Month: November 2006

Hypocrisy

by tristero

One of the most tedious aspects of the rightwing assault on liberal, and therefore American, values is that they are using arguments that have been refuted long ago, sometimes, as in the case of the ontological existence of God, centuries ago. Here we are in the 21st century, a time when we should be literally agog at the astonishing wonders we now know the process of evolution has generated, and equally amazed that so much of that history has been comprehensible over the space of ionly around 147 years of concentrated human effort. Instead, brilliant women and men like Eugenie Scott, Pz Myers, Ken Miller, Richard Dawkins, and Barbara Forrest have to expend a great deal of effort explaining to the American public that idiotic notions like the Blind Watchmaker or the downright blasphemous God of the Gaps – two of the primary “philosophical” assumptions behind “intelligent design” creationism – are utterly fallacious. Meanwhile, are you aware that scientists have learned that whales once had legs? That they evolved from land animals that returned to the sea? And they have extraordinarily fascinating paleontologic evidence to show how this happened?

And so we return, as Digby notes below, to the defense of hypocrisy. With all due respect to Roy, especially for recalling the Diaghilev anecdote in this context, the only thing that would have astonished Diaghilev is that the right is trying again to defend hypocrisy.

In the 19th century, numerous American evangelicals published defenses of hypocrisy, of the importance of preaching and expounding things you knew weren’t true or that you didn’t follow yourself.* Here is an excerpt from a 1995 interview with Gertrude Himmelfarb, author and mother of William Kristol who spells out Victorian values, and argues for them:

R&L: The Victorians, especially with their strong emphasis on morality, virtue, and the like, are often criticized for hypocrisy – their high rate of prostitution, for example. How do you interpret this?

Himmelfarb: First of all, many of the charges of hypocrisy are grossly exaggerated. The rate of prostitution, for example, was probably no higher in the early Victorian period than it had been before, and it was almost certainly lower later in the century. In any case, I believe firmly in the old adage, “hypocrisy is the homage that virtue pays to vice.” Violations of the moral code were regarded as such; they were cause for shame and guilt. The Victorians did not do what we do today –- that is, “define deviancy down”– normalize immorality so that it no longer seems immoral. Immorality was seen as such, as immoral and wrong, and was condemned as such. Men might be weak – they might have recourse to prostitutes, for example–- but the moral principle remained the same. (And the same, incidentally, for men and women. Men violated the principle more often than women, but the principle applied to both. In this respect, there was no “double standard”.

Recently, in 2003, Jonah Goldberg made much the same argument in excusing Betting Bill Bennett’s hypocrisy when his spectacular addiction to gambling was exposed. In a typical rightwing rhetorical blitzkrieg**, Goldberg employs a “fire on all fronts” approach, advancing numerous contradictory arguments in the hopes that something will hit the enemy – that’s you and I, dear reader – and we will be overwhelmed and surrender . And so, earlier in his article, Goldberg asserts that Bennett really isn’t a hypocrite, but those who reported on his gambling are. While you’re trying to wrap your brain around that one, Goldberg shoots from the exact opposite angle: if Bennett was a hypocrite, what’s wrong with that?

Bennett is a big, sloppy Irish Catholic guy from Brooklyn who believes in old-fashioned morality and decency. He’s not perfect, but he’s been focusing our attention on the right things. When charged with hypocrisy, Max Scheler — the moral philosopher who dallied with the ladies — responded that the sign pointing to Boston doesn’t have to go there. America is a better place because Bennett pointed in the right direction.

There is also much amusing discussion of Madonna by Jonah, which I’m sure she found very touching. Who knew anyone still cared?

And then, published earlier this year is In Defense of Hypocrisy: Picking Sides in the War on Virtue by Jeremy Lott which I suspect is where Frum may have cribbed his argument (although I’ll grant that Frum is morally perverse enough mahybe to have thought it up ex nihilio). Lott, too, defends Betting Bill Bennett and raises the ante, invoking the name of the Savior of Mankind to his cause.

No, not George Bush. The other one, the Jew. Jesus, says Lott, would “not find common cause with our many modern anti-hypocrites.” And dig the sneaky use of the phrase “common cause” here, as in Common Cause, as in liberals, which enables Lott to say Jesus is no liberal but a righwinger without actually saying exactly that.

Having a book to fill with defenses of hypocrisy, Jeremy doesn’t limit himself to the odd couple of Betting Bill and the Holy Anticipation of George Bush. No, Lott slams both left feet into those evil scoundrels who would denounce poor Britney Spears as a foul hypocrite. Well, I have to admit I don’t follow pop culture very closely so it comes as quite a surprise to learn that the purpose of watching Britney Spears is to listen to her ideas. Thanks for the heads up, Jeremy. I’m sure your book is full of all sorts of useful goodies like that.

And here is a blogger who last August summarized much of the modern rightwing take on hypocrisy. And slide over, Rick Santorum and poodle – talk about strange bedfellows! Here, Paris Hilton joins NAMBLA to sock it to the liberals:***

Given a choice between the real thing and a faker, I’ll take the real thing anyday. But more and more that’s not the choice I’m given. When I have to pick between the slimy pretenders and the people proudly trumpeting their vice to the world, I’ll take the slimeballs.

The hypocrites are at least acknowledging that what they are covering up is wrong, or at the very least, socially unacceptable. As François de la Rochefoucauld famously said, “Hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue.” There is still an operative sense of shame and a tacit acknowledgement that what they are keeping under wraps is wrong.

