — mirabile dictu – that at least 150 Gitmo grads have gone back to “terrorist or insurgent activities.” That’s a 25 percent recidivism rate, and it’s probably both understated and rising.

To better understand these developments, Fox News called on Mr. Crowley, an admirer of many Islamic regimes who is nevertheless comfortable blasting the state of Arizona over its attempt to enforce federal immigration laws. Crowley first grossly misstated the pertinent facts, intimating that the recidivists had been ordered released by the courts. In fact, most of the hundreds of former detainees were released pursuant to diplomatic agreements, the lion’s share of them during the Bush years, when the Gitmo population was more than four times its present level.

Furthermore, federal judges have no authority to order detainees released. It is true that, in several cases, the judges have ruled that the military designation of a detainee as an enemy combatant was based on insufficient evidence. Ruling on the validity of that designation, however, is the limit of the judicial role. Neither Congress, in giving federal appeals courts an unprecedented power to review wartime detention, nor the Supreme Court, in extending that power to the lower courts, purported to endow the judges with the power to order the release of terrorists held at Gitmo. Once a judge strikes the designation, it is for the executive branch to decide whether to appeal, detain on alternative grounds, or try to find a country willing to accept custody.

It is the Obama administration that has effectively given the courts the power to unloose jihadists. According to Crowley, vacating the combatant designation is the same as directing release. This, the Obama administration holds, is what “the rule of law” dictates. Don’t look at the president, he says, it’s the courts that run the show, and if they say spring ’em, the terrorists must be sprung — even if we all know that means they go right back to the fight.

Indeed, Crowley claims this is not only a necessary result but a result that was fully anticipated. As he put it, the administration “actually expected this” growing recidivism but opted to release the jihadists, anyway.

Since leaving Gitmo, some alumni have carried out savage attacks, killing scores of people. Others are now high-ranking figures in al-Qaeda’s network: Their credentials burnished by a stint in U.S. detention, they now coordinate operations against U.S. troops.

Yet, though it expects one in four detainees to return to the jihad, the administration has no plans to change its approach, except for this: Attorney General Holder says the president still wants Gitmo closed and the trained jihadists brought into the United States. If the administration has its druthers, stateside is where they’ll be as judges continue to review their combatant status.

That means this is where they’ll be when judges vacate combatant designations, which the administration claims means they must be released, which enables the terrorists to go back to the jihad, which the administration fully expects them to do.

I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the new Congress to help the president close Gitmo.”

Comment:  Why does president Obama keep this incredibly incompetent Attorney General Eric Holder in his administration?

Knowing a Little More About Minnesota

The following article was sent to me by friend and fellow conservative, Regina Reed:

“One dark night outside a small town in central Minnesota , a fire started inside the local chemical plant and in a blink of an eye it exploded into massive flames. The alarm went out to all the fire departments for miles around.

When the volunteer fire fighters appeared on the scene, the chemical company president rushed to the fire chief and said, “All our secret formulas are in the vault in the center of the plant. They must be saved. I will give $50,000 to the fire department that brings them out intact.”

But the roaring flames held the firefighters off.

Soon more fire departments had to be called in as the situation became desperate. As the firemen arrived, the president shouted out that the offer was now $100,000 to the fire department who could bring out the company’s secret files.

From the distance, a lone siren was heard as another fire truck came into sight. It was the nearby Norwegian rural township volunteer fire company composed mainly of Norwegians over the age of 65. To everyone’s amazement, that little run-down fire engine roared right past all the newer sleek engines that were parked outside the plant.

Without even slowing down it drove straight into the middle of the inferno. Outside, the other firemen watched as the Norwegian old timers jumped off right in the middle of the fire fought it back on all sides. It was a performance and effort never seen before.

Within a short time, the Norskie old timers had extinguished the fire and had saved the secret formulas. The grateful chemical company president announced that for such a superhuman feat he was upping the reward to $200,000, and walked over to personally thank each of the brave fire fighters.

The local TV news reporter rushed in to capture the event on film, asking their chief, “What are you going to do with all that money?”

“Vell,” said Ole Larsen, the 70-year-old fire chief, “Da first ting ve gonna do is fix da brakes on dat focking truck!”

Comment:   There are some things that don’t change much in this North Star state despite its Blue state problems.