I first heard about Vice President Cheney’s hunting accident via a scratchy A.M. radio transmission last night, and no kidding, my first thought was: Dick Cheney shoots a lawyer…. I didn’t know the Onion had a radio show.Now I don’t want to make light of an incident that nearly cost someone his life, but it did remind me that Master Hunter Cheney took the lead back in 2004 in mocking John Kerry for hunting geese on the campaign trail:

“My fellow sportsmen, this cover-up isn’t going to work,” Cheney said, speaking to supporters in an upscale Toledo suburb that borders the Ohio-Michigan state line. “The Second Amendment is more than just a photo opportunity.”The National Rifle Association has endorsed the Bush-Cheney ticket.Kerry has a camouflage jacket but bought a new one for the outing because he was on the campaign trail. Cheney seized on the fact that the jacket was new.”Which did make me wonder how regularly he does go goose hunting,” the vice president said.

You can only imagine what Cheney would have said if Kerry had splattered a bystander with buckshot. But more to the point, maybe the NRA should offer its lifelong ally one of those Eddie Eagle gun safety courses before he’s allowed to return to the woods with shooting irons.

This weekend the mid-Atlantic and Northeastern states got clobbered with a major snow storm. I was luckily down in Central Virginia, and got to see the Blue Ridge beautifully dusted with powdered snow. And with most chores beyond feeding apples to the horses and seed to the birds snowed out, I read a lot. On Sunday morning, unable to get across the mountains to Grace Episcopal Church, I did penance by finishing Stephen Bates’ fascinating if painful study of the Anglican Communion’s rendering over the ordination of gay priests and bishops, A Church At War. Bates, a religion correspondent for The Guardian, does not pretent to be an impartial arbiter of the politico-sexual agony of Anglicans in recent years. He clearly views the whole crisis as having been engineered by conservative evangelical Anglicans, especially in England, who chose sexual issues as just another weapon with which to promote their quasi-fundamentalist drive for power in a faith community that has for centuries balanced Protestant and Catholic traditions and habits. Indeed, Bates almost certainly goes too far in suggesting that the African and Asian bishops who insisted on a condemnation of homosexuality at the Lambeth Conference of 1998 were just instruments of an intra-British ecclesiastical fight. But he knows the Anglican landscape well, and his profiles of the two unintentional protaganists of the current war over sexuality–the unsuccessful candidate for Bishop of Reading, Jeffrey John, and the successfully confirmed Bishop of New Hamphsire, Gene Robinson–are exquisitely wrought. As an Episcopalian, I also took pride in Bates’ argument that Americans handled the subject of gay and lesbian ordinations more honestly, and with greater theological depth, than their British counterparts. At a time when both the religious and secular conventional wisdom holds that conservative movements are the only vibrant and authentic trends in all the great faith traditions, Bates makes a strong case that the conservative ascendancy in Anglicanism is temporary, opportunistic, and ultimately incompatible with the future of the Communion. From what I know of Anglican Episcopalians, even those deep in the heart of Protestant Virginia, I think he’s right.

My ears perked up this morning when I heard on NPR that the president would be discussing the situation in Darfur today with Rebecca Garang, widow of the southern Sudanese leader John Garang, and a government official in her own right.So far as I can tell, the meeting produced no news or public statements. The White House web page showed a photo of Bush and Garang’s meeting, but provided nothing else. And in yesterday’s White House press briefing, there was this depressing exchange:

Q: On another subject, Kofi Annan says that he wants to ask the President next week for troops and equipment for Darfur. Has the administration’s views on that changed at all? Are you more willing to consider that?MR. McCLELLAN: Let me check and see if there’s an additional update on that. Obviously, Sudan and the Darfur region is a high priority for this administration. It’s something that we have led the way on and pushed the international community to address. And Secretary General Annan is someone who is committed to addressing it, as well. That’s why we supported helping get the African Union forces in there, and I think we’ve continued to work with the international community on how best to address the situation moving forward. And I’ll just see if there’s any additional update. I don’t have it at this point.

“I don’t have it at this point” is a nice summary of the Bush administration’s entire approach to Darfur for the last three years.If you’re interested in Darfur but don’t know much about the background, you can check out my review of Gerard Prunier’s book on the subject, which came out yesterday in Blueprint magazine. Prunier’s pessimistic predictions about Western attitudes towards Darfur have so far been sadly spot on.

The quote of the day comes from Ezra Klein over at TAPPED, linking to Josh Marshall’s account of the unlikely success of former FEMA director Michael Brown in facing down Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN):

Reports have Senator Norm Coleman being bested by disgraced FEMA chief Michael Brown in this morning’s hearings. Brown joins George Galloway on the list of contemptible public figures who’ve publicly humbled Mr. Coleman. Quite a shame to see the legendary Paul Wellstone’s seat pass to an empty suit most notable for making the odious look better in comparison to himself.

Let’s please don’t let any Iranian government officials get close to an encounter with Coleman, eh?

