The Diary of Tom Joad

Leno, Carlin, and Coulter

2006-06-14T21:52:00.000-07:00

So Leno explains his decision to let Ann Coulter use his show as a stage for her excretions by saying simply that he'll let anyone on his show to say what they think. Somehow I doubt it. I doubt he would have David Duke on. I doubt he would have some white supremacist from the Oregon woods. I doubt he would have a Muslim fundamentalist who advocates terrorism.

Coulter's fecal emissions are similar to those of these others, and are similarly dangerous -- insisting that her political opponents are traitors who would undermine the nation and endanger our physical security, and who therefore should be smashed. That sort of propaganda is not simply vile. It is dangerous. If believed, such ideas make peaceful coexistence of political opponents impossible. The prominent airing of shit like that is an important part of what turned Rwanda from a more or less normal poor nation into a nightmare.

Leno and the rest of the big media outlets indulge this shit-tongued tramp largely, I think, because Coulter is physically attractive in a lizardly sort of way. Such tolerance is repulsive and shameful, but we've gotten used to it. What surprises me, though, is that George Carlin was on the show and treated Coulter as if she were a decent person. It takes a lot, in my book, for a person to be worthy of being shunned and berated. But there are such people. You don't shake Saddam Hussein's hand. You don't have dinner with a serial rapist. And you don't smile at Ann Coulter. When she opens her mouth you turn away and tell her to close it, because of the stench. You don't smile into the hole of an outhouse. Ann Coulter is a tramp with a tongue of excrement.

I'm disappointed in Carlin. His treatment of Coulter as an ordinary person, worthy of ordinary civility and respect, was not nice or civil or restrained. It was either foolish or cowardly.

Letter: To NPR, re. "Strict Constructionism"

2005-10-05T05:38:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine forwarded this note to NPR, with permission for me to publish it:

Just listening to David Wellna's story on the Miers nomination.

We heard a clip of Sen. Jeff Sessions saying that Miers understands that the courts are bound by the law, just as the executive and the legislative are.

Then David Wellna said, "That sort of deference to the constitution is called 'strict constructionism.'"

Wellna thereby adopted and promoted the chief PR talking point of the right wing: The alternative to Bork/Scalia/Thomas is a judge who doesn't care about the law, but who just decides according to his personal beliefs about the underlying issue. If the judge likes abortion, he'll say there's a constitutional right to it, without regard to the law.

Wellna apparently doesn't know understand the debate. *Every* judge, *every* "judicial philosophy" believes that judges are bound by the law. The disagreement is over how a judge decides what the law means. Many laws -- particularly many constitutional provisions -- are general, vague, ambiguous, and open to widely varying reasonable interpretations. Strict constructionists say they look to the original public meaning of the texts. So, for instance, they read about what five or ten men took the phrase "equal protection of the law" to mean when the 14th Amendment was passed more than a century ago. It is fair to say that "strict constructionists" defer both to the text of the constitution and to the judge's understanding of what was widely believed in 1868 -- not a very reliable kind of guesswork.

Other schools of thought hold that the meaning of the grand generalities like "equal protection of the law" should take their specific meaning from the evolving understanding of the society of what, in this case, "equality" or "equal protection" means. Many people think that the authors of the Constitution understood and intended that the grand generalities would be interpreted and applied in this way. We think this approach to the Constitution is not only more democratic -- easing the counter-majoritarian problem of a fundamental social compact that is all but unalterable by the society currently working under it -- but also more faithful to the very idea of a fundamental social compact and to the intention of the Founders. It is fair to say that "strict constructionists" defer both to the text of the constitution and to the judge's understanding of what was widely believed today -- a kind of guesswork, to be sure, but more reliable than the alternative. (

If Mr. Wellna is to report this issue, he should learn more about it than can be gleaned from op-eds written by right-wing agitators.

Comment: Remembrance of 9/11

2005-09-11T19:40:00.000-07:00

I think we’re getting to the point where public grief over 9/11 becomes a maudlin cult of grief. For the fourth anniversary of 9/11 today, the major tv networks broadcast an hours-long reading of the names of the 9/11 victims.

It is hard to say this. Those who lost loved ones have permanent losses and permanent grief. It is no one else’s business how they grieve. There is a sort of community of 9/11 victims, and if they feel a need or find comfort in remembering and mourning together, then they should do it.

My question is about public ritual. The public mourning, four years on, has taken on the aspect of forced piety. We didn’t do this over the Oklahoma City bombings, or the Columbine High School shooting, or any other nation-searing tragedy. I doubt we did it over Pearl Harbor, though I don’t know.

I recognize that 9/11 was unique and has a special place in our memory. Even so, while the historical singularity of 9/11 imbues the deaths of that day with distinctive significance, the ritual of obligatory pious grief is disproportionate.

National tragedies can be remembered. The sorrow, however, need not be puffed up into the organizing principle of a national cult of grief. We don’t need to trot the victims of 9/11 out for the sake of patriotic correctness. Let them rest in peace.

Attempted Parody: In Response to Hurricane, Bush Signals Invasion of Iran

2005-09-01T05:32:00.000-07:00

Washington (AP)

Speaking from a picnic site at a golf course near his vacation spot in Crawford, Texas, President Bush today indicated that America is likely to invade Iran, in response to hurricane Katrina.

“Everything is different now,” the President said. “This hurricane has taught us the painful lesson that we are no longer fighting individual nation-states. Our enemies are scattered around the world, and they gain shelter and support from many sources.”

The hurricane, the President said, “has Iran’s fingerprints all over it.” Before returning to his pork sandwich, the President added, “We’re gonna deal with them. They’ve nearly destroyed a great American city (New Orleans). Payback is gonna be hell.”

Attempted Parody: Right-Wing Religious Group Call God "Cruel & Stupid"

2005-09-01T05:12:00.000-07:00

Philadelphia (AP)

The right-wing religious group Repent America issued a statement today declaring that God is “cruel and stupid.” The group announced that it is now opposed to God.

The group’s statement began by stating the points on which the group agrees with, and supports, God. “God hates fags,” the statement said. “God hates fags so much that he destroyed virtually the entire city of New Orleans.” “We hate fags, too, but it was deeply unjust of God to attack the entire city, just because of the fags,” the statement said.

“We have held our tongues for years,” the statement went on, “but the time has come to speak frankly: God has a long history of striking out indiscriminately when He is provoked by sin. If He is all-powerful and all-knowing, he ought to be able to punish just the fags. There was no reason to destroy the houses, businesses, and even lives, of the good Christians trying to live Godly lives in New Orleans and Mississippi. God’s history of indiscriminate attacks has led us, finally, to one inescapable conclusion: God is a cruel and stupid tyrant.”

The statement announced that, after an alliance of many years, the group is breaking with God. “With deep regret and heavy hearts, we announce today that we no longer support God. We continue to agree with and to support God on particular issues, such as hating fags. But we can no longer ally ourselves with God.”

Attempted Parody: Preachers Blame Hurricane on Republicans

2005-09-01T04:53:00.000-07:00

Colorado Springs (AP)

The Reverend James Dobson stated today that God is using hurricane Katrina to punish southern states that voted for George Bush. “God is talking to us in a very loud voice,” Dobson said. “God is punishing us for electing a man who doesn’t care about climate change.”

The Reverend Pat Robertson, in a tearful statement on his 700 Club television program, said “God is telling me that we have sinned. God is telling me that he is punishing us for re-electing President Bush.” Weeping, Robertson cried, “I repent, O Lord, I repent.”

The Reverend Jerry Falwell, speaking from his pulpit in Lynchburg, Virginia, in a special “Repentence Wednesday” service, exhorted his congregation to repent for voting for President Bush. “We have sinned, friends,” Falwell said. “God has taken us to the whipping shed. If we don’t repent, it’s going to be one hurricane after another.”

President Bush was golfing near his vacation home in Crawford, Texas, and could not be reached for comment.

Comment: On Civility - Pt. 1

2005-07-25T22:09:00.000-07:00

I will make some remarks here about my own occasional incivilities, because I suspect that my own experience is fairly common. I don’t mean this as an exercise either in navel-gazing or in navel-exhibitionism.

I just watched Jon Stewart interview Rick Santorum on The Daily Show. It was a very friendly affair, though Stewart challenged him in a serious way on some basic points. There was a palpable desire on the part of both guys to like the other guy and to be seen as likable, differences notwithstanding.

As posts in this blog demonstrate, I am inclined at times to offer cutting, insulting criticism. This comes from frustration, anger, whatever. I have a fairly high tolerance for this sort of thing, whether I’m on the giving or the receiving end.

It’s hard, though, for me to take that approach toward people I know personally. In a moment of exasperation, I may still give a cutting edge to a remark – essentially for the purpose of making sure it gets through – but I am uncomfortable insulting people I know. If I knew John McCain personally, I could not have called him a “hack” as I did in a previous post. If I knew the ABC producers I wrote about a post or two ago, I could not have called them “stupid.”

This aversion extends to any sort of in-person encounter, so long as it does not begin with open hostility. Even meeting McCain for the first time, I would not call him a “hack” to his face – not out of some sort of cowardice, but simply because in-person hostility feels so different. I don’t like it, and I generally can’t bring myself to do it (though there have been exceptions). I could make the same criticism to his face, and could make it in fairly blunt terms, but I would leave off the gratuitous flourish of anger-tinged insult – which feels natural and fairly inoffensive in a mere blog posting about someone I’ve never met, who will never read what I’ve written.

This is the funny thing. I have a certain propensity for cutting language, but that coexists – or alternates with – a genuine desire to like and be liked by others, including people I disagree with.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think that public hostility – which oozes from blogs, newspaper columns, etc. – happens mostly when the speaker doesn’t personally know the target of the hostility. There are exceptions, of course. There is real, personal antagonism and even hatred in the world. But I suspect that most hostility, most incivility is my sort – directed at people one has never met and has no expectation of meeting.

The cutting, insulting approach does not come from the better angels of my – or anyone’s – nature. I freely acknowledge that, and I admire – even envy, to some extent – people who either lack the impulse to throw daggers or are simply more virtuous and control the impulse better than I do.

Is there, though, any place for incivility? Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I think that anger, and angry words, have an important and necessary place. Even obscenities have an important place, though one reserved for extremities.

Take Ann Coulter, for instance. The only appropriate way to speak of this woman – who freely accuses people of hating their own nation and committing treason – is with contempt, derision, and scorn. I have referred to her in this blog as “a tramp with a tongue of excrement,” and I think that is an entirely just and appropriate reference.

The graver the occasion, I think, the less acceptable any kind of unnecessary flourish of insult. A President should not use such language, I think, because it is simply below the dignity of the office. On a sort-of grave occasion like a politician’s stump speech, there might be some room for the uncivil sort of angry language, but not much. Language must fit the occasion.

Am I hinting, then, that in a forum like a mere blog anything goes? No. That’s not what I mean. But let me get back to this subject in the next post.

Comment: Who's a Christian?

2005-07-24T09:11:00.000-07:00

Fundamentalist Christians – like fundamentalists of all stripes – think that non-fundamentalists are not true Christians. They refuse to acknowledge that a devout liberal Catholic who attends mass every week and is active in the Church is a Christian. They refuse to acknowledge that a liberal Methodist or Presbyterian or Baptist is a Christian.

The national news media frequently adopts this propagandistic language. I just saw an ABC commercial for a news program saying that “Christians have had enough” and want to move to Mississippi or some such state in sufficient numbers to control the government and secede from the Union, or some such thing.

I don’t care about the project – which seems Quixotic at best. I do care, however, about ABC’s use of “Christian,” which implies that the rest of us Christians – non-fundamentalists who do not want to move to Mississippi to create a pre-American theocracy – are not Christians.

I don’t think that the ABC producers are fundamentalist propagandists. I think they are just stupid. They don’t understand that language matters, so they don’t pay attention to language.

Comment: John McCain, Political Hack

2005-07-24T08:16:00.000-07:00

John McCain has been turning into a hack. This morning on ABC This Week he dodges the established facts about Rovegate and makes excuses for outing a CIA agent.

McCain declined to address the established fact that Rove told a journalist that Joe Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA, with weapons of mass destruction – and that this was classified information. McCain declined to say whether Rove should lose his security clearance and his job for – at least – handling classified information about a CIA agent’s identity with clear negligence.

McCain said he doesn’t know the definition of “negligence.” And he invoked the presumption of innocence in criminal prosecutions to justify keeping Rove in his job until – until what? Perhaps until he is convicted by a jury.

Additionally, McCain made the excuse for Rove that Rove’s spreading classified information about the identity of a CIA agent was OK because it was in an effort to discredit Joe Wilson’s statements that part of the case that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program was bogus.

This is sheerest hackery.

In 2000, I was impressed with McCain and would have seriously considered voting for him had he been the Republican nominee. Not any more. McCain is just another politician, willing to say whatever will help – regardless of whether it is true, he believes it, or even if you can say it with a straight face.

Comment: American Exceptionalism and Torture

2005-07-22T23:04:00.000-07:00

America is a great nation. I say that, as a liberal, without irony. America is a great nation.

Wherein lies our greatness?

It is not that we are, as individuals, better people than those of other nationalities, though some of us are better than some others. It is not that we, as a society, are better than other societies, though in some ways we are better than some others.

One principal source of our greatness is our commitment to a national mission of achieving nobility and pure morality. We are on-again-off-again about pursuing such ideals. There are times when we get scared of some threat, and we run around burning witches and tearing down villages. The evil and the frailty that is in humanity generally is in us – as individuals and as a society.

But we always come back to our ideals eventually. It is politically incorrect to say this, but we know that our nation was born with original sin – the sins of genocide and slavery. Our founders were great in many ways, but their hold on the land and their prosperity was at the cost of genocide perpetrated against the Indians who lived here before our founders came. We can say many things to mitigate this sin: It was a warlike time, and they were all – whites and Indians both – warlike people. But still it was genocide, and still it was sin. American prosperity was built up in large part by slaves brought here in chains. We can say many things to mitigate this sin, too: The black slaves we bought were sold to us by other blacks in Africa. But still it was slavery, and still it was sin. And apart from these great sins that lie deep in our origins, there have been many others.

And still I say that America is a great nation. For notwithstanding our sin, we have always felt the call of ideals nobler than we are ourselves. Even while burdened by the depravity that led us to believe there is nothing wrong with driving the Indians out of their land and slaughtering them occasionally, and to believe there is nothing wrong with enslaving people – even while burdened with this depravity we dreamed of a morality that was above us. And we have been trying, however fitfully, to live out the full meaning of our creeds from the beginning.

Our greatness as a nation is not in the good things we have done – though we have done many good things. It is, first and most fundamentally, in our commitment to the perfectibility of our nation – and thus, our willingness to look ourselves in the mirror and confess that we have sinned. And then to try to do better.

Now. About Abu Ghraib – and Bagram Air Force Base, and Guantanamo Bay.

Some of our people have committed wrongs in our name. They have sexually humiliated people we have swept up in military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. They have physically assaulted and abused these people. Some of the abuse amounts, without question, to torture. It appears that innocent people have been mercilessly beaten. It appears that some of our people have participated in, or allowed, the raping of women and little boys. Some of our people have killed detainees, with no provocation or justification.

These crimes have been committed by individuals. The responsibility, however, runs all the way to the top – at the very least, for gross negligence in failing to prevent an altogether predictable train of abuses, but almost certainly for winking at and affirmatively nudging lower-down individuals in the direction of abuse. (Our government has also – as a matter of official policy – delivered people into the hands of torturers, with no more than a chuckling assurance that the torturers will commit no torture.)

These crimes do not shock me. They are awful, but they are the products of the innate depravity of humanity. There will always be people capable of doing such things – in any organization, in any nation. I have no doubt that there are senators and congressmen capable of doing this. We know there are priests and pastors capable of it. Perhaps I am capable of it. Perhaps you are. Put a lot of human beings into a situation that fosters this evil, and some individuals in the group will commit the evil. That saddens me, but it does not shock me.

What shocks me is that some of my fellow Americans refuse to acknowledge the sin, to hold those responsible to account, and to demand action to prevent further abuses. Many Americans simply will not look this thing in the eye. They will not say, “This is shameful. Our government let it happen. Never again.” Many Americans are talking like children: “Well, you should see what Saddam Hussein did. We should be talking about Saddam Hussein. He's the real monster. Forget what we did. Look at Saddam Hussein.”

The refusal to face facts and to call a sin a sin is un-American. This refusal – not the underlying sin – is what cuts the greatness of our nation. Of course we will sin. There are many of us, and we are all human, and conditions will sometimes seem to push us to sin. What makes us great is our willingness to confess our sins and to seek redemption by avoiding further wrongs, and righting those that can be righted. And this is what many Americans are refusing to do, saying instead, “Well, look what Hitler and Stalin did. Don’t look at us.”

No. We’re Americans. That’s not how we do it here. We are trying to live out ideals that are nobler than we are ourselves. We face facts, we confess sins, and we strive to do better.

Let America be America again.

The Argument: The Second Primary Issue on Rovegate

2005-07-17T10:25:00.000-07:00

There are now two primary issues here:

1. The White House outed a CIA agent in order to protect its discredited case for war in Iraq.

2. In it’s coverup, the Republican leadership has shown contempt for the truth and contempt for the American people.

The second issue is no longer secondary. And if it is framed correctly, it does not divert attention from the issue, but rather refocuses and amplifies the essential point – Republican contempt for facts, for truth, and for the American people.

Here’s the attack on the second issue (to be made after the attack on the first issue), in a nutshell:

“In covering up the White House’s outing of a CIA agent, the Republican leadership has shown contempt for the truth and contempt for the American people.

