Civil Commotion

Newsweek says the big news is that ISIS leader al-Baghdadi has been killed in a raid.

The United States military has conducted a special operations raid targeting one of its most high-value targets, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State militant group (ISIS), Newsweek has learned. President Donald Trump approved the mission nearly a week before it took place.

Amid reports Saturday of U.S. military helicopters over Syria’s northwestern Idlib province, a senior Pentagon official familiar with the operation and Army official briefed on the matter told Newsweek that Baghdadi was the target of the top-secret operation in the last bastion of the country’s Islamist-dominated opposition, a faction that has clashed with ISIS in recent years. A U.S. Army official briefed on the results of the operation told Newsweek that Baghdadi was killed in the raid.

With independent confirmation from the military, and the implausibility of (even) Donald Trump lying about a thing like this, I think we’re probably good to accept that al-Baghdadi has been put down.

Here’s more evidence that, as I’ve long suspected, the great divide in American life is not race, gender, ethnicity, the familiar suspects. It’s education:

By the end of September, overall white support for impeachment had risen to 34 percent in that month’s Monmouth poll. Nearly all of that change, however, came from college-educated whites whose enthusiasm for ending the Trump presidency rose by 70 percent—jumping from 26 percent supporting it to 44 percent. For whites with no college degree, however, allegiance to Trump stayed strong, and support for impeachment barely budged, with a small uptick of 2 percent.

This should not be a surprise. A good education introduces the student not merely to an array of cultures, personality types, and intellectual disciplines, but cultivates an openness to intellectual updating. The healthy, properly functioning mind is a voyager.

This is why evangelicals are so immobile in their support for Trump: they hear from childhood that everything they need to know is all-settled, that to even doubt or reconsider a question is a failure of character itself and the fast-track to eternal punishment. This is why it’s a waste of time to try to reason with them; they must be defeated and let alone to sulk.

Seriously? Though solid research has shown dispositively that the components of sexuality are hard-coded before birth, we’re back to psychological arguments? Though that position was rejected by the American Psychological Association back in the 1970s?

I’m puzzled as to why and how it has happened, since Civil Commotion isn’t focused on sexuality per se, but I have a number of gay readers with whom I’m in regular contact, and without exception they say that ‘coming out,’ ending the public fiction that they’re ‘straight,’ was liberating. The only thing causing them despair is the smug, resolute ignorance of such as Albert Mohler.

Apparently, there is a Godly broadcaster out there who discerns that Rep. Adam Schiff is a pedophile and a Satanist who performs human sacrifices.

On Tuesday night’s edition of his “The MC Files” program, right-wing commentator and radical conspiracy theorist Chris McDonald baselessly asserted once again that Rep. Adam Schiff is a pedophile and a Satanist who practices human sacrifice.

McDonald asked his guest, Ricci Wilson of World For Jesus Ministries, if she had heard anything about Schiff supposedly being involved in pedophilia and human trafficking, to which Wilson replied that “there are some deep, dark secrets in his closet.”

Again: Are these people crazy, or are they whores who specialize in servicing the crazy?

A New York pastor has been arrested for murdering his wife.

A New York pastor who allegedly ran over his estranged wife with her car and then chopped her repeatedly with a machete as her neighbors and grandchildren watched in horror was arrested and charged Tuesday with her murder.

The pastor, 63-year-old Victor Mateo who led Christian Congregation The Redemptor, Inc., in the Bronx was taken into custody in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, by the Pennsylvania State Police and U.S. Marshals Regional Task Force, ABC 7 reported. He was later extradited to the Bronx in New York City, where he was charged with murder, manslaughter, acting in a manner to injure a child, and criminal possession of a weapon.

Can we please get over, once for all, the marketing lie that moral behavior relies upon unthinking obedience to an Invisible Friend?