Contrast that, for instance, with NAMBLA and its avowed aim to “leave” children “free to determine the content of their own sexual experiences.” Or with Paris Hilton and her open quest for the venal, the superficial and the narcissistic.

Somehow, they evoke in me a much deeper sense of horror. And quite apart from my own personal feelings, which really don’t much matter to anyone who isn’t me, there is the fact that these people serve as magnets for the like-minded and together, they enable and embolden each other. It’s like removing a quarantine; the sickness spreads more easily.

Hypocrisy is indeed a vice, but in the long run it’s preferable to shamelessness.

To which, incidentally a commenter with the nom de net “Jeremy Lott,” he of the book defending hypocrisy asked, ” Is hypocrisy always a vice?”

Now, I have as much interest in “engaging” rightwing arguments on the subject of hypocrisy as I do in engaging Heaven’s Gate followers as to whether there really was a spaceship behind Hale Bopp. They are intellectually at the same level, and I don’t find it interesting that you can’t logically prove there wasn’t a spaceship behind the comet nor that there may be times when lying is defensible. Oh, and by the way, “live” backwards spells “waste of my fucking time.” But I will say this:

Hypocrisy on the level of influence Ted Haggard had directly harms millions of lives, both gay (Haggard’s enthusiastic support for a constitutional amendment declaring certain Americans ineligible for marriage) and to a much lesser extent, straight (by feeding one of the ugliest, stupidest, and most manipulated prejudice in modern American culture, with all the anguish and even violence that flows from stoking such hatred). Such hypocrisy is grossly immoral.

To defend hyypocrisy of the sort that Ted Haggard practiced, where he went out of his way to preach that perfectly normal behavior is a deep sin while repeatedly, and in secret, enjoying the behavior himself, is to advocate precisely the kind of moral relativism the right accuses liberals of practicing (but we don’t). There is nothing shameful about same-sex attraction and there is nothing morally wrong with two consenting adults doing whatever intimate acts they both enjoy. Haggard’s hypocrisy was not that he hid an immoral act. It is that he enjoyed his perfectly normal desires while enthusiastically preaching the lie that they are abnormal.****

What is morally wrong is to deny any couple that is prepared to celebrate that love in the public ceremony of marriage all civil rights a culture bestows on married couples. [Update: Including the right to marry itself.]

As I said earlier, if I were an evangelical, I would conclude that Haggard’s fall was Christ’s message to us. And the message is to stop the persecution of gays, stop trying to write bigotry back (again) into the US Constitution, let couples who love each other marry, and accept – love – them as your neighbors, friends, and family. Because that is, as with straight couples, what gay couples simply are.

*I haven’t yet re-located the reference in which I learned this. I believe it was in a book by Gary Noll. Any help from people who have this info on the tip of their brains would be deeply appreciated. The rest of you, if you don’t believe me without a reference, well, I don’t blame you. You shouldn’t. I hope to have a reference soon. FWIW, the 19th cent. arguments I recall seeing were, to some extent, similar to what Himmelfarb says.

**Ooops, by using blitzkrieg did I just make a sneaky association between Goldberg’s tactics and Nazi propaganda? Of course not. I meant no such reference. Honestly, the things people read into what I write!

***To those not up either on pervertspeak or rightwing propaganda….ahem…well anyway, NAMBLA stands for North American Man/Boy Love Association. And, if you ask anyone you care to on the right, since I’m a card-carrying member of ACLU, I therefore fully support the homosexual rape of minors. I also heart Oliver North. Don’t ask me why this doesn’t make any sense. I already know that.

****Haggard also betrayed his marriage vows. But that is between him and his wife. What concerns us is the hypocrisy that affected us, his lying words, his characterization of normal sexuality as immoral, while at the same time practicing his sexuality.

[UPDATE: One sentence immediately removed after posting which called Victorian hypocrisy the Victorian double standard. Not quite.]

Perverting Reality

by digby

I have long written that the right has retired the concept of hypocrisy. But until I read this piece by David Frum over at alicublog I didn’t realize that they had actually formulated a moral philosophy to justify it. It is truly astonishing:

Roy writes:

Frum’s opening made me think he was just going to show sympathy for a fallen sinner; later, I thought he would be content to tag on some contempt for a liberal media pile-on; but eventually I realized to my horror this man, a professional writer who had once been employed by the President of the United States, was rejecting a taboo as old as human society:

Consider the hypothetical case of two men. Both are inclined toward homosexuality. Both from time to time hire the services of male prostitutes. Both have occasionally succumbed to drug abuse.

One of them marries, raises a family, preaches Christian principles, and tries generally to encourage people to lead stable lives.

The other publicly reveals his homosexuality, vilifies traditional moral principles, and urges the legalization of drugs and prostitution…

…the first man may well see his family and church life as his “real” life; and regard his other life as an occasional uncontrollable deviation, sin, and error, which he condemns in his judgment and for which he sincerely seeks to atone by his prayer, preaching, and Christian works.

Yet it is the first man who will if exposed be held up to the execration of the media, while the second can become a noted public character – and can even hope to get away with presenting himself as an exemplar of ethics and morality.

How does this make moral sense?

