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OK, about that Eliot Spitzer business. There have been public calls for the New York governor to step down or face impeachment. So far, he has not announced an exit, stage left, but this is a developing news story. It’s possible that by the time you read this, New York Lieutenant Governor David Paterson will be in charge.
When I saw the transcripts of the Rev. Ted Haggard’s phone message, my first thought was that it sounded more like a call to his dealer. That would have still been a big story but more of a local affair. You know, “Pastor of Megachurch Bought Meth from Sketchy Guy.”
With this post I take my leave of GetReligion. Terry Mattingly should be along either later today or early tomorrow to announce further changes. I’m skedaddling to devote time to a book-in-progress about hypocrisy, which should land in finer retail outlets next year. Don’t know if I’ll be back to these cyber pages, but I wouldn’t rule it out. It has been fun.
This week, The Christian Science Monitor interviewed Senator Rick Santorum as part of his new book tour. And the excerpt is just lame.
The nomination of Judge John Roberts is driving some Democrats to distraction because he is probably ultimately un-Borkable. As my colleague Gene Healy wrote, Roberts’ selling points include “[g]reat grades, stellar resume, nice posture, nice smile, [and] no doubt a firm handshake. But where he stands on anything is anyone’s guess. What we’ve got here is a guy who, apparently, was genetically engineered and grown in a vat for the sole purpose of getting past the Senate Judiciary Committee.”
I had to read this dispatch by a Rome correspondent for The Economist a few times to see if I had missed anything: some hint of parody or that refined British sense of irony perhaps. Alas, the report was just as humorless, shrill, and petulantly PC as I had thought.
In his latest column for The Times of London, Matthew Parris tries to pick a rock out of his shoe. He chastises his fellow journalists for reporting stories based on the limited facts available and then dropping those stories when they don’t pan out:
So a man repeatedly beat his three-year-old son and shoved him into a box, which induced shaking, vomiting, and, eventually a coma. The boy died this January. The father is claiming that he beat the hell out of the kid in order to keep his son from becoming a “sissy” or going gay.
