James Carville, who’s getting more and more active in the Hillary Clinton campaign because she needs a bulldog, used “Judas” to describe New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson last week, after Richardson abandoned two decades of friendship with the Clintons to endorse Barack Obama, and there was a little flurry of name-calling [1] on the Sunday talk shows as Richardson refused to comment and Carville refused to apologize and Clinton campaign manager Howard Wolfson implied that Carville should probably apologize, and everybody missed the main point, which is that “Judas” is a time-tested tried-and-true metaphor for any betrayal—so what’s the big deal?—but the larger implication of Carville’s comment was that Hillary Clinton is Jesus, and that’s just wrong, especially since she seems so desperate that yesterday she was attacking Obama [2] for refusing to abandon his pastor, Jeremiah Wright [3], referencing that speech Obama made last week that was so popular that people already want to publish it in bound golden vellum and so anybody who says that what Obama should have done is to theatrically abandon his church is sort of saying that he should be more like, uh, Judas.

Woman, Thou Art Imbibing

It’s probably not a good idea to punch your wife in the face [4] if you run a church with “Family” in the name, especially if your wife is the local spokesperson for Domestic Violence Awareness Week, so the arrest of pastor Markus Bishop of Faith Christian Family Church in Panama City, Florida, for socking pastorette Margie in the eye (on Sunday no less!) is only slightly mitigated by the fact that, by her own admission, she did throw wine in Bishop’s face, and we can only assume it was communion wine since it evoked such a strong response, but then again she claims that she only threw the wine after he called her a whore [5], but that could have been a reference to the whore of Babylon, totally unrelated to his immediate domestic situation. At any rate, this can’t make Kenneth Copeland happy, since the Reverend Bishop sits on the board of Kenneth Copeland Ministries [6], which is normally opposed to the mere drinking of wine, much less aggressive projectile vinicultural baptisms. The last time we checked, Bishop was promising a news conference to “tell his side of the story,” so maybe he just smacked her for being a lush, which would be doctrinally correct based on the Pastoral Epistles [7].

Who Will Give This Guy a Break? (Not Us.)

The Archbishop of Canterbury—the guy who spends six or seven hours a day answering the question “Hey, how do you feel about homo priests [8]?”—has used the past month trying to back-pedal and soften and stress the nuances of his speech about introducing Shariah law into the British system, and many prominent blue noses have rallied to his defense [9], including Prime Minister Gordon Brown. It’s true that both his speeches—the original one, delivered to lawyers at the Inns of Court, and the followup, delivered for academics and fellow churchmen at Cambridge—were misunderstood and his intent was exaggerated. All he was suggesting is that it’s unfair to bar Shariah courts when, in both England and America, marital issues are already decided by Jewish bet din courts, Catholic courts, and the Institute for Christian Conciliation (for Protestants). I won’t go into all the similar nuances in Noah Feldman’s defense of Shariah [10] in the Times Sunday Magazine—he argues basically that Shariah law is an improvement over Muslim autocracy—but I have a bone to pick with almost every apologist for Shariah. They always say, “Shariah is not what you think. The word means much more. The word can mean this, but it can also mean that.” This is the same thing they say about jihad—“you don’t understand the full meaning of the word.” So my question is, if every Arabic word is some kind of floating ephemeral philosophical concept that can be pushed and pulled this way and that, avoiding a definition, then how are we ever to engage in dialogue with the Muslim world? Are these apologists for Islam saying that the Islamic mind is itself incapable of defining terms? Because that would be a putdown of the Muslim world, right? Our own explanation: we still think the Archbishop of Canterbury is Cat Stevens in disguise [11].

Thank Goodness We’ll Get It Back

Joann Bolliger, the bookkeeper at St. Maurice Catholic Church in Dania Beach, Florida, filched $800,000 the old-fashioned way [12], with forged payroll checks and palming the petty cash. After she serves her 366 days in prison, she’ll be expected to “pay all the money back,” according to a Fort Lauderdale federal judge who apparently has a sense of humor about such things.