Month: September 2014

The 23 year long war

by digby

1991:

1998:

2003:

2014:

I’m getting some blowback for suggesting that this argument about congressional authorization is a dodge, but I honestly believe that  it’s inevitable that the congress will approve it if they decide to take it up.  Therefore, it doesn’t matter if they take it up.

This is happening. It has been happening with regularity since 1991 under presidents of both parties regardless of congressional approval.

We have been fighting in Iraq in one way or another for 23 years.

Videos via Hit and Run.

QOTD: creepy former top spook

by digby

“The reliance on air power has all of the attraction of casual sex: It seems to offer gratification but with very little commitment. We need to be wary of a strategy that puts emphasis on air power and air power alone.” — General Michael Hayden

There is something wrong with this guy and the fact that he used to run the NSA and the CIA really creeps me out. (All you have to do is watch the Frontline documentaries on the secret surveillance state in which he is very loquacious to see what I mean.)

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Is it time to revisit our prohibition on paying ransom?

by digby

Uhm, if true, this is just horrible:

Obama administration officials repeatedly threatened the family of murdered journalist James Foley that they might face criminal charges for supporting terrorism if they paid ransom to the ISIS killers who ultimately beheaded their son, his mother and brother said this week.

“We were told that several times and we took it as a threat and it was appalling,” Foley’s mother Diane told ABC News in an interview.

She said the warnings over the summer came primarily from a highly decorated military officer serving on the White House’s National Security Council staff, which five outraged current and former officials with direct knowledge of the Foley case also recounted to ABC News in recent weeks.

“Three times he intimidated us with that message. We were horrified he would say that. He just told us we would be prosecuted. We knew we had to save our son, we had to try,” Diane Foley said.

Nice, really nice …

As I’ve written before, this issue of ransom is one that has to be discussed more fully especially not that warhawks and terrorists are using the recorded execution of hostages for propaganda and recruitment purposes. I don’t think our adamant refusal to ever “negotiate with terrorists” is getting the results we want. Not claiming to have the answer here, but something’s gone wrong.

And threatening the family of someone who ended up being publicly beheaded with criminal charges of aiding terrorism is just disgusting. And I don’t know that this is even official US policy. According to this article it isn’t:

The U.S. government certainly tried to save James Foley before he was executed by Islamic State extremists. Sources have told The Washington Post that a secret raid was conducted in a bid to save the American journalist and others. It failed because the hostages were not at that location at that moment.

However, there may have been one big tactic they didn’t try: paying a ransom. David Rohde, a well-respected journalist who works at the Atlantic and the Reuters news agency, touched upon this Wednesday, when he wondered whether U.S. foreign policy had failed Foley with its refusal to negotiate with his captors. Rohde points out that journalists of other nationalities were apparently released after their governments paid large sums to the Islamic State, something the U.S. government refuses to do (though private individuals and entities may).

Rohde has spoken out about this before:

In the days and weeks ahead, the Foley family will speak for themselves about their ordeal. But the payment of ransoms and abduction of foreigners must emerge from the shadows. It must be publicly debated. American and European policymakers should be forced to answer for their actions.

Foley believed that his government would help him, according to his family. In a message that was not made public, Foley said that he believed so strongly that Washington would help that he refused to allow his fellow American captives to not believe in their government.

A consistent response to kidnapping by the U.S. and Europe is desperately needed. The current haphazard approach is failing.

If what the Foley family is saying is true, we have a major problem on our hands. Threatening the family of an abducted journalist with criminal charges for terrorism is indeed appalling. But the fact that everyone, including the president, is using the execution of these prisoners as a rationale for military action  means that this policy has major ramifications we have not fully examined.

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Are Americans just frustrated?

by digby

QOTD: Senator Chris Murphy

Americans today, more than ever, feel like they have lost control of their lives, of their ability to feel financially, economically, and even physically secure. These videos, and reports of ISIS’s unconscionable brutality, add to this feeling of insecurity. And they invoke rage –justifiable, appropriate rage – about those who would carry out such acts.

