From what I can tell, Matt Nisbet has no idea who or what he is dealing with, nor any clue as to who his real friends are. Nisbet youtubes a clip from a new creationist propaganda film, interviews with Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers. He summarizes the scene as follows:
…the message is spelled out via the interviews provided by PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins.
Notice the very clear translation for audiences as to what supposedly establishment science believes:
A) Learning about science makes you an atheist, it “kills off” religious faith.
B) If we boost science literacy in society, it will lead to erosion of religion, as religion fades away, we will get more and more science, and less and less religion.
C) Religion is a fairy tale, similar to hobgoblins, a fantasy, and even evil.[Emphasis in original]
Indeed the takeaway is as Nisbet claims. But…
First of all, Nisbet is not quite accurate here. If you actually watch the clip and suffer through the insufferably bad music, you will find fairly innocuous statements by Dawkins and PZ (the “fairy tales” stuff is a bit gratuitous, but hardly offensive compared to what McCain bff Pastor Hagee has said about Catholics). In fact, the Dawkins/Myers material is actually pretty thin and uncontroversial. Hence the unbearable, ominous music and more importantly, the addition of a third interviewee – not Dawkins or Myers – who declares religion “evil” and who serves as the button for the segment.
Secondly, NIsbet fails to realize that Dawkins and PZ didn’t create the takeaway message. The producers of the film did, by deliberately misleading them about the nature of the film in the first place, asking questions that provoked certain hoped-for answers, and most critically, editing the film in such a way as to turbo-charge the message. When you’re dealing with dishonest filmmakers – Matt, they lied about the nature of the film in order to snag face time with PZ and Dawkins – then no matter who they had “representing” science – including Nisbet himself – they would be slathered with bad music and edited to look like the Devil Incarnate.
Nisbet concludes
As long as Dawkins and PZ continue to be the representative voices from the pro-science side in this debate, it is really bad for those of us who care about promoting public trust in science and science education.
Oh, he couldn’t be more wrong. The lies behind the making of the film are the clue to what is really going on.
The effort to undermine American science and science education – did I just accuse creationists of being anti-American? Yep – is not being conducted by honorable men and women but by extreme right ideologues who will not take yes for an answer. They are funded by men such as billionaire Howard Ahmanson, a passionate follower of the loathsome R.J. Rushdoony, an avowed theocrat, and a man who was far to the right of Pat Robertson.
In short, Nisbet is urging compromise with the American Taliban. It won’t work. Ever. There is no middle ground. Or rather, through the refusal of the American Taliban to recognize anything other than their will to power as legitimate, those that compromise with them end up moving the middle ground progressively rightward. Today, it’s teach the controversy in biology classes. Tomorrow, it’s questioning the Big Bang theory in astronomy.
There is only one reasonable response and that is to insist, loudly, that those working to undermine American science should have no standing in the larger public discourse about the role of science and science and science education. That will take a plethora of honest knowledgeable voices including PZ’s and Dawkins’, but also Ken Miller, Genie Scott, Barbara Forrest, and Neil de Grasse-Tyson. Each person will speak with his/her own accent and styles. Each, to the extent they are working scientists, “represents” science. None is THE official representative of science and may the Flying Spaghetti Monster preserve us from there ever being such a thing.
Matt, I know you mean well and care deeply about science (as well as carving out a career to communicate science to a wide public). But you are dead wrong here, both tactically and morally. You cannot reason with the American Taliban but you can render them less powerful. Furthermore, it is simply reprehensible to urge people who have been deceived and mistreated to shut up and let others speak for them. You clearly haven’t thought this through. Please consider changing your mind. I know it’s hard to admit mistakes but better to do so than compound the error. THEY are not your friends; they want to crush you no matter how much effort you expend to “frame” things in an effort to placate them.
Michael O’Hanlon is deeply upset that he’s not able to pontificate so much anymore on his brillliant concept to get American soldiers held hostage doing police work on the streets of Baghdad.
Five years later, the United States remains at war in Iraq, but there are days when it would be hard to tell from a quick look at television news, newspapers and the Internet […]
“I was getting on average three to five calls a day for interviews about the war” in the first years, said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow on national security at the Brookings Institution. “Now it’s less than one a day.”
What a sad life, ONLY getting called once a day to spout the same patently false blithering nonsense again. I mean how can he go on, right? He’s merely had 13 op-eds in major newspapers in the last seven months. You call that a life in the public spotlight?
Of course, his lack of visibility is all those treacherous Democrats’ fault, anyway:
He argued that Americans who support the war might not have wanted to follow the news when it was bad, and that Americans against the war are less interested now that the news is better. And the presidential candidates, he said, have shown “surprisingly little interest in discussing it in detail.”
