The Holy Beatings Will Continue Until the Marriage Improves

In terms of the War on Women, it looks like we're falling behind. Via the Toronto Sun.

A local bookstore has “sold out” of a controversial marriage guide that advises Muslim men on how to beat their wives.
The 160-page book, published by Idara Impex in New Delhi, India, is written by Hazrat Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi, who’s described in the book’s foreword as a “prolific writer on almost every topic of Islamic learning.”
...
In terms of physical punishment, the book advises that a husband may scold her, “beat by hand or stick,” withhold money from her or “pull (her) by the ears,” but should “refrain from beating her excessively.”

The story goes on to cite a horrendous honor killing, without providing more than a fuzzy linkage. I don't think that's fair journalism. The question is also put whether such a book should be sold in Canadian bookstores. They don't seem to have that freedom-of-the-press burden the U.S. has.

At least the beatings should not be "excessive."

David Brooks: ORIGINAL SIN to blame for Afghan Massacre?

That's right, that's what he wonders, right here:

"According to this older worldview, Robert Bales, like all of us, is a mixture of virtue and depravity. His job is to struggle daily to strengthen the good and resist the evil, policing small transgressions to prevent larger ones. If he didn’t do that, and if he was swept up in a whirlwind, then even a formerly good man is capable of monstrous acts that shock the soul and sear the brain."

I wish Brooks would just come out and say, "I blame original sin," but he doesn't. The mind reels, trying to figure out what exactly he is saying. In sum, nothing. He fails to say what he thinks, and just maunders on about the age-old question: "Humans, good or evil?"

Pundits like him? I'll let you guess which of evil or good I'd class him in. He always slithers away from a conclusion, following another actor in the original original-sin myth.

The disturbing part of his nonsense is its function as smokescreen. Well, perhaps it was The Devil... Yes, el diablo himself, horns and all.

Geez, could you just shut your backward, Medieval, if not evil, thoughts off for a second and not throw out a defense not allowed in court for 500 years. Of course, back then, in those same good ol' days, that defense would get you hanged as a witch.

This is the conservatives' brightest bulb on the marquee? Or is he second, after Newt?