In this case, the fear and the anger that we feel about ISIS’s actions is complemented by a legitimate threat that this group poses. So we shouldn’t hesitate to act, simply because our desire to do so is fueled by the intense emotion that this enemy engenders in us. But our response – the details of our strategy – cannot be dictated by these impulses. Our plan of attack against ISIS needs to be well thought-out, nuanced, not rushed into because we feel an emotional compulsion to do something – anything – right now.

We’ve made that mistake in the past as a nation, and we shouldn’t misstep again. And we certainly shouldn’t allow election year politics to play into our calculations. This is a debate about ISIS, but it’s also a debate about how we’re going to meet a potential plethora of anti-Western extremist groups that are, and will, organize against us throughout the world. We’re creating a precedent for action, and we shouldn’t rush into action simply because we feel pressure to get something done before an election. As the President noted last night, and it’s important to repeat, ISIS today does not have imminent plans to attack the United States. That doesn’t diminish the necessity of taking them on, it simply means that we don’t need to engage in a panicked response.

I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one who recognizes that Americans are frustrated by the chaotic nature of the world today and their own feelings of powerlessness and so are ready to engage in some “action” — any action  — to assert control. And it’s good that someone is recognizing how the financial and economic insecurities of our time might lead us into making some major errors in judgment. Since we are a military empire, those errors in judgment about what action to take are unfortunately likely to fall into that category.

If you read the rest of his comments you’ll see that the ship has sailed, however. He’s backing the president’s strategy for the most part while cautioning him about mission creep and demanding a debate in congress, which I argue here in Salon, is one of those procedural dodges in any case. Yes, the congress should debate. But let’s not bullshit ourselves into believing it will make some sort of difference. It never has before. If the congress votes, whether for explicit authorization or simply for the funding, they will find a majority to support. Murphy says the president will get his authorization if he wants it.  Everyone says he’ll get his authorization. Every member of congress is deciding right now whether it’s best to be on record supporting or opposing, calculating the odds down the road. Maybe they’ll let the president take all the risk and the potential glory.  If I had to bet, I’d say they’ll vote. And if they vote, they will vote yes. And if they don’t vote, it’s happening anyway.  So why are we obsessing about this?

This whole argument reminds me of the one before the Iraq war in which all of us liberals — myself included — argued vociferously for UN authorization as if that was the be-all and end all of the issue at hand.  But the real issue was the decision to invade Iraq and it would have been wrong whether we did it under the auspices of the UN or not.  UN approval wouldn’t have changed it and arguing as if that was what really mattered made it seem as though the process was more important than the result.  And when it comes to war, I don’t think that’s true at all, particularly since once you’ve reached the stage of asking for permission the default is almost always to defer to war anyway.

Certainly the congress in the US is most likely to rubber stamp whatever the president wants to do in these matters. There is very little precedent for anything else and if you look at the political make-up of both houses you are not going to see an anti-war majority in either one.  So all of our braying about congressional authorization has no potential to change the decision to escalate in Iraq and Syria. (Now, down the road, if it all goes wrong, they can try to use the power of the purse to pull the president back, but for right now, the di is cast. ) We’re going, and the only question is whether congress wants to be part of the show. They will not stop it at this point.

Anyway, Murphy is right that this should not be done out of a sense of frustration that the world is chaotic place and Americans can’t seem to get a grip. But that’s part of what’s motivating this willingness to be baited into action by these dramatic videos. I’ve always been skeptical of the “no-drama Obama” business but I’ve been glad he seemed to be taking a deliberate approach and not stoking this sense of alarm in this situation. His speech, unfortunately, broke with that and he sounded a lot more like George W. Bush than I’ve ever heard him sound before. That’s too bad. I get it. He was baited too, and not just by ISIS but by American warmongers. Still, I had hoped for less flag-waving and more “keep calm and carry on.”

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An economic cult

by Tom Sullivan

Paul Krugman this morning writes about “the inflation cult,” doomsaying pundits and supposed economic experts who, economic rain or shine, predict that a steep rise in inflation is coming anytime now and, quite reliably, get it wrong time after time.

