The handball heard around the world

By now you've heard all of the sensationalism and outrage over the handball by Thierry Henry which led to the goal that sent France to the World Cup and eliminated Ireland. In short, Ireland is a little miffed. Many are saying Henry is a cheater, that his reputation will forever be damaged. They're demanding a replay of the game, or else saying Henry should personally protest and not suit up for the World Cup.

Just a few thoughts:

1. Thierry Henry (full disclosure: he's been one of my all-time man crushes for years, maybe my favorite footballer) did not cheat. Fixing games is cheating. The flopping that is rampant in the game now is, if not outright cheating, awfully close. The play was the result of split-second instinct (while tip-toeing the end line at full sprint), not cheating. Refs are supposed to call handballs. This isn't a backyard "call your own foul" game. There were also two French players offsides on the play. If Henry was "cheating," so were they. The refs blew it. It happens (and I'm not above griping about it).

2. You don't replay World Cup qualifiers. That makes a mockery of FIFA and sets a terrible precedent that will only lead to griping from every fan who thinks their team should've won (which means every fan) in hopes that they too might get their deus ex machina "do-over."

3. The Irish legend himself, Roy Keane, summarized it well in his interview. His take: Ireland probably didn't deserve to win, they're playing the victim now and blowing the handball out of proportion:

Of course [Henry] handled it...but I'd be mad at my defenders. There's only one ball; put a head on it. How can you let the ball bounce in the six-yard box from a free kick just inside the halfway line?

Here's Keane's full interview, a reminder that no one does "angry" better than the Irish (just wait until one of the reports' cell phones goes off -- classic Keane)...

"More is less"

Here's a refreshingly apolitical discussion of the real problem with health care -- not death panels, co-ops, or public option triggers, but cost. In short, rising costs are out of control and it's all the doctors' fault. Except for the huge part that's the patients' fault. Also, a lot of the blame falls on health insurance companies. And probably celebrities, too.

Okay, so costs are out of control and we basically have to change the whole system or we'll all go broke and die of dysentery by 2012.

But on the bright side, at least everybody now agrees that something has to be done.

Just listen. You won't regret it.

NPR's This American Life: "More is Less"
[click "full episode" for the 60-minute radio show]

Stuff that's happening (with commentary)

Some gratuitous thoughts on recent news items, for what they're worth...

-- Obama is reportedly sending more troops to Afghanistan.
If it's true, and whether or not you agree with it, can we finally stop calling Obama a "radical liberal?" He falls more on the moderate side of liberal, which is why environmentalists, gay rights advocates, anti-war folks, Public Option proponents, the city of San Francisco, and partisan hacks like Nancy Pelosi aren't big Obama fans.

-- Rush Limbaugh has been denied his share of a bid for the St. Louis Rams by the group he was to partner with.
It's hard to escape the fact that when Rush tries to mix in with the real world, he either fails or is fired. But with The Great Persecuted One it only makes him stronger. Two options with this story:
1) Rush knew this wouldn't fly, but he went through with it so he could play the martyr. (His comments today: "This is about the ongoing effort by the left in this country...to destroy conservatism. Therefore, this is about the future of the United States of America and what kind of country we're going to have." Oh Rush.)
2) He thought it would work, which means he's severed all ties with reality, one aspect of which being that most people really don't like him.

-- Health Care Reform has passed the Senate Finance Committee
I just like that the private health insurance lobby tried to stop reform at the eleventh hour by claiming that the bill won't cut costs. In doing so they're actually creating a pretty good case for a public option, which, by all accounts, would cut costs.

-- Nobel Peace Prize for Obama?
Apparently the five guys in Norway who hand this thing out thought that this might encourage Obama to follow through with his promises from the campaign and his early days as president. If he does, he has a bigger chance at "promoting peace between nations" than anyone else on the planet. But there's still that nagging fact that even Obama's supporters can't deny: he hasn't actually done anything remotely Nobel worthy. (On a positive note, it did put an end to the narrative being pasted together by Obama detractors that the IOC rejection of Chicago was a signal that the world was turning on Obama. So much for that idea.)

7 of 10 doctors recommend a public option

Not only does there seem to be general support for a Public Option among Americans (55% to 42% in the new Washington Post-ABC News poll), here are the survey results from a random sample of 6,000 AMA physicians (courtesy of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation):

62.9% support public and private options
27.3% support private only options
9.6% support public only options

Just to confirm these findings, I've spent several backbreaking minutes conducting my own survey: of my six clients who are in the medical profession, five support a public option as one among many needed reforms. One opposes the public option.