Because, you hoser, human society depends upon at least a rudimentary concept of justice. We can forgive inconsistencies, and even admire trying and failing, but when someone amasses power from us based on his personal superiority, and is proved a fraud, he has broken the basic bargain of leadership. We mock him not out of meanness, but out of a communal survival instinct.

It is innate common sense to hold those who fail to practice what they preach to their own standards — otherwise there are no such thing as standards in the first place and there is no moral value in honesty. Dear God, is he 12?

I had heard Kate O’Beirne make Frum’s argument on Friday on Chris Matthews’ show and just thought she was blubbering incoherently because she didn’t know how to spin it. Apparently Frum’s piece had just been injected into the Borg and hadn’t been fully assimilated.

But this isn’t really all that unusual. For instance, it also fits with their earlier admonition that parents should lie to their teen-agers about having taken drugs when they were younger. The right wingers say it’s better to lie than admit that you have regrets (or don’t.) They are enshrining dishonesty and hypocrisy as a moral imperative.

Frum and his fellow neo-cons and faith-based robots have spent the last few years mangling the discourse with so much hypocrisy, so many outright lies and twisted moral reasoning that they may have permanently built an alternate universe that they can turn to whenever the need arises. Witness two events that happened just last week.

First you had the John Kerry flap. After the first news cycle everyone knew he’d blown a punchline. There were even plenty of conservatives who admitted it. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was forcing him to apologize for something he never said. It was a pure act of force, as if they put their foot on his neck and demanded that he agree that “up is down and black is white” — a modern show trial in which Kerry agreed to confess in order to spare his party’s chances in the upcoming election. He instinctively resisted, as sane people always do when forced to deny reality. But the sheer power of the coordinated Republican outcry (with the willing help of cynical Dems and the media) finally made it imperative for him to issue an apology for something he never said.

And the Republicans laughed and laughed because once again they had forced a leading Democrat to bow to their will as surely as if they’d physically held him down and made him agree that black was white and up was down. It was all the more delicious because every party to it, the Republicans, the Democrats, the public, the media and John Kerry himself all knew the real truth. Now that’s power.

They pulled off a different, but related, gambit with something that was far more important. The administration tried to spin the irresponsible dumping of nuclear secrets on the internet as proof that the Iraq war was justified despite the fact that the documents were from before the first Gulf war. Even the secretary of state went on conservative talk radio and pretty much said “you can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes.” Since it happened so late in the election cycle, it got lost in all the gay, meth snorting, joke blowing Republican effluvia of the campaign, but it is still one of the most audacious attempts at reality denial we’ve yet seen.

Fox news, unsurprisingly, shows how it was done:

GIBSON: Catherine, wait a minute. It sounds to me like the lead is buried. Has the U.S. government confirmed that Saddam Hussein had nukes? And The New York Times, of all — of all organizations, is now confirming that Saddam Hussein was pursuing or had or was close to having nukes?

HERRIDGE: Right. I — I don’t want to think that I buried the lead, but that’s always possible. I think what’s happened here is that [Rep. Peter] Hoekstra (R-MI) and others are saying — and Secretary [of State Condoleezza] Rice said also today, look, these documents show that Saddam Hussein may have been further along in the nuclear weapons process than we had believed. It was alleged in the Times that the documents included information on firing plugs. This is a very specific type of technology, which is not freely available on the Internet. So, that’s — that’s one aspect of the story.

“Herridge” is Catherine Herridge, allegedly a news reporter, not a pundit. I suppose it would be too much to ask that she anger Roger Ailes and challenge Gibson on his blatant misrepresentation. But her approach wouldn’t have been all that different from the mainstream media had they seen it as something more than an “oops,” as CNN called it. It would have played out differently than the Kerry gaffe, but with the same underlying dynamic. The Republicans would have looked the media in the eye and dared them to say outright that the Republicans were lying. The media knows what it’s supposed to do so it would have reported it like this:

Republicans claim that the New York Times has verified that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear program and was much closer to building one that we’ve previously thought. Democrats counter by saying that the plans that were released on the internet date from before the first gulf war. Coming up, Representative GOP Liar and Senator Democrat Noodle debate the issue.

The pressure in the media is slightly different, but the result is the same. The real point of this total disregard for reality is to force others to be complicit in their falsehoods.

They succeeded in getting everyone to agree that John Kerry should have immediately apologized for something he never said and they managed to at least partially spin what should have been a public relations disaster — Bush personally ordering a project that resulted in arabic language nuclear plans winding up on the internet at the behest of their political fringe — into a positive story that proved the Bush administration case for war.

These are bold, in-your-face challenges to what we all commonly perceive as reality. Frum’s perverse moral view of Haggard’s hypocrisy and dishonesty is the same thing. It’s where the faith-based, the Limbaugh nation and the neocons come together in a Straussian orgy of lies and myths and pure brute force.

Winning this election will not change this. The political establishment has been trained in this method for almost two decades now and the Republicans are actually better at wielding this power as the opposition. I have no answers about how to deal with it. It’s one of the most difficult challenges we face.

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Richard Perle And The Limits Of Schadenfreude

by tristero

In re: Neo Culpa again.

I’d like to draw attention to some remarks of Perle’s that have gotten less attention from bloggers than the more outrageous things he and the others said. Except for phrases in brackets, the following are all quotes from Perle:

The levels of brutality that we’ve seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity…”

[An anarchic, failed state is becoming more likely], and then you’ll get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating.”

I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, ‘Should we go into Iraq?,’ I think now I probably would have said, ‘No, let’s consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists…’Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have.”