Via DKos, I just read an article from The Hill that warms the cockles of my heart: a technical screwup in the budget reconciliation bill recently rammed through Congress by the GOP and signed by Bush could theoretically force a re-vote. All Congressional Dems have to do is object to a unanimous consent motion to fix the problem. They should.Just before the hurry-up House vote on the obnoxious measure, Mark Schmitt provided a good analysis of why it was important to defeat it. Those reasons have been strengthened by the subsequent, aggressive Republican effort to push more tax cuts–far offsetting the “savings” in the budget measure–and by Bush’s new budget proposal for next year, which continues the let’s-cut-taxes-and-let-the-military-fight-it-out-with-every-other-national-priority-for-what’s-left fiscal philosophy of this administration. Democrats have one more shot at some really bad and important legislation. They should lock and load on this one.

A new issue of Blueprint magazine came out today, and it’s chock full of good political news. Mark Gersh (the congressional number-cruncher supreme) and I did a forecast of how U.S. House races are beginning to shape up, and concluded a Democratic takeover is no longer a big reach. As a sidebar to Gov. Tom Vilsack’s cover story on the successes of Democratic red-state governors, I did a brief and even more optimistic evaluation of this fall’s gubernatorial contests. And you might also want to check out Gov. Tim Kaine’s first-hand report on how he won Virginia in 2005.

The continuing saga of “Cartoongate”–the publication and republication in European newspapers of cartoons maligning the Prophet Muhammad, and the spasm of anger and violence that greeted it across the Muslim world–is obviously exposing a lot of misperceptions on both sides of the battle-lines. I am hardly an expert on Islam, but do think one important point about the reaction to the cartoons, and the reaction to the reaction in the West, is worth emphasizing: the basic nature of the offense to Muslim sensibilities.About half the stories in the U.S. press solemnly inform readers that the cartoons are considered “blasphemous” by Muslims, on pretty much the same grounds that Christians would consider cartoons mocking Jesus might be considered “blasphemous.” And that’s got it exactly backwards. The Prophet Muhammad warned against physical representations of human beings generally, and of himself in particular, in order to avoid temptations to idolatry, the worship of anything other than Almighty God. That reinforced the radically transcendent nature of Muslim theology–the insistence on strict submission to the sovereign will of God without the kind of human or quasi-divine intermediaries common to both pagan and Christian traditions. Now I don’t think anyone is under the misapprehension that the authors and publishers of these cartoons were trying to promote an idolatrous worship of the Prophet. So while the cartoons did violate a deeply embedded Muslim antipathy towards physical representations of Muhammad, that’s not the source of the offense: it’s the contemptuous misrepresentation of what the Prophet taught in terms of legitimate Western concerns about Islamic Jihadism. And that’s why non-Jihadist Muslims are if anything more offended by the cartoons than anyone else. Maybe this point is of less importance than the free-speech aspects of this saga, but it’s worth keeping in mind, particularly among those who constantly look for Christian or Judiaic parallels to poorly-understood Islamic beliefs.

For anyone interested in political history generally, or in contemporary debates about “populism,” Michael Kazin’s new biography of William Jennings Bryan, A Godly Hero, is essential reading. It’s being officially released tomorrow, and if this plenary endorsement doesn’t encourage you to check it out, here’s a sneak preview of my review of the book, which appears in the March issue of The Washington Monthly. If you’re smart enough to be a subscriber to TWM, you probably got this issue in the mail today, or will momentarily, with lots of stuff you can’t get online.

I generally don’t pay attention to the Super Bowl, especially when, as has generally been the occasion in recent years, I have no particular attachment to either team. The vast and endless hype over the game does provide an excellent opportunity to do things, like grocery shopping, in pleasantly uncrowded circumstances (if only the DMV were open on Super Sundays!).This particular year, as it happens, I was on the road during the entire game, driving from Amherst, Virginia, to Richmond, to Arlington. As a result, I actually listened to the Super Bowl on a variety of AM radio stations, beamed at me from Lynchburg, Charlottesville, St. Louis, New York and Cincinnati. That means I was able to follow the football game, qua football game, while avoiding the ridiculous spectacle of the Big Commercials that are invariably premiered during the most expensive network television segment of the year. Indeed, I got to hear Dr. John, Aaron Neville and Aretha Franklin do the National Anthem, and even heard a bit of the Rolling Stones halftime show, but without the attendant hype, since the radio commentators were relentlessly focused on football. From the privacy of my car, I was able to assess the game itself as a comedy of crucial errors, with the one real star, to my delight, being Georgia Bulldog Hines Ward.So when it comes to Super Bowl XLI, I recommend getting on the road and disrespecting the television sponsors of the Big Show. It becomes obvious in the light traffic of Super Sunday that it’s really just a football game.

During one week, we’ve lost two of the most influential, and even iconic, American women of the 20th century, Coretta Scott King and Betty Friedan. Both had long and complicated careers in public life, and together represented the drive for the equality of all human beings that redeemed the last century from its horrific and bloodstained legacy of totalitarianism–a legacy for which women, it is important to note, bear virtually no blame.I’ll try to offer additional thoughts on Coretta Scott King on Tuesday, on the occasion of her funeral in Atlanta, and on Betty Friedan later in the week. But for now, may they both rest in peace.