“In this coverup, Republican leaders have attempted to distract attention from the outing of a CIA agent by telling outright lies about the agent’s husband. One example: They say that the husband claimed to have been sent on a mission by Vice-President Cheney. It’s a lie. The husband never said that, never implied that, never hinted at that. The Republican leaders know the truth. But they don’t care about the truth. And they expect journalists and the American people to fall for these obvious, childish lies. They play the American people for fools.

“In this coverup, Republican leaders have said that up is down, black is white, day is night. And they expect journalists and the American people to fall for it. They think the people are stupid. The Chairman of the Republican Party says [on Meet the Press, 7] that the political operative Karl Rove confirmed the identity of a CIA agent for one journalist and then volunteered the identity of a CIA agent for another journalist, but that this doesn’t count as being “involved” in outing the CIA agent.

“The White House outed a CIA agent in order to protect its discredited case for war. Now, in covering up the outing of a CIA agent, the Republican leadership has shown contempt for truth and contempt for the American people. For the Republican leadership, truth doesn’t matter, and the American people can be played for fools.”

The Argument: How to Do a Rebuttal

2005-07-17T08:00:00.000-07:00

Democratic talkers – and writers, for that matter – are not very good at rebuttal. The Republican talking points on Rovegate provide a splendid basis for an attack. When you do rebuttal, you turn the Repubs’ words against them, using their words to hammer them. You level another charge – subordinate to your main point, and based on and tied to the Repub talking points – that opens up another front the Repubs have to defend.

So you have your main point – see the Mantra below – and then when the Repubs trot out their BS, you turn that into a new, fresh problem for them, in addition to the main problem that the BS was in response to.

Democrats have so far missed the boat.

“Attacking” based on the Repub line is not the same as simply “responding” to the line. Democrats have, of course, responded to what the Repubs have said. That’s not the same, and it’s not enough.

To turn an a response into an attack, all you have to do is make an accusation based on the response. You don’t just say, “What the Republicans are saying is false,” or “The Republicans are attempting to divert attention from the real issue.” Instead, you begin by making an accusation: “The Republican leadership does not respect the truth and does not respect the American people,” or something like that. And then you go into the response to the Repub talking points: the childish falsehoods about Joe Wilson (e.g., that Wilson said Cheney sent him to Niger), the insistence that Rove was “not involved” in outing a CIA agent (though he admits reinforcing Novak’s belief about the CIA agent – which Novak then put into his newspaper column).

In general: Every rebuttal is prefaced with an attack that is supported by the substance of the rebuttal. You force them to respond to the attack, to deny your accusation.

If your response is well-founded, the accusation will be borne out. And the Repub line will not merely fail, but will work against the Repubs. If you merely respond, then you have just deflected an attack, not landed a blow.

Note: It should be obvious, but let me emphasize: The specific accusation you make has to be appropriate to the talking points you're responding to. You don't accuse someone of lying if they're not lying. You don't accuse someone of playing the public for fools if they're speaking in good faith and saying something reasonable. When you're dealing with an opponent who is in good faith, is serious, and is reasonable, the accusation that begins a rebuttal will necessarily be mild. But even in these circumstances, the structure of your argument is the same: You preface your response with a new attack that puts them on the defensive on some new ground.

Comment: What Would a Good Democratic Argument Shop Look Like? -- Part 2

2005-07-15T22:37:00.000-07:00

A necessary long-term project would be to create a politico-media culture in which accuracy matters.

The goal here would be both (a.) that the news media calls people on false statements – whether deliberate or not, and (b.) that the news media, with appropriate rigor, checks the validity of statements they report.

How would an argument shop go about trying to change the culture in this way? I don’t know of any way other than to catalogue the media’s errors, publish them, and demand correction. I envision something like what Media Matters for America does. You’d use a couple full-time researchers/editors. They would do their own research, and they would solicit and follow up on tips and research sent to them online (or offline) by anyone.

They would send letters to the culpable reporters and editors, demanding either that the apparent error either be justified or that it be corrected. Additionally, the shop would publish a daily chronicle of errors in the news media – with full supporting evidence. They would publish this on a DNC website and send out a subscription-only email newsletter – giving the contact info for the culpable reporters and editors.

Of course, if you are going to call people on their errors, you had better be serious about being accurate yourself. That would go for people in the shop and for Democrats generally. That’s fine. We Democrats value truth. The shop would occasionally commit errors, and it would acknowledge and correct them when the errors are pointed out.

Media Matters is invaluable. I do not suggest that the party replace them, but merely that the party must engage in the same work of policing the media. The more watchdogs, the better. The party has more clout than an independent group when demanding that news outlets correct their errors. (Again, we’re talking about misstatements of fact – did Joe Wilson say Cheney sent him on the trip? for instance – not editorializing. News outlets are not entitled to their own facts, but they are entitled to their own opinions.)

I consider this project to be the work of an argument shop because reason and argument depends upon a culture that values factual accuracy. Absent that, we are mired in a stew of half-truths and lies, with argument being irrelevant, with the game being one of unprincipled propaganda. That is more or less what we have today (though things could be worse than they now are). In any event, I would put this project in an argument shop, but it wouldn’t have to be there. It must be done by the DNC itself, however. The project is vital, and it requires the prominence and clout that would come from being a DNC effort.

Comment: What Would a Good Democratic Argument Shop Look?

2005-07-14T20:40:00.000-07:00

There’s no evidence that the Democrats have a real argument shop. The Republicans clearly do. They develop a line, they disseminate it among their party, and they flood the media with it. Individual Democrats think and talk on their own, but there appears to be neither an institutional facility for developing arguments, nor a strategy for disseminating the arguments.

One stock response to this observation is that Democrats are by nature individualists. You can’t coordinate them. You might as well try herding cats. That’s the stock response. Forget it. Anyone who thinks Democratic politicians are individualists is a romantic divorced from reality. Group-think is as prevalent among Democrats as among any group. More to the point, the party can’t do without a serious, well-staffed, well-run argument shop. So let’s just do it.

This is not to say that an argument shop implies the sort of borg-like party discipline that the Republicans suffer under. A Democratic argument shop should simply develop arguments and provide them as suggestions to individual office-holders and other talkers. If the arguments don’t seem persuasive and effective to the talkers, then the talkers shouldn’t go with them.

But enough of that. What should a Democratic argument shop look like? I’ll take this up in the next post.

The Argument: Rebutting the RNC Line on Rove

2005-07-14T18:02:00.000-07:00

The Republican counter-attack concerning Karl Rove’s outing of an undercover CIA agent is this: Rove outed the agent in order to discredit a flawed report written by the agent’s husband. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

The line includes details concerning the supposed flaws with the husband’s (Joe Wilson’s) report. The details are childishly, obviously bogus. But no matter.

What to say about the Republican line, when it is made? Very little, I think.

Something like this: “You’ve just heard the official Republican story, and they’re sticking to it. The story misstates every fact that matters, but forget about that for the moment. Assume the CIA agent’s husband really was awful. Assume that outing the CIA agent really would discredit a terrible report. Does that justify outing an undercover CIA agent? Does that justify endangering the lives of every contact and informant the CIA agent had in a 20-year career? Does that justify ruining the ability of the CIA agent ever again to gather intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in the hands of our enemies?”

I don’t think anything more needs to be said in response. And the response feeds directly into our case.

So after making that rebuttal to the Republican’s case, you go back to our case:

1. Bush cited bogus intelligence to justify war on Iraq.

2. Karl Rove burned a CIA NOC agent because her husband corrected one of Bush’s bogus claims.

3. The Republican leadership defends Rove’s actions.

4. The White House lied for two years about Rove’s actions.

5. Bush said he would fire whoever was involved in that, but he now seems to have changed his mind.

The Argument: The Mantra on Rove & Plame – v.1.01

2005-07-13T20:38:00.000-07:00

Here’s the mantra I would suggest for Democratic talkers, responding to the current RNC talking points on Rove:

1. Bush cited bogus intelligence to justify war on Iraq.

2. Karl Rove burned a CIA NOC agent because her husband corrected one of Bush’s bogus claims.

3. The Republican leadership defends Rove’s actions.

4. The White House lied for two years about Rove’s actions.

5. Bush said he would fire whoever was involved in that, but he now seems to have changed his mind.

I think those are the essential points.

As for the falsehoods in the current RNC talking points – which is an irrelevant attack on Joe Wilson – I think it’s a mistake to talk about them. I strongly suspect they were deliberately put in as bait. They provide an inviting target, so we talk about them. And then instead of attacking Rove for indefensible conduct he has admitted to (through his lawyer), we are defending Joe Wilson against false accusations. Every word we spend defending Wilson gives the impression – perversely, but nonetheless – that there is a real debate, and that it is the relevant debate.

Comment: The Nature of Belief – Part Two: Free-Market Fundamentalism

2005-06-16T14:14:00.000-07:00

(Note: Postings under the “nature of belief” heading should be taken not as an attempt at a systematic analysis, but as extemporaneous ramblings.)

Why do people get passionate about economic theory? Why is there an emotional attachment to theories of laissez-faire capitalism?

An emotional attachment to contrary economic theories – Marxist socialist theory, for instance – is easy to understand, because they tend to link up directly with moral issues. Such theories claim to show how social institutions and economic arrangements directly, predictably, and purposely commit injustice.

But free-market fundamentalism is at best indirectly connected to moral issues. The theory says, roughly, economies will work best, and more people will prosper, if you have an unrestricted free market. Of course this links up, at some point, with moral issues, but it is a remote connection. The theory doesn’t diagnose deliberate injustice. It doesn’t prescribe a remedy for injustice. It just says there will be greater wealth in society if we do such and such. That sort of theory is clearly important, but so are theories of disease transmission in urban environments, and there are no passionate, sword-wielding crusaders creating political movements around disease transmission theories.

I have a guess about why free-market fundamentalists are so emotional about their economic theory. (And mainly we’re not talking about economists – who might be expected to be passionately committed to their own theories. Mostly we’re talking about non-economists who come close to getting sexually excited at the mention of Adam Smith or David Ricardo.) My guess will not find much favor among the fundamentalists themselves. Here’s my guess. It’s short and simple.

Theories of laissez-faire capitalism provide a mask of respectability for selfishness and unconcern for others. The theories say that as long as you cater to the interests of prosperous people, everyone else will be better off. The theories allow you to act selfishly in the interests of the people you identify with (the rich) and to say that you are doing it for the benefit of the poor. You can demand tax breaks for the rich, because that will help everyone else. You can demand that the power company be allowed to pollute air and water, because that is in the best interests of the people who breathe the air and drink the water.

This is not just an economic theory. This is a putatively empirical-logical justification for selfishness and unconcern for others. That is something you can get excited about. That is a theory you can be emotionally committed to and take to bed. And so they do.

That’s my guess. Maybe I’m wrong, but something has to explain why this social-scientific theory, unlike others, incites such passionate love and fanatical devotion. Nobody gets that excited about quantum physics. I’d be interested to hear other possible explanations.

Comment: Letter to Washington Post re. Downing Street Memos

2005-06-16T05:31:00.000-07:00

Your editorial writers supported Bush's case for invading Iraq and taking it over. They generally accepted the assertions of Bush and his subordinates uncritically. Your writers did not hold Bush to account for the fear-mongering exaggerations that he, Cheney, et al repeated over and over. And of course your naive writers, having essentially trusted Bush to be honest and candid, turned out to be wrong about everything concerning Iraq: No weapons of mass destruction. No significant threat to the United States.

Those same writers say today that the Downing Street memos add nothing to the debate over how we came to invade Iraq and take it over. The principal memo states the view of the most highly placed British officials, after consulting with the Bush administration, that contrary to Bush's repeated statements, Bush had early on decided to invade Iraq, and that "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Your writers say that is nothing new because some of us thought all along that Bush was set on war and was perverting the intelligence to get war. The news here is that highly placed British officials, after consulting with the Bush administration, took the same view. The news is that British officials confirm what we critics of the war were saying all along. The news is that the debate is pretty much over. We were right, and your writers were wrong. Bush wanted war, and he perverted the intelligence to get it.

Comment: The Nature of Belief, or Why Are Some People Republicans? Part One.

2005-06-15T21:31:00.000-07:00

You really do wonder sometimes. You think we all — we Americans — agree on certain fundamental things, and then you see people contradicting those fundamentals. How can they do that? How can they believe what they believe? How can they possibly? And the question is genuine and poignant. It’s as if these people, neighbors and fellow countrymen, have been abducted and replaced with alien beings of some unknown sort. How can this be?

You get this sense when you look at pictures of lynchings. You see a throng of happy, smiling, nice-looking people posing for a group photo. It’s a picnic ground, and there are little boys and girls at their mothers’ knees. Everything is sunny and beautiful, except that there’s the mutilated corpse of a black man dangling from a tree in the middle of the frame. The victim will have been tortured before finally being killed. Fingers and toes cut off one by one. Teeth broken or pulled out with pliers, one by one. Ears, lips, nose, genitals cut off. And so on. Your mind reels. You understand psychopaths. The occasional psycho doesn’t cause confusion and bewilderment. But this is a whole community of people who look like ordinary, decent Americans. How could this possibly have happened? How could they have done this? How could they have believed and felt the things necessary to believe and feel in order to do this? How could they possibly?

(I’m trying only to evoke a sense of incomprehension and bewilderment. I’m not equating anyone with a member of a lynch mob, though I understand that someone who wants an easy way to be offended, and who has the requisite level of stupidity or intellectual dishonesty – a “journalist,” say – would say I am equating Republicans generally with lynch-mob torturers and murderers. I’m not. But now that you mention it, I do notice that the set of people who defend our torturing and killing of Afghan and Iraqi detainees are mostly Republicans.)

Back to the subject: There are moments when you feel a similar incomprehension and bewilderment about people with other beliefs about politics and religion. I see this bewilderment in the face of a conservative acquaintances when she talks to me, and I sometimes feel it when I hear Bush supporters dismiss criticism of Bush over such piffles as deceiving the country and, on the basis of that deception, taking us into a war which he prosecuted with mind-blowing incompetence. It can be hard to understand such people.

So what’s going on? How do people come to believe what they believe?

This is an impossible question, but it’s not pointless. It is possible to say a few things that are meaningful, though a satisfactorily full answer is impossible. I’ll try to say something about this in the next couple posts.

Comment: A Moment of Despair Over Our "News Media"

2005-06-13T22:19:00.000-07:00

There are days when you want to give up on the news media – print as well as stupidbox – and just turn away from it all or, better yet, do whatever one can do to undermine the influence of these jokers. Even in the midst of this mood, you know it’s too much, that there are decent journalists doing actual journalism, and that a decent news media is indispensable. But still you want to give up and send out the clowns. For whatever reason, today is one of those days for me.

I don’t have the stomach to count the ways right now. I’m too nauseated. But one darkly comic example comes to mind:

Poor Tim Russert, who poses as a tough interviewer, asks Bush if Bush is planning to invade Iraq. Bush says “there are no plans on my desk,” and Russert lets it drop. He doesn’t ask, are there plans on someone else’s desk? He just lets it drop. But it’s not his fault. He’s neither talented nor diligent. The same “no plans on the President’s desk” line was repeated to countless other “journalists” on countless occasions. None of them thought to ask the obvious question. Would be impertinent, I suppose.

Honestly, you want to laugh, you want to weep.

And these foolish, frivolous, irresponsible, and dangerous people get paid for this. The race is doomed.

Comment: A Party Unfit to Dominate

2005-06-06T22:18:00.000-07:00

I hinted below that the failure of moderate Republicans to stand up to their party leadership could be excused. It is, I suggested, a matter of long ingrained habit, which comes from never (at least from the 1950’s until 2002) being the party running a one-party government, with majorities in both Houses of Congress as well as the Presidency.

I think the analysis of the earlier post is right, but any implication that the Republicans can be excused for their behavior since 2002 is outdated.

The Republicans – all of them, not just the moderates – have shown that they lack the intellectual honesty and the integrity to control the government.

I’m not accusing them of having bad ideas or being partisan or making untenable arguments or any of the normal stuff that is more or less intrinsic to politics. I’m accusing them of being dishonest and lacking integrity.

Here’s what I have in mind: On two issues of some importance, the Republicans have pressed an agenda by pretending to believe what they do not, I think, believe. (1.) They have pretended to believe that it is unconstitutional to deny judicial nominees an up or down vote on the Senate floor. I boldly declare that no more than two senate Republicans believe something this stupid and this contrary to the history of the senate. Maybe not even two. I’m just making allowances for the possibility that there may be two genuinely, deeply stupid Republicans in the senate. (2.) The Republicans are so far pretending to believe that John Bolton is qualified to be our ambassador in the United Nations. No doubt those who hate the UN do think we should send Bolton to it – as a way of telling the UN to f-ck off and, perhaps, of weakening the institution. But again I boldly proclaim that no more than two Republican senators who takes the UN seriously and who knows anything of substance about John Bolton actually believes Bolton is qualified or that it would be in the interest of the United States to send Bolton to the UN. Bolton is a disgraceful, half-crazed ideologue. (Peruse Steve Clemons’ blog for the details.)

I suggest an argument that can be taken to the voters: We cannot afford to keep the Republicans in control of the government. Even if you agree with individual Republican politicians, and even if you agree with Republican policies generally, they have proven that when they operate together as a party controlling all parts of the government, something happens to them: Together, they lose their ability to look facts in the eye. They lose their intellectual honesty. They lose their integrity. As a party, they are unfit. Even if you like every individual in the bunch. As an organized party, they are unfit to govern.

Now let me say that I don’t think this is the argument that should be front and center. To make this a principal attack would hint that we are conceding the policy fights and the individual office races. But it is an argument, and it is a serious one. It should be made, though it should be made as a secondary argument.