Perle’s evasion of responsibility and propensity to blame others has been noted by others.

But Perle is also saying that he has learned a bitter lesson from the catastrophe of the Bush/Iraq War. Knowing what he knows now, he wouldn’t be so rash to recommend invasion, conquest, and occupation.

I’m going to try to say this as clearly and as forcefully as possible.

War should never be fought to provide anyone with an opportunity to grow in wisdom. Yet that is, as far as anyone can tell, the only thing other than sheer horror and outrageous exploitation that has come from this war. Richard Perle and friends have learned something.

And they all learned…what?

They learned that war is “horrifying.” They learned that war is unpredictable and chaotic, and its outcome impossible to discern. They learned that the men who start wars, no matter how brilliant they appear to be before the war, are incompetent. They learned that men who prosecute wars, no matter how stong-willed they might appear to be, cannot control them.

Yes, that is what Perle and his friends learned. That is all.

Question: After a war, how much wisdom do you need to gain to recognize the carnage? Answer After a war it takes only as much wisdom to see it was horrible as it takes intelligence to blame others – Rumsfeld, the beauracracy – for the failure of your crackpot plans. And that is exactly how much wisdom Perle has gained.

Why did Perle underestimate “the depravity” the world would see from a Bush/Iraq war, and spectacularly underestimate it at that? I have no idea, but it was not because he’s never seen a war up close. I haven’t either and I never underestimated the depravity to come from this war. Why did Perle fail to weigh carefully the very real probability that the Bush/Iraq war might result in a failed state where you’d get “all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating?” Again, I don’t know, but once again, I didn’t.

And I was far from alone.

Most of the world knew what was going to happen if Bush invaded Iraq. And to make absolutely sure Perle knew that we knew, and to bring the possibility that the Bush/Iraq war would end in chaos to his attention, just in case it happened to have escaped his brilliant mind, tens of millions around the world marched, not once, but twice, in protest. Millions of us wrote our governments begging them to do something, anything, to avert the inevitable disaster. Helen Caldicott even urged that the ailing John Paul II travel to Baghdad to become a human shield. And the Pope himself, face to face with George W. Bush, counseled a peaceful solution.

And then the war came. And the casualties began to mount. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands dead or horribly mutilated. Tortures and beheadings. Atrocities even worse, too horrible to describe. And no end in sight no matter whether the US stays or goes – and the US isn’t going anytime soon.

And it took all this to provide Perle with his learning experience. To finally have Perle say, maybe we could have looked at other means than war in dealing with the very containable threat of Saddam Hussein.

But you’d have to have been “delphic” to know that, Perle says. Yes, delphic… As if Richard Perle was a half-crazed woman ranting oracles in the mists. And Perle, he tells us this straight out, that’s the last thing he wants anyone to think Richard Perle could possibly be.

But this post really isn’t about Richard Perle.

When I first saw that article, like many of you, I was entertained by the spectacle of these scoundrels having to eat crow. But then I remembered that poor kid whose parents were killed and whose legs and an arm were severed by a bomb I paid for.

And I remembered that a television anchor asked the reporter on the scene whether the shocked, traumatized beyond all belief, child really understood that all of this happened to him for a good cause, the liberation of his country.

And after I remembered that I felt ashamed of my schadenfreude towards Perle. For he is among those directly responsible for the murder of that child’s parents, and for that kid’s own permanent mutilation. And he implicated me, and you, in that murder and gore as well, despite the fact that we protested loud and long. And he helped create the ghastly environment of immoral self-righteousness reflected in that anchor’s remarks. And he urged it happen. He wanted it to happen. He rejoiced when it happened. He wants it to happen again in Iran, in Syria, and elsewhere.

And I felt ashamed that this country’s public discourse is even now still so unspeakably corrupt that people as morally sick as Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, and Ken Adelman still have access to a wide public. And I felt furious that while Vanity Fair fusses to find the most elegant way to fling Perle’s shit at America, the rest of us can only wait anxiously for the inevitable catastrophes, the direct result of the advice and avid support of these people, to unfold, with little opportunity to guide the discourse back to anything close to sanity.

A longtime ago, the summer of ’03, I think it was, I wrote a private letter to Josh Marshall. I had just seen a video of him and Perle on a panel at, I think, American Enterprise Institute, discuss the Iraq War. Perle was unbearably coarse, surly, and contemptuous, even personally nasty towards Josh. And of course, everything Perle asserted was dead wrong.

In the letter, I told Josh that he shouldn’t raise Perle’s status in the world by deigning to appear with him.

I never heard back from Josh, but I’m pretty sure that one of the things he thought was that I was completely uninformed and had it entirely backwards. Probably he thought I didn’t know that Perle, a highly-placed adviser to a president and his war cabinet, was deigning to appear with him.

No, Josh, I knew exactly what I was saying.

It is high time that Perle, Ledeen, Adelman and the whole sick crew stop getting their phone calls returned from the media. And for the media to stop calling them. For truly, Perle is not Joshua Marshall’s peer. Perle is Joe McCarthy’s. He is Curtis Lemay’s. Perle is a nutcase, a madman. He makes Ward Churchill appear a paragon of insight and integrity. As for not being delphic, he makes Anne Heche seem normal.

