Month: October 2006

Liberal Intolerance Of Intolerance

by digby

Pastordan defends himself quite well from a typically obtuse criticism from Amy Sullivan in The New Republic and I’ll let him speak for himself. But I have to wonder where she gets the idea that liberals are so blinded by their belief that Bush and Rove have been building a theocracy that they can’t see that Kuo’s book presents an opportunity to drive a wedge between the evangelicals and the GOP? I never thought that Bush was a serious theologian, only that he was willing to do whatever he could get away with to keep the evangelicals happy. Nothing in Kuo’s book undermines that theory. In fact, it validates it.

Rove is a cynical political operative and Bush is an idiot whose only religious commitment is to the idea that he was anointed by God to follow his “instincts” (which amounts to running the country by coin flipping.) I honestly don’t know anyone who thinks the big money boys of the Republican Party give a damn about religion except to the extent it brings them votes.

What we did believe is that the religious right wants to build a theocracy and that seems indisputable to me. Of course they do. And because they are an enormously valuable consituency they are managing to incrementally blur the lines between church and state and pass laws of a theocratic nature or that conflict with progressive values. (Like this one, where employees of religious groups have far fewer rights in the workplace than others.) I’m not sure what is controversial about that.

As far as the idea of taking advantage of the developing schism between the Christian right and the GOP, I’m all for it. I think we should point out Republican hypocrisy on these issues every chance we get and as far as I can tell, the liberal bloggers and op-ed writers and progressive radio she ctiticizes have been scathing on this topic.

(It’s true that we are a little more than two weeks away from a seminal election so there is quite naturally a rather diffuse critique of the Republicans going on right now. It’s a little unfair to compare it to the earlier revelations by Paul O’neil or even the Woodward book, which is about the biggest issue in the campaign and it’s written by the official court hagiographer.)

Sullivan is convinced that liberals are so hostile to religion that we refuse to see that religious people are in the process of rejecting the Republican party. I welcome that if it happens and I’m delighted to see that some conservative religious leaders are looking at issues other than abortion and gay marriage,like Darfur and poverty and global warming, which are areas upon which we can agree and work together:

Bishop Harry R. Jackson Jr., pastor of Hope Christian Church, a 3,000-member congregation in Lanham, was among the signers of the Darfur appeal. He said he knows that some evangelicals are concerned that their clout will diminish if they take on too many issues. But, like Combs, he pointed to the need to address subjects that matter to young Christians.

“I think you could call this a PR problem, because young people who are very involved in their churches understand the passion for these two issues,” he said, referring to abortion and same-sex marriage, “but in the culture at large we can come across as wild-eyed bigots to some because we have only emphasized these things.”

Broadening the agenda, “not to 99 things but to five or six core things,” such as fighting poverty and providing aid to Africa, “helps improve our image and more accurately reflects the full panoply of our beliefs,” Jackson said. “It’s hard to say that those two things — abortion and gay marriage — are the only things God had in mind in the Bible.”

I am not sanguine, however, that we will crack the Republican hold on the conservative evangelicals and make them want to vote for us. They are after all,conservatives.

To some evangelicals, however, the new issues are less clear than the old ones, which have led evangelicals to vote overwhelmingly Republican in recent elections.

“I definitely don’t like the widening of the agenda, because it muddies the water,” said the Rev. Michael Haseltine, pastor of the 2,000-member Maranatha Assembly of God Church in Forest Lake, Minn.

“Be good stewards of the environment? Sure, but how? These tree-huggers and anti-hunters think it’s terrible to kill animals. Oppose poverty? Sure, but what’s the best way to do it? We can’t solve everybody’s problems for them,” he said. “Family and life issues — abortion, sexuality — they’re much more clear from the biblical standpoint.”

I am happy to allow evangelical Christians to fight this out. And I’ll be happy to make common cause with them on poverty and global warming and the death penalty. (I gratefully welcome them to that thankless cause as a matter of fact.) But we aren’t going to agree on abortion or gay marriage and I can live with that. The question is if they can. If they look at the panoply of issues as followers of Jesus Christ, I feel quite confident they will find that they can easily vote for the Democratic party. If they decide that “abortion and sexuality” trump everything else then so be it. It’s up to them.