Comment: Note to Joe Biden & John Edwards re. Howard Dean's Rhetoric

2005-06-05T14:04:00.000-07:00

The AP says you guys said Howard Dean doesn't speak for you or, you suppose, for a majority of Americans "with that kind of rhetoric." The AP hints that the sort of rhetoric you were talking about is Dean's having said Delay should go back to Texas to serve his prison sentence and that a lot of Republicans have never earned an honest living in their lives.

I suggest that the Democrats' problem is not an excess of aggressive talk. I suggest that our chief liability is the impression that we're a bunch of weak-kneed sissies.

Instead of criticizing Dean directly, you might try this: Say that while his language is a bit strong, he makes a good point. A lot of Republicans -- inherited-wealth fatcats and Enron-style crooks -- in fact have never earned an honest living and don't know what life is like for the rest of us. And in fact Tom Delay is about as sleazy as they come -- whether he'll be indicted and convicted for anything or not.

And while you're on the subject of offensive rhetoric, you might compare Dean's offense (hurting feelings) with the offense of Bush and his underlings (scaring the country into a war that has killed or otherwise ruined the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis -- by perverting intelligence reports and then exaggerating what even the perverted reports said).

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the best thing for us Democrats is to chastise Dean for being too mean. Maybe we need the kind of elevated statesmanship of a John Kerry or a pre-2000 Al Gore. That's the ticket.

Comment: Party Discipline in Dominant Parties

2005-05-27T11:21:00.000-07:00

The Republicans have shown great party discipline, and that has caused great damage over the last few years. The party leadership – Bush, Frist (Lott before him), DeLay, Hastert – and the most influential lobbyists are on the hard right edge of the Republican landscape. So party discipline for the Republicans now means control of the party by the party’s ideological (and tactical) extremists.

Why have moderate Republicans consented to this? It may be a matter of history, and the hard-dying nature of old habits.

Party discipline is an entirely different creature in a one-party government than it is in a divided government. Right now, the Republicans control a one-party government – with control of both houses of Congress as well as the presidency. The last time the Republicans were in this position was 1952. Party discipline in a one-party government means the institutions of government are controlled by the party leadership – a tiny rump minority of the elected officials. Party discipline in this context is gravely undemocratic.

Party discipline is much safer when the party in question is in the minority. In this context, party discipline helps (especially in the Senate) to prevent action by tepid majorities. Discipline among the minority party means that the majority party can act only if there is near-unanimity on the question among that party (or if – as we see these days – the majority party is itself highly disciplined and can corral the votes of members who disagree with what they’re voting on). Even when the disciplined party has a majority in both houses of Congress but the president is from the other party, party discipline is much less dangerous than when the party dominates in a one-party government. In that case – the Clinton presidency after 1994 – the two institutions can lock each other up, but the leadership of one party cannot control all the power of government.

Democratic legislators are notoriously undisciplined. But for a good part of the time since FDR the Democrats controlled both the Congress and the White House. A dominant party doesn’t need party discipline in order to assert itself – as a dominated party does. The Democrats didn’t need disciplined legislators as the Republicans did. And it is good that it worked out that way. A dominant party with disciplined legislators means a government controlled by the small number of people in the party leadership – a group that is unlikely to represent even that party, let alone the country at large.

I suspect that the moderate Republicans have submitted to the customary Republican party discipline out of deeply ingrained habit. There is not a Republican in the Congress who was in office the last time the Republicans were a dominant party. They don’t have a feel for the different environment, the different needs, the different effects of party discipline. Perhaps they are slowly adjusting. The defection – perhaps only temporary and perhaps ultimately futile – of a few Republican senators on the judicial filibuster issue may indicate that some Republicans are beginning to see the dangers of discipline in a dominant party.

Attempted Parody: Right-Wing Bloggers Take Part in Iraq War Through "Internet Gunning"

2005-05-25T22:39:00.000-07:00

Washington (AP)

Pro-war bloggers and others have found a way to serve in the Iraq war – through “internet gunning.”

In a system devised by Halliburton, M-60 machine guns are stationed at road intersections in Baghdad and other cities. The guns are equipped with remote controls for aiming and firing. The remote controls, in turn, are connected to the internet. A “gunner” seated at a computer anywhere in the world can connect to the gun, watch the passing traffic, and fire at will.

Right-wing bloggers have long been criticized by opponents of the war for not enlisting to fight. Many pro-war bloggers are young enough and are otherwise capable of serving in the military. They have chosen not to. They cite family and work obligations that prevent them from fighting to defend America from terrorists and to plant democracy in the Middle East.

The Army needs able-bodied recruits. Enlistment rates have fallen dramatically below the Army’s needs. The shortage of new recruits has increased the burden on soldiers who have already served or are now serving in Iraq.

With the advent of internet machine-gunning, however, many pro-war bloggers can now fight, without leaving their keyboards. In the past two days alone, eighty-three internet gunners, taking turns with four M-60’s, have killed three hundred Iraqi targets and destroyed approximately a dozen vehicles.

The remote-controlled M-60’s must be maintained by soldiers present on the ground. Ammunition must be fed to them, and occasional weapon jams must be cleared. In the past two days, three U.S. Army soldiers have been killed while servicing the remote-controlled M-60’s. Army officials suspect, in one case, that the soldier was killed by “friendly fire” from an internet gunner.

Attempted Parody: White House Spokesman Criticizes President; President Retracts Rationale for War

2005-05-24T21:15:00.000-07:00

Washington (AP)

Scott McClellan, President Bush’s press secretary, today criticized President Bush. “The President inaccurately reported that Saddam Hussein posed a grave and gathering danger to the United States. This report was based largely on a single anonymous source with an ax to grind, and on intelligence assessments that were ideologically massaged. On the basis of this inaccurate report, the United States went to war. People have died. The President’s faulty reporting has led to tens of thousands of deaths.”

This afternoon, President Bush responded to this unusual criticism. “I apologize for the errors in my reporting, and I will take steps to correct my sourcing and reporting methods,” he said.

Mr. McClellan said the President’s apology was “a good start.”

The President later issued a full retraction and took responsibility for the deaths occasioned by the invasion and takeover of Iraq.

Attempted Parody: Congressman Accuses Comedian of "Possible" Treason

2005-05-23T20:34:00.000-07:00

[Note: The joke’s on you. This is not a parody. You can’t parody these clowns.]

WASHINGTON (AP) — A congressman says comedian Bill Maher's comment that the U.S. military has already recruited all the "low-lying fruit" is possibly treasonous and at least grounds to cancel the show.

Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., takes issue with remarks on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, first aired May 13, in which Maher points out the Army missed its recruiting goal by 42% in April.

"More people joined the Michael Jackson fan club," Maher said. "We've done picked all the low-lying Lynndie England fruit, and now we need warm bodies."

Army Reserve Pfc. England was accused of abusing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

"I think it borders on treason," Bachus said. "In treason, one definition is to undermine the effort or national security of our country."

…

"I don't want (Maher) prosecuted," Bachus said. "I want him off the air."

The Argument: Democratic Argument Shop Needs Work – Case-Study: Filibusters

2005-05-23T19:38:00.000-07:00

Two essential elements of the filibuster dispute:

The Democrats have relied on the filibuster only because the Republicans have eliminated the traditional devices for minorities to block judicial nominees – devices that the Republicans have happily used to block Democratic nominees.
The Republicans are not talking about changing the rules by the ordinary means (requiring a two-thirds vote), but rather are threatening to say that the filibuster the Republicans have also happily used against Democratic nominees is … unconstitutional.

Both of these points are essential. If you don’t understand one of them, you don’t understand the filibuster dispute. Period. But neither point has been part of the filibuster story as the news media has covered it.

This is a failure on the part of the news media. Astonishingly, while this story has developed over months, they still haven’t understood the issue, and they haven’t enabled their audience to understand it.

But this is also a failure on the part of the Democrats. They haven’t explained the issue and made their argument. Folks in the news media are not actively suppressing these two essential points. They just don’t understand them. That indicates their laziness, of course, but it also indicates the laziness or incompetence of the Democrats. If the Democrats routinely explain the issue this way – and criticize the news media when these elements are left out – the media will report it.

The rule is that the media won’t get anything right unless you spoonfeed it to them. It is basic that a political party must figure out how to present the issues, spoonfeed it to the media, and police the reporting. If a party doesn’t have an argument shop capable of doing this – and if it’s not able to communicate the arguments to office-holders and other members – then the party lacks a fundamental competence.

We need a good argument shop.

Comment: Sounds Like the Democratic Negotiators Gave Up the Farm. But Maybe Not.

2005-05-23T17:44:00.000-07:00

I hope I’m wrong about this, but what I’m hearing is that (a.) the most objectionable judicial nominees will get an up or down vote, (b.) future filibusters are off-limits except in “extraordinary circumstances,” and (c.) if there is a disagreement as to what counts as “extraordinary circumstances,” then the deal doesn’t bind anyone.

I interpret this as an agreement that the Republicans will not eliminate the filibuster on a bogus constitutional basis that virtually none of them actually believes in so long as the Democrats agree not to use the filibuster.

Lindsay Graham has twice or three times (that I’ve heard) emphasized that some of the nominees will be confirmed, and some won’t – on the up or down votes. Perhaps there’s an unwritten agreement among these negotiators that the more objectionable nominees will be rejected. But that’s a bit too hopeful a view for me to believe.

It seems more likely that the deal was done only because of a core vagueness and ambiguity about its terms. Sometimes that’s good and necessary. I fear that in this case it just means that the fight is postponed for a few weeks, and that the Democrats have given up the possibility of blocking some of these nominees, while getting nothing in return. But maybe not. And if the nuclear option does come to a vote later, perhaps the attempted compromise and the passage of time will bring over a couple more votes. And it gives the Democrats a chance to build their case anew – more on that in the next post – though I don’t have much faith in their ability to make the argument.

The undeniable good in this is that the moderate Republicans asserted themselves. They rejected the diktat of Dobson, Bush, and Frist. Hopefully this will strengthen them and lead to a resurgence of the moderates.

The Argument: Argument-Focused Ad Campaigns

2005-05-22T16:30:00.000-07:00

I suggest a different kind of political ad campaign. Traditionally, candidates spend a lot of money on a few expensive, highly produced ads that run over and over. There are a few problems with this.

First, the ads aren’t particularly good. They’re over-produced – too slick, too cheesy, too much. Second, it annoys people to see the same damned ads over and over. If it doesn’t annoy them outright, it just bores them, and they stop paying attention. Third, too few different ads means you convey too little information.

I suggest an ad campaign based on these principles:

1. A single point can be made in many ways.

2. You want your audience to have a fuller grasp of your point than a single 30-second statement of it can convey.

3. You want to show respect for your audience.

4. You want to be serious, and not to seem flashy or slick.

The sort of ad campaign I suggest would involve creating many inexpensive, quickly produced ads, each of which is played only a few times for any potential audience. For each point, many different ads, and the ads would simply present information simply and seriously, to make an important point.

The idea is that any person would see any individual ad only once or perhaps twice, but would see several different ads making the same point. The new ads would remain as interesting as political ads are likely to be, so the audience would be attentive. And each person would have more information, and a fuller, more informed understanding of the point than if they had just seen one or two ads making the one point over and over.

This sort of ad would not, of course, mean forgoing emotional appeals. But the ads would consist of information seriously, though emotionally, presented. Here’s a model of the sort of thing I’m talking about.

Such ads should consist of the candidate talking, making a serious point; of ordinary Americans telling their own stories, making a serious point; or of faceless narrators making a serious point. (The faceless narrator is the least capable of making an emotional connection – so the least desirable.) (Ad producers with digital video cameras should seek out (a.) people with powerful personal stories and (b.) ordinary people who can articulately, powerfully state their concerns, and so forth.)

I would not hold inflexibly to this single kind of ad campaign. Fancy sets, imaginative narratives, and so forth might be useful occasionally. The famous Daisy commercial run against Goldwater, and the Bear-in-the-Woods commercial that Reagan ran are examples of powerful fear-inducers. There may be a place for this sort of thing alongside the kind of campaign I’m describing.

Comment: Abusing the Filibuster?

2005-05-21T14:52:00.000-07:00

Moderate Republicans uneasy about redefining Senate rules through a bogus constitutional argument that no one actually believes say, nonetheless, that the Democrats have been abusing the filibuster in an untraditional way, and that this is very bad.

Nonsense. The Democrats have used the filibuster to kill a few nominations, when they thought the nominees were too far out of the mainstream. That’s exactly how the filibuster should be used. That’s how you make a (very modest) attempt to keep the judiciary ideologically balanced.

Right now, the country is split more or less down the middle. But hard-right conservatives control the presidency and the Senate. Those two institutions do not represent the country at large. The Democrats, in their opposition, represent not only the half of the country that is aligned more with them than with the Republicans, but also much of the Republican party – those Republicans who are not hard right-wingers. The moderate Republicans in the Senate have, for whatever reason, bowed down to the hard-right leadership.

If the Democrats do not filibuster, we will end up with a judiciary that is heavily skewed toward the ideological hard right wing. The Democrats should be filibustering more, not less – just as the moderate Senate Republicans should be acting like senators with independent minds, not like mice intimidated by James Dobson and Jerry Falwell.

This is the situation the filibuster was made for.

[Update: Kevin Drum notes that the Democrats have fallen back on the filibuster more than they would have, only because the Republicans have changed the rules to eliminate the other ways that minorities have traditionally blocked nominations. The moderate Republicans who accuse the Democrats of over-using the filibuster are talking out of both sides of their mouths.]

Today's Verses: Graphomania (slightly embarrassing for a blogger)

2005-05-21T05:56:00.000-07:00

From The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, by Milan Kundera. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. Published in the U.S. by HarperPerennial, 1994.

Part Four – Lost Letters

You are hereby excused from the lecture the two Socrateses gave the young woman on the art of writing. I want to talk about something else instead. Recenly I took a taxi from one end of Paris to the other and got a garrulous driver. He couldn’t sleep at night. He had a bad case of insomnia. It all began during the war. He was a sailor. His ship sank. He swam three days and three nights. Finally he was saved. For several months he had wavered between life and death, and though he eventually recovered, he had lost the ability to sleep.

“I live a third more life than you,” he said, smiling.

“And what do you do with the extra third?” I asked.

“I write,” he answered.

I asked him what he wrote.

His life story. The story of a man who swam three days at sea, held his own against death, lost the ability to sleep, but preserved the strength to live.

“Is it for your children? A family chronicle?”

“My kids don’t give a damn.” He laughed bitterly. “No, I’m making a book out of it. I think it could do a lot of people a lot of good.”

My talk with the taxi driver gave me sudden insight into the nature of a writer’s concerns. The reason we write books is that our kids don’t give a damn. We turn to an anonymous world because our wife stops up her ears when we talk to her.

You may ask whether the taxi driver was merely a graphomaniac. Let us define our terms. A woman who writes her lover four letters a day is not a graphomaniac, she is simply a woman in love. But my friend who xeroxes his love letters so he can publish them someday—my friend is a graphomaniac. Graphomania is not a desire to write letters, diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one’s immediate family); it is a desire to write books (to have a public audience of unknown readers). In this sense the taxi driver and Goethe share the same passion. What distinguishes Goethe from the taxi driver is the result of the passion, not the passion itself.

Graphomania (an obsession with writing books) takes on the proportions of a mass epidemic whenever a society develops to the point where it can provide three basic conditions:

1. a high enough degree of general well-being to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities;

2. an advanced state of social atomization and the resultant general feeling of the isolation of the individual;

3. a radical absence of significant social change in the internal development of the nation. (In this connection I find it symptomatic that in France, a country where nothing really happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel. Bibi was absolutely right when she claimed never to have experienced anything from the outside. It is this absence of content, this void, that powers the motor driving her to write.)

But the effect transmits a kind of flashback to the cause. If general isolation causes graphomania, mass graphomania itself reinforces and aggravates the feeling of general isolation. The invention of printing originally promoted mutual understanding. In the era of graphomania the writing of books has the opposite effect: everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without.

Comment: Bush Has Lost the War.

2005-05-19T22:14:00.000-07:00

Bush has lost the war against terror.

The soldiers who personally commit indecencies and atrocities like those described in today’s NYTimes story are responsible for their own grotesque inhumanity, and they should be punished for it. Some of them will be.

But the leaders who created the system that fostered this utterly predictable result are also responsible. President Bush said the people we pick up in Afghanistan are not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention. Attorney General Gonzalez minimized the importance of those “quaint” protections. Judge Jay Bybee said torture is not torture unless it causes major organ failure. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld dittoed all the above.

These stupid, derelict men have shamed themselves and our nation. They have slandered the name of America to the world. They have tirelessly – through stupidity, not intention – created as many terrorists as they have killed. They will never be held responsible.

I am not ashamed to be an American. I am ashamed that these men are Americans. I disown them. They do not speak for me or represent me.

America is not the land of torture. It is the land of the free.

America is not President Bush and Colonel Pappas and Pfc. Lynndie England. I disown them. America is the government employee who risks a career and potentially jail time to blow the whistle, so that we can know what is being done by the people holding the reins of power. I am proud of these Americans. I am proud that when our government acts oppressively, some individuals inside the government will resist. I am proud that some in our media will tell the tale. I am proud that most of us are outraged by atrocities committed by our government. Because of this, we are not Saudi Arabia or Uzbekistan.

I love America not because I was born here, but because, despite the wrongs we are responsible for, our commitment to decency and human dignity is deep and widespread – though still a work in progress. We are trying to climb up from the bestial viciousness that all people and nations are prone to and derive from – to climb up from bigotry and hatred and cruelty.

Even so, we will not talk about this report long. It shames us, so the news media will report it perfunctorily and then turn away. The Democrats will be too scared to talk about it – intimidated by the debasers of America who think it unpatriotic to acknowledge our government’s wrongdoing and to insist on accountability and corrective action.