I'm not saying this settles the issue (despite even the overpoweringly persuasive conclusions of my own survey) -- the majority of doctors could be wrong. But in a debate that continuously suffers from each side not taking the other seriously, it's at least worth pointing out.

Richard Dawkins "lunging, flailing, mispunching"

I discovered a fantastic review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion a couple years ago. It was written by Terry Eagleton, one of Britain's most respected literary critics. For no real reason, other than I've been thinking about Dawkins this week, here are several notable excerpts from Eagleton' concise, intelligent, articulate, sometimes sarcastic, and thoroughly scathing review of Dawkins' The God Delusion titled "Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching":
(Much of the article is a positive presentation of the richness of Christian theology that goes conveniently unmentioned -- if known at all -- by Dawkins himself.)

-- As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it’s just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it.

-- Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

-- Dawkins sees Christianity in terms of a narrowly legalistic notion of atonement – of a brutally vindictive God sacrificing his own child in recompense for being offended – and describes the belief as vicious and obnoxious. It’s a safe bet that the Archbishop of Canterbury couldn’t agree more. It was the imperial Roman state, not God, that murdered Jesus.

-- The Christian faith holds that those who are able to look on the crucifixion and live, to accept that the traumatic truth of human history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life – but only by virtue of an unimaginable transformation in our currently dire condition. This is known as the resurrection. Those who don’t see this dreadful image of a mutilated innocent as the truth of history are likely to be devotees of that bright-eyed superstition known as infinite human progress, for which Dawkins is a full-blooded apologist. Or they might be well-intentioned reformers or social democrats, which from a Christian standpoint simply isn’t radical enough.

-- Now it may well be that all this [Christian theology] is no more plausible than the tooth fairy. Most reasoning people these days will see excellent grounds to reject it. But critics of the richest, most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook. The mainstream theology I have just outlined may well not be true; but anyone who holds it is in my view to be respected, whereas Dawkins considers that no religious belief, anytime or anywhere, is worthy of any respect whatsoever. This, one might note, is the opinion of a man deeply averse to dogmatism.

-- On the horrors that science and technology have wreaked on humanity, he is predictably silent. Yet the Apocalypse is far more likely to be the product of them than the work of religion. Swap you the Inquisition for chemical warfare.

-- Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history – and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry. He is like a man who equates socialism with the Gulag. Like the puritan and sex, Dawkins sees God everywhere, even where he is self-evidently absent.

-- Dawkins, by contrast, believes, in his Herbert Spencerish way, that ‘the progressive trend is unmistakable and it will continue.’ So there we are, then: we have it from the mouth of Mr Public Science himself that aside from a few local, temporary hiccups like ecological disasters, famine, ethnic wars and nuclear wastelands, History is perpetually on the up.

-- Dawkins tends to see religion and fundamentalist religion as one and the same. This is not only grotesquely false; it is also a device to outflank any more reflective kind of faith by implying that it belongs to the coterie and not to the mass.

Quote of the day

Say what you will about Michael Vick's re-entry into the NFL, but you probably can't say it much better than The Ohio State's Terrelle Pryor. When asked about painting "Mike Vick" into his eyeblack on game day, Pryor stated the following in support of his childhood hero:

Not everybody is a perfect person in the world. Everyone kills people, murder people, steals from you, steals from me, whatever.

I guess as long as you can run a 4.25 40, not only will your fans forgive the worst pass completion percentage of any QB in the NFL, but they'll also forgive torturing dogs for fun, and apparently murder.

Tarantino's brilliant, cathartic, revisionist history

Critics and Tarantino lovers everywhere are gushing about Inglourious Basterds. Leading the charge are German film critics, who are out-raving each other over his immensely entertaining and satisfying revision of history, in which the good guys win, and the bad guys -- well, no sense spoiling Tarantino's outrageous climax for you:

"historic"
"important"
"brazen, a declaration of war, a pleasure"
"there is so much in it to discover"

and my personal favorite:

"It took 65 years for a film-maker, instead of bringing Germany's evil 20th century history to life once more to have people shudder and bow before it, to simply dream around it. And to mow all the pigs down. Catharsis! Oxygen! Wonderful retro-futuristic insanity of the imagination!"

I won't add my own rave review here, but to say that I absolutely loved, loved, loved this movie, and that Christoph Waltz deserves an oscar for making one of the most entertaining villains I've seen onscreen in a long time.

Go see it. (Unless you can't tolerate gratuitous, graphic violence. Or completely fabricated historical dramas. Or Brad Pitt with a mustache.)