That won’t be enough for Sullivan of course:

Lawrence O’Donnell–former Democratic Senate aide and the resident liberal commentator at msnbc–dropped the ball. “I think the good news here is that people working in the White House think that Pat Robertson is nuts,” he said. “They should. Pat Robertson is nuts.” It seemed a little off-message–after all, this was a politically embarrassing book for the Bushies, and here O’Donnell was praising them. True, Robertson does regularly spout off truly nutty and dangerous statements (his call for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez; his prayer for the death of liberal Supreme Court justices; his belief that UPC symbols are the Mark of the Beast as foretold in Revelation). But what rankled O’Donnell the most was Robertson’s “insane” belief that Jews are going to burn in hell. “

While most of them would put it more delicately than Robertson, it is an article of faith for millions and millions of evangelicals that the only way into heaven is through belief in Jesus Christ. (The good reverend has also said he believes Methodists will burn in hell, but that’s not really the point.) By condemning and mocking that doctrine, O’Donnell managed an impressive feat. He took Robertson, a figure widely disliked and discredited throughout the evangelical community, and found a way to criticize him that would also insult and alienate evangelicals. Congratulations, Lawrence O’Donnell–you’re the new poster-boy for secular liberal intolerance.

I can’t help but wonder if Sullivan would find O’Donnell so “intolerant” if he were Jewish? (And yes, the fact that Robertson thinks Methodists are also going to burn in hell is exactly the point.) Sullivan believes that in order to appeal to evangelicals we must not only study their theology in detail so as to understand why they follow some lunatic like Pat Robertson but we are supposed to be tolerant of what would be called racist or religiously intolerant statements from anyone else because they believe it derives from the Bible. Oy.

This is why strictly secular government is the only way to go. When it becomes a sign of religious intolerance to object publicly to a political and religious leader’s statement that “Jews are going to burn in hell,” we are in real trouble.

But then, we are in trouble on this subject in so many different ways:

The top US general defended the leadership of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, saying it is inspired by God.

“He leads in a way that the good Lord tells him is best for our country,” said Marine General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

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Treasure Trove

by tristero

About half of the complete work of Charles Darwin is online, with everything expected to be available, by 2009. ‘Course, it’s easier to read them on paper, but for searching, and for special things, this is just incredibly fantastic. Includes transcriptions of some of the notebooks as well!

ht, Lindsay Beyerstein.

Primed For McCain

by digby

The latest GOP mantra on Iraq sounds incredibly pathetic and it’s probably why they are losing. Here’s Bay Buchanan on CNN yesterday:

BUCHANAN: There’s no question in that people have a legitimate concern.

But I think the issue here is not to debate whether we should have gone or not, but that we have a serious situation. We are at war in Iraq. It is not going well . What do you do now?

Bush expanded on that in an interview with George Stephanopoulos:

BUSH: I have always found that, when a person goes in to vote, they are going to want to know what that person is going to do.

You know, what is the plan for a candidate on Iraq? What do they believe? Frankly, I hear disparate voices all over the place on the Democrats’ side about Iraq. We got some saying, get out.

The argument seems to be, “yes we’ve fucked up, and we’ve fucked up so badly that there are no good choices. Do you want to take a chance that the Democrats will fuck it up too?”

I think people have just come to the reasonable conclusion that they have nothing to lose by letting the Democrats have a crack at it. Certainly, it hardly seems wise to reward these people by validating their policy at the voting booth. The problem, of course, is that the congress has only the nuclear option of cutting off funds, which they will not do. No maqtter how many hearings are held and how much dirt is exposed, Bush would, in my opinion, die before he would withdraw (or even be seen to be withdrawing) from Iraq. That hideous problem will be left to the next president.

Which is where St John McCain comes in.Atrios and Greenwald both discuss his rambling comments about Iraq on Chris Matthews’ show earlier this week. I saw that show and I was particularly struck by this:

MCCAIN: I don‘t think we need to think of the draft again because I don‘t think it makes sense in a whole variety of ways. But I guarantee you, if these young people felt that this nation was in a crisis and we asked them to serve, virtually every one of them would stand up because I have the greatest confidence in the young people of America.

The current problem is that unless we are invaded by martians all the crying wolf the Republicans have done these last five years means that nobody believes Bush’s abstract claims of threat anymore. They went so over the top with their screeching, fearmongering that it’s lost its punch.

McCain could change that. He will be the grown-up reformer who is coming in to fix the mess that the terrible Bushies have made. And his pitch is going to be “sacrifice” wrapped up in all kinds of feel-good symbols of national interest. He will try to persuade the country that the crisis we face(however he defines it) requires that young people cast off their self-centered interests and serve their country. It’s a potent message and it doesn’t really have to make sense.

John McCain is a bigger warmonger than George W. Bush, always has been. The only difference is that he doesn’t believe, as the administration does, that it can be done without a national mobilization. (Like most nationalists he feels that such a mobilization is good for the national character.) The change in policy will involve spending more money and putting more young people in battle, not less.

Bush’s warmaking desires have been restrained by his unwillingness to put the country on a real war footing or create a coherent military strategy. McCain will have no such restraint and may very well be the man who sets this country on a militaristic binge the likes of which we haven’t seen before.

Here’s the opening of his speech to the Republican Convention in 2004:

It’s a big thing, this war.