Actually, many of us are well aware that the news is not better, that arming and funding both sides of a sectarian divide is bound to catch up with us in both the Sunni and Shiite communities, and the ones disinterested in discussing the war in detail are those fabulists telling us how the news is so much better, people like… Michael O’Hanlon:
In an event at the American Enterprise Institute today, Brookings analyst Michael O’Hanlon — sitting next to hawks Fred Kagan and Ken Pollack — praised the Iraq surge, saying the surge architects would make former Green Bay Packers head coach Vince Lombardi “proud”:
“I want to call them the Lombardis of this war. … And in addition to Fred and Ken who have been two of the most important people. Andy Krepinevich is another important think tanker. Retired Gen. Jack Keane from the outside. A small group of people inside the administration, smaller than it should have been, but people like Meghan O’Sullivan. […]
These people did two things that I think would have made Vince Lombardi proud. One, they stuck with it, and they persevered through difficult times. And two, they stayed focused on fundamentals.”
Y’know Mikey, maybe if you didn’t spout such irresponsible and ignorant tripe like that, on the same day that we mark 4,000 dead American soldiers (which is actually a ridiculously low number that doesn’t take into account contractors, journalists, coalition forces, Iraqi security forces and civilians), you’d get something like two calls a day. And wouldn’t that just make life more worth living for you!
Scientists plan to put one of the twin Mars rovers to sleep and limit the activities of the other robot to fulfill a NASA order to cut $4 million from the program’s budget, mission team members said Monday.
The news comes amid belt-tightening at NASA headquarters, which is under pressure to juggle Mars exploration and projects to study the rest of the solar system.
The solar-powered rovers Spirit and Opportunity have dazzled scientists and the public with findings of geologic evidence that water once flowed at or near the surface of Mars long ago.
Both rovers were originally planned for three-month missions at a cost of $820 million, but are now in their fourth year of exploration. It costs NASA about $20 million annually to keep the rovers running…
“Any cut at any time when these rovers are healthy would be bad timing,” Callas said. “These rovers are still viable capable vehicles in very good health.”
Appeals are planned. Those of us who followed the rovers know how important their contribution to science is – what they have accomplished is simply awesome. And in some ways just as important, the rovers also represent a scientifically passionate and competent America.
To shut them off in order to save such a small chunk of change is simply criminal. And it reminds us that the Bush administration goes much further than not caring about competence, expertise, or excellence. They feel compelled to crush it.
There’s been a lot of chit-chat these last few days about McCain having what Brit Hume called a so-called senior moment when he “accidentally” said repeatedly that Al Qaeda in Iraq was being trained in Iran. George Will said his gaffe was “not damaging at all because people say it’s a given that this man knows what he’s talking about.”
And today we see that George W. Bush “accidentally” said more than once that Iran has said it wants a nuclear bomb to destroy people. Bush’s flacks said he was engaging in shorthand for the fact that Iran is an enemy of Israel.
Both men are given a pass for these ridiculous statements — and in McCain’s case it’s actually assumed that he is some sort of “expert.” Here’s another example of McCain’s foreign policy expertise:
In a small, mirror-paneled room guarded by a Secret Service agent and packed with some of the city’s wealthiest and most influential political donors, Mr. McCain got right to the point.
“One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit,'” said Mr. McCain, according to Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, an invitee, and two other guests.
That’s deep. And reminiscent of his president who famously told Tony Blair during the Israeli Lebanon war:
“What they need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit.”
It’s tempting to simply say they are both dumb as posts, and believe they can move nations and people around like chess pieces, which they are. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that their uninformed worldview is always tilted toward confrontation.
In their comments of the last few days about Al Qaeda and Iran wanting to build nukes to threaten nations, it all leads in one direction: war with Iran. The only question is whether it would happen before Bush leaves office or after McCain takes office. Either way, you can tell by their “gaffes” that they both believe that Iran is a threat to the US. And there is no doubt that they both believe the US has the right under the Bush Doctrine to preempt Iran.
Anyone who votes for McCain in November is voting for war with Iran. It’s that simple.
Every one of these deaths was a preventable tragedy.
Also, as Brandon Friedman notes, 25 of these men and women died in the past two weeks, an uptick of violence not seen since last summer.
We are now entering a period of Iraqi restlessness in which Sunni Sahwa militias are growing restive, Muqtada al-Sadr’s ceasefire is on the verge of unraveling, and little political progress is being made. In fact, I received an email today from a friend in the Green Zone who told me he slept in his body armor last night–something not typically done these days. And it’s not a good sign.
Perhaps this will give John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman pause to stop patting themselves on the back for five minutes in order to realize that they are not vindicated, they are still wrong, and any sort of resolution in Iraq will require a serious change from the current short-sighted Bush administration strategy of “pay them off until I’m out of office.”
*Note: this is a tediously long post. If you are inclined to spout off in anger at me about it, could you please do me the favor of reading the whole thing before you do it.
I finally got a chance to hear Senator Obama’s speech in full today and I couldn’t help but think of a piece Rick Perlstein wrote for the Washington Post a few weeks back. He wrote:
One of the most fascinating notions raised by the current presidential campaign is the idea that the United States can and must finally overcome the divisions of the 1960s. It’s most often associated with the ascendancy of Sen. Barack Obama, who has been known to entertain it himself. Its most gauzy champion is pundit Andrew Sullivan, who argued in a cover article in the December Atlantic Monthly that, “If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today’s actual problems, Obama may be your man.”