Let this Vanity Fair article be the last time any mainstream publication would think enough of someone as utterly worthless as Richard Perle to publish his comments surrounded by the trappings of seriousness. And if it’s not the last time, then by God, let’s work to make sure its the second to last. Or the third to last.

[Updated to correct the name of the Pope. Thank you, commenters!]

Call Me, Harold

by digby

Via Talking Points Memo, I see that we are able to see some results of the Corker “call me” ad in tennessee and it’s not pretty:

The poll suggests that a Republican ad mentioning that Ford attended a Super Bowl party attended by Playboy playmates and featuring a white woman telling Ford to “call me,” hurt Ford. A whopping 81 percent of likely voters saw the ad.

While 67 percent said it would have no effect on their vote, 23 percent said it made them more likely to vote for Corker and 10 percent said it made them more likely to vote for Ford.

Of those who said the ad affected their vote, by two to one they decided to vote for Corker. TPM also has a copy (pdf) of a slick mailer put out by this new national character assasination squad called Common Sense Ohio which says “Bob Corker and Harold Ford are separated by more than their school colors…”

There can be no question why this stuff still works. The good news is that far fewer people think that way than used to. The bad news is that quite a few still do. In a close election in the south it can make the difference.

Bob Herbert reported in the October 6, 2005 edition of the New York Times of a 1981 interview with Lee Atwater in which he explains the GOP’s Southern Strategy:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni**er, ni**er, ni**er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni**er” – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ni**er, ni**er.”

“Different school colors” and “call me, Harold” are abstract, but you don’t have to be a genius to get the message.

Ford opted to pretend that it was not happening and instead criticized the ad for being placed in the family hour. (The layers of hypocrisy surrounding that ad are a mile high.)He ran as far right as you can possibly run without breaking into Deutchland Uber Alles. Maybe that was a good idea, but it didn’t seem to work. I’m not sure what would work once the racist genie is out of the bottle.

Update: Joe Scarborough and Chris Matthews just agreed that the problem for Ford wasn’t the ad. It was when he confronted Corker at that press conference. Scarborough explained that 200 years of history show that this is something that would offend a lot of southern voters.

Scarborogh and Matthews agreed that a black man has to be very careful how he behaves if he wants to win. Matthews pointed out that he needs to be a General or a 4.0 Harvard grad. Scarborough sadly intoned, “and it’s important not to appear to be intimidating.”

So, Ford’s loss has nothing to do with that racist ad after all. It was soemthing else entirely.

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The F Word

by tristero

This disturbing notice on Slashdot comes via Sara Robinson at Orcinus:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has proposed a system which will in essence make it mandatory for you to have permission before leaving or entering the country, effectively putting everyone on a no-fly list unless the government says otherwise. Interestingly, the proposal does not seem to cover personal travel, only that on some sort of carrier like an airline or cruise vessel.

One would think that passports would be enough for a free government to regulate travel abroad by its citizens. But no, issuing passports doesn’t have enough goose-stepping zip and pizazz for the Bushites. Passports are subject to public checks and balance And that, we just can’t have; it would be too easy for someone to learn whether Bush is abusing them.

Sara quotes from the Identity Project, which has filed comments in opposition to the proposal. Notice how the Bushites are trying to sneak this one by:

In the guise of an NPRM [Notice of Proposed Rule-Making] alleged to propose a change only in the required timing of transmission of information already required to be provided to the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the CBP has actually proposed a fundamental regulatory change with far-reaching (literally and figuratively) legal, policy, and logistical implications: The NPRM would replace a requirement for ex post facto notice to the CBP of information about who is on each vessel (ship or plane) with an unconstitutional system of prior restraint of international travel, entirely unauthorized by statute and inconsistent with the U.S. obligations embodied in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Under the proposed rules, orders by the CBP to common carriers not to transport specific persons… would be based on an undefined, secret, administrative permission-to-travel (“clearance”) procedure subject to none of the procedural or substantive due process required for orders prohibiting or restricting the exercise of protected First Amendment rights…

The NPRM would create a clearly invalid administrative…, that all those persons not affirmatively “cleared” in advance by the CBP – according to decision-making procedures and criteria specified nowhere in the NPRM – are barred from travel. [emphasis added]

Okay, let’s not jump to any conclusions that fascist tendencies, and only fascist tendencies, are behind such a proposal. We need to put this into context.

Something like 1/3 to 1/2 of all Congresscritters don’t have passports. Not only that, but Crawford’s Own Messiah had visited only Mexico, China, and Israel before he moved into the White House.

In short, for a huge chunk of the highest levels of government, the world stops at the US border. It is barely an exaggeration to characterize the worldview of such incurious, fearful know-nothings as one which sees the un-United States as a dark, fetid place which has no value except as a source for oil. Oil, which unfortunately, comes with a host of undifferentiated brown-skinnned pests that have to be cleared out of the way, by one means or another.

In other words, the notion that anyone must travel outside the United States is a concept that a huge number of extremely influential American leaders have a lot of trouble wrapping their minds – such as they are – around. So what’s the big deal if permission is denied without reason?

As for wanting to travel abroad…why on earth would you want to do that? Something wrong with the USA? You’re in the best country in the world! And you want Italian, hey, we got Domino’s Pizza, fine American pizza just as good as that fancy stuff they make over in Rome or Barcelona or wherever. And Domino’s delivers.