It’s a fight between a just regard for human dignity and a malevolent force that defiles an honorable religion by disputing God’s love for every soul on earth. It’s a fight between right and wrong, good and evil.

And should our enemies acquire for their arsenal the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons they seek, this war will become a much bigger thing.

So it is, whether we wished it or not, that we have come to the test of our generation, to our rendezvous with destiny.

And much is expected of us.

We are engaged in a hard struggle against a cruel and determined adversary.

Our enemies have made clear the danger they pose to our security and to the very essence of our culture …liberty.

Only the most deluded of us could doubt the necessity of this war.

Coming from Bush that talk is just more “blah, blah, blah.” Coming from McCain it is gravitas.

The failure in Iraq is going to cause many Americans to yearn for some sort of restoration of national pride. We really hate losing. If the country can be persuaded that McCain is the competent version of the man with the bullhorn, he could win and he could take the nation down a very scary road. Seven years of relentless rhetoric about a “different kinda war” and “the enemy hates America” has perfectly primed this country for a man on a white horse.

If he can manage to combine America’s tribal pride, its yearning for some sort of spiritual meaning and its fear of the other and put together an inspirational, nationalistic message (along with his pre-fab image as a straight-talking “reformer”) he could be very hard to beat — and very, very dangerous. He’s a warmongering hawk, don’t ever forget it. The only real difference between him and Bush on these matters is that he’s willing to attend the funerals of the dead.

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GOP On Self-Destruct

by tristero

Yes, these upcoming GOP ads are utterly outrageous. That said, they ain’t gonna help Republicans, nohow:

The ad portrays Osama bin Laden and quotes his threats against America dating to February 1998. “These are the stakes,” the ad concludes. “Vote November 7.”

Indeed, and not too many folks are gonna vote for the party that’s let Osama stay loose for the five years after 9/11.

Moving right along:

The ad displays an array of quotes from bin Laden and his top lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahri, that include bin Laden’s Dec. 26, 2001 vow that “what is yet to come will be even greater.”

The ad also cites al-Zawahri’s claim to have obtained “some suitcase bombs,” followed by a scene that appears to show a nuclear explosion.

And American voters will be immediately reminded of the latest nuclear test, North Korea’s, which happened on Bush’s watch and which he couldn’t prevent because he and which happened in great part because the Bushites are as utterly incompetent at diplomacy as they are at protecting Americans from terror attacks, or catastrophic, predicted hurricane disasters, pedophiliac Congresscritters, corporate malfeasance, or anything else you might think of.

Liberals

by tristero

Tony Judt wrote an article in the London Review of Books which began by asking, “Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy?” Bruce Ackerman and Todd Gitlin responded in The American Prospect with a manifesto that said in essence, “Who you talkin’ about, Tony?”

But Tony has simply observed what all of us have known for the longest time: genuine liberalism – hell, even centrism – has long gone missing from the mass political discourse in the United States. The closest anyone can find to a liberal on tv – and folks, I love them dearly, but Jon Stewart and Steve Colbert are comedians – are liberal hawks of the George Packer/Paul Berman/Peter Beinart variety.

Judt makes this, unfortunately, quite clear by pointing out that in 1988, a “reaffirmation” of liberalism published in the NY Times was signed by, among others, Daniel Bell, J.K. Galbraith, Felix Rohatyn, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Irving Howe, Eudora Welty, Kenneth Arrow, and Robert Penn Warren. Many positive things can be said about the people on the current list (which, btw, includes Arrow and Schlesinger), but in terms of name recognition and cultural status, it just isn’t the same. Who has taken their place? Not the signers of the Prospect manifesto, surely. Instead, those presently with name recognition and cultural status in America are genuine morons: Paul Wolfowitz, Bill O’Reilly, William Kristol, Max Boot, and, to take Pynchon out of context, the rest of the Whole Sick Crew.

Please don’t misunderstand. I am NOT saying that the signers are in any way lightweights. There are many important thinkers among the signatories. What I’m saying is that they have, at present, next to zero stature in mainstream American culture. To claim, as Judt did of the ’88 manifesto, that the present one is an “open rebuke” of a conservative president’s folly is to ascribe much more influence to the signers of this manifesto than they command in American intellectual, let alone political and cultural, life.

American culture has literally eliminated liberals and liberalism from any consideration of serious influence. What this esoteric little spat among the intelligentsia illustrates is just how much work we liberals have cut out for us in order to regain anything resembling serious stature, let alone influence, in the US.

Re-United, And It Feels So Good

by poputonian

Church and State finally back together after forty years of separation.

” … remember the good time we had together … “”Once maybe I touched him …”

“We were just fondling …”

“He seemed to like it … “
” … we enjoyed each other’s company.””… almost like brothers …”

Oh, those young Christo-Republicans. They were so … cute.