Part of that appeal is clearly political; there’s a reason why Mr. Santelli yells about both inflation and how President Obama is giving money away to “losers,” why Mr. Ryan warns about both a debased currency and a government that redistributes from “makers” to “takers.” Inflation cultists almost always link the Fed’s policies to complaints about government spending. They’re completely wrong about the details — no, the Fed isn’t printing money to cover the budget deficit — but it’s true that governments whose debt is denominated in a currency they can issue have more fiscal flexibility, and hence more ability to maintain aid to those in need, than governments that don’t.

And anger against “takers” — anger that is very much tied up with ethnic and cultural divisions — runs deep. Many people, therefore, feel an affinity with those who rant about looming inflation; Mr. Santelli is their kind of guy. In an important sense, I’d argue, the persistence of the inflation cult is an example of the “affinity fraud” crucial to many swindles, in which investors trust a con man because he seems to be part of their tribe. In this case, the con men may be conning themselves as well as their followers, but that hardly matters.

This tribal interpretation of the inflation cult helps explain the sheer rage you encounter when pointing out that the promised hyperinflation is nowhere to be seen. It’s comparable to the reaction you get when pointing out that Obamacare seems to be working, and probably has the same roots.

Not just economists, but the country (and perhaps the entire Republican Party) seems to be in the grip of an economic cult concerned with much more than inflation — that’s just a symptom. As Krugman suggests, ethnic and cultural (and class) divisions factor into it. Digby has written repeatedly (and just yesterday) that many of the same people “have always been wrong about everything.” And yet, their followers keep listening. Conservatism never fails. It is unfalsifiable. I wrote last week that the Koch brothers’ evangelism for the their libertarian Kochification Church resembles recruiting techniques used by cults.
Hey, let’s start a meme.

America’s blood is up

by digby

Matt Yglesias delivers an interesting critique of President Obama’s strategy and rhetoric.  I tend to agree that the regional coalition is a no-brainer and that the bombing campaign in Iraq was just inevitable. (It’s been our catch-all strategy for decades now …) The long term prospects for “eradicating” ISIS through such a strategy are not good, but they could be slowed at least in some respects. The potential of unintended consequences is growing by the minute.

However, Yglesias points out that the real danger here is exacerbating the threat with all this sabre rattling. (Apparently, everything at Vox has to be in list form …?)

7) The biggest problem with Obama’s current approach isn’t what he’s promising to do, but what he’s promising to accomplish. Over the course of 2014, Obama’s anti-ISIS statements have become increasingly dire and alarmist.

8) The shift in tone appears to have two causes. One is backlash to his ill-advised quip about ISIS being global jihad’s JV team. The other is polling indicating that the American public was profoundly affected by the execution videos, which were the single most widely-noted news event since 2009.

9) Public opinion always matters in politics and therefore in policymaking, but the fact of the matter is that the American people have this a bit mixed up. The beheadings are not the most alarming thing ISIS did this summer (try taking Mosul or genocidal violence against religious minority groups) and the rise of ISIS isn’t even the summer’s most alarming foreign policy crisis (try Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and apparent probing of Estonian and Finnish borders). There is no good reason for the United States to take maximal action against ISIS, not least because none of our potential partners in the region are going to.

10) Alarmist rhetoric and a policy of wise restraint make odd bedfellows. If the US catches some lucky breaks (or ISIS some bad ones) it may all work out for the best. But Obama’s speeches are writing checks his policy can’t necessarily cash. And eliminating ISIS’ ability to occasional kidnap westerners who travel into the conflict zone is much more difficult than eliminating its ability to capture new Iraqi cities or threaten major oil fields. If another shoe drops in a bad way, there is enormous risk that the president has set the country up for a cycle of unwise escalation.

11) “We will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq,” Obama promised last night. Certainly we shouldn’t. But in the context of the administration’s stated aspirations, this is more of a vague hope than anything else. If Obama really wants to stick to the policy he’s outlined, he needs to find a more measured way to describe what he’s promising it will achieve.

It seems to me that he’s overreacting to criticism and that’s a bad thing in these situations. People will calm down about the beheading videos if our leadership stays calm and reassuring. The only reason not to is to gin up support for war — and if Obama has finally come around to that way of thinking it’s very disappointing. He doesn’t need the nation to be hysterical over this simply because Huckleberry Graham is waving his hands and calling for the fainting couch.