No offense to either Obama or Sullivan, but: No he isn’t. No one is.
[…]
A President Obama could no more magically transcend America’s ’60s-born divisions than McCarthy, Kennedy, Nixon or McGovern could, for the simple reason that our society is defined as much by its arguments as by its agreements. Over the meaning of “family,” on sexual morality, on questions of race and gender and war and peace and order and disorder and North and South and a dozen other areas, we remain divided in ways that first arose after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. What Andrew Sullivan dismisses as “the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation” do not separate us from our “actual problems”; they define us, as much as the Great War defined France in the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s and beyond. Pretending otherwise simply isn’t healthy. It’s repression — the kind of thing that shrinks say causes neurosis.
The events surrounding the videos of Reverent Jeremiah Wright’s controversial sermons over the past week or so bear that out, don’t you think? It would be pretty to think that the culture war and symbolic boomer battles stuff is all old news, but it clearly isn’t. We have made great strides since the 60s and continue to, but these are hard intractable differences that have to be faced and dealt with at each stage of improvement. This was why I took issue with Senator Obama using the myths created by the Republicans about the 60’s. I knew that his statement that the country had “moved on” from all those contentious issues would be unsustainable over the course of the campaign and saw little point in pretending otherwise since it was going to be used against us anyway.
“What I’m saying is I think the average baby-boomers have moved beyond the arguments of the 60’s but our politicians haven’t. We’re still having the same argument… It’s all around culture wars and it’s all … even when you discuss war the frame of reference is all Vietnam. Well that’s not my frame of reference. My frame of reference is “what works.” Even when I first opposed the war in Iraq, my first line was I don’t oppose all wars, specifically to make clear that this is not an anti-military, you know, 70’s love-in kind of approach.”
I certainly understood why Senator Obama would take the technocratic approach and say he was about “what works” rather than about ideology or civil rights. He naturally didn’t want to turn his campaign into a free for all over what the right pejoratively named “identity politics.” But it was clear to me that the Republicans would never cooperate and these issues were going to be engaged whether he liked it or not. American politics are identity politics, whether it’s a phony Texan or a California movie cowboy or an east coast “ethnic.” We have always voted largely on image (granted, it was variants on the white, male image until now) and the first African American and the first female president were not going to be able to pretend forever that race and gender were not in play. Conservatives have, after all, been winning by stoking primal fears on those very issues for decades and they certainly weren’t going to stop using them when the Democrats put forth a couple of historic candidacies which literally embodied them.
Which brings me to Reverend Wright. Perhaps I have a different sense about this than others, but I personally didn’t find what he said to be all that shocking. Many of his comments on racial issues were as true as they were discomfiting and his views on American error weren’t illogical or unprecedented. Like virtually everyone else, I understood immediately upon hearing them that they were going to be a political problem, but on the substance (except for the HIV stuff, which is rank conspiracy theorizing) they weren’t indefensible. Indeed, they speak to the essence of what separates us from the lockstep, chauvinistic , American exceptionalism of the right. No, we aren’t “blame America first” fifth columnists. But neither are we “blame America never” which means that we have a much clearer eye about our government’s sometimes irrational and immoral actions than conservatives do. It’s why we tend to be civil libertarians and skeptical of inscrutable military adventurism.
Here’s a case in point, again from Andrew Sullivan, who wrote an explanation of his evolution on the question of the Iraq war for the five year anniversary. He gave a number of reasons, but it’s this one that I think is most telling:
[M]y biggest misreading was not about competence. Wars are often marked by incompetence. It was a fatal misjudgment of Bush’s sense of morality.
I had no idea he was so complacent – even glib – about the evil that men with good intentions can enable. I truly did not believe that Bush would use 9/11 to tear up the Geneva Conventions. When I first heard of abuses at Gitmo, I dismissed them as enemy propaganda. I certainly never believed that a conservative would embrace torture as the central thrust of an anti-terror strategy, and lie about it, and scapegoat underlings for it, and give us the indelible stain of Bagram and Camp Cropper and Abu Ghraib and all the other secret torture and interrogation sites that he created and oversaw. I certainly never believed that a war I supported for the sake of freedom would actually use as its central weapon the deepest antithesis of freedom – the destruction of human autonomy and dignity and will that is torture. To distort this by shredding the English language, by engaging in newspeak that I had long associated with totalitarian regimes, was a further insult. And for me, an epiphany about what American conservatism had come to mean.
I know our enemy is much worse. I have never doubted that. But I never believed that America would do what America has done. Never. My misjudgment at the deepest moral level of what Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were capable of – a misjudgment that violated the moral core of the enterprise – was my worst mistake. What the war has done to what is left of Iraq – the lives lost, the families destroyed, the bodies tortured, the civilization trashed – was bad enough. But what was done to America – and the meaning of America – was unforgivable. And for that I will not and should not forgive myself either.