There are still too many of us in love with hatred. Too many of us who earnestly proclaim, “My country, right or wrong. My mother, drunk or sober.” Too many of us who, scared to death by endless government pronouncements of imminent danger, will endorse any atrocity, committed against any innocent (but brown-skinned Muslim) cab driver, so long as the atrocity is beatified as part of the War On Terror.

I love America, because America hates torture, because America loves justice and decency and human dignity. By betraying those core American values, George W. Bush and his gang have betrayed America.

[Update: This was posted in anger. I've edited it to tone the piece down a bit, though the anger still shows up pretty strongly. It remains a bit harsh, but I think it's fair. I have also edited very slightly for style.]

The Argument: Harsh but Fair. Strong and Honest.

2005-05-19T21:21:00.000-07:00

Who’s Afraid of Howard Dean?

Dean is mean. That, we are supposed to think, is a big problem. It’s a terrible political liability, Republicans tell us, to criticize Republicans bluntly and harshly. We are only going to hurt ourselves, Republicans tell us, by being too hard on Republicans.

The DC-based news media bought it. And Democratic primary voters bought it – opting for a supremely circumspect and thus highly electable milksop instead of that scary Howard Dean. He yelled at a rally, you know. That’s just weird.

The psy ops are back. Robert Novak, always looking out for the good of Democrats, lets us in on a bit of inside baseball:

Since being elected DNC Chairman last February, Howard Dean "has studiously avoided most national television exposure," Robert Novak writes. "But he has been talking to party gatherings across the country, and his intemperate language at these outings contradicts the notion that he has been kept under control. That he will leap onto the national stage Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press with Tim Russert raises concern among the Democratic political players whether he will contain himself."

Anticipation of the appearance "is unsettling for the party's faithful. This will be his first exposure as chairman on a major network interview, and Russert predictably will be well-prepared with a rap sheet of the chairman's verbal assaults. The prospect that Dean will make juicy additions to that collection unnerves Democrats."

Let us muzzle Dean, and fast, before he calls Rick Santorum a liar, Tom DeLay a criminal, and George W. Bush a loser one more time.

Such vicious rhetoric will make us hated. This is not how ordinary Americans talk. It unnerves people to hear a politician called a liar. You can’t convince ordinary Americans that a politician might be a criminal. It’s unheard of, and the word “criminal” is too nasty for the masses in Peoria. They don’t use that language themselves, and they cringe when they hear others use it. And George W. Bush a loser? Have you seen his smashing victory in Iraq? Why, it appears that 37% of Americans approve of Bush’s handling of Iraq. You can’t swim against that kind of tide.

Look to the Republicans, for goodness’ sake. They’ve won. Look at how moderate their language has been. Remember the Swift Boats? And remember the terrible fallout when Bush called Adam Clymer from the New York Times an “asshole”? Why, Bush’s poll numbers almost moved, though not quite.

I think we can drop this foolishness. What matters most when we criticize is that the criticism be justified. If it is justified, then we say it. That’s part of telling the truth. If you are convinced someone is lying, then you say they are lying. If they do a lot of it, then you say they’re a liar.

To be sure, we should be cautious about making accusations. And the graver the accusation, the more cautious we should be. But when it is clear to us that the accusation is justified, we make it. And we make it bluntly.

Nothing is gained by pussyfooting – except that you look like a pussyfooter. Lots of people would rather elect a strong liar than a truth-telling pussyfooter.

Harsh but fair. Strong and honest. That’s what we need, and people know it.

The Argument: Got Principles?

2005-05-18T19:49:00.000-07:00

The Republican attempt to kill the filibuster for judicial nominees – without changing the Senate rules – is good ammo for Democrats. The Republican action is both simple and indefensible. Meaning it will make a handy sledgehammer to use against them, to show that they are:

· Unprincipled

· Hypocritical

· Partisan

· Reckless

The Democratic Party, and every individual Democrat going up against a Senate Republican, should have a short, cutting attack formulated for speeches, impromptu remarks, and TV ads. Here’s one – taking, say, Bill Frist as the target. Read moderately slowly, this is a one-minute script:

Senator Frist says he’s a man of principle. But consider this:

Senator Frist wanted to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominees.

With a two-thirds vote, the Senate could change its rules to eliminate the filibuster.

Since he couldn’t get the votes to change the rules, Senator Frist decided just to break the rules.

With a bare majority vote, he could just declare the filibuster rule unconstitutional. And that’s what he and his fellow Republicans did.

Do you think he actually believed the filibuster was unconstitutional?

Well, Senator Frist himself filibustered a judicial nominee on March 8, 2000.

But that was one of President Clinton’s nominees. Now that we’re talking about President Bush’s nominees, suddenly the filibuster is unconstitutional.

What do you think? Principle or Politics? Integrity or hypocrisy?

[alternate last line: What sort of principles does Senator Frist have?]

Here’s a 30-second version, for TV ads:

[The phrase “Got Principles?” appears on the screen.]

Five years ago, Senator Frist filibustered a judicial nominee.

Today, he says it’s unconstitutional to filibuster a judicial nominee.

What’s changed?

Well, back then it was one of President Clinton’s nominees. Today it’s President Bush’s nominees.

Senator Frist thinks the Constitution changes depending on who is President.

Do you?

I hope Howard Dean, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi have hired some people who know how to make an argument.

Comment: A Glimpse of Spine -- On Loan From the UK

2005-05-17T22:46:00.000-07:00

I know virtually nothing about George Galloway – the British Member of Parliament who testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee today.

But he showed what it looks like when a political leader stands up to intimidating opposition and answers back unflinchingly. And on the narrow question he spoke to today, he faced down the senators. The committee had leveled grave accusations at Galloway – that he had illegally, corruptly profited from the Iraq oil-for-food program. Galloway showed the accusations and the evidence they were founded on to be a pile of nothing. (The video is available here.)

I am judging only from what was said at the hearing. And perhaps evidence will be discovered in the future that will prove the committee right. But as it stands today, the accusations and the evidence looks like a pile of nothing.

In fact, Galloway made the committee look like gullible, juvenile hacks.

***

Again, I don’t know anything about Galloway apart from what I saw today. He may be the very Devil himself. I only know that this is how you are supposed to act when someone has made grave, false accusations against you.

I recall when then-Attorney General Ashcroft went to a Senate committee to testify about the then-pending PATRIOT [sic] Act. Ashcroft said to the senators, “To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty; my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists—for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends.” Ashcroft was talking about the Democratic senators in front of him.

This statement should have caused immediate shouts of outrage from those senators and relentless demands for an apology. Ashcroft had just called them traitors to their faces. Their anger should have scorched everyone in the room. But no. They sat there, not saying a word, just taking it.

Is it any wonder that Americans don’t trust Democrats with national security. These sad, timid weaklings can’t even speak up for themselves when a reckless partisan hack clothed in attorney general’s garb calls them traitors to their faces.

***

I hope Democratic politicians were watching Galloway today. They could learn something.

What I saw today was almost as refreshing as the last five years have been dispiriting.

Comment: Press Grovels Before BushCo on Command

2005-05-16T22:53:00.000-07:00

The news media, with no perceptible BS detector (unless sexcapades are involved) was abuzz today with the scandalous news that Newsweek printed a false story about American military and intelligence personnel desecrating the Koran – a story that caused riots in Afghanistan which killed about 15 people.

That was the story, more or less. It was clear from the moment I heard the story that the scandal was probably cooked up. But the news media can’t be expected to listen carefully, ask questions, and report details.

See Arthur Silber’s comments here and here.

Five quick points, five news stories:

1. The underlying claim of the Newsweek story – that American personnel have been desecrating the Koran – is well-founded. See The Raw Story, for instance, for reporting on this. Or even the New York Times.

2. All Newsweek said that is now in question is that an internal military investigation concluded that the desecration happened. Apparently the military says its investigation has not concluded that.

Curious, though, that the military didn’t object based on this point until 10 days after Newsweek published the piece. (See the NYT piece above.) Maybe it’s an innocent delay. Maybe the findings of the investigation were re-written after they were leaked to Newsweek.

3. The right-wing attack on Newsweek – that a false story caused riots and got people killed – is transparent propaganda. First, our generals say it’s not so. (See the NYT piece.) But you don’t need to know that. You only need to know that (a.) chronological sequence is not the same as causation, (b.) things in Afghanistan (and everywhere BushCo has blundered) are complicated and have not been going well for some time, and (c.) the claims of causation were made at the drop of a hat, before anyone could possibly have any sound basis on which to make the claims.

4. The right-wing noise machine has attempted to intimidate the press virtually since the moment the planes hit the towers. BushCo and its hacks have accused the press of recklessly endangering America consistently, in response to press coverage of news that is bad for BushCo – or in response to the mere asking of impertinent questions (i.e., “But why do the nuclear experts at the Department of Energy say you’re dead wrong about those aluminum tubes?”).

5. The press has overwhelmingly, consistently, virtually since 9/11, submitted to BushCo pressure not to ask impertinent questions but to use their reporting and chatter to demonstrate their “patriotism” – meaning loyalty to Dear Leader.

And a bonus point/story: BushCo now believes it is wrong to make inaccurate claims that get people killed. That is news indeed.

***

Now, a nervous expression of hope: I think this attack on Newsweek may be a little like the religious right’s vampiric Schiavo-fest. It may be that the press will come to see that Newsweek has been stupidly bludgeoned over a significant but not dramatic inaccuracy in a report the underlying substance of which is credible. The press may begin to see that this sort of working-over can be done to any reporter, any news outlet that gets on the wrong side of the war party. The press may begin to get back on its feet, having had an epiphany brought on by this mock scandal.

What would this mean? It should mean reporting all five of these stories – yes, even #5, about the press’ submissiveness and abandonment of its role as a check upon the people controlling the state.

We should have a few days of stories on the evidence of Koran desecration, and of other abuses. (Remember Abu Ghraib?) We should have stories, in increasing depth, over the next few months on BushCo’s various fetid dealings with the news media. We should have an accounting of the Fourth Estate’s dereliction of duty.

-- Well. I’m way beyond mere optimism here.

Attempted Parody: Government to Place Surveillance Cameras in Toilets

2005-05-15T22:24:00.000-07:00

Washington (AP)

Michael Chertoff, Director of Homeland Security, announced today that the Department will begin installing video surveillance cameras in all toilets in all public restrooms and in many private residences.

The decision to put cameras in public toilets had been expected for months. The decision to put cameras in private residence toilets surprised many observers. Under the new rule, cameras must go in all toilets of any private residence of any person receiving any federal payments whether social security, medicare, or welfare payments.

“We are sensitive to the privacy concerns raised by our decision,” Director Chertoff said, “but anuses are unique, like fingerprints. The new decision will allow us to identify likely terrorists and to track their movements.”

Chertoff said the Department will soon begin soliciting public comments on proposed rules requiring female airplane passengers going through airport security to submit to mock papsmears and male passengers to submit to a cystoscopy (a procedure in which a scope on a flexible tube is inserted into the penis). Such measures, Chertoff said, would gather information that might have potential to aid law enforcement.

[Update: Typos corrected]

Comment: God Red in Tooth and Claw

2005-05-15T10:50:00.000-07:00

Darwin exonerated God. The New Creationists are blaming God again.

Life on earth – human and animal life – runs on pain. To live, one creature must kill another creature, and in doing so must inflict physical pain and, in the higher animals, emotional pain. Life runs on fear, pain, grief, killing. That is the logic of the universe. It is inescapable. It is the law of nature.

People had always blamed this on God – impliedly making God into a cruel, bloody torturer. (This image of God was elaborated at length in the Old Testament, of course.) Darwin said No. Darwin said that God is not to blame, that life has evolved over countless ages in accordance with purely physical dictates.

Darwin’s defense of God is incomplete, of course. There remained the question of just what role God did have in creating the cruel logic of life. Perhaps God is still responsible for the physical dictates under which life evolved – so that God is still indirectly responsible for the cruelty of life. But Darwin at least mitigated God’s responsibility. After Darwin, God was at most indirectly responsible – a contributing factor, not a direct perpetrator.

The old creationists never had any excuse for God. The best they could come up with was, “Well … there must be an excuse we can’t think of.” No one has ever improved on the apostle Paul’s attempt in chapter 9 of his letter to a Roman church: “As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated. What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid…. Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God?” Job got the same answer directly from Yahweh himself. After Job had been cruelly tormented – as a sort of spiritual lab rat experimented on by Yahweh and Satan – Job protested that he did not deserve this. “How dare you complain,” Yahweh said to Job, “I could break you like a twig.” “I’m sorry,” Job said, “Don’t hurt me. Praise you.”

The New Creationists are blaming God again. They say that notwithstanding Darwin’s being right about a lot, God directly controlled key parts of the evolutionary process – deliberately guiding the evolution of life toward the cruel logic of life on earth. So it was God’s deliberate plan that in order to survive, the killer whale would have to rip the harp seal cub apart while the harp seal mother moans on the beach. It was God’s deliberate plan that the wolf would die unless it chased down the terror-stricken deer and tore off chunks of its flesh while the deer lay dying.

God must feel like the defendant charged with failing to maintain a building which collapsed and killed some people – the defendant whose lawyer says in his opening statement, “My client didn’t neglect the building at all. He kidnapped those people and blew up the building on purpose, to murder them.” The New Creationists aren’t doing God any favors.

The New Creationists, while reviving the case against God, do offer the same lame non-excuses: There must be some excuse we don’t know about, they say. “It's hard to evaluate [a design],” they say, “unless you know what the Designer was trying to create…. Flawless design may not be [God’s] point."

Don’t hire that lawyer to defend you. Indeed, if God is to blame for the cruel logic of life on earth, then his point was at least in part to cause fear, pain, and grief. But maybe there’s an excuse that we just can’t think of. Maybe Yahweh had a bet with Baal or Satan or one of the other gods.

Comment: Shell-Shocked Democrats Remain on their Backs

2005-05-15T00:20:00.000-07:00

To be sure, some can stand up and have stood up. Lots are still on their backs, cringing whenever a Republican or a news personality walks past.

House Democrats have circulated two letters in the last couple weeks. One letter demanded an explanation from the White House of the Downing Street Memo – an internal British government memo strongly indicating that BushCo had decided early to invade Iraq and was perverting the intelligence to support the decision.

There are 201 House Democrats. Only 89 signed the letter.

A second letter has circulated. It calls on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to appoint a special counsel to investigate whether “whether high-ranking officials within the Bush Administration violated the War Crimes Act, 18 U.S.C. 2441, or the Anti-Torture Act, 18 U.S.C. 2340 by allowing the use of torture techniques banned by domestic and international law at recognized and secret detention sites in Iraq, Afghanistan Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.”

Only 51 House Democrats have so far signed this letter.

There is no moral ambiguity here, and no doubt that the letters are not only justified, but necessary. The Downing Street Memo seems to confirm that BushCo deliberately deceived the country about a war that has killed, crippled, or otherwise devastated countless thousands of innocent people – American, Allied, and Iraqi. BushCo must be forced to answer up. Their answer will be evasions and deception, but they must be put to the effort and embarrassment. A betrayal of the nation’s trust, in matters of war and peace, must be answered for.

Likewise with BushCo’s endorsement of torture – torture by Americans directly and more brutal torture by other nations (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Uzbekistan, etc.) doing BushCo’s dirtier business for them. We don’t believe in torture. It’s illegal. There is strong reason to believe that BushCo officials have broken the law, and there is no reason to believe the Department of Justice [sic] will investigate and prosecute adequately through its normal channels.

The House Democrats who remain on their backs don’t recognize fundamental principles. I assume these mice are afraid that signing on to the letters could hurt them politically. I doubt it. If these politicians were any good at politics, they would be able to use the issues to their advantage. BushCo is down in the polls. But maybe I’m wrong. Doesn’t matter. On fundamental principle, you take the political risk.

There are issues where wind-sniffing is OK. Not on fundamental betrayals of the nation’s trust. Not on the perversion of basic American values.

Where have all the leaders gone? Why are we cursed with all these cowards?

Attempted Parody: Pope Beatifies Friend; President Knights Self; Preacher "Holifies" Reagan

2005-05-13T22:54:00.000-07:00

Washington (AP)

Pope Ratzinger will suspend the ordinary rules to make his friend, the late Pope John Paul II, a saint. The rule is that the process to make someone a saint can begin no sooner than five years after the person dies. It has already been over five weeks since John Paul died, the Vatican spokesman pointed out.

Thousands of miracles have been attributed to John Paul since his death. Hundreds of commuters have reported that their windshield wipers miraculously sprang back into operation after being inoperable. John Paul’s face has appeared miraculously all over the world since his death as well. His face has appeared on bedsheets, omelets, and shower curtains.

Also today, in a move parallel to Pope Ratzinger’s decision, President George W. Bush has announced that he will now be referred to as Sir George the Great, Knight of Liberty. White House tailors are designing appropriate costumes for the President’s new title.

Late today, a related development was reported in Tuskaloosa. The Reverend Jerry Falwell announced that he was declaring the late President Ronald Reagan to be holy. Falwell is a member of a Protestant denomination which does not recognize saints. Falwell said he was “holifying” Reagan, and that this was the Protestant equivalent of calling someone a saint.

In related news, the Reagan Monument will break ground in June. The plans call for a 200-foot fiberglass likeness of Reagan to tower over the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The statue will show Reagan wearing an Uncle Sam outfit and a jaunty smile, as Reagan pats an elderly Black man on the head.

Comment: Hold Your Nose and Choke It Down

2005-05-12T21:37:00.000-07:00

BushCo is forcing the Senate Republicans to eat a turd: John Bolton for UN ambassador. It’s hard to see how any good can come of this either for BushCo or for the Republicans at large. Assuming BushCo succeeds in forcing the turd down their throats, the moderate Senate Republicans will not like the taste of it. And if the moderates successfully fend it off, then the yellow rose of Bush will have lost more of its bloom.

