This Week in Crazy

Then Paterson said he was going to meet with the Park51 organizers, in order to convince them to support his weird and bad plan. This wasn’t really true. (Although Paterson did meet with Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who really has nothing to do with anything.) Still, Paterson insisted that everyone was on board, and at this point he was citing Rudy Giuliani, which is a probable sign that he’s just losing it.

Also losing it, in a more serious sense, was Michael Enright, a film student, fixated on the Afghanistan war, who, in an apparent racist, drunken rage, viciously slashed a Muslim cab driver in Manhattan on Tuesday night. Was the crime related to a general uptick in anti-Muslim sentiment, across the nation, localized in New York? It’s impossible to tell. But Paterson thought this statement was appropriate:

“The potential for this kind of violence is one of the reasons why I have called publicly for a respectful and unifying conversation about the Park51 project. I continue to offer my assistance for an open dialogue that I believe will help to bring New Yorkers together.

The implication is that Muslims have it coming — that they can expect more slashings, as long as they refuse to meet with Paterson to plan a different way forward. (Paterson then attempted to educate Americans on different kinds of Muslims.)

I think David Paterson means well. But he’s sounding completely nuts.

“Mistakes and inattention or distractions cost Marines lives,” he said on Tuesday, explaining how he came to his decision. “That’s the currency of this fight.

“I don’t want to lose any Marines to the distraction. I don’t want to have any Marines that I’m visiting at Bethesda [National Naval Medical Center, in Maryland] with no legs be the result of any type of distraction.”

OK. He obviously thinks highly of Marines, if he thinks that the mere knowledge that one of his colleagues is gay will distract a trained, professional Marine so much that his legs will fall off.

That’s what he thinks is going to happen, right? A Marine will just be so inattentive that he’ll forget to keep his legs attached to himself? Because that interpretation is actually less insulting to the Marines than thinking that gay people will make them less effective in actual combat situations.

(I’d guess that Amos’ opposition to lifting the ban is informed less by realistic concerns about the safety of his Marines than by his particular brand of born-again Christianity. And the fact that he’s crazy.)

Amos might not think much of his Marines, but there’s reason to believe that the majority of them will deal with the “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal much better than he thinks. While a majority of combat arms Marines surveyed said allowing gay people to serve openly would negatively affect their unit, a vast majority of the Marines who’ve actually served with gay people said there’d be no effect or a positive effect.

Marine Corps Infantry Capt. Nathan Cox — not gay, by the way — respectfully destroyed his commandant’s reasoning in a Washington Post Op-Ed on Thursday, writing, “[in] the end, Marines in combat will treat sexual orientation the same way they treat race, religion and one’s stance on the likelihood of the Patriots winning another Super Bowl.”

And Cox added a fact that Amos would probably deny: Some of the Marines at Bethesda Naval Hospital — and some of them buried at Arlington — are almost certainly gay. And they all served honorably, even though American politicians were too cowardly to allow them to serve openly.

For those playing along at home, John McCain conditionally supported the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” until Barack Obama got elected and began pushing the Senate to do something about it. Once military leadership told McCain the policy should be repealed, he said, he would vote to repeal it, and now that the Republican defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs have told McCain that it should be repealed, he is vowing to fight it with everything he’s got.

But, like, he had excuses before. Not great ones, but they sounded coherent on Sunday shows. Once the commanders came around, he wanted to wait for the results of the Pentagon’s review of how repeal would be implemented. That review is done. Then McCain just needed more time to read it. Then he had a problem with some of the survey questions. Then he was upset that more Marines oppose repeal than other branches. Then he was upset with the survey’s response rate. Transparent straw-grasping, but at least those objections had something to do with the issue at hand.

Now, well, shoot: John is opposed to repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” because of non sequiturs. “My friends, I will not vote for this bill to go forward because Ke$ha did not receive a single Grammy nomination, and the American people want us to focus on that as a priority.”

McCain’s vaunted “independence” was always something closer to incoherence. He’ll hold wildly different positions on issues depending on the weather, or, more specifically, depending on whom he’s friendly with and whom he resents today. The boxing enthusiast who once campaigned to ban Ultimate Fighting for no reason other than he didn’t like the looks of it has always been intellectually inconsistent, to say the least. But he’s lost his mind on the simple question of whether or not gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve their country openly and with honor.

If he thinks the answer to that question is no, he won’t just come out and say it. In his attempts to avoid endorsing bigotry while simultaneously doing everything he can to keep discrimination enshrined in the law, he’s clearly completely cracking up. Even his partner in irritating independence Joe Lieberman is being reasonable this time around. Could one well-crafted question on “Meet the Press” send McCain completely over the edge?