So perhaps the intent behind this proposal isn’t entirely un-American and tyrannical. Maybe they’re also dumb as posts as well. After all, the Bush Administration seems to have an infinite supply of people who are unfailingly stupid, ignorant, arrogant, and indifferent to the world beyond the gates of their exclusive communities.

But let’s not joke around anymore.

This latest proposal for secret powers is the kind of garbage that gets thought up, proposed, and implemented by fascists. And it’s only a matter of milliseconds before it’s abused. Let’s not forget that DHS was used at least once against domestic political opponents of the GOP. Republicans, probably including DeLay, used the Department of Homeland Security in an effort to locate and round up Democrats as part of a successful effort to gerrymander Texas.

Jesus Doesn’t Mention It

by digby

Following up tristero’s post below, it’s interesting that David Kuo says something along those lines in this new TIME magazine article:

“The evangelical obsession with homosexuality makes this especially ironic. For many evangelical leaders, anything related to homosexuality is this special, dark sin. But that’s not what the Bible says,” says Kuo. “Really it’s a sin like gossiping to your neighbor. Jesus doesn’t even mention it at all.”

Nobody made it sound darker or more sinful than Ted Haggard.

ABC is reporting that Haggard’s church just excommunicated fired him for “sexually immoral conduct:”

“Our investigation and Pastor Haggard’s public statements have proven without a doubt that he has committed sexually immoral conduct,” the New Life Church’s Overseer Board said in a statement.

Haggard on Friday acknowledged paying Jones for a massage and for methamphetamine, but said he did not have sex with him and did not take the drug.

I don’t know what this could mean except that he confessed to something sexual. Perhaps if he had spent his time teaching his flock that Jesus never mentioned homosexuality and that it’s considered at worst a “sin” akin to gossip, he wouldn’t be in this mess.

Here’s a little spiritual guidance for him:

as ye sow, so shall ye reap, big guy

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Stale Cakewalk

by digby

Everybody’s talking about the the neocon rats deserting the sinking ship article that’s coming up in the December Vanity Fair. It’s a doozy. There are two excerpts however that I think are just priceless.

First, there’s Michael Ledeen, who sent his totally inexperienced 29 year old daughter to Bagdad to work as a financial advisor for the Coalition Provisional Authority in the early days of the invasion, blaming it on the bitches:

“Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes.”

The other is Ken “Cakewalk” Adelman:

And if he, too, had his time over, Adelman says, “I would write an article that would be skeptical over whether there would be a performance that would be good enough to implement our policy. The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can’t execute it, it’s useless, just useless. I guess that’s what I would have said: that Bush’s arguments are absolutely right, but you know what, you just have to put them in the drawer marked can’t do. And that’s very different from let’s go.”

The same guy who Bob Woodward spoke to in 2004 for his book “Plan of Attack;”

Former Reagan administration official Kenneth Adelman, a prominent neoconservative, had authored an op-ed piece in the April 10, 2003 Washington Post entitled “Cake Walk Revisited,” gloating over what appeared to be a quick victory in Iraq and reminding readers that, 14 months earlier, he had written that the war would be a “Cake Walk.”

Cheney read the article and congratulated Adelman on his “clever column,” which, he said, “really demolished them.” Cheney and his wife, Lynne, invited the Adelmans to join the Cheneys on April 13 for a “small private dinner” with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby.

Adelman was so happy that he burst into tears at the door of the vice president’s residence that Sunday. He hugged Cheney for the first time in the 30 years he had known him. “We’re all together,” Cheney said. “There should be no protocol; ‘let’s just talk.'”

Wolfowitz proceeded to embark on a long review of the 1991 Persian Gulf war. “Hold it, hold it,” Adelman interjected. “Let’s talk about this Gulf war. I have been blown away by how determined the president is. The war has been awesome.”

Adelman said he had been “worried to death that there would be no war as time went on and support seemed to wane.”

“Yes,” agreed the vice president. “And it all began the first minutes of the presidency, when Bush said they were going to go full steam ahead…This guy was just totally different,” Cheney said. “He just decided here’s what I want to do and I’m going to do it.”

Writes Woodward, “It was a pretty amazing accomplishment, they all agreed, particularly given the opposition to the war. Here was Brent Scowcroft, the pillar of the establishment foreign policy, widely seen as a surrogate for the president’s father. There had been James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state, insisting on a larger coalition of nations.”

Talk turned to the current secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, and there were chuckles around the table. Cheney and Wolfowitz agreed that, as Cheney put it, Powell “was someone who just followed his poll ratings and bragged about his popularity. He sure likes to be popular. Colin always had major reservations about what we were trying to do.” (Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 30, 2004)

Adelman claims that he’s just shocked about Don Rumsfeld’s performance:

“The problem here is not a selling job. The problem is a performance job.… Rumsfeld has said that the war could never be lost in Iraq, it could only be lost in Washington. I don’t think that’s true at all. We’re losing in Iraq.… I’ve worked with [Rumsfeld] three times in my life. I’ve been to each of his houses, in Chicago, Taos, Santa Fe, Santo Domingo, and Las Vegas. I’m very, very fond of him, but I’m crushed by his performance. Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don’t know. He certainly fooled me.”

Uhm no. He was always full of shit and so was Ken Adelman:

March 23, 2003

Kenneth Adelman, a former Reagan arms control official who is close to top Bush military officials and serves on a Pentagon advisory panel, said these weapons are likeliest to be found near Tikrit and Baghdad, “because they’re the most protected places with the best troops.”

