Sox Schedule Oddity

The Tampa Bay Devil Rays are hot. They're scoring runs like the Yankees and winning even more games (that tells you how bad the Yanks pitching has been this month).

So will the Devil Ray bats be able to knock the Sox fab five rotation around? We won't find out until July. That's right: the first half of the season features not a game between the Sox and the divisional whipping boy. After that, of course, Sox players will need a second home in St. Pete: the two teams are to play six times in July, six times in August, and six times in September.

If the Rays continue to win, maybe they'll have to play the Sox six times in October as well. But don't count on it.

Religion and the Candidate

Is America ready for a president who is not a mainline Protestant or Catholic?

The New York Times describes the candidate's church: they do not follow Christian orthodoxy on many points, but describe themselves as 'Christian' nonetheless. The candidate openly quotes scripture, and identifies with Christian voters. Most disturbingly for orthodox believers, perhaps, is that the church interprets scripture racially, with a unique place given to one race (and it's not the Jews).

The candidate, of course, is Senator Barack Obama, who is a member of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

Like many mainline denominations, Trinity supports ordination of women and membership of practicing homosexuals. Its gospel is heavily social and its pastor has been a guest of Fidel Castro and Muammar Gaddafi, and the Times reports on his particular brand of liberation theology:

Mr. Wright preached black liberation theology, which interprets the Bible as the story of the struggles of black people, whom [sic] by virtue of their oppression are better able to understand Scripture than those who have suffered less.

The Times then quotes a professor at U. of Chicago who helpfully says that this isn't really racist because white people just don't understand.

Perhaps not. And if Mr. Obama accepts this narrative of history and the premise that whites simply cannot understand black people, perhaps he should abandon his campaign to seek an office representing a nation that is home to more than 200 million white people.

Also, the Times should be somewhat less surprised than it is that the far-left Obama found religion at Trinity after years of resisting evangelism by the many other black pastors with whom he worked. The pluralist Obama had found a church that told him that earth is more important than heaven, that blacks are better than whites, and that his personal behavior is not admissible evidence in the final judgment. Finding God is surprising, because God is utterly different than man and demands much of him. Making a God in one's own image is much less surprising - Nietzche's phrase aptly captures the foolish religions that proliferate in a postmodern world, as varied as the images of those they reflect.

April

From the Soxaholix:

Now that we got that out of the way can I just say that the only othah seasons in which the Red Sox led the league or division by three games after the first month of playing were 1904, 1918 and 2004.

And a memo to the Red Sox: don't have another post-Yankees minislump like last week. Believe it or not, games against the AL West count in the standings, too.

Tenet's Puzzle

In his terse style, Drudge reports on a new 'tell-all' book from former CIA Director George Tenet:

BOOK: Tenet expresses puzzlement that al-Qaida has not sent 'suicide bombers to cause chaos in a half-dozen American shopping malls on any given day'... He writes: 'al-Qaida is here and waiting'

Tenet can't figure out why Al-Qaeda hasn't hit American targets again. Hmm, let's think about this. They hit us in 1993; we did nothing. They hit us in 1998; we did very little. They hit us in 2000; we did nothing. Then they hit us in 2001; and we responded with a long war against the Al-Qaeda structure, its friends, and its fellow travelers.

At this point, Al-Qaeda wants badly to win in Iraq and to carve out a statelet in Afghanistan or Pakistan wherewith to rebuild. They can accomplish this, obviously, by killing people in Baghdad and Kabul, raising the cost of the war to the U.S. prohibitively.

Imagine if instead, Al-Qaeda blew up a shopping mall or a subway car in the U.S. That would be child's play for them. But it would also coalesce American opinion behind the war effort like never before. Sure, there would be some leftist naysayers claiming that this is proof positive that we should retreat posthaste. But the majority of the American people would be convinced that the only way we can guarantee our safety - abroad and at home - is to kill every last living jihadi.

And So It Begins, Not With a Bang, But With a Whimper

The Brave New World is here. Two UK couples are screening their embryos for a breast-cancer-causing gene in hopes of ending a family scourge. As always, catastrophic, dehumanizing change arrives in the form of compassion.

Your homework: go watch GATTACA and read Brave New World (free online). And then have unprotected sex with your spouse to contribute to the natural propagation of the species.

You Don't Say

Husband of Israeli diplomat shot; criminal motive suspected - Haaretz headline

Webgem

Extra Bases catches this wild pitch:

[Red Sox manager Terry] Francona said he accidentally voted for Orioles catcher Ramon Hernandez for the All-Star Game while he was logged on to the Internet trying to check on the catcher's injury.