Culture Briefs

Three little words

“If Barack Obama was the worst thing that could have befallen the Clintons, Obama’s very own pastor and friend was the worst thing that could have befallen him. … ’This is somebody who was preaching three sermons at least a week for 30 years,’ Obama explained, or tried to. ’They found five or six of his most offensive statements, boiled that down into a…half-minute sound clip, and just played it over and over again.’

“Perhaps. But three little words … were enough to bring the wrath of God down on Don Imus, who in his career had done hundreds of serious interviews and raised large sums of money for charity. One little word — ’macaca’ — was enough to cost George Allen his Senate seat and the GOP its control of that body. A few words of praise of Strom Thurmond cost Trent Lott his place in the party leadership….

“Obama’s fans in the press, and his liberal base, will insist that this case is ’different’ but Middle America is unlikely to share that perspective and worse things may be yet to come.”

— Noemie Emery writing in “Cursed?” in the April 21 National Review

Kids unleashed?

“Would you let your fourth-grader ride public transportation without an adult? Probably not. Still, when Lenore Skenazy, a columnist for the New York Sun, wrote about letting her son take the subway alone to get back to her Manhattan home from a department store on the Upper East Side, she didn’t expect to get hit with a tsunami of criticism from readers.

“… [B]uoyed by all the attention, Skenazy started her own blog — Free Range Kids — promoting the idea that modern children need some of the same independence that her generation had.

“[F]or those who like the idea of free-range kids but still struggle with their inner helicopter parent, there may be a middle way. A new generation of GPS cell phones with tracking software make it easier than ever to follow a child’s every movement via the Internet — without seeming to interfere or hover. Of course, when they go to college, those kids might start objecting to being monitored as if they’re on parole.”

— Louise Crawford writing in “Helicopter Moms vs. Free-Range Kids” in April 21 issue of Newsweek.

Muslims, American liberals

“I have just started reading Dalia Mogahed and John Esposito’s ’Who Speaks for Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think.’ It’s one of the first books to put some real data behind a much-disputed question.

“[W]e often forget the simple fact that Islam has been around for 1,300 years and Islamic terrorism has been around for a few decades. … The intelligent questions to ask are, what is it about Islam today that has made it an incubator of radicalism and terrorism? And second, what do most Muslims really think about the West?

“The problem for most Muslims is Western liberalism. But here we must distinguish between two kinds of liberalism. There is the classical liberalism of the American founding. Call this Liberalism 1. This liberalism is reflected in such principles as the right to vote, to assemble freely, to debate issues, to trade with others, to practice one’s religion, political and religious toleration, and so on.”

— Dinesh D’Souza writing in “What Muslims Really Think” April 28 in TownHall.com