“I have no doubt we’re going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction,” Adelman said, though he acknowledged some surprise that they have not been used yet. “One thing we may find is Saddam Hussein ordered them to be used and soldiers didn’t follow the orders. The threat of use goes down every day because adherence to orders goes down.”

March 30, 2003

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, weapons of mass destruction. Key goal of the military campaign is finding those weapons of mass destruction. None have been found yet. There was a raid on the Answar Al-Islam Camp up in the north last night. A lot of people expected to find ricin there. None was found. How big of a problem is that? And is it curious to you that given how much control U.S. and coalition forces now have in the country, they haven’t found any weapons of mass destruction?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Not at all. If you think — let me take that, both pieces — the area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.

Adelman throwing Rumsfeld under the bus is rich. There is no difference between them. They are both incompetent, ideological zealots who have never been right about anything.

Update: Kevin Drum correctly says this pathetic attmpt by the neocons to separate themselves from the architects of the war should be drowned in the bathtub. Iraq was their baby:

The neocons have always been idealists, and their ideals saw full flower in the Iraq war. A show of force in one country, plenty of threats against its neighbors, a disdain for multilateral action, and an occupation designed to be a showpiece of conservative ideology rather than a serious attempt at reconstructing a society. That’s what the neocons wanted, and that’s what they got. The rest is details.

The failure of Iraq is inherent in the naive idealism and fixated ideology of neoconservatism, and shame on us if we let them get away with suggesting otherwise. This is one rehabilitation project that needs to be stopped dead in its tracks.

The starry-eyed neocons are more than idealists. They are full-on magical thinkers who actually believed that if we deposed Saddam, the mere sight of our mighty army on the field would be enough to make everyone behave exactly as we wanted them to. That what puts the neo in neoconservatism. They are idealistic in the sense that they believe we won’t have to actually kill hundreds of thousands of people but merely rattle our giant codpieces and the enemy would capitulate out of pure shock and awe.

They know even less about human nature than the paleos who, at least, are clued into to the real human id. These guys are dreamier than dreamiest liberal idealist but they love to play with big, loud toys that go boom.

Adelman does say one thing I hope is true in the VF piece:

“the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world”—is dead, at least for a generation.

Good riddance. Consciously letting loose the most powerful military in the world for the pupose of “sending messages” and creating democracy and freedom at the point of a gun is a ridiculous idea. We have many other powerful tools in our toolbox that work a helluva lot better and don’t include “liberating” 600,000 people from their lives.

Update: I just realized that Adelman quoted Cheney saying “it all began the first minutes of the presidency, when Bush said they were going to go full steam ahead…this guy was just totally different, he just decided here’s what I want to do and I’m going to do it.”

Six years later, hundreds of thousands of deaths later, he said almost exactly the same thing to George Stephanopoulos this week-end:

“The president has made clear what his objective is and that’s victory in Iraq. We’re full speed ahead on that…It may not be popular with the public — it doesn’t matter in the sense that we have to continue the mission and do what we think is right. And that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re not running for office. We’re doing what we think is right.”

They have not grown or changed one iota from the first moments of their presidency.

Update II: Weldon has found an amazing example of a fresh faced neocon hanging in there in Foreign Policy magazine. He thought it might be a satire. It isn’t.

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A Message From On High

by tristero

I came across this interesting editorial in The Christian Post on what the National Associations of Evangelicals (NAE) should do now that their president, Ted Haggard, has been exposed as a hypocrite.

First of all, what is the NAE?

The National Association of Evangelicals is a group that is 30-million strong with over 50 years of history. However, in the last few years, its headquarters has moved to an office within Haggard’s New Life Community Church with its staffers fully employed by the church.

Oops.

Most of the editorial consists of practical advice for what the NAE should do now, like move out of Haggard’s megachurch, and elect a temporary president, which assumes they can find a leading christianist who isn’t involved in a sex scandal or batshit crazy like Pat Robertson. Or, like Tim LaHaye, too rich to bother. But I digress.

Sprinkled throughout the editorial, you get lines like these:

…the situation in its entirety is a stark reminder of man’s sinfulness and a dark exposure of how deeply the sin of homosexuality has taken root in the American society. …now would be the time for the Evangelical community look within its own walls and battle against the culture of sin that looms before the Church of Christ…

…fighting more adamantly against the culture of sin…

Get it? It’s the “culture of sin” – that’s liberals to you – that done did in poor Ted Haggard and kicked the 30-million strong NAE in the teabags. (And right around now, if you haven’t been following the American theocracy movement closely, you should be saying to yourself: “A 30 million strong evangelical group! Holy fucking shit!!”)

And then the editorial closes with a common invocation of Jesus, who rules over us sinners. Admittedly, we’re not really supposed to read the words so much as feel the goodness and strength that comes whenever Jesus is mentioned with love. But let’s read it anyway:

After all, no matter how sensationalized the reports and how deep the sin, it is Christ – not Ted Haggard – who is the head of this Church.

If that is so, that “Christ is the head of this Church,” then Christ has just sent his Church – through the travails of Ted Haggard – an unequivocal message to stop bashing and obsessing over gays. And stop forcing them to hide in closets.

Since Haggard before his fall was consumed with making marriage for certain Americans constitutionally illegal, Christ now is telling evangelicals to behave with mercy and grace towards gays, to stop obsessing over the gender of two people who love each other, but to accept them, to love them.