Grenade-Threatening Lunatic Interviews US President

by tristero

Every once in a while, like three or four times a day, it is important to remember how genuinely, utterly, bogus modern American mass discourse has become. For example:

O’Reilly said that he knew “for a fact that President Bush doesn’t know what’s going on in the Internet.” O’Reilly then said, “I have to say President Bush has a much healthier attitude toward this than I do. Because if I can get away with it, boy, I’d go in with a hand grenade.”

Four things here.

First of all, O’Reilly equates presidential ignorance with presidential mental health. By his reasoning, then, George W. Bush therefore must be the sanest president that ever lived.

Secondly, note the utterly vacuous nature of the threat. Where, exactly, would Bill 0’Reilly go in with a hand grenade to destroy the evil bloggers? A server farm in Virginia? Well, that doesn’t really eliminate any bloggers, now does it? To do that, O’Reilly would have to come invade our homes.

But Bill’s right. He’d never get away with it. Oh, not that he’d get in trouble with the law: there ain’t any. Hell, a government that can rationalize torture can easily find a way to excuse Bill O’Reilly’s grenade jihad.

No the reason O’Reilly wouldn’t dare attack us is that he knows that many of us bloggers live with the kind of serious protection that would easily scare O’Reilly into dropping a huge load of falafel into his drawers.

And thirdly, even when eliminationism is uttered by blustering fools, it is still elimationism and fascism. This should be particularly disturbing to those who say we need to wait until the Minutemen… sorry, I slipped, I meant brownshirts… start their patrols before declaring the US a fascist state. After all, O’Reilly is presently deemed mainstream enough to rate an opportunity to interview the president of the United States.

And that was point four, in case you missed it.

Exceptionalism

by digby

Nearly a third of people worldwide back the use of torture in prisons in some circumstances, a BBC survey suggests.

Although 59% were opposed to torture, 29% thought it acceptable to use some degree of torture to combat terrorism.

While most polled in the US are against torture, opposition there is less robust than in Europe and elsewhere.

More than 27,000 people in 25 countries were asked if torture would be acceptable if it could provide information to save innocent lives.

Some 36% of those questioned in the US agreed that this use of torture was acceptable, while 58% were unwilling to compromise on human rights.

The percentage favouring torture in certain cases makes it one of the highest of all the countries polled.

This is kind of embarrassing. More Nigerians, Israelis, Iraqis and Philippinos approve of torture than we do. But we’re getting there. A couple more years and we’ll be number one. After all, a large majority of our political representatives voted for it.

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Shorthand

by digby

Word to the wise: if both Joe Klein and David Brooks give the same piece of advice to Democrats, do the exact opposite.

Barack Obama should run for president.

He should run first for the good of his party. It would demoralize the Democrats to go through a long primary season with the most exciting figure in the party looming off in the distance like some unapproachable dream. The next Democratic nominee should either be Barack Obama or should have the stature that would come from defeating Barack Obama.

Right. Thank Dave, for all your concern, but don’t you worry your pretty little head about the Democrats, ok? You’ve got your hands full keeping your own party from a full scale implosion.

Apparently both Joe and David think we are such idiots that we would put the callow young pup Barack Obama up against the manly old lion John McCain for president in 2008. (Jesus, I hate having my intelligence insulted by people like the Kumbaaya twins.)

I have nothing particularly against Barack Obama, he seems like he has a lot of good qualities. But this nonsense about how Democrats should nominate him because he’s a nice bipartisan boy who can change the ugly tone in Washington is just a tad presumptuous.

Here’s an idea. How about if the Republicans nominate a bucket of vapid lukewarm spit instead? Joe Lieberman would be a good choice. The Democrats will nominate somebody who is qualified to run the government for a change.

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Fooling Only Themselves

by digby

From the Carpetbagger Report:

This month, it’s a new set of ads — running in more than two dozen congressional districts nationwide — sponsored by a political action committee called “America’s Pac,” which is a project of the very wealthy (and very white) Patrick Rooney. I honestly didn’t think the right could be this disgusting.

“Black babies are terminated at triple the rate of white babies,” a female announcer in one of the ads says, as rain, thunder, and a crying infant are heard in the background. “The Democratic Party supports these abortion laws that are decimating our people, but the individual’s right to life is protected in the Republican platform. Democrats say they want our vote. Why don’t they want our lives?”

Another ad features a dialogue between two men.

“If you make a little mistake with one of your ‘hos,’ you’ll want to dispose of that problem tout suite, no questions asked,” one of the men says.

“That’s too cold. I don’t snuff my own seed,” the other replies.

“Maybe you do have a reason to vote Republican,” the first man says.

There’s more at the link.

I really doubt this is going to work.

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