That is a mistake that Reverend Wright would never make. Neither would I. And not because we hate America or even hate George W. Bush. I can’t speak for Wright, but I love many things about my country and being an American is as much a part of my identity and worldview as my family and life experience. I get tearful about the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, which I consider to be among the most idealistic, progressive documents in human history. I miss it when I’m away too long.
But our nation has a past which should preclude any person who’s taken a high school level course in American history to believe what Andrew Sullivan claims to have believed prior to the invasion of Iraq. America has a long history of immoral deeds, done by men who at the time we all might have assumed were moral and upright too. Unless you think that Native American genocide, slavery, lynching, jailing without due process, apartheid, medical experiments on prisoners and military personnel, forced sterilization, wars of aggression etc are moral acts, you can’t possibly think that what Bush has done is unique to despoiling “the meaning of America.” The meaning of America has always been ambivalent and confused. (Thomas Jefferson, the writer of that great document about liberty and unalienable rights owned slaves, for gawds sakes)
Of course Bush was capable of immoral acts. He’s a human being. That is why we should never blindly trust our leaders’ (mostly manufactured) “characters” and rely instead on the rule of law and the constitution. And it’s why we must be vigilant in defending ourcivil liberties an d democratic processes even when we really, really love our leaders. Humans are flawed, power corrupts, leaders are stupid, shit happens. You can’t depend on powerful people’s good intentions. It’s more than a little bit silly that so many adults seem to need to maintain a romantic fiction that elected leaders are more prophet than politician, but many of them do. (Sullivan especially is susceptible to this phenomenon.)
For me, the fact that Barack Obama may have sat through those sermons and listened to them and didn’t stand up and march out as people seem to think he should have done, settles some important questions. I have not been able to discern until now whether he truly understood the fault lines that run through our nation’s history or had any sense of just how hard it was going to be for him to make good on all these promises of reconciliation. I couldn’t honestly tell if he got that we have to fight for progress and sometimes get bloodied up, both literally and metaphorically. Those sermons answered that question for me. If he’s been listening to Reverend Wright then he understands that very well.
Yes, Wright is an example of unreconstructed 60’s style African American confrontational politics. And for those of us who weren’t in the know, we learned over the course of several days of fevered discussion of the issue that it isn’t just him, but rather that he represents a widely held philosophy in much of the African American church, one of the bedrocks of American liberalism. And when those views came to the surface through those video tapes, his parishioner Barack Obama, the urbane, modern, post racial, transcendental politician who wanted to cast off all those musty old politics from the past, was forced to use his tremendous rhetorical skills for something more than political process talk about “getting beyond the divisions of the past.” He had to talk about it, straight up. And that was a very good thing.
I realize that many of you love Obama because of his heartfelt appeal to hope and change, two abstract idealistic and inspirational concepts. But I’m unmoved by abstract, quasi religious language that demands faith because well — I’m not much of a believer in faith, particularly when it comes to politicians. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love a great speech or understand the power of words. In my view there is no skill more valuable to a politician than the ability to explain complex issues in accessible, human terms and employ political rhetoric to speak to higher truths. So, while I’ve read his book on the subject (and it is quite moving) I have been waiting for Obama to use his great gift to say something real about these divisions and he did. It was a great speech, a milestone, which had heft and substance and spoke to something more than feel-good exhortations about the value of “hope.” This was the kind of speech I’ve been waiting for him to give.
Now, am I under any illusion that the speech put the issue to rest and Wright’s sermons aren’t going to continue to dog Barack Obama’s campaign? Of course not. Here on planet earth, Wright’s words are decidedly un-mainstream and there is nothing more important for a presidential candidate than to be seen as mainstream. The subjects of race and religion make people uncomfortable and challenge their own view of themselves creating all kinds of emotional dissonance. We saw that with Katrina, when even the most committed liberals didn’t want to admit that race played a part in the response to the tragedy or the conditions that led to it. Time and again I was challenged on the subject by those who insisted it wasn’t about race, it was about class, and by discussing it racial terms I was perpetuating the myth. I disagree. It is no myth. Progress has been made, but as I wrote at the time, the single most powerful lingering vestige of racism is an irrational fear of an angry black mob — led by an angry black man. That informs the perpetual fear among whites that Obama mentions in his speech and that’s the political minefield Obama and Reverend Wright walked into when those tapes surfaced.
The Republicans have been laying the groundwork for sometime to portray Obama as an ultra-liberal, anti-American, black militant (Muslim) in a nice suit. Tim Russert didn’t get all obsessed about the Farrakhan out of nowhere — he’s well known to call up GOP oppo shops and ask for tips, you know. (David Niewert does a nice job showing how the media’s own racist tendencies come to the fore with stories like these.) I’m not surprised, and I’m sure Senator Obama is not surprised, that the reaction to the flap among the public, particularly among political independents, was mixed:
Of those who knew about the controversy and the speech, we asked, “Taking all this into account, are you more or less likely to support Obama for president?”
Less likely (52%) More likely (19%) About the same (27%) No opinion (2%)
[…]
The disturbing numbers for Obama are the independent voters. By 56% to 13%, they said they’re less likely to vote for him because of the speech.