And if I were a member of “this Church,” I’d very much attend to this message Christ has sent our way.

Update: Digby here. Just thought you’d enjoy this from Jerry Falwell. Turns out some of the big boys were already mad at Haggard for calling them out for their anti-Muslim slurs. Also notice that Falwell uses political terms to describe critics such as Haggard:

The fact is that we, as Christian leaders, do have a biblically-ordained responsibility to reach out with the Gospel of Christ to all people, including Muslims. This is not a popular concept with many on the left. But our responsibility is to Christ, and not our earthly critics, as we strive to do His will.

I suspect Haggard is going to become the poster boy for the (liberal) “culture of sin.”

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Blue Heroes

by digby

As we close in on the election, with our prospects looking good, I think the netroots and the blogosphere deserve a little pat on the back and none moreso than the Blue America Pac, which raised more than half a million dollars this cycle for a very specific and original purpose:

The Blue America PAC was formed on August 24 to raise money to put “Have You Had Enough” on the radio in the form of 30 second advertising spots for various Blue America candidates. As you can see from our list, most of our candidates are in low-cost media markets where just a few dollars will go a very long way. We have no candidates in expensive media markets like NYC or Boston or Los Angeles or Chicago. These are “dollah a hollah” markets. We’re hoping to have people humming their way into the polling booths come November. The story of the song is here and please watch Firedoglake, Crooks and Liars, Music For America and Down With Tyranny for updates—and for the videos.

Howie Klein of Down With Tyranny has posted this letter from the campaign manager of an oregon candidate named Carol Voisin that really does my heart good and shows how valuable these kinds of projects are to the grassroots of the Democratic party:

I’m Carol Voisin’s campaign manager, and as we get to the end of the campaign I wanted to thank you again for all that you and the Hadenough/BlueAmerica team have done for us and the other candidates. As you and Rick Brown wrote in the Voisin DownWithTyranny writeup, this is one of those campaigns that has such structural disadvantages (Dems lose by 45%+), that it typically never gets off the ground, with a downward spiral of no belief and no money. This year has been different because Carol is a great candidate and she came together with some highly motivated volunteers, several of us from the netroots. Our weakness was also a strength, as the lack of professionals and insiders has allowed us all to keep the campaign in line with our ideals– we’ve made things up as we went along while running an honest and positive campaign that has shined a big spotlight on Greg Walden’s record.

Without Hadenough we wouldn’t be running any commercials. As soon as we saw it on fdl we put it on Carol’s website (with Walden’s numbers next to an explanation about how Coleen Rowley was running against rubberstamper John Kline). Just asking you all if it could get adapted for us seemed like a big deal, yet the answer was always yes, all the interactions were always easy and fast, and soon we were running our own 60 second spot in our only two “metro” areas of Medford and Bend. Since we didn’t have much money the ads, played sparsely, were sort of symbolic, but most everything about this campaign has been sort of symbolic, and it felt good.

And then a couple of days ago the Democratic Party of Oregon sprung $10,000 for us to run the ad the last week of the campaign. This is enough so that it will really get seen, and really will bring in some votes. The fact that the DPO wanted to spend money on these ads when the Oregon House is in play signifies that they know that it is helping both Carol and all the down ballot races. People see it and they immediately understand and remember the song and the images, and it pushes them across the action-inaction line. I know I’ll never get it out of my head. Our grateful thanks to everyone who gave their time and talent to make this happen, and all the FDL and C&L and other people who make Blue America possible…[there’s more.]

This is how you create a majority party, my friends. You make people believe in the party and support them even when they are not immediately “winners” by creating a feeling of solidarity. You make it feel good to be a Democrat again.

Klein called on his pals in the music industry, the Squirrel Nut Zippers and Ricki Lee Jones, and put together a jingle that could be used by candidates all over the country for free and which they adapted for each candidate who wanted to use it. Then they raised money to put it on the radio and the web. It’s catchy and fun and gets right to the main question of this election — “have you had enough?” And whether or not it made a difference in these individual races (it probably did) it certainly gave all these campaigns a lift and an identity and a belief that it was worth it to spend all this time and energy working to get Democrats elected even when it seemed hopeless — which we now know is something you should never assume.

So, hats off to the Blue America Team, particularly its hardest worker and leading visionary, Howie Klein, who didn’t wait for the party to do something and didn’t whine about what they weren’t doing — they just went out and did it.

If you haven’t seen it, here’s the web ad for Darcy Burner:

Question: Has Scott Ritter Ever Been Published/Extensively Interviewed In “Vanity Fair?”

by tristero

The reason I ask is that right now, “Vanity Fair” is wasting paper preparing to print the utterly worthless opinions of the murderous morons who sold the Bush/Iraq war to the American people. Meanwhile Ritter, who was absolutely right about Iraq, has published an extremely important article on Iran – which, unlike the neo-cons, he has taken the trouble to actually visit extensively – in The Nation, where it will receive perhaps 1/10th the coverage it would if it were in Vanity Fair.

And so I ask: Has Scott Ritter ever been prominently published/featured in “Vanity Fair”? A quick Google search seems to answer “no” but maybe someone can remember something.

If the answer really is “no,” then perhaps a letter or 3 million to the VF editors is in order…

[UPDATE: Apparently, “Vanity Fair” has never published or extensively interviewed Scott Ritter. You can write the editors here. h/t Dave in comments.]