One sign the world isn't too screwed up, at least in Minnesota: On Friday evening the most-emailed story from the Strib was
Recipes: Oven-Fried Sweet Potatoes, Sweet Potato Spice Bread, Sweet Potato Pone, Sweet Potato Praline Pie
*****
And one sign it is:
Yes, this post comes from the man with the CLASSY hair trigger, the guy who has been criticizing Al Franken for being a comedian. You almost expect Michael Brodkorb to rip off his shirt and throw down, he's so offended that Franken made some offensive remarks about gays.
Conservatives like Brodkorb don't care a whit about gays. They hate Franken because of his politics and because he makes fun of the comfortable, the powerful, the sanctimonious and the bigoted — their homies. They prefer humor be directed at the poor, the immigrants, the non-straight, the dispossessed and now, people with debilitating diseases.
Nothing personal, you understand. This is really a critique of intrusive government.
I love free speech, and I would never interfere with the right of Brodkorb and company to demonstrate what buffoons they are.
*****
On a related note, the Agnostic Christian quotes theologian Martin Marty:
One of my distinctions in religion is not liberal and conservative, but mean and non-mean. You have mean liberals and mean conservatives, and you have non-mean of both.
Goes for bloggers, too. But Mikey plays such a sweet, harmless private school teacher type on TV. I'd love to see TPT's Mary Lahammer ask him why he thinks the above post is funny. Better yet, I'd like to see him explain it to Jan Malcolm of Courage Center.
*****
The Lens, Carleton's independent student magazine, interviews Robert Flaten, the U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda immediately before the 1994 genocide. Flaten was a diplomat who specialized in South Asia, but was posted to Africa because:
I got wise with some of the people that were making decisions about where we were going to be placed. One of those people was John Bolton. He didn't like me very much.
On what he might have done differently during his time there:
I think we probably could have done more to create institutions of a civil society than we did... I came home on vacation once and ... discovered in [Sauk Centre] there were 30-some institutions that were supporting the little museum: churches, banks, 4-H groups — in this tiny town in central Minnesota there are more institutions than in the whole state of Rwanda.
On counteracting a crisis-driven approach to foreign relations:
The first thing I would do, if I were the White House, would be to listen to my diplomats. If they had been listening to diplomats, they would have never gone into Iraq. They would have known that you can't do it that way. The Pentagon and the White House disbanded the State Department operation that was going to figure out the way to make things happen. In the broadest sense, I believe that foreign policy can be made at the intersection of our domestic policy and our diplomacy.
Going back to Rwanda, if the U.S. president was listening to me, we would have done something different, but he wasn't. He was listening to the politics. Maybe in the Rwanda case, the politics had to dominate, because the political system would have had a hard time sending a company of American Marines into Central Africa after Somalia. But if you are going to have a Foreign Service and you're going to send people into harm's way all over the world, then you ought to listen to them, and make foreign policy based on the insight of the people who have "been there."