David Corn asked the right question about all this (and not just the rhetoric, but the strategy itself) in this piece:

After depicting ISIS as a peril warranting a US military response—and with much of the American public convinced of that—can he then shrug his shoulders and say never mind? Will he provide the hawks an opening for political attacks and demands for greater military intervention? In his speech, the man who ran for president with the pledge to end the Iraq war declared, “we will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq.” But what if all else fails? He vowed to eradicate the ISIS “cancer,” noting it will take time to do so. Can he stop if his non-war counter-terrorism campaign does not defeat the disease? It is hard to put the case for war back in the box.

He’s right. Once you start with the chest beating about a mortal enemy such as the world has rarely known, you trap yourself into acting, something the president had thus far adroitly avoided. As Ed Kilgore wisely pointed out:

It doesn’t help that Obama closed his speech, as I noted last night, with an appeal to American Exceptionalism: if we don’t “destroy” IS, we’re not simply exposing U.S. interests to danger, but skewing the moral compass of the whole world. That distorted self-image of the United States as the first, last and only resort for the vindication of wrongs is also difficult to “put back in the box” after it’s projected so often, even as a rhetorical afterthought.

I think this is about America itself feeling a lack of control over all these recent chaotic events, including the collapse of the economy, and demanding that the government take some sort of action. Which is ironic since the cognoscenti are determined to portray the country as a bunch of isolationist, small government libertarian/conservatives who just want to be left alone to pray. In reality, everyone knows we’re a big, rich, badass military empire and a majority of Americans don’t like the fact that other people in the world think they have some agency to act while we sit around watching our standard of living go down and our future prospects dim.  (The fact that much of our problem stems from our being a big-badass military empire hasn’t really penetrated.) So the president has simply come around to giving them what they want.

Update: Yeah, baby. Now we’re talking:

Rep. John Fleming said many see the president’s strategy as not nearly enough.

“This is a stalemate strategy,” he said. “I think that we would want to see an all-out war, shock and awe. We put troops on the ground, we put all of our assets there after properly prepping the battlefield, and in a matter of a few weeks we take these guys out … and we leave a stay-behind force to keep our friends up and going, and also maybe a no-fly zone in Syria over the area Assad controls.”

Others are worried that the situation will escalate and noted their constituents are, too. Rep. John Carter, whose Texas district includes Fort Hood and who chairs the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, said he told members in the meeting that if Congress is going to commit to this strategy, it must fund the military at a higher level.

“If we’re going to do this, nobody’s that got any sense can think any way other than we will eventually have boots on the ground. We already have 1,500. Those people are not wearing ballet slippers over there,” said Carter. “And so the reality is, if we’re asking these tired, overcommitted quite patriotic families to do this some more, we’ve got to start reinforcing them. We’ve got to start building our military back, not cutting it.”

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And now a word from the isolationist , small government Tea Party

by digby

War is hell. So go big or go home, Mr. President. Big means bold, confident, wise assurance from a trustworthy Commander-in-Chief that it shall all be worth it. Charge in, strike hard, get out. Win.

Obama famously claims to despise the “theater” and “optics” of the presidency. In tonight’s speech he illustrated the “optics” of toughness. He tried to show a war-weary America that he’s tough in his speech concerning the threat of ISIS/ISIL. “The One” who believes in leading from behind can’t have it both ways. He sure wasn’t concerned about “optics” when he let the crisis starring this Islamic death cult reach this point as he dithered and danced and golfed the time away while the Middle East exploded into chaos.

Tonight he announced he’s flipped and will finally militarily engage inside Syria – the red line he’d set and then forgotten about surfaced again. This, after three and a half years of civil war, 200,000 people killed, and millions displaced amid horrifying humanitarian conditions. Last month, he authorized U.S. military action to stall ISIS’ momentum as it’s taken nearly complete control of Iraq. Tonight, President Obama pledged to fight Islamic militants “wherever they exist” with a very small coalition of the willing. (Can you blame foreign nations for not trusting the resolve of this president enough to join us? Right now he has a coalition of nine; President Bush had over 40 allied countries that could trust America’s leadership.)