The only Republicans who like Bolton for the job are those that hate the UN. But most don’t hate it, even if they have a slight distaste for it. Dick Lugar is not John Birch. Chuck Hagel is not a Know-Nothing. These guys may abase themselves and scrape their foreheads for BushCo, but it will leave bruises.

And the matter has been covered widely enough that – at least among the class of people who follow the news – the votes of Lugar, Hagel, and others will probably be transparently political. People who would ordinarily give the senators the benefit of the doubt will take it for granted that on this one the senators are putting party loyalty above principle, and are just choking down a turd.

We may have that rarest of political issues these days: Whatever the outcome, there is no way the Republicans can win, and there is no way the Democrats can lose. (Well … if there’s a way, the Democrats will find it.)

It would be far better for the country if Bolton is rejected. We need someone who can work within the UN effectively, to do good. But even if Bolton is confirmed, the experience will weaken the power of BushCo to do further harm elsewhere. And it will hasten the efforts by the rest of the world (the EU and the Chinese in particular) to create power structures to offset and contain the new American empire. Just the legacy – along with an Iraq in flames – that Little Big Man (or is it Ozymandias?) has been lusting for.

Comment: Shiny Smiley Idiots

2005-05-11T21:20:00.000-07:00

A day or two ago I had CNN’s morning news-&-BS show on in the background as I got ready for work. I hadn’t watched TV news or chat of any kind in weeks – maybe months – and I never watch cable news. Watching this, I remembered why.

The show has two bland, smiley, young-looking main characters – a white man and a woman with a name that suggests she’s a Latina, though I really have no idea. The show also has a character who is older and wrinkled in the face. He’s played by a white guy who apparently used to star on some local Manhattan news station.

The wrinkled character is a curmudgeon with a conservative bent. He doesn’t smile much, and when he does, it’s to suggest constipation. He was doing a routine about a provision in a bill recently passed by Congress that will, as the curmudgeon described it, give a billion dollars to states to pay for emergency hospital care for illegal aliens.

The curmudgeon grumpily said this was “our money” – alluding, I'm sure, to the fact that illegal aliens pay taxes just like the rest of us (including FICA taxes, though they will receive no Social Security or Medicare return). And the curmudgeon wondered aloud what those of us listening to him thought about this outrage.

Over the course of the half hour or so that I had the show on, the curmudgeon reported back with two or three batches of emails in response to his question. From the first batch, it was clear that those of us listening to him thought it was outrageous that the federal government was going to pay for illegal aliens to get medical care when lots of us citizens can’t even get medical care.

Brushing my teeth, I heard this just as a scrum over what services illegal aliens should get. But as I was putting my socks on, it occurred to me that the law in question wasn’t about that.

I remembered that in many, if not all, states, hospitals are required by law to give emergency care to anyone who shows up with an emergency – whether citizen, green-card holder, or illegal alien. Everyone is entitled to emergency care. (Look here, for instance.) And it occurred to me that the only issue as to the passage of the federal funding provision was whether the federal government should help the states pay for the obligations already enshrined in law. And the argument in favor of federal reimbursements is obvious: It’s the federal government’s obligation to keep the illegals out of the country in the first place, so the states shouldn’t be left holding the bag for the cost of the failure to keep them out.

This occurred to me as I was putting on my socks.

Why hadn’t it occurred to the bland smiley people and the wizened curmudgeon? To be fair, they are not journalists. They merely play them on TV. But even so…. These three clowns were on TV addressing an audience of some millions. On a topic they had planned out ahead of time, they were clueless. They knew less than I know, and I've just told you all I know. They evidently hadn’t researched it – that is, told a staffer to research it – at all. And they were completely unembarrassed about talking out their anuses on a matter of some importance. Again, I grant you that they’re not journalists, and so don’t have any obligations to participate responsibly in the civic discourse. They’re just a sort of sugared television cream of wheat. But still….

They’re a strange breed, these smiling idiots. Most of us feel stupid when we stumble into talking about things we know nothing about. We feel our ignorance, and we fear looking stupid. We blush. Humanity, Mark Twain said, is the only animal that blushes – or needs to. TV “news” personalities in this respect have been gelded. They have the need, but lack the ability.

Attempted Parody: Moses Banned from County Council Prayer List

2005-05-10T21:40:00.000-07:00

Richmond (AP)

A federal appeals court today said that a Virginia county has the right to ban Moses from its list of religious leaders to give prayers at the beginning of the county council’s sessions.

The county rotates through a list of leaders to give the opening prayers. The list includes many Christian, Jewish, and even Muslim leaders, but Moses is banned.

“The list is limited to monotheists,” said Randy Whitehead, the Chesterfield County Council Clerk. Monotheists believe there is one and only one God.

“Moses believes there are many gods,” Whitehead said. “While Moses worships only Yahweh, he does believe there are other, less powerful gods whom Moses and the Israelites cannot serve,” Whitehead said.

Moses confirms that he believes Yahweh is the God of gods and Lord of lords but that other, lesser deities exist. “The heathen go whoring after Baal, Ashteroth, Moloch, and divers gods,” Moses said. “The gods of the heathen are as children. Yahweh ruleth over them,” Moses said. Asked specifically whether he means to say that these other gods actually exist, Moses said simply, “of course.” “But Yahweh is a jealous god,” Moses added. “Who burneth sacrifices and praiseth the names of other gods shall be smitten,” Moses said.

Whitehead said that while the county council is glad that Moses worships only Yahweh, Moses nevertheless does not qualify as a monotheist, because Moses acknowledges the existence of other deities. “The council’s policy excludes polytheistic pagans,” Whitehead said.

The court of appeals said that the council’s decision to exclude Moses because of the nature of Moses’ religious beliefs does not denigrate Moses or his belief.

Moses said today that Yahweh will smite the court and the county.

Comment: Bureaucrats -- Safeguards of Liberty

2005-05-09T12:20:00.000-07:00

The protection of democracy depends largely on cultural and ethical norms by individuals inside the government, at all levels, from lowest to highest. If individual cops think it's ok to rough people up, we're all in danger of being abused by the state. If government bureaucrats think it's ok to lie to the public, then we don't have a government accountable to the people. It is vital to democracy that individuals within the government be individually committed to democratic norms.

The silver lining of the reign of Bush has been the demonstration that many of the people within government are in fact committed to democratic norms -- enough to hazard risks to their careers and public slander by blowing the whistle. Many, if not most, of the public disclosures of indecencies committed by the Bush administration have come from government officials or employees offended by the insult to democracy.

The Bush experience emphasizes the importance of maintaining institutional measures to inculcate a democratic culture within government (including the military, of course). It uderscores the importance of strong whistleblower protections. Even in the best of circumstances, whistleblowing is a hazardous activity.

And the Bush experience suggests that Congress should be less deferential toward presidential nominees for the executive branch. A great deal of damage can be done to our democracy simply by purging the government of individuals willing to blow the whistle on government impropriety. Congress should carefully scrutinize nominees who show an inclination to pervert the bureaucracy, to purge the professional ranks of people who are not loyal to the administration, or otherwise to manipulate the institutions for political loyalty. Congress should be less deferential to the president concerning such nominees.

The rule of law is about culture and individual government actors as much as it is about statutes, regulations, official policies, judges, etc. We need to keep this more in mind.

A few examples of government whistleblowing off the top of my head:

Paul O'Neill, treasury secretary, spilled the beans about Bush deciding to go to war with Iraq early on, and then fitting the intelligence to the plan. (O'Neill's story is confirmed by the leaked British government memo saying essentially the same thing.)

John Diiulio, hired by Bush to coordinate government efforts to fund religious programs, spoke out about the disturbing subordination of policy to political strategy inside the White House. (Though Diiulio later recanted when squeezed by the Bush slander machine.)

Richard Clarke, counterterrorism head under Bush I, Clinton, and Bush the Younger, commented publicly on BushCo's frivolous approach to terrorism both before and after 9/11. For this, Clarke was slandered nonstop for weeks on every TV station BushCo could think of.

Senior military lawyers sought civilian help sought civilian help in opposing the Bush administration's plans for detaining and treating people picked up in the "war on terror" -- plans that were abusive and foolish, if not illegal.

A Health and Human Services bureaucrat told the press that his political-appointee supervisors threatened to fire him if he revealed to Congress that the Bush administration was dramatically understating the cost of Bush's then-pending prescription drug bill.

An interpreter at the Guantanamo Bay detention center told about abusive interrogation tactics used on people swept up in our operations in Afghanistan.

There are many other instances, of course.

Bible Lesson: No Prohibition of Gay Sex (reading the King James Version literally)

2005-05-07T22:10:00.000-07:00

I do not say that it is impossible to read the Bible as prohibiting gay sex. Certainly, one can reasonably read such a prohibition into the text. But then the prohibition comes as much from you as from the Bible. I say only that such a prohibition is not there in the literal text of the King James Version.

This narrow conclusion is more important than it may sound, because most fundamentalist anti-gay bigots believe (or think they believe) in the literal meaning of the Bible. And most fundamentalists think the King James Version has some special status as the authentic translation. (At least this was the attitude when I was growing up as a fundamentalist.)

There are very few references that even come close to talking about gay sex. None of them — taken at face value, without adding or subtracting anything — unequivocally prohibits it.

In the Old Testament, there are three passages.

(1.) Leviticus 18:22 — “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” Don’t lie with men as you do with women. This means no more than that you can’t have with men the same kind of sex you have with men. Not a problem for a gay man or a lesbian, who has sex only with either men or women, but not both. Only an inconvenience for bi-sexuals.

(2.) Leviticus 20:13 — “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” Same as (1.) above.

(3.) Deuteronomy 23:17 — “There shall be no whore of the daughters of Israel, nor a sodomite of the sons of Israel.” This clearly says that Israelite men must not be sodomites. But it doesn’t say what a sodomite is — nor does any other passage. Looking at the famous story of Sodom and Gomorrah (in Genesis 19) doesn’t help, because it shows the people of Sodom doing a number of bad things — like a father giving his two virgin daughters to a gang of men, so that the men can gang-rape them (as they do). This verse might well be telling Israelite fathers not to have their daughters be gang-raped. You can read some other meaning into it, but then the meaning comes, in decisive part, from you, not the Bible.

The New Testament has four arguably relevant passages.

(4.) 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 — “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.”

This passage puts being effeminate and abusing yourself with mankind on par with committing adultery. But having gay sex is not the same as being effeminate. I hear that some gay men are very butch. (And notice that the passage doesn’t criticize men who are effeminate, but anyone — man or woman — who is effeminate.) Unfortunately, the passage doesn’t say what counts as abusing yourself with mankind. It probably covers rough sex with a man, whether you are a man or a woman. Maybe it covers football and rugby, which can be very abusive. It would certainly seem to cover suicide with the aid of a man. But it’s not at all clear that it covers ordinary gay sex. You can read that into the passage if you like, but that’s you, not the passage.

(5.) 1 Timothy 1:9-10 — “Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, for whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine….” This is the same as (4.) above.

(6.) Romans 1:26 – 27 — “For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.”

This passage (which later puts these wrongs on par with fornication, envy, murder, debate, whispering, backbiting, and more) talks about “leaving the natural use” but doesn’t define that use. And it talks about men lusting after each other and doing unseemly things together, without saying what is unseemly. Again, you can read into that what you want. Many wives could talk about their husbands lusting after their poker buddies and doing unseemly things like getting boozed up and coming home too late.

To be clear, I think it is entirely reasonable to read a criticism of gay sex into this passage. That’s how I read it, in fact. But that’s me exercising my own puny reason to come up with a meaning that is not there if you just take the text at face value, adding nothing and subtracting nothing.

(7.) Jude 1:6 – 7 — “And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day. Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.”

Same problem as I described under (3). The people of Sodom apparently made a habit of raping strangers who came into the city (and the daughters of the strangers’ hosts, and probably anyone else they could get their hands on). This is fornication, and it is going after strange flesh. Nothing here necessarily about gay sex.

If you find yourself in conversation with a fundamentalist anti-gay bigot, I suggest you simply tell them that on the issue of gay sex, you take the Bible literally, and therefore you see no prohibition of gay sex. (Though clearly the Old Testament would prohibit you from eating shellfish or wearing clothes made of more than one kind of fabric.) This reading may surprise your fundamentalist conversation partner.

In all fairness, I do think you should agree that he reasonably reads such a prohibition into the Bible, but tell him that you don’t regard his exercise of puny human reason as authoritative.

Movie Review: The Kingdom of Heaven

2005-05-06T19:34:00.000-07:00

Of the movie reviewers polled by Rotten Tomatoes, only 42% are favorable toward the movie – and most of those are only tepidly favorable. I’m not sure why. I liked it, and the criticisms of the few reviews I’ve read strike me as off-base. I recommend the movie.

The central complaint is that the movie, driven by a moralistic impulse, creates absurd, unhistorical characters. David Edelstein (a reviewer who liked the unbelievably incompetent remake of The Stepford Wives) is typical: “Kingdom of Heaven is an epic about Christian crusaders who happen to be liberal humanists willing to die for the sake of religious tolerance. That's just ... weird.”

The criticism misses the mark. The “liberal humanists” in the movie are the king of Jerusalem and a bloc of his barons. It is 100 years after Jerusalem was first taken, and the Arabs are capable of destroying the Europeans. Or so the king and this bloc believe, and they turn out to be right. So the king and this bloc of barons are accommodationists. Jerusalem is open to Christians, Muslims, and Jews. The king attempts to ensure the safety of Muslim pilgrims. The members of this political faction are pragmatic and take a dim view of the religious fanaticism at the heart of the Crusades. That fanaticism, they believe, is likely to get the European possessors of Jerusalem killed.

Then there are the fundamentalist Crusaders, who want a war with the heathen and set about to provoke the Muslims into attacking. Eventually, having suffered enough raids and other depredations, the Muslims acknowledge that the modus vivendi is dead, and they attack.

As pragmatic accommodationists who have backed away from fundamentalist-style religion, the members of this bloc have some respect for the Muslim inhabitants of the region. This, I suppose, is why some reviewers think the characters are anachronistic historical absurdities. I think the reviewers have a naïve, simplistic view of history. It is true, I’m sure, that religious fundamentalism and chauvinism were very widespread throughout Europe at the time. But there were lots of people, and people vary from one to another, sometimes greatly – then as now. Anyone who thinks that all medieval European Christians were devout, uncynical believers, for instance, don’t know much about the popes.

There is nothing particularly surprising about the existence of some Christians, even then, who were not fundamentalist chauvinists. Especially if they’re political leaders in a situation where they realistically believe their survival depends on getting along with their natural enemies. Liberal democracy developed in large part out of the simple recognition that fundamentalist chauvinism, whether religious or national, just gets everyone killed. The accommodationist characters in the movie didn’t strike me as that odd.

(And at least two of the characters seem to have been more tolerant of potential enemies because they carried a strong sense of personal guilt and moral frailty.)

The movie makes the simply point very nicely that fundamentalist chauvinism just gets everyone killed. It’s a simple point, and an old one, but novelty isn’t everything, you know. The point needs to be made – these days especially.

There are some merely aesthetic complaints, too. (I think it was Edelstein, too, who complained that the battle scenes are confusing and hard to follow. I don’t know if he was joking or not. Battles, I’m reliably told, actually are confusing and hard to follow.) It is enough to say that I found the movie interesting, engaging, and entertaining. There’s no accounting for taste.

I think some of the reviewers were anxious to accuse a big Hollywood director of being vapid and do-gooderly. Maybe that’s how people who watch movies for a living prove that they’re not limousine liberals. If it gives them some pleasure, good for them.

But I recommend the movie.

Today's Verses: If I am going to be drowned ...

2005-05-05T18:25:00.000-07:00

From “The Open Boat,” by Stephen Crane. Published 1898.

“If I am going to be drowned — if I am going to be drowned — if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?”

During this dismal night, it may be remarked that a man would conclude that it was really the intention of the seven mad gods to drown him, despite the abominable injustice of it. For it was certainly an abominable injustice to drown a man who had worked so hard, so hard. The man felt it would be a crime most unnatural. Other people had drowned at sea since galleys swarmed with painted sails, but still —

When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wished to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. Any visible expression of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers.

Then, if there be no tangible thing to hoot, he feels, perhaps, the desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one knee, and with hands supplicant, saying, “Yes, but I love myself.”

A high cold star on a winter’s night is the word he feels that she says to him. Thereafter he knows the pathos of his situation.

The men in the dinghy had not discussed these matters, but each had, no doubt, reflected upon them in silence and according to his mind. There was seldom any expression upon their faces save the general one of complete weariness. Speech was devoted to the business of the boat.

To chime the notes of his emotion, a verse mysteriously entered the correspondent’s head. He had even forgotten that he had forgotten this verse, but it suddenly was in his mind.

A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers;

There was lack of woman’s nursing, there was dearth of woman’s tears;

But a comrade stood beside him, and he took the comrade’s hand,

And he said, “I never more shall see my own, my native land.”

In his childhood the correspondent had been made acquainted with the fact that a soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers, but he had never regarded it as important. Myriads of his schoolfellows had informed him of the soldier’s plight, but the dinning had naturally ended by making him perfectly indifferent. He had never considered it his affair that a soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers, nor had it appeared to him as a matter for sorrow. It was less to him than breaking a pencil’s point.

Now, however, it quaintly came to him as a human, living thing. It was no longer merely a picture of a few throes in the breast of a poet, meanwhile drinking tea and warming his feet at the grate; it was an actuality — stern, mournful, and fine.