This CBS poll has a different result, showing that the only area in which Obama suffered was his “ability to bring the country together” — which actually makes some sense, since the country got a refresher course in how the conservative movement and their friends in the media handle these things. (Update: The Gallup poll shows him back in the lead over Clinton, so at least with Democrats he seems to have come back to his previous position before the Wright scandal broke. How this will affect the general election is obviously still unknown.)
Lest anyone think that I am making an electablility argument in favor of Hillary Clinton, I’m not. If anything, it’s quite clear that she would have an even harder time getting past these deep intractable stereotypes than Obama. Kevin Drum wrote about that recently, showing that while many people are still racist in America, even more of them are sexist — and willing to admit it outright. (Paul Lukasiak crunches some numbers on the gender gap here ,to demonstrate the same thing.)
The fact is that faced with circumstances that make the prospect of a victory easier than they could usually expect, Democrats have used that opportunity to break through some long standing barriers to blacks and women in spite of the fact that it would lessen their advantage. This is an unusual and counterintuitive step for a party out of power to take — generally they go the safe route after being beaten two elections in a row and nominate the most mainstream candidate they can find. So, good for the Democrats for using their advantage to do more than just win an election. ( And truthfully, when else could they possibly do it? When the Republicans are on a roll?)
As a liberal who’s been watching all this take place over the course of half a century now, I am thrilled at the prospect of crossing those boundaries with an African American or female president. But the sexism and racism we’ve seen in the campaign so far is a reminder that these things don’t happen by magic or positive thinking. (Look at the racial make up of the prison population or the gender pay gap for illustration.) They happen because people are always out there fighting for it, over time, vigilantly manning the barricades against the conservative aristocrats (there aren’t any other kind) and the people they purposefully manipulate with fear to keep full equality and true liberty from coming to fruition.
And sadly, those who do that fighting are often considered to be “unamerican” and “unpatriotic” because by demanding that America change, they are making a case that America is not perfect. For the chauvinist, nationalist, exceptionalist right, (and the mindbogglingly provincial thinkers in the village) that is something you are not allowed to admit.
I have long believed that Democrats will win in the fall and I still think so. But no election is guaranteed and running the first African American and the first woman undoubtedly made it harder than it otherwise would have been. But that’s the price you pay for progress.
Oh, and as for Obama’s church? I am not qualified to weigh in on the theological acceptability of the various people politicians pray with and I don’t make political decisions based on religion anyway. However, I might be more persuaded by the arguments of people like Pat Buchanan, who says that Obama should repudiate his pastor and the teachings of his church, if Buchanan himself weren’t a member of a church that enabled and covered up for pedophile priests for decades. Perhaps my freethinking ways make it impossible for me to see the proper theological distinctions. I’ll leave it to others to sort that all out.
Update: If you haven’t read Glenzilla’s post today illustrating certain current racial attitudes, go here.
I have been trying to wrap my head around Paul Berman’s nearly incomprehensible screed Why Radical Islam Just Won’t Die and for the longest time couldn’t figure it out.
In his defense, the headline is probably not his fault. He makes a point of using the more accurate term “radical Islamism” to describe a political movement that exploits the symbology and traditions of Islam in its attempt to gain adherents. But he provides us with exactly two examples of radical Islamism and here’s where I start to have problems:
I declared myself happy in principle with the notion of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, just as I was happy to see the Taliban chased from power.
There are many ways I’d describe Saddam Hussein – for example, as an odious mass murderer whose hand Donald Rumsfeld was all too eager to embrace – but he, and his regime, were the exact opposite of the Taliban. In fact, Saddam was loathed by the radical Islamists descended from Qutb, decried as a secularist. He thought himself the reincarnation of Saladin, not Muhammad
So what do these two utterly different ideologies (to the extent Baathism is an ideology) have in common? I honestly couldn’t think of much, but I’m no expert (and if you happen to be a scholar of the area, please enlighten us in comments if I’m wrong here). But finally, towards the end of the essay, Berman tells us:
…instead of enjoying the unstinting support of their non-Muslim colleagues, the Muslim liberals find themselves routinely berated in the highbrow magazines and the universities as deracinated nonentities, alienated from the Muslim world. Or they find themselves pilloried as stooges of the neoconservative conspiracy — quite as if any writer from a Muslim background who fails to adhere to at least a few anti-imperialist or anti-Zionist tenets of the Islamist doctrine must be incapable of thinking his or her own thoughts.
So that’s it. Sort of. The defining ideologies of radical Islamism are “anti-imperialism” and “anti-Zionism.” All the rest is frou-frou. Well, actually, so is anti-imperialism – after all, Saddam overran Kuwait and the oft-stated goal of radical Islamists to re-establish the Caliphate. Some anti-imperialists. Perhaps he means “anti-Americanism,” but if he does, he should come out and say so.
