Keith Burgess-Jackson

I leave you this fine evening with a column by Ronald Brownstein. I renew my prediction that John McCain will defeat Barack Obama in a landslide.

Here is a dramatic scene from today’s stage of the Tour de France. Here is tomorrow’s stage.

Here.

Four members of my adopted Texas Rangers will play in Tuesday’s All-Star game. Here is a New York Times story about the two who will be starting: Josh Hamilton and Milton Bradley. Hamilton drove in his 95th run this evening in a loss to the Chicago White Sox. Bradley hit his 18th home run.

Here is a New York Times story about progressives who are disappointed by Barack Obama.

“I followed all of the rules, man’s and God’s. And you, you followed none of them. And they all loved you more. Samuel, Father, and my . . . even my own wife.”

Brad has a new sport.

In the popular mediaeval tradition, as contrasted with official theology, there are many legends which associate saintliness and martyrdom with kindness to animals: even Jerome has his lion, to say nothing of Androcles. Vicious animals in that tradition were like the Gadarene swine, inhabited by demons. They might be brought to trial for their misdeeds and punished by the extremest of penalties—a form of distinction which, no doubt, they would willingly have foregone. Domesticated animals, in contrast, were the dwelling places of angels. The merely wild, but not the vicious, were spiritually uninhabited. Saintliness was demonstrated by a capacity to drive the demons out of the vicious—as some of the biographers of Francis of Assissi report that he tamed the wolf of Gobbio—and ordinary human virtue in domesticating wild animals, thus making of them a fit residence for angels.

(John Passmore, “The Treatment of Animals,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36 [April-June 1975]: 195-218, at 199)

To the Editor:

If Barack Obama is a really wise man—and the jury is still out on that—he will pay a great deal of attention to “Lurching With Abandon,” by Bob Herbert (column, July 8).

Having secured the Democratic nomination, Mr. Obama appears to be giving up, one after another, the positions that galvanized his supporters and won that victory. On the Iraq war, on government surveillance, on the separation of church and state, on this disastrous Supreme Court, Mr. Obama appears to be tacking toward the center. He is abandoning those firmly stated principles that created his political movement.

For Mr. Obama to lose in November, it’s not necessary for his core supporters to vote for John McCain; all they have to do is not continue to work and spend on his behalf, or not vote at all.

Faced with a choice between a real Republican and a fake Republican, the voters will always be smart enough to opt for the real one.

Ron Bonn
San Diego, July 8, 2008

Note from KBJ: The letter writer doesn’t see Barack Obama winking.