The correspondent plainly saw the soldier. He lay on the sand with his feet out straight and still. While his pale left hand was upon his chest in an attempt to thwart the going of his life, the blood came between his fingers. In the far Algerian distance, a city of low square forms was set against a sky that was faint with the last sunset hues. The correspondent, plying the oars and dreaming of the slow and slower movements of the lips of the soldier, was moved by a profound and perfectly impersonal comprehension. He was sorry for the soldier of the Legion who lay dying in Algiers.

Comment: Powerful Man, Weak Personality

2005-05-04T21:48:00.000-07:00

One of the perversely comical paradoxes of Democratic politics these days is that the people we have in positions of great power are such weak personalities. Twice in two campaign cycles we have nominated candidates for president who displayed morbid insecurity and made the country cringe at their efforts to impersonate some other kind of person. And it’s not just Gore and Kerry. There seems to be a whole raft of politicos whose disturbingly strained smiles and gestures show mainly that they’re terribly, terribly afraid that people aren’t going to like them.

There is some systemic flaw, some structural defect, with any system that puts such weak personalities in positions of power. (John Rogers, at the Kung Fu Monkey blog, has some useful and insightful comments on related questions here and here.)

I think part of the problem is just that the whole Democratic party – including primary voters – seems to be infected with the fear that the rest of the country isn’t going to like them. I think that is the root of the stupid, self-defeating obsession with tactical positioning and voting. Gore won the primaries over Bradley largely because the party’s movers and shakers thought Bradley was a bad choice for the general election because the rest of the country wouldn’t like them. Kerry won – and Dean was trashed by everyone but a re-birthed Al Gore – for the same reason.

But morbidly insecure people who are afraid that the rest of the country won’t like them are very bad judges of what the rest of the country will like. Tactical voting doesn’t work, because it’s too damned hard to know how the rest of the country will react. For example: The supposedly catastrophic baggage for Howard Dean was that he enacted a civil union law as governor, and that he opposed the Iraq Invasion from the beginning. Neither was a liability. Bush endorsed civil unions himself, as election day drew near, and well before election day the public knew the premise for the war was false and that the clowns running the show had fubarred it. (Google “fubar” if you don’t know the term. I’m trying to run a clean blog here.)

A morbidly insecure party that falls into the trap of making tactical positioning the primary, decisive factor in its decisions ends up with morbidly insecure candidates who creep everybody out. Gore creeped people out with his strained, please-like-me smiles and multiple personalities in the debates. Kerry looked – maybe not creepy – but sad with his gun-toting photo ops and strained efforts to be vivacious. No one wants a leader who is creepy or pitiful (though the alternative wasn’t appealing either).

And weakness of personality is all-embracing. Both Kerry and Edwards said after the campaign that they each disagreed with the decision not to respond immediately to the Swift Boat slanders. Apparently the men who wanted to be President and Vice President of the United States weren’t capable of standing up to their employees, whose decision they disagreed with.

I don’t think this weakness of personality, this morbid fear that people won’t like you, is natural to the politicos. Rather, it seems to come from being immersed in a culture that tells them a hundred times a day that people aren’t going to like them unless they pretend to like Nascar and hate coffee drinks. We can be pretty sure that Americans are not as trivial and stupid and bigoted as the David Brooks’s of the world think they are. Nascar fans know that not everyone is going to like Nascar. In any event, there comes a point when you have to recognize that the people you’re listening to are poisoning you – perverting your judgment and sapping your strength. And you turn them off. You don’t invite their advice, you don’t read their newspaper columns, you don’t go to their cocktail parties, because they are transforming you into a quivering, pathetic mess.

How do you know which advisers and opinion mongers are likely to have this effect on you? They’re the ones whose message is, in effect, “Be someone else.”

What if they’re right, though? What if people really won’t vote for you? Don’t you get it? The choice is not between taking their advice and winning or being yourself and losing. If people really don’t want you, then the choice will have been between losing on your feet or losing on your knees, between losing a fight or being a loser. Now, if this is a hard choice for you, then you’re already a loser.

Attempted Parody: Networks Sing to Bush

2005-05-03T18:20:00.000-07:00

Washington (AP)

Beginning this week, three times a day the Public Broadcasting Service will play a song praising President Bush. CNN, MSNBC, and ABC will follow suit.

The networks have adopted the new policy, in the words of CNN Chairman Andy Tripe, “to balance the liberal bias that creeps into our programming despite our best efforts.”

The song was written by former Attorney General John Ashcroft. It will be sung to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Each network’s principal on-air personalities will lead the singing, with backup by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

The song is titled “Dear Leader, Great Leader.” The lyrics are as follows:

Dear Leader, you’re the greatest man in the entire world.

You are brave and true and lead us well in all that we must do.

You have fought so bravely all our wars we don’t know what to do .

Your courage makes us strong.

(chorus)

Glory! Praise to our Dear Leader

Your courage makes us strong.

We love you so ‘cuz you love us ‘tho we don’t deserve you to.

You love the brown and black and yellow just like they were white.

You free the savage from his yoke and then you kill the bad’ns.

Your love will make us free.

(chorus)

… Your love will make us free.

God chose you for our leader and we humbly bow to God.

You are like God so we follow you and love you, love you, too.

The enemy within our midst cow’rs in prison ‘cuz of you.

You crush the evil lib’s.

(chorus)

… You crush the evil lib’s.

Dear Leader, we will follow you. Lead on and lead us home.

Dear Leader, we will honor you. Ask of us what you will.

Dear Leader, we will sing to you our love and love and love.

We love you, yes we do.

(chorus)

… We love you, yes we do.

(final chorus)

… We love you, yes we do.

Comment: Police Strip-Search Kerry Supporters for Attending Bush Rally

2005-05-03T17:47:00.000-07:00

This is not a parody.

Two 50-year old women they were arrested and strip-searched for attending a presidential campaign rally for President Bush held in a city park in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

President Bush held a rally at a city park. Apparently, the city had rented the park to the campaign, however, so the Bush campaign could treat the park essentially as private property.

The two women thought the city park was public property, and presumably thought President Bush was their president, too, and that they could go to his rally. When told to leave, they apparently didn’t retreat back far enough, and they asked why they had to leave a city park. So they were arrested for trespassing.

At the county jail, they were strip-searched.

This is how you use the state to intimidate political dissenters. But how do we crank this up a notch?

1. Get search warrants to ransack people’s houses. Here’s how: A campaign worker reports to a reliable local cop that members of your opponent’s local support group are planning to disrupt your rally and to commit not only trespass, but assaults (with water balloons, but you can leave that out), and theft (of posters, but you can leave that out). The reliable cop gets search warrants signed by a reliable judge. Now you’re in. Just take the search warrants to the houses of the main supporters of your political opponent. Now slash their sofas, chairs, etc., throw everything in their cabinets and closets on the floor, tear the wallpaper off the walls, rip up the carpeting, smash the floorboards. Look carefully for plans and water balloons and bombs.

2. Strip searching is fine, but you can’t stop there. Some hints on improving your technique:

a. Do the strip search with a crowd of cops in the room (to protect you in case the women make any sudden moves).

b. Do a body cavity search – both vaginal and anal. Start with your fingers, but use other implements as well – coke bottles, broomsticks, whatever. Things can be well hidden.

c. Take pictures and video. If, through the police department’s negligent handling, the photos and video get posted on the internet and passed around the local community – well, that’s unfortunate. No liability for negligence in administrative procedures, though.

These two women were strip-searched because George W. Bush didn’t want his critics messing up the TV pictures of adoring crowds.

He’s a uniter, not a divider.

He wants to raise the tone in Washington.

He’s the most powerful man in the world, and all he cares about is keeping you safe.

Yes, Dear Leader, yes.

Attempted Parody: Kansas Puts Copernicus On Trial

2005-05-02T19:14:00.000-07:00

Topeka (CNN online)

A hearing is under way today in Kansas, to determine whether schoolchildren should be taught that the earth is the center of the universe or, as some scientists believe, the sun is the center of the “solar system.”

The state Secretary of Education, Karen Stout, convened the hearing to determine “whether students are entitled to learn the problems with the heliocentric theory.” Fundamentalist Christians believe the Bible says that the earth is at the center of the universe. In recent years, the heliocentric theory has come under increasing challenges from scientists who advocate a theory of “intelligent orbits.”

The “intelligent orbit” debate puts an old religious dispute on a new scientific footing. Fundamentalist Christians have long held that the Bible plainly says that the earth is the center of the universe. For instance, Genesis speaks of the sun rising and setting. Further, a poem in the book of Psalms (19:4-5) states that the sun has a tabernacle and goes forth from one end of heaven to the other.

Intelligent Orbit theorists have produced new scientific work, however, that supports the Biblical truths.

Dr. John Shine, Chair of the Department of Nutritional Science at Pepperdine University, has written several scientific pamphlets on Intelligent Orbit Theory. Professor Shine points out numerous inconsistencies and gaps in academe’s received wisdom of heliocentricity. Heliocentric theory cannot explain, for instance, the proliferation of caves and underground lakes on earth. The recent discovery of sunspots also pokes holes in the received wisdom, Dr. Shine says.

The hearing will determine whether Kansas schoolchildren continue to be taught only the increasingly challenged, traditional heliocentric theory devised centuries ago by the Polish Nicolas Copernicus, or if they will be taught both sides of this developing scientific debate.

Comment: I Accuse!

2005-05-01T10:13:00.000-07:00

Democratic politicians have been afraid to accuse BushCo of grave faults. Minor faults, yes. Moderately serious faults, yes. But grave faults -- those are too explosive. People might resent us for bringing it up. Better to let it slide.

Republican politicians would not hesitate to accuse Bill Clinton of having sex with a donkey, if some cab driver from Little Rock who was in the third grade with Clinton signed an affidavit saying that he saw Clinton and the donkey in a barn back in August 1968. Republicans -- and a news media anxious to show its not liberal -- would keep the Clinton Bestiality story in the papers for months. They would issue hourly denunciations. They would hold hearings. They would call for Clinton's resignation. Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Jimmy Swaggert, Jim Bakker, G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, and other worthies would warn that we are slouching toward Gomorrah, that God is going to smite us with terrorist attacks, because we elected a president who had sex with a donkey.

Democratic politicians, on the other hand, were (are) afraid to point out that BushCo ignored terrorism before 9/11, and thereby missed important opportunities to prevent the 9/11 attacks. They were afraid to point out that BushCo did not take terrorism seriously even after 9/11 -- that BushCo was extremely careful to wring every bit of political advantage out of 9/11, and then used that "political capital" primarily to start an irrelevant war with a country that posed no significant threat to us. Democratic politicians were afraid to point out that BushCo was essentially lying to the country about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction -- perverting the intelligence bureaucracy, waging a campaign of innuendo and alarmism, and claiming to have evidence they did not have. Democratic politicians have been afraid to denounce BushCo for allowing the torture of prisoners.

The faults of BushCo are extraordinary, and the evidence for them is strong. They constitute a fundamental breach of trust with the nation, and a rejection of basic American values. Democratic politicians have been afraid to make an issue of these faults. It's all just too incendiary.

Caution in leveling accusations is good. Cowardice is not. I think the Democrats are wrong to think the country would shoot them, the messengers, if they were to make the accusations strongly. But perhaps I am wrong. It doesn't matter. On unimportant issues, it may be OK just to avoid a sensitive, potentially risky issue. When a fundamental betrayal of the nation is at issue, when a gross perversion of basic values is at issue, a leader with integrity addresses the issue, risk notwithstanding. If it hurts you, it hurts you. The Democrats don't have such leaders.

Much of what BushCo and the Republicans said about John Kerry and the Democrats was false, slanderous bile. But -- I'm sorry to say -- one basic thing was true: Kerry and the Democratic leaders are weak. They are not leaders. They are politicians with many good qualities, but they are not leaders. When a popular president, aided by a submissive press, was deceiving the country on life-and-death questions and perverting fundamental American values, the Democrats didn't have the steel to stand up against it.

We need leaders.

Comment: Bush, Torture, Evil

2005-04-30T15:14:00.000-07:00

A moment of moral clarity: Torture is evil.

George W. Bush and his subordinates have come within a stone’s throw of officially condoning torture. Abu Ghraib was the utterly predictable result of a system designed to run amok, of policies designed to wink at would-be torturers and to give them a nudge. Same at our prison at Guantanamo Bay.

George W. Bush has appointed to a federal court of appeals a lawyer who, as chief legal adviser for the executive branch, advised government agencies that torture does not violate the laws and treaties against torture. Why not? Because it doesn’t count as torture unless it kills the victim or causes organ failure. Where did the lawyer get this definition? Out of his colon.

George W. Bush has been sending prisoners to countries where torture is practiced freely – Saudi Arabia, Egypt, etc. Today, the New York Times reports that we have been sending prisoners to Uzbekistan – run by a monster who is second to no one (not Saddam Hussein, for instance) for brutal, ghoulish cruelty.

George W. Bush and his fan base over-did the “moral clarity” thing. The world is complicated. What is moral and what is immoral can sometimes be difficult to figure out. Hard practicalities sometimes force compromises. Moral clarity is not always possible.

But sometimes it is. This I know for certain: Torture is evil. Sidling up to torture is evil. Making partnerships with torturers to do your torturing for you is evil.

The moral picture is not complicated, and the evil is not mitigated, merely by a claim of willful ignorance and a pro forma statement of policy. "We tell the torturers in Syria not to torture the prisoners we deliver to them. What happens after that is none of our concern. We're not responsible." Such inanities may comfort the pro-torture officials who want to sleep better, but they fool no one who does not deeply wish to be fooled.

I grant you one caveat, one slim exception: Whether torture is evil or not can be hard to discern, if you know that a disaster is imminent and you can stop it by torturing someone. But such instances will rarely, if ever, occur. It must be a disaster. It must be imminent. And you must have good assurance that torture will allow you to stop it. There is no reported instance that comes close to this. None of the atrocities committed in the name of freedom are remotely associated with such a rare extremity.

No. On torture, we have moral clarity. Torture is evil. And George W. Bush is a torturer – though only second-hand, wearing subordinates and partners as gloves to keep his own fingernails clean.

George W. Bush has smeared our flag with excrement – the shit that was smeared on the Abu Ghraib prisoner in the photograph. The news media that have witnessed this and refused to raise an outcry have proven themselves useless. Republicans and Democrats in Congress who have refused to rebuke the President and to insist on humane treatment of prisoners have brought shame on themselves, the Congress, and the country.

Where are our leaders?

Todays Verses: The Grapes of Wrath

2005-04-30T09:37:00.000-07:00

[Note: Let me go on record as rejecting the criticism of Steinbeck as a heavy-handed preacher who relies on vulgar symbolism, simplistic & moralistic plots, stick-figure propaganda characters, and phony stilted dialogue. I think that about captures the criticism of Steinbeck that is popular nowadays. I don't buy it -- except, here and there, for the stilted dialogue. I think what has happened is that people have become uncomfortable with simple, straightforward moral discussion. And Steinbeck is consumed by questions of justice and injustice, decency and cruelty, humanity and indifference. Steinbeck's art is about this and (almost) nothing but this, and Steinbeck made no effort to coat this content with sugar. I don't think the problem is Steinbeck's art -- the verisimilitude of his people, events, and words; the flow of his prose. I think the discomfort with Steinbeck is a discomfort with this plain, undisguised obsession with morality. I, on the other hand, value this all-consuming obsession with justice and injustice. I think we could use more of it. Oscar Wilde and Andy Warhol are nice for certain moods, but we could get by without that sort of art. We need Steinbeck's sort.]

From The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. In paperback by Penguin Books. Published 1939, copyright renewed by Steinbeck 1967.

Chapter 25

The spring is beautiful in California. Valleys in which the fruit blossoms are fragrant pink and white waters in a shallow sea. Then the first tendrils of the grapes, swelling from the old gnarled vines, cascade down to cover the trunks. The full green hills are round and soft as breasts. And on the level vegetable lands are the mile-long rows of pale green lettuce and the spindly little cauliflowers, the gray-green unearthly artichoke plants.

And then the leaves break out on the trees, and the petals drop from the fruit trees and carpet the earth with pink and white. The centers of the blossoms swell and grow and color: cherries and apples, peaches and pears, figs which close the flower in the fruit. All California quickens with produce, and the fruit grows heavy, and the limbs bend gradually under the fruit so that little crutches must be placed under them to support the weight.

Behind the fruitfulness are men of understanding and knowledge and skill, men who experiment with seed, endlessly developing the techniques for greater crops of plants whose roots will resist the million enemies of the earth: the molds, the insects, the rusts, the blights. These men work carefully and endlessly to perfect the seed, the roots. And there are the men of chemistry who spray the trees against pests, who sulphur the grapes, who cut out disease and rots, mildews and sicknesses. Doctors of preventive medicine, men at the borders who look for fruit flies, for Japanese beetle, men who quarantine the sick trees and root them out and burn them, men of knowledge. The men who graft the young trees, the little vines, are the cleverest of all, for theirs is a surgeons’ hands and surgeons’ hearts to slit the bark, to place the grafts, to bind the wounds and cover them from the air. These are great men.

Along the rows, the cultivators move, tearing the spring grass and turning it under to make a fertile earth, breaking the ground to hold the water up near the surface, ridging the ground in little pools for the irrigation, destroying the weed roots that may drink the water away from the trees.