I don’t think I’m erecting a straw man here by saying that leaves us ,in Berman’s world, with anti-Zionism as the only essential characteristic of radical Islamism, or at least the only one he deemed important enough to mention here. But hold on, it doesn’t even appear that “anti-Zionism” per se fully defines radical Islamism. Rather radical Islamism seems to be a reaction against the specific kind of Zionism held by American neo-conservatives.
In which case, I am a radical Islamist. But there’s a problem with that. You see, I’m not a radical Islamist. I’m not even an anti-Zionist, as some irate commenters here would be happy to inform Dr. Berman. I fully support Israel’s right to exist even as I strongly protest their treatment of Palestinians, the bombing of Lebanon, and other actions.
It is precisely Berman’s kind of incoherent pseudo-reasoning that led us into the current mess, at least on the intellectual level. Saddam did not equal Mullah Omar. Wahabbism is not the dominant practice in Iran. It is impossible to imagine enthusiastic support for Al Qaeda in Iraq from the mullahs in Iran. And strenuous objection to Likudism is not extremism, let alone de facto support for islamist goals.
I can only speak for myself but it distresses me to see the incomparably brave Ayaan Hirsi Ali align herself with the neoconservatives, even as I understand it – what does she know or care about American foreign policy except to the extent it impacts her immediate concerns? Those of us who know neoconservatism and the damage it’s done are just as understandably repulsed, reluctant to enter into an alliance with Ali that provides these scoundrels and buffoons any credibility.
In short, Dr. Berman: it’s the neo-conservatives, stupid. True, liberals need to articulate better an objection to radical Islamism that will enable people like Hirsi Ali to join us. But that is no reason for liberals to form an alliance of convenience with some of the dumbest people on the planet. Put another way, just as a viable alternative to bin Laden is not George W. Bush, a viable opposition to radical Islamism is not neo-conservatism.
A modern revolutionary group heads for the television station. -Abbie Hoffman
In September of 1969, Abbie Hoffman and fellow radical activists Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, and Lee Weiner were hauled into court along with Black Panther Bobby Seale on a grand jury indictment for allegedly conspiring to incite the massive anti-Vietnam war protests and resulting violent mayhem that transpired in the Chicago environs during the 1968 Democratic Convention. What resulted is arguably the most overtly political “show trial” in American history.
Scarcely a day after I went to see Brett Morgen’s new documentary, Chicago 10, which recounts the events leading up to the “police riots” in the streets, the tumultuous convention itself and the subsequent trial of the “Chicago 7”, I saw this story on the local TV news here in Seattle and thought to myself,“Yippee!”
TACOMA, Wash. – About 150 people — those opposed to the Iraq War and those supporting it — gathered noisily outside a Tacoma Mall office building on Saturday. A group known as World Can’t Wait had organized an anti-war protest to mark the coming fifth anniversary of the Iraq War. But long before their protest was scheduled to begin, counter-protesters arrived. The counter-protesters surrounded an office building that houses military recruiting offices, which anti-war protesters had said they planned to “shut down.” They shouted “God bless our troops” and waved American flags. As the two groups faced off, dozens of police officers, including some in full SWAT gear, served as a buffer zone. They formed a human line to divide the groups. But there were no arrests or injuries. The two groups shouted insults at each other and waved posters and flags. The demonstrators shouted insults at each other and each side attempted to out-yell the other side. “They don’t appreciate our soldiers and what they do for our freedom,” said Cheryl Ames. “I am on this side because I do not agree with the way the war started,” said Tommie CeBrun. Protesters held up photos of Iraq detainees tortured at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. They also laid out 281 pairs of shoes on the sidewalk in front of the building, including 81 pairs of combat boots that carried tags bearing the name of a U.S. military member killed in Iraq who listed Washington as his or her home state. The protesters said the 200 pairs of shoes represented the 200-to-1 ratio of the Iraqi-to-American death rate. But the act was met with a volley of insults. Warnings for military families to avoid the mall had been circulating for days, since some recent protests, including one at the Port of Olympia, have seen increased violence. Meghan Tellez and her children planned to avoid the mall. Her husband is in the Navy Reserve. “I love that mall, but I don’t want my children around that,” she said.
Up against the mall, motherfucker.
Yes, it’s been nearly 40 years to the day since the tumultuous 1968 Democratic Convention, but it would seem that the more things change, the more they stay the same; which is all the more reason that you need to rush out and see Chicago 10 immediately.
First, let’s solve the math story problem that addresses the disparity between the film’s title and the conventional “Chicago 7” reference. There were originally 8 defendants, but Bobby Seale was (for all intents and purposes) “banished” from court early in the proceedings after heated verbal exchanges with presiding judge Julius Hoffman. After draconian physical restraint methods failed to silence him (Seale was literally bound, gagged and chained to his chair at one point), Judge Hoffman had him tossed out altogether. His crime? Demanding his constitutional right to an attorney of his choice, for which he eventually served an unbelievable 4 year sentence for contempt (well, “unbelievable” back in the pre-Gitmo era). The group’s outspoken defense attorneys, William Kuntsler and Leonard Weinglass, also rubbed the judge the wrong way and were cited for contempt as well (although they never did time). Hence, we end up with “10”.