Remember the inexperienced presidential candidate speaking from Germany at the Brandenburg Gate (2008)? Or the know-it-all state senator (2002), known for merely voting “present” on the big things, yet lecturing about this “dumb war” he claimed was a distraction from his desire to force income redistribution to create security. Remember him? Today, he seems more worried about contradicting his campaign promises (2002-2008) and typical political poll angst than leading as president (2009-present). These are the “optics” he’s worried about.

The rise of the animalistic terror group, ISIS, is the result of Obama’s lead-from-behind foreign policy. He had broadcast his war strategy for all the enemy to see in Iraq, so the enemy could wait us out and strike as soon as America turned tail and turned away from all we’d sacrificed there. Terrorists who we had under control got to regroup and grow after Obama’s premature pull out. Those are the facts, and some tough talking speech is still just talk. Ronald Reagan was described by the Soviets as a politician for whom “words and deeds are one and the same.” When Reagan said his vision of the Cold War was “we win, they lose,” he meant it, and his policies won the Cold War. The real question Americans and our allies must ask is whether Obama-the-lecturer’s words will translate into deeds.

Go big and be real, Mr. President, if you’ve really changed your mind again and now wish to engage. You must acknowledge reality: the organization calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is, in fact, “Islamic.” Not many of us pretend to be experts on the Muslim religion, but these terrorists obviously consider themselves Muslim and they believe what they’re horrifically doing to innocents is part of their “religion of peace.” So, you can use your soapbox to fiercely encourage the sane, civilized Muslims of the world to tell ISIS and all these sickening terrorists that they’re wrong. In the meantime, we must identify and understand the enemy by at least acknowledging their ideological motivation and identity. Our president is naive to ignore this.

ISIS must be stopped in Iraq and Syria before we need to stop them anywhere else. As they dominate the region they head for us; we’re next on the hit list. For the sake of peace-loving people in America and throughout the world, let’s hope Barack Obama means what he says when he uses terms like “defeating ISIS.” He is so inconsistent in leading a failed agenda that it’s virtually impossible to put any hope in his new promises, because either his past statements shrugging off ISIS as just a “JV squad” was all talk or tonight’s new terminology is just all talk.

We should honor and understand our brave men and women of the U.S. armed forces today more than ever. Please do not support politicians who join Obama in diminishing our military. Our finest, trained to fight for what is right and determined to win, deserve our support. Thank you, military, may you be heard when you pray America’s leadership understands that if we’re in it, then we’re in it to win it; no half measures. Troops, we are always with you.

– Sarah Palin

Oh, were you under the impression that the right wing wasn’t pro-war anymore? That they had turned into some amalgam of John Galt and Robert Taft?

No, they’re the same old bloodthirsty warmongers they always were. Counting on anyone besides Justin Amash and maybe a handful of wingnuts who just want to stick it to Obama to oppose any escalation in killing is a fools errand. This is what it’s all about for them.

And, by the way, from what I’m seeing there are more than a few liberals who might disagree with her criticism of Obama but wouldn’t really argue too much with her exhortation to “Win” whatever the hell that means. Evidently, they too are concerned that ISIS is coming to kill them any day now.

Why the lack of accountability among the powerful is perverting our society

by digby

Why is it that prosecutors are so loathe to admit that they might have made a mistake?  Apparently, it’s a psychological tick that we all have. But it seems to me that prosecutors have a particular responsibility to be open to error — and if they aren’t we should have better mechanisms for ensuring that they are. The legal system doesn’t seem to be very good at it.

But then, this is a wider political and sociological problem as well, isn’t it?  Just look at how our political system protects the likes of Dick Cheney and other torture advocates? They aren’t even shunned  — they’re welcomed back into respectable company as if it never happened.

Anyway, there’s a problem, which I discussed in more detail in this piece for Salon:

Yesterday, historian Rick Perlstein wrote an important piece about the Nixon pardon, which he shows was the true beginning of the political culture that holds that business elites and government actors cannot be held accountable for corruption and malfeasance because it will “destabilize” the system. From pardons of presidents to too-big-to-fail banks to torturers getting the benefit of “not looking in the rearview mirror,” it’s hard to come up with an example of elite, institutional players having to face the music.