And all the time the fruit swells and the flowers break out in long clusters on the vines. And in the growing year the warmth grows and the leaves turn dark green. The prunes lengthen like little green bird’s eggs, and the limbs sag down against the crutches under the weight. And the hard little pears take shape, and the beginning of the fuzz comes out on the peaches. Grape blossoms shed their tiny petals and the hard little beads become green buttons, and the buttons grow heavy. The men who work in the fields, the owners of the little orchards, watch and calculate. The year is heavy with produce. And men are proud, for of their knowledge they can make the year heavy. They have transformed the world with their knowledge. The short, lean wheat has been made big and productive. Little sour apples have grown large and sweet, and that old grape that grew among the trees and fed the birds its tiny fruit has mothered a thousand varieties, red and black, green and pale pink, purple and yellow; and each variety with its own flavor. The men who work in the experimental farms have made new fruits: nectarines and forty kinds of plums, walnuts with paper shells. And always they work, selecting, grafting, changing, driving themselves, driving the earth to produce.

And first the cherries ripen. Cent and a half a pound. Hell, we can’t pick ‘em for that. Black cherries and red cherries, full and sweet, and the birds eat half of each cherry and the yellowjackets buzz into the holes the birds made. And on the ground the seeds drop and dry with black shreds hanging from them.

The purple prunes soften and sweeten. My God, we can’t pick them and dry and sulphur them. We can’t pay wages, no matter what wages. And the purple prunes carpet the ground. And first the skins wrinkle a little and swarms of flies come to feast, and the valley is filled with the odor of sweet decay. The meat turns dark and the crop shrivels on the ground.

And the pears grow yellow and soft. Five dollars a ton. Five dollars for forty fifty-pound boxes; trees pruned and sprayed, orchards cultivated—pick the fruit, put it in boxes, load the trucks, deliver the fruit to the cannery—forty boxes for five dollars. We can’t do it. And the yellow fruit falls heavily to the ground and splashes on the ground. The yellowjackets dig into the soft meat, and there is a smell of ferment and rot.

Then the grapes—we can’t make good wine. People can’t buy good wine. Rip the grapes from the vines, good grapes, rotten grapes, wasp-stung grapes. Press stems, press dirt and rot.

But there’s mildew and formic acid in the vats.

Add sulphur and tannic acid.

The smell from the ferment is not the rich odor of wine, but the smell of decay and chemicals.

Oh, well. It has alcohol in it, anyway. They can get drunk.

The little farmers watched debt creep up on them like the tide. They sprayed the trees and sold no crop, they pruned and grafted and could not pick the crop. And the men of knowledge have worked, have considered, and the fruit is rotting on the ground, and the decaying mash in the wine vats is poisoning the air. And taste the wine—no grape flavor at all, just sulphur and tannic acid and alcohol.

This little orchard will be a part of a great holding next year, for the debt will have choked the owner.

This vineyard will belong to the bank. Only the great owners can survive, for they own the canneries too. And four pears peeled and cut in half, cooked and canned, still cost fifteen cents. And the canned pears do not spoil. They will last for years.

The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosence on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.

And the smell of rot fills the country.

Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

Comment: God is a Liberal

2005-04-29T14:55:00.000-07:00

Politics is about morality. Feeding hungry people is a moral issue. Giving shoes to the shoeless is a moral issue. Protecting a woman from a rapist is a moral issue. Supporting political regimes that respect human rights is a moral issue.

I can’t think, offhand, of a political issue that is not a moral issue. The details of any issue may be purely technical. Empirical questions inform our judgment about these issues, and the mass of empirical questions is enormous. But the ultimate issues are moral. Do we consign vast populations to poverty or don’t we? Do we ensure that sick people get medical care or don’t we? Do we allow religious bigots to use the state to dominate people who disagree with the bigot’s religion or don’t we? These are moral issues.

Religion, properly understood, is about morality. While the role of religion in politics is a very sensitive matter, very prone to abuse, religion does have a role in politics, and we liberals impoverish our politics when we attempt to seal the one off from the other.

Religion and politics can be dangerous and oppressive. I do not advocate simply throwing the doors open for anything wearing a religious armband to march in. We need a liberal sort of religion to inform our politics. Right-wing sorts of religion should be kept in the private sphere. But what do I mean by these labels?

There are two different kinds of religious sensibility. For right-wing religiogues, religion is just a matter of reciting formulas that will get you into heaven, while everyone else is burning in hell for eternity, and of policing people’s private behavior. What matters for right-wing religious types is that I’m going to heaven and you’re not, and that you can’t have sex. (A bit of a caricature, but you get the point.) For right-wing religiogues, my religious beliefs are divine truths, and yours are lies from Satan.

Right-wing religiogues have every right to believe, preach, and (when they are up to it) practice their religion – so long as it does not involve harming others. But right-wing sorts of religion are dangerous when brought into politics. (And of course right-wing religion wants nothing more than to control the power of the state, to create a City of God, by suppressing the lies of Satan that underlie all other religions.)

The liberal religious sensibility is concerned primarily not with proclamations of theological truth, but with acting to make the world better. Liberal religion is grounded in the conviction that we are all God’s children and that we are under an obligation to help one another, particularly those most in need. Liberal religion rejects the notion that God has picked one group of people as his special favorites, for special revelation of secret truth, to eat ice cream and sing in a choir with angels forever while the unlucky majority of humanity burns in hell. Liberal religion accepts that God speaks in different languages, that spiritual truth takes different forms in different cultures and traditions. Liberal religious types believe it is sinful to belittle or oppress people who follow a different way. (Some of us know self-proclaimed atheists who have a deeper sense of the divine importance of each person, and the obligation to make the world better, than any televangelist.)

Liberal religions are able to motivate individuals, groups, even whole countries, to help others – while posing little danger of undermining the principle of secular tolerance that is at the heart of post-enlightenment liberal democracy. We are not, apparently, overcome by unstoppable impulses toward unselfish action. We need to harness the moral, spiritual sensibility embodied by liberal religions.

Our politics should be informed by liberal religion. I emphasize that the state should neither privilege one set of religions above others nor privilege religion generally above non-religion. Expressions of religion in political contexts should be expressly, self-consciously tolerant not only of other forms of religion but of those who reject religion altogether. The public, political role of religion is to galvanize unselfish action to improve the lives of others. The public, political role of religion is not to proclaim the theological truths of one particular form of religion.

Beyond bringing religion into politics in the way I have described, we liberals ought to reclaim the flag of Religion. Right-wing religiogues have loudly and pretty effectively defined religion as simply a matter of proclaiming theological truths and stopping people from having sex. The religiogues are free to promote this primitive trivialization of religion, but they should be challenged, and their claim of ownership over the very idea of Religion should be rejected as self-serving propaganda. God is a liberal.

Comment: Bush, 9/11, & Weak-Kneed Democrats

2005-04-28T21:40:00.000-07:00

As the bloom turns ever duller on the yellow rose of Bush, it seems clearer and clearer that the only thing that saved Bush from being an unpopular, inconsequential one-term president was 9/11.

And it is clearer and clearer that the cowards leading the Democrats were unforgivably stupid in letting Bush off the hook for bungling the war on terror both before and after 9/11.

Our timid leaders were afraid, apparently, that Americans would resent criticism of Bush for botching the war on terror. They were afraid that it would be unseemly to politicize the issue by saying that we should replace the clown with someone competent. So, with the occasional exception, the mice running the party sat on their hands while Bush politicized the terror issue and did his best sissy's impression of a cowboy (think Nathan Lane's character in The Birdcage imitating John Wayne) -- an impersonation that was just convincing enough, apparently, when compared to John Kerry's impersonation of a vertebrate.

This timidity seems to have been induced by a climate of opinion in D.C. manufactured by Republicans publicly advising Democrats that it would be bad strategy for Democrats to criticize Republicans, and by a credulous press that cemented this public advice into an all-pervasive conventional wisdom. It worked, of course, because the folks leading the Democrats were too insecure and stupid to puncture the con.

There are moments when one despairs of the race. If we are capable of such mass stupidity, how can we hope to escape the fate of the dodo bird? What hope is there, for instance, that we will turn off the heat before we boil ourselves to death in a globally warmed pot of greenhouse gases?

But these things go in cycles. Howard Dean now leads the party, Harry Reid the Senate Democrats, and Nancy Pelosi the House. It appears that all three know how to grab a guy by the throat and aim a knee. It's about time. Now if we could find campaign advisers who know ass from elbow -- or even just candidates with the courage to stand up to their employees -- we might have an organized political party.

The Argument: The Woman Decides

2005-04-28T09:44:00.000-07:00

The woman decides. Not a preacher, priest, or politician. The woman.

That’s the way to frame the abortion issue: Who decides?

We are not pro-choice. We say the woman decides. They are not pro-life. They say the priest decides. (We may have to get by without adjectives in this one. So be it.)

It’s not about being pro-choice or pro-life, much less about being pro- or anti-abortion. “Pro-choice” is not the same as “the woman decides.” “Pro-“ is wrong, and “choice” is wrong. “Pro” means “favor,” and while it’s not “pro-abortion,” everyone knows we’re talking about abortion. It’s a mistake to get anywhere near the idea of “pro-abortion.” And “choice” is too light, too trivial. The bumper sticker, “It’s a baby, not a choice” has some bite. No. We don’t favor abortion, and we don’t regard it lightly. No one – least of all a woman who has had one – likes abortion. For most of us, abortion is at best a wretched necessity, to be avoided if reasonably possible, and deeply unsettling when necessary. The point for us is that it’s the woman – not preacher, priest, or politician – who decides.

There is no downside to acknowledging that an abortion is upsetting, that it’s a hard, painful decision, that there would be no abortions in a perfect world. Everyone knows all that. There’s no downside to acknowledging what everyone knows. But refusing to acknowledge it makes us look like ghouls.

Putting the issue this way — who decides? — shows respect for the moral views of the priest’s-decision crowd. We can acknowledge that one can reasonably consider a fetus in the womb as being like a baby in a crib. We just insist that it’s a hard decision, and that it must be the woman’s decision to make. We don’t need to pretend that people are simply crazy or would-be tyrants who regard a fetus as a baby. Most everyone sees that it’s a hard question. And because they see it’s a hard question, they agree that it is the woman’s decision to make.

We aren’t ghouls and we aren’t fanatics. We just insist that the woman decides. Not a preacher, priest, or politician. The woman.

Comment: Bush Judges & Silver Linings

2005-04-28T05:04:00.000-07:00

A couple Bush-appointed Supreme Court justices might be the best thing to happen to liberals since Earl Warren.

Most of the country is liberal on the all-consuming culture-war issues that keep the right energized. But most of the country is not politically engaged – largely because court rulings make it unnecessary to be engaged.

I suspect that if Roe v. Wade were overturned, and the availability of abortions became subject to the will of state and federal legislatures, the current bloated significance of the religious right would be over, in all but a handful of states. The majority of the country that sides more or less with the left on abortion would have to vote, and would start paying attention to what candidates say. In many places this would give Democrats control of the legislatures. In others, it would just realign the Republican party – giving control to social-issue moderates (who can still be quite mad on economic issues).

To be sure, a Bush-swayed Supreme Court would do a lot of damage in other areas, but it would probably be adequate compensation to control Congress. Far better to write the laws than to administer them. (There is always the specter of a return to pre-New Deal jurisprudence, if there were a Clarence Thomas majority. But then we could always carry through on FDR’s court-packing plan. True radicalism on the Court would be short-lived.)

The great danger is that Bush appointees would be politicians, and would keep Roe in place, to avoid energizing the bulk of the country as religious extremists have been energized. Given the risks, Democrats should still oppose Supreme Court nominees who are ideologically far right. (And I can’t think of anything good about having far-right wingers on the lower courts.) But there is some comfort in knowing that a bit of overreaching by the Bush crowd has the potential to realign political power by jolting the public and bringing it into politics.

Comment: Shit Culture, Parents, and the State

2005-04-27T05:00:00.000-07:00

Liberals argue among themselves whether we should make an issue – or address the issue – of indecency within the culture. Barring censorship, some ask, what can we do about it? And none of us is enthusiastic about state censorship.

The issue should be framed as making it easier for parents to raise their children. All of us find the culture noxious in certain respects. Our popular culture is saturated with indecent portrayals of sex and violence. With certain limited exceptions (like the distribution of sex videos without the consent of the people in them) we don’t want the state getting into censorship. We do, however, want parents to be able to shield their children – who may be actively seeking this stuff out – from shit culture.

It just isn’t true that there is nothing the state can do in this regard, short of censorship. A couple ideas off the top of my head: (1.) Run a government-sponsored ad campaign to inform parents that their TV set probably has a V-chip in it, and point them to information about how to use it. I suspect that fewer than 10% of parents are aware of this. We don’t need to censor Friends on account of the occasional blow-job reference. The V-chip enables parents to filter such shows out, but parents have to know about the chip. (2.) Modify copyright laws to permit the creation and use of software that filters out offensive content from DVD’s. (This has been done by Congress, over the objection of some Democrats who were largely shilling for Hollywood – which wants to capture any money spent in connection with movies.) (3.) Create an internet domain named “.sex” or something like that, and require web sites with explicit sexual content to be located on that domain. This would make it far easier for parents to block access to porn sites, without involving government censorship. (There would, of course, be difficulties in defining which sites would have to be located in this domain, and the definitions would require some sensitivity and continuous refinement. But a solution doesn’t have to be perfect to be helpful.) (4.) Regulate advertising directly to children.

There are probably dozens or hundreds of things the government could do to make it easier for parents to shield their children from shit culture. Liberals ought to identify the ones that do not involve state censorship or otherwise unduly burden expressive activity, and we ought to champion these measures.

Comment: To war on the wings of a lie

2005-04-26T05:11:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post reports today that the Iraq Survey Group -- whose job was to find those elusive weapons of mass destruction -- has issued its final report, saying that it has found no evidence of WMD in Iraq, and no evidence that WMD were moved to Syria before or during the war.

This is a good time to remember that BushCo took us to war on the wings of a lie. Bush was careful to avoid literal lies. Like Clinton, Bush would avoid a perjury conviction. Like Clinton, Bush just deliberately deceived us, without (for the most part) making explicit factual declarations that were flatly false. Mostly, he used innuendo and alarmist imagery. Also, he perverted the bureaucratic machinery of government, to give him the intelligence he needed to support the war he wanted. (The clearest, most shameful perversion of the bureaucracy is in the handling of the Energy Department's contribution to the National Intelligence Estimate, concerning certain aluminum tubes that BushCo said were evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapon project in Iraq.) Bush's deception, unlike Clinton's, has cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars, and has greatly reduced our standing in the world.

Bush's deception is what ordinary people call "lies." It is ironic that BushCo must borrow from the defense of their great nemesis Clinton, objecting to the word "lie," because Bush didn't technically, literally lie (much).

This is a good time to remember also that the news media was essentially useless during the buildup to the war. Abdicating their responsibility to hold the government to account, the media repeated BushCo's pronouncements, without scrutinizing them. It would not have been especially hard for the "fourth estate" to do its job. BushCo's flimflam was easy to spot. It's aversion to simple statements of verifiable fact was obvious. BushCo's reliance on assumptions and guesswork clearly signalled the absence of evidence. Journalists, however, were not about to ask difficult questions of our Dear Leader and his agents.

BushCo now more or less admits that its innuendo about Iraq and WMD was false. But you can't blame us, BushCo says, because "we were all wrong." We reasonably thought Saddam Hussein had WMD, BushCo says, and we had to assume he was poised to sell them to anti-American terrorists.

BushCo would have a good point, in some alternative universe where we had not suppressed Iraq militarily and economically for a dozen years and didn't have WMD search teams running all over Iraq, to check our fears against actual fact. But the BushCo excuse suffices for this universe, too. Because virtually no one in our media and political establishment did their job of scrutinizing BushCo's argument for war, there is now virtually no one interested in remarking that the argument was a sham from beginning to end.

This is a good time to remember that virtually all Congressional Democrats lay down for BushCo. They just weren't interested in questioning the bullshit case for war. The public, hearing only one story from BushCo, the Democrats, and the press, naturally believed what it heard. Later, Democratic primary voters were convinced that it would be dangerous to run a pressidential candidate who had opposed the war. After all, who opposes a war? That's crazy.

I grew up thinking that our leaders told us the truth, at least when it really mattered, and that journalists and opposition politicians ensured that. It may be that this war will be good for Iraq and the Middle East in the end. It is more likely that Iraq will become a variant of Iran, with the addition of endemic, violent antagonism between the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. And it is likely that the permanent military bases we are building for ourselves in Iraq will heighten the Arab sense that we are imperialists encroaching on Arab ground, inciting further hatred of us. We don't know how this will play out. The headlines, changing day to day, don't help much. We'll know in a few years. But whether the war ends by helping or hurting the Middle East, it has hurt American democracy. A President took us to war on the wings of a lie, while the political opposition and the press lay quietly in the corner.

Attempted Parody: Excerpts from Time Magazine Profile of White Supremacist Pundit

2005-04-25T18:32:00.000-07:00

[note: Time Magazine's recent profile of Ann Coulter inspired this piece.]

(promo tagline: He is quite possibly the most divisive figure in the public eye. But love him or hate him, you don't know the real Randy Whitehead.)

(promo tagline: Fair and balanced he isn't. This conservative flamethrower enrages the left and delights the right. Is he serious or just having fun?)

The Right Stuff

By John Cloud

Randy Whitehead, outspoken advocate of murdering Blacks, Jews, Gays, and other minorities, is more prone to seeing red than to turning red. But as we chatted over lunch at a popular Memphis barbecue pit, I caught him making goo-goo eyes at a toddler in the booth behind me. Moments earlier, he had been in familiar form, reciting the insidious danger of the Yellow Man, and insisting that female racial minorities must be sterilized and the males killed. When Whitehead saw that I noticed his display of tenderness toward the toddler, he blushed. He refused to admit it, and insisted that I note his having drunk four shots of whiskey, but he blushed.

And so it is with Whitehead. One moment, you think you've got him pegged. Then he overturns the facile simplicity of your labels with a gesture.