Using a mélange of animation, archival footage and voiceover re-creation by well-known actors, Morgen expands even further on the eye-catching multimedia technique that he and co-director Nanette Burstein used in their 2002 doc The Kid Stays in the Picture.
The bulk of the animated sequences are re-enactments from the trial itself, with dialog lifted directly from courtroom transcripts (and trust me, no rewrites were required because you couldn’t make this shit up). This visual technique perfectly encapsulates the overall circus atmosphere of the trial, which was largely fueled by Hoffman and Rubin’s amusing yet effective use of “guerilla theatre” to disrupt the proceedings and accentuate what they felt to be the inherent absurdity of the charges. The courtroom players are voiced by the likes of Nick Nolte (as prosecutor Thomas Foran), Jeffrey Wright (as Bobby Seale) and the late Roy Scheider (in full “fuddy-duddy” mode as Judge Hoffman).
Do not, however, mistake this film as a gimmicky and superficial “cartoon” that only focuses on the hijinx. There is plenty of evidence on hand, in the form of archival footage (fluidly incorporated by editor Stuart Levy) to remind us that these were very serious times. In one memorable clip, the usually unflappable Walter Cronkite, ensconced in the press booth above the convention arena, shakes his head and declares the situation in Chicago to be tantamount to “…what could only be called a police state”. Interestingly, the iconic, oft-used footage of reporter Dan Rather being manhandled by security officers on the convention floor is conspicuously MIA; Morgen seems determined to avoid the conventional documentary approach in order to give us a fresh perspective on the story. The footage of the Chicago police wildly bludgeoning any and all who crossed their path (demonstrator and innocent bystander alike) still has the power to shock and physically sicken the viewer. There is a protracted montage of this violence that seems to run on for at least 10 minutes; sensitive viewers may find this sequence particularly upsetting.
I have to give kudos for the excellent soundtrack; or rather, for what songs are not on the soundtrack. For once, a film about the “turbulent 60s” does not feature “Fortunate Son” by CCR, “Get Together” by the Youngbloods or (most notably) “For What It’s Worth” by Buffalo Springfield (you can always re-watch Forrest Gump if you wish to wallow in trite 60s clichés). Appropriately incendiary music by Rage Against the Machine, The Beastie Boys and Eminem balances well with less-plundered period songs from Black Sabbath (“War Pigs”), Steppenwolf (“Monster”) and the MC5 (“Kick Out the Jams”).
I understand that Steven Spielberg is currently in pre-production on a dramatized version of the story, written by Aaron Sorkin and tentatively titled The Trial of the Chicago 7. Rumor has it that Sacha Baron Cohen will play Abbie Hoffman, which would be such a perfect match on many levels (if someone can prove to me that his alter-egos, Ali G and Borat, don’t have deep roots in the political guerilla theatre of the 60s, I’ll eat my Che cap). With the obvious historical parallels abounding vis a vis the current government’s foreign policy and the overall political climate of disenfranchisement in this country, I say the more cautionary films about the Chicago 7 trial that are out there, the merrier.
If I have any quibble with Chicago 10, it is a minor one. Although some of us are old enough (ahem) to remember the high-profile media coverage of the trial and grok the circumstances surrounding it, perhaps a little hindsight analysis or discussion of historical context would have been helpful for younger viewers. But as I have already said, perhaps Morgen wanted to steer clear of the usual clichés, like parading a series of talking heads with gray ponytails, sentimentalizing and waxing poetically about the halcyon days of yore. Besides, if you “remember” the 60s, you probably weren’t there anyway, right?
With all the media frenzy over the Governor Spitzer scandal, I got to thinking about films that deal with “sex and politics” themes.
My personal favorite of the genre is an outstanding and overlooked drama from 1995 that was originally presented as a three-part miniseries in the UK, The Politician’s Wife. Juliet Stevenson delivers a tour-de-force performance as Flora, the staunchly supportive wife of Duncan Matlock, an ambitious rising star in England’s conservative Tory party.
A scandal erupts when Duncan is caught with his pants down by the notorious British tabloid press. His fling with an “escort” girl (Minnie Driver) quickly becomes fertile ground for muckraking, as he happens to be the Minister of Family (oops). At first, Flora suffers in silence, desperately wanting to believe her husband’s assurance that it was only a regrettable one night stand. She caves to pressure from Duncan’s handlers (including her own father) to keep a brave face in public, “for the sake of the party”.
But when a conscience-stricken member of the Minister’s inner circle slips Flora some irrefutable evidence proving that the “fling” was in fact a torrid year-long affair, her pain turns to bitterness and anger. Fueled by the deep sense of betrayal and growing awareness of Duncan’s wanton abuse of his powers, she hatches a clever and methodical scheme to subvert his political capital (i.e. to drain his precious bodily fluids, figuratively speaking).