But one of the more confounding aspects of this unaccountable culture of ours is the one that says the legal system has no responsibility to right its own wrongs or even admit to a lack of perfection even when it’s obvious they have made a grievous error (or broke the law). Yesterday I wrote about Justice Antonin Scalia’s rather shocking opinion that the Constitution provides no avenue for an innocent person wrongfully condemned to be released if all the proper i’s were dotted and the t’s crossed. That strikes me as a perverted definition of justice. But it goes even deeper than that.

Read on about one of those prosecutors and a discussion of how this ongoing lack of governmental accountability is perverting our society.

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The gates of hell, brought to you by Dick Cheney and his pals

by digby

Lindsey Graham: “If we take on ISIL and lose, we will unlock the gates of hell.”
— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlakeWP) September 11, 2014

Somebody get him a bottle and put him to bed. I’m afraid those gates were unlocked some time ago.

Meanwhile, in the adult corner:

This is the central irony of Obama’s speech—and, it must be said, of his approach. The caution that he has shown, the time that he has taken to reach a decision, are admirable and wise; the course of action that he has set out is, despite its increasing scope, narrowly targeted. (This is no war on terror or on radical Islam.) Even so, as he acknowledged last night, “we cannot do for Iraqis what they must do for themselves.” And there is, at this point, little to suggest that Iraqis can do much of anything for themselves but continue their slide into mutual mistrust and retributive violence. The security forces that Obama has now pledged to train, equip, and advise are seen, by many Sunnis, as a force of subjugation; Shiite militias, empowered by the previous Iraqi government and backed by Iran, have terrorized the population we intend to protect. The situation in Syria is less promising still. The anti-Assad rebels there have been unable to keep their weapons out of the hands of ISIS, which does raise the question: which side will we be arming?

In this sense, last night’s peroration—with its ode to American exceptionalism—was beside the point. Not because America isn’t terrific, which it is, or because our “technology companies and universities” aren’t “unmatched,” which they are, but because America’s success in this new and important mission will not depend, in the last analysis, on our values, our strength, or our can-do spirit. It will depend on partners who are at best unreliable and possibly incapable. If they falter, what becomes of the U.S. effort? That question was neither asked nor answered in the President’s speech, but there is always next year.

It’s time for a little reminder of how we got here:

The neoconservative Project for a New American Century laid much of the groundwork for the foreign policy of the Bush administration. Its members received important postings in the White House, Department of Defense and other institutions. But what is seldom mentioned is that PNAC achieved its first great political victory during the Clinton administration when PNAC pushed Clinton to sign the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998.

In January 1998, the group wrote to Clinton: “[Y]ou have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.”

The Iraq Liberation Act, backed overwhelmingly by Democrats and Republicans and signed by Clinton, made regime change in Iraq official US policy and set the course for the eventual invasion and occupation.

Also keep in mind the fact that the highly influential PNAC strategy document called Rebuilding America’s Defenses was really no more than a warmed over version of the Cheney-Wolfowitz strategic defense document of 1992 that was rejected by … well, everyone. They never gave up. They never do.

It was this malign neoconservative influence that set everything in motion in Iraq and we are still paying the horrible price for that today. Al Qaeda existed apart from Saddam and would have been a threat regardless. But don’t forget that the same people who pushed to invade Iraq for more than a decade forgot to put terrorism on its long list of threats. They always assumed that state power was the problem and they couldn’t have been more wrong. As usual. And now we are mired in the Middle East even more deeply than before as the whole place burns down and nobody knows what’s to take its place.

The entire political establishment bears responsibility for this — largely because they panicked after 9/11 and completely surrendered their good judgement and common sense. (That seems to be the reflexive response, unfortunately.) Still it’s important to recall just who it was that planned and schemed and strategized for well over a decade to get the US militarily enmeshed in the region so deeply that it could never get out.