...

Does Whitehead mean what he says? It sometimes seems he can't open his mouth without saying that some minority is a threat to the nation -- enemies, traitors, false Americans bent on destroying our way of life -- and that they ought to be imprisoned or exiled or killed. But the very odiousness of Whitehead's statements are the best proof that he isn't entirely serious. For no one with access to television, radio, and print publications could say such things seriously. To hear him is to know he must not be serious.

...

Whitehead is unusually attractive. Tall, with rugged good looks, he is a cross between Tom Selleck and Saddam Hussein. At his popular college campus lectures, seats are invariably sold out, and boys and girls stand in line for hours after the lectures, for Whitehead to sign their books, t-shirts, shaved heads, and breasts.

...

Whitehead's critics say he is a filthy hate-monger. His fans say he is a force for moral clarity. But Whitehead surely is more complicated than either view allows. Did I mention that he blushed when I caught him playing hide-and-seek with a child?

...

Love him or loathe him, you know where Whitehead stands, and you have to admire his steadfastness. As we left that Memphis barbecue joint after our final interview, Whitehead spotted a well-dressed Black woman walking with her young biracial son. Whitehead shook his head. "The race traitor who sired that mongrel brat ought to be electrocuted," he said.

I had to chuckle. That guy. What a card -- a complicated, controversial card.

Comment: The Fearless Journalist & the Unicorn

2005-04-24T17:47:00.000-07:00

Who knew the press was so easy to control? If you want them to change the language they use, just tell them to change it. If you want them to do more favorable stories on you, just tell them to do them. (Some recent examples: banning "privatize" from news stories on social security, in favor of "personal accounts," and treating "nuclear option" -- a term coined by Republicans -- as a hostile Democratic reference to the Republican threat to ban the filibuster for judicial nominees.)

Occasionally, you may have to apply pressure: move reporters to the back of the press room if they ask the wrong questions; ban them from your campaign jet if their publications don't stroke you enough.

Occasionally, you may have to use government funds to pay journalists for covert PR services.

And you have to be Republicans, in what the news media types think is a conservative period.

But I'm being coy. Mostly, you have to have complained about the "liberal media" for decades, and trained the news media to think they have to prove their independence by adopting Republican talking points.

While the boot-licking by the news media is disquieting, I am hopeful that the response from the left will help bring things back into a proper alignment within a couple years. Hopeful, but not confident. I worry that right-wing shit-bombing is just more provocative than anything comparable from the left -- therefore more apt to draw ratings and higher ad rates. And if it isn't ad rates, it's just corporate conservatism (the sort that led MSNBC to shut down the revived Phil Donahue show, MSNBC's best-performing chat show, to avoid criticism of the Iraq War during the buildup to the war).

One way or the other, it will be necessary to create a left-wing counterpart to the Fox phenomenon, though it should be avowedly partisan, rather than insulting everyone with some sort of "fair and balanced" schtick.

The presidency of George II will become a textbook case in news media cowardice and submission. The subservience of the new media allowed Bush & Co. to take us to war on the wings of a lie, among various other depredations.

The norm in all professions is mediocrity, so it is no surprise that journalists should be predominantly mediocre. During the reign of George II, they have not lived up to the standard of mediocrity. They have in large part become useless and contemptible. It is unfair to those journalists who have done good work, but the thumbnail image for journalists now is that of a hack or a quisling.

This may change, but it seems likely to stay this way for a few years. Hopefully, a balanced referee-media will come back in time. Regardless, we need a partisan liberal media.

Today's Verses: Milan Kundera on Stalin, God, & Shit

2005-04-23T19:18:00.000-07:00

From The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera, trans. Michael Henry Heim. Published in paperback by Harper Perennial (1991).

Part 6

Not until 1980 were we able to read in the Sunday Times how Stalin's son, Yakov, died. Captured by the Germans during the Second World War, he was placed in a camp together with a group of British officers. They shared a latrine. Stalin's son habitually left a foul mess. The British officers resented having their latrine smeared with shit, even if it was the shit of the son of the most powerful man in the world. They brought the matter to his attention. He took offense. They brought it to his attention again and again, and tried to make him clean the latrine. He raged, argued, and fought. Finally, he demanded a hearing with the camp commander. He wanted the commander to act as arbiter. But the arrogant German refused to talk about shit. Stalin's son could not stand the humiliation. Crying out to heaven in the most terrifying of Russian curses, he took a running jump into the electrified barbed-wire fence that surrounded the camp. He hit the target. His body, which would never again make a mess of the Britishers' latrine, was pinned to the wire.

Stalin's son had a hard time of it. All evidence points to the conclusion that his father killed the woman by whom he had the boy. Young Stalin was therefore both the Son of God (because his father was revered like God) and His cast-off. People feared him twofold: he could injure them by both his wrath (he was, after all, Stalin's son) and his favor (his father might punish his cast-off son's friends in order to punish him).

Rejection and privilege, happiness and woe -- no one felt more concretely than Yakov how interchangeable opposites are, how short the step from one pole of human existence to the other.

Then, at the very outset of the war, he fell prisoner to the Germans, and other prisoners, belonging to an incomprehensible, standoffish nation that had always been intrinsically repulsive to him, accused him of being dirty. Was he, who bore on his shoulders a drama of the highest order (as fallen angel and Son of God), to undergo judgment not for something sublime (in the realm of God and the angels) but for shit? Were the very highest of drama and the very lowest so vertiginously close?

Vertiginously close? Can proximity cause vertigo?

It can. When the north pole comes so close as to touch the south pole, the earth disappears and man finds himself in a void that makes his head spin and beckons him to fall.

If rejection and privilege are one and the same, if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, if the Son of God can undergo judgment for shit, then human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearably light. When Stalin's son ran up to the electrified wire and hurled his body at it, the fence was like the pan of a scales sticking pitifully up in the air, lifted by the infinite lightness of a world that has lost its dimensions.

Stalin's son laid down his life for shit. But a death for shit is not a senseless death. The Germans who sacrificed their lives to expand their country's territory to the east, the Russians who died to extend their country's power to the west -- yes, they died for something idiotic, and their deaths have no meaning or general validity. Amid the general idiocy of the war, the death of Stalin's son stands out as the sole metaphysical death.

When I was small and would leaf through the Old Testament retold for children and illustrated in engravings by Gustave Dore, I saw the Lord God standing on a cloud. He was an old man with eyes, nose, and a long beard, and I would say to myself that if He had a mouth, He had to eat. And if He ate, He had intestines. But that thought always gave me a fright, because even though I come from a family that was not particularly religious, I felt the idea of a divine intestine to be sacrilegious.

Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely, that man was created in God's image. Either/or: either man was created in God's image -- and God has intestines! -- or God lacks intestines and man is not like Him.

The ancient Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the second century, the great Gnostic master Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming that Jesus "ate and drank, but did not defecate."

Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man's crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the Creator of man.

Comment: Mainstreaming Political Hate Speech

2005-04-22T20:52:00.000-07:00

Political violence within countries, among countrymen, afflicts much of the world. The stereotype is of primitive Black people in Africa, or Brown people in Latin America, or Yellow – a color name I’ve never quite understood – in Asia killing each other. That’s nonsense, of course. It was white people in the disintegrating Yugoslavia killing each other through the 90’s – largely Christian white people killing Muslim white people. In Northern Ireland it is Christian white people killing each other – though there is some controversy over who are the real Christians and who the fakes, destined to burn in Hell forever. The world-historical slaughters committed by the German and Soviet states in the 20^th century consisted largely of the political murders of some citizens by their fellow citizens.

The United States, for all our ordinary criminal violence, is blessedly free of internal political violence. We have some of it, and we appropriately think of the perpetrators as crazies. We used to have more. Not so long ago we fought a civil war, because the South could not abide the intrusion of the federal government into the prerogatives of the states to make slaves of Black people. More recently, we have had lynchings and assassinations and riots over political (often racial) questions. We have had political persecution of “commies” – often meaning “pro-union workers” – sometimes taking violent form. We are not a deeply peaceful and gentle people. We are capable of hating each other and striking out in violence. And we have a disturbingly large number of crazies who are capable of being pushed over the edge into political violence.

But as I said, we have had mercifully little political violence in this country. A big part of what makes us a people at peace with one another is the simple fact that we think of ourselves collectively as fellows, fellow Americans. We have disagreements. We often think of each other as fools, idiots, even scum. But in a fundamentally important way, these are intra-family disputes and enmities. You are an idiot, but still you are, like me, an American. So we don’t, for the most part, physically attack each other over politics.

This will change, if some loud, filthy voices have their way. There is a class of right-wing screamers who are not content with personal abuse of political opponents, but go over the edge and say their political opponents are not merely stupid but are enemies, traitors, false Americans.

This is dangerous, and mainstream media institutions – cable news networks, broadcast TV and radio networks, national magazines, and nowadays Congress – are giving platforms to these screamers and supporting them. Political hate speech has gone mainstream.

This is deeply, incomprehensibly foolish. Presumably, the media institutions are just looking for higher audience ratings and advertising rates, and right-wing hate speech gets ratings. Joe McCarthy has not yet taken the place of Edward R. Murrow, but we’re moving in that direction. It would once have been unthinkable that screamers who accuse their opponents of hating America and siding with our sworn enemies would be invited to ooze their filth as commentators on mainstream news programs. Today, Ann Coulter – a tramp with a tongue of excrement – graces the cover of Time magazine and is favored with a love letter in the form of a cover story.

Opinion can be manufactured, and mainstream media institutions are manufacturing an America in which political opponents are not fellow Americans, but enemies. We are not immune from political violence. There are more Timothy McVeighs among us, and more to come.

We are sowing the wind, and we will reap the whirlwind.

Comment: Culture of Life, Politics of Death

2005-04-21T21:06:00.000-07:00

Saying they are serving what they call a “culture of life,” the politicians running the country have been rolling like dogs in the corpses of Theresa Schiavo and Pope John Paul II.

There are serious moral issues beneath this multifaceted “culture of life” business, on which decent people can disagree. But the politicians and hucksters crowding the cameras to smear some Schiavo and Pope mojo on their backs have lost – some just for the moment, some apparently for the duration – any decency they began with.

These politicians have an audience conditioned to believe in conspiracies of judges, liberals, and elites. The hucksters knew that Theresa Schiavo’s cerebral cortex had dissolved and taken with it the human person who had inhabited her body. Knowing this, the shills indulged the hopeful illusions of Schiavo’s grief-stricken parents. Politicians in the worst sense, they cried to their gullible audience that Theresa Schiavo was smiling, laughing, joking, feeling. They lied.

And the lie meant that Theresa Schiavo’s husband, who stood at her side for 15 years after she lapsed into a permanent vegetative state, was simply trying to kill a woman who suffered from a disability. And the judge who conscientiously oversaw the case was trying to kill her. And the liberals who thought that the fate of a wife in a permanent vegetative state should be determined in court, in the manner ordained by law, taking evidence from the husband who lived with her and from anyone else with evidence – these sinister liberals were pushing an agenda to euthanize babies, old people, the disabled, and you, too, probably.

There are people who believe this. The politicians who pandered to this paranoia didn’t. They just pandered – not minding that they were lying (or silently standing behind a lie), not minding that they were slandering on global television decent people caught up in a private tragedy, not minding that the paranoia they were fueling is dangerous to the country.

We eat a lot of dirt with our politics, and we just accept it as unavoidable. But this is something else. This is stunning. These are politicians without shame, cynics willing to do anything for political advantage. And it’s not just one rogue senator. It’s the entire Congressional majority leadership arm in arm with the President.

This is not business as usual. Something has gone very wrong in our politics and in our news media, the forum for our political discussion.

Attempted Parody: Alabama Legislators Introduce Bill Based on the Book of Leviticus

2005-04-20T23:23:00.000-07:00

ArialMontgomery (AP)

Alabama state legislators were outraged today by a Colorado court decision and introduced a bill they say will “bring God back into the justice system.”

The Colorado Supreme Court threw out a jury-imposed death penalty because jurors had brought Bibles into the jury room. The jury decided to impose the death penalty after reading Leviticus 24:17 – 20. That passage says that a murderer must be killed, and that injuries must be repaid in kind, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. The Colorado court said jurors may not bring outside texts into the jury room to inform their deliberations.

Legislators in Alabama spoke out against the “tide of Godless secularism sweeping the country.” Randy Whitehead, majority leader of the Alabama Senate, introduced legislation that he said would “restore God to our society” and “put morality back into justice.”

The proposed legislation would revamp the Alabama criminal code, bringing it largely into line with the Old Testament Book of Leviticus. The bill would dramatically rewrite sentencing laws. It would also create several new crimes.

Legislators from both sides of the aisle today said the bill is likely to pass. Alabama Governor Bob Robertson has pledged to sign it.

Under the bill, all homicides – from manslaughter to first degree murder – would require a mandatory death penalty.

The bill would create several new categories of sex offenses, drawn largely from Leviticus, chapter 20. Adultery would become a felony, punishable by a mandatory death penalty. Sex between a man, his wife, and her mother would require that all three be executed by fire. Most varieties of incest, regardless of the age of the participants, would require that the couple be exiled from the state. A man who has sex with his aunt or his brother’s wife would lose custody of any children he may have – as would the aunt or sister-in-law.

Under the bill, a couple that has sex during the woman’s menstrual period would be exiled from the state.

The bill would also require changes to zoning, health, and safety ordinances. Church leaders would be allowed to kill sheep and cattle with machetes, to drain the blood onto the floor, to throw blood on the congregation, and to burn the corpses of the animals inside the church. Churches would be allowed to throw the animal’s skin, innards, and dung onto the street.

Senator Whitehead said these revisions are necessary “to bring the word of God back to life.” God, he said, “has been gagged by the filthy sock of liberal secularism.” In a speech at Liberty University, Governor Robertson said, “The judicial activists’ attempt to murder God ends today in Alabama.”

The Alabama bill has stirred interest in other states, as well as in Washington, D.C. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said today that Republican leaders are drafting legislation “on the pattern of” the Alabama bill.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said the Senate “will make sure we don’t appoint judicial activists to the bench who will interfere with God’s work.”

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said, “President Bush looks forward to working with the Congress to make this once again ‘one nation under God.’”

Congressional Democrats today could not be reached for comment.

Attempted Parody: President Bush Declares Michael Moore an Enemy Combatant, “Renders” Him to Saudi Arabia

2005-04-20T23:22:00.000-07:00

ArialWashington (AP)

Papers mistakenly released today by the Justice Department reveal that the filmmaker Michael Moore has been detained as an “enemy combatant,” on the order of President Bush. Mr. Moore was reported missing eleven weeks ago. California law enforcement authorities have been looking for him.

The papers reveal that Mr. Moore was sent to Saudi Arabia four weeks ago, entrusted to the custody of the Saudi secret police.

Weeks before the federal government detained him, Mr. Moore released a film apparently arguing that Bush administration policy has been duped by the Al Queda terrorist network. The film attempted to argue that the war in Iraq has made Al Queda more powerful and a greater threat to the United States.

The President had previously claimed the authority to detain indefinitely any person, whether citizen or not, if the President deemed the person an “enemy combatant” in the “war on terror.” The Bush administration had previously said that the policy of transporting detainees to the custody of states known to torture prisoners is legal under United States law.

Scott McClellan, spokesman for the President, acknowledged the detention and “rendition” of Mr. Moore. “Unfortunately, the films of Michael Moore strengthen the morale of Al Queda and increase the danger of terrorism to the United States,” Mr. McClellan said. “The detention of an enemy combatant is a grave decision, which the President takes with the utmost seriousness,” Mr. McClellan said. “Michael Moore was detained because of the grave threat his ideas pose to the security of the United States,” he said.

Justice Department officials said the United States has no control over the conduct of Saudi authorities. Mr. Moore was put in their custody, however, under an agreement that they would not torture Mr. Moore. Officials said they do not know whether Mr. Moore has been tortured or not.

Congressional Republicans today defended the detention and rendition of Mr. Moore. “Michael Moore has made it clear for many years that he hates America,” Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said. “Moore is on the terrorists’ side. All the President has done is recognize that simple fact and act appropriately,” Senator Frist said.

Congressional Democrats criticized the treatment of Mr. Moore. “Michael Moore should never have been sent to Egypt,” said Democratic Senator Joseph Biden.

Attempted Parody: Bush Administration Sells Interstate Highway System to Halliburton

2005-04-20T23:20:00.000-07:00

ArialWashington (AP)

The Bush administration announced today that it has concluded the sale of the interstate highway system to Halliburton.

Halliburton has paid $15,000 for the network of federally-financed roads that criss-crosses the nation. Department of Transportation officials said that over 90% of all goods sold in the United States are moved on the interstate highways. “Many trillions of dollars’ worth of goods” are transported on the system, officials said.

Scott McClellan, the President’s spokesman, said the deal would be good for Americans and good for Halliburton. “The government should get out of the business of subsidizing private transportation,” Mr. McClellan said. “The era of big government is over,” he said.

Halliburton will be responsible for financing the system. It will maintain the existing roads and build new roads.

Halliburton announced today that it will immediately begin erecting toll booths on all interstate highways. Within two years it will have toll booths erected every ten miles on all interstate highways. Halliburton officials said they have not yet set prices for traveling on their highways, but they “anticipate an average price of ten cents per axle, per mile.”

Under the terms of the sale, the federal government will continue to be responsible for the maintenance of all existing highways, for the next twenty years.

Department of Transportation officials said the sale to Halliburton was properly conducted under rules allowing non-competitive sales in emergencies. “The government is facing a crisis of maintenance requirements,” the officials said.

There was criticism of the sale from congressional Democrats today. “Fifteen thousand dollars is far too low a price for the interstate highway system,” Senator Joseph Lieberman said.