This supremely confident group of failures is still out there, braying about American exceptionalism and the threat of the boogeyman coming to kill us all in our beds. And their influence is now fully woven into the national security state to the extent that nobody knows where they end and everyone else begins anymore. But it doesn’t change the fact that they have always been wrong about everything, going all the way back to the 1970s when they were wrong about the Soviets and wrong about everything else. There has never been a more dangerously misguided faction in American politics. And yet, they just keep keeping on.

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Your Daily Grayson

by digby

Grayson sent this out to his supporters earlier today:

Right-wing cranks and fools haven’t come up with a “cure” yet for stupidity, greed, paranoia, bigotry, hypocrisy or even laziness. But they do think that they’ve come up with a “cure” for something that requires no cure: homosexuality. It’s called “conversion therapy,” and here’s how it “works”: 

In one form of conversion therapy, they attach live electrodes to your genitalia, they start showing you gay porn, and then they turn on the juice. 

In another form of conversion therapy, they feed you an emetic, they turn on that gay porn (is it OK to use the phrase “turn on” here?), and then they wait until the emetic takes hold, and you puke all over the floor. 

Here’s another method: prayer. Or as they call it, “spiritual intervention.” They try to pray the gay away. The Religious Right has set up “counseling clinics” for gays, or rather against gays, that purport to “cure” homosexuality. 

Who would be so stupid and cruel as to think that conversion therapy is a good idea? Or, more specifically, which spouse of which Member of Congress would be? That would be Rep. Michele Bachmann’s husband Marcus. Marcus Bachmann who runs a Christian counseling clinic in Minnesota that indulges in conversion therapy. 

And the U.S. of A. is not the only land in which you find such things. If you’re curious, you can look up the case of Pitcherskaia v. Immigration and Naturualization Service, 118 F.3d 641 (9th Cir. 1997), and see how it’s done in Mother Russia. There, gay students are beaten up– not only by other students, but also by the school principals. Gay students are incarcerated in mental institutions, and they are “treated” with shock therapy. When released, they are required to continue such “treatment” at outpatient clinics. Other attempted “cures” include hypnosis and sedatives. All of this came to light when Ms. Pitcherskaia, a lesbian, sought political refuge in the United States. Fortunately for her, she was not required to undergo “conversion therapy” with Marcus Bachmann as a condition of entry. 

The American Psychiatric Association has unequivocally condemned any psychiatric “treatment” based on the assumption that homosexuality is a mental disorder. The Attorney General has written that “a growing scientific consensus accepts that sexual orientation is a characteristic that is immutable.” The World Health Organization has said that “sexual orientation by itself is not to be regarded as a disorder.” And yet in the United States, gay teenagers have been held in isolation for months, and forced to attend this “conversion therapy.” 

Except in California. Thanks to Ted Lieu. 

In 2012, State Senator Ted Lieu wrote a bill to prohibit conversation therapy for minors in California. That bill passed in the California Legislature, and was signed into law. Ted Lieu made California the first state to ban conversion therapy for minors, but hopefully not the last. That was a very important accomplishment. 

Now Ted Lieu is running for Congress, and he needs your help. He is seeking the seat of Rep. Henry Waxman. Henry has served for 40 years in Congress, and yet he kept his seat last time with only 54% of the vote. It’s a difficult district, it’s a close race, and we need Ted Lieu in Congress. 

And to give you an extra little nudge, Blue America PAC has extended its drawing for Ted Lieu contributors through noon tomorrow. One lucky contributor to Ted Lieu’s campaign will receive the RIAA-certified Quadruple Platinum Award for Fleetwood Mac’s album The Dance.

So I’m asking you to click here, and show your support for Ted Lieu. He had the guts to take on the Religious Right when it was the Religious Wrong, and he rescued countless children from the bigoted lie that their sexual identity was a “disease” that demanded a quack “cure.” Ted Lieu deserves our support. 

Courage, 

Rep. Alan Grayson

Lieu’s been on top of civil liberties too here in California.

By the way, Sheldon Adelson is putting some of his pocket change (millions) into this race.  It’s not a good idea to underestimate the power of money in a situation like this — it’s an off year election and who knows how many people will come out to vote?

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