The beauty of Paula Milne’s script lies in the subtle execution of Flora’s revenge Avoiding the usual “Hell hath no fury” clichés, Milne’s protagonist (not unlike Livia in I, Claudius) finds her empowerment through an assimilated understanding of what makes the members of this particular boy’s club tick; she is then able to orchestrate events in such a manner that they all end up falling on their own swords (keep your friends close, but your enemies closer). Intelligently written, splendidly acted, and not to be missed.
See, there’s a very simple explanation for how federal investigators discovered Eliot Spitzer’s secret trysts in hotel rooms with prostitutes. They were merely alerted by a series of suspicious financial transactions and thought it was a bribery case and then just stumbled upon the prostitution ring. It’s all so very s-
Almost four months before Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned in a sex scandal, a lawyer for Republican political operative Roger Stone sent a letter to the FBI alleging that Spitzer ”used the services of high-priced call girls” while in Florida. The letter, dated Nov. 19, said Miami Beach resident Stone learned the information from ”a social contact in an adult-themed club.” It offered one potentially identifying detail: The man in question hadn’t taken off his calf-length black socks “during the sex act.”
Stone, known for shutting down the 2000 presidential election recount effort in Miami-Dade County, is a longtime Spitzer nemesis whose political experience ranges from the Nixon White House to Al Sharpton’s presidential campaign. His lawyer wrote the letter containing the call-girl allegations after FBI agents had asked to speak to Stone, though he says the FBI did not specify why he was contacted.
”Mr. Stone respectfully declines to meet with you at this time,” the letter states, before going on to offer ”certain information” about Spitzer.
”The governor has paid literally tens of thousands of dollars for these services. It is Mr. Stone’s understanding that the governor paid not with credit cards or cash but through some pre-arranged transfer,” the letter said.
So a well-known Republican ratfucker with a history of making threatening phone calls to Spitzer’s father in the middle of the night, is contacted by the FBI, in reference to God knows what, and he refuses to talk to them, but through his lawyer he leaks a bit of oppo research he picked up in a sex club, which he’s been known to frequent. The Miami FBI apparently TAKES NO FOR AN ANSWER, and may have forwarded the information to the FBI in New York (they would not say whether or not they received the letter). A month later Stone goes on Michael Smerconish’s radio show and says unequivocally that “Eliot Spitzer will not serve out his term as governor of the state of New York.” A couple months later Spitzer is picked up on a wire and you know the rest. Immediately Stone is interviewed by Newsday, and you can almost smell the smugness.
“I didn’t make him go to a prostitution ring,” said the most famous and ruthless Republican dirty trickster who still walks the earth. “He did that all on his own.”
Stone said that even before I asked if his hand was somehow in Spitzer’s latest trouble. I figured, somehow or another, it had to be.
“No comment on that,” Stone said. “I will say I knew it was coming. That’s why I wasn’t too upset about the results of the special election,” where a Democrat grabbed a supposedly safe Republican State Senate seat, leaving Democrats just one vote shy of control.
Conversations with Stone often go like that. Always cocky. A little cryptic. Leaving you wondering about more.
Yeah, I’m wondering why some slimy political operative is all but managing federal investigations in the Bush Justice Department.
The Justice Department used some of its most intrusive tactics against Eliot Spitzer, examining his financial records, eavesdropping on his phone calls and tailing him during its criminal investigation of the Emperor’s Club prostitution ring. The scale and intensity of the investigation of Mr. Spitzer, then the governor of New York, seemed on its face to be a departure for the Justice Department, which aggressively investigates allegations of wrongdoing by public officials, but almost never investigates people who pay prostitutes for sex.
A review of recent federal cases shows that federal prosecutors go sparingly after owners and operators of prostitution enterprises, and usually only when millions of dollars are involved or there are aggravating circumstances, like human trafficking or child exploitation. Government lawyers and investigators defend the expenditure of resources on Mr. Spitzer in the Emperor’s Club V.I.P. case as justifiable and necessary since it involved the possibility of criminal wrongdoing by New York’s highest elected official, who had been the state’s top prosecutor.
So the Justice Department, under the direction of Roger Frickin’ Stone, at least from the outside, deployed massive resources to capture the bad actions of a sitting Democratic governor, while in the analogous case of the DC Madam they expended no energy entrapping David Vitter or Randall Tobias. And we know the Bush Administration has a history with going after Democratic governors and even putting them in the slammer.
Eliot Spitzer did what he did; there’s no getting around that. The selective prosecution and politicization of justice, however, continues to magnify in this case.
As we’ve “celebrated” the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion these last few days, with exciting speeches by the Commander in Chief and former war advocates pleading for everyone to forget what they said then and listen to them now, it’s probably predictable that the mainstream media failed to cover the Winter Soldier testimony last week or that they are pulling back their coverage from Iraq now that it’s not a sexy story. The fact that CNN has had Kira Phillips over there for a couple of weeks dressed in Prada fatigues and interviewing people in the Green Zone tells us everything we need to know.
And, predictably, the war is falling down the list of people’s concerns, what with the economy doing a belly flop and the necessity to obsessively report every tit-for-tat of the election campaign. There are only 24 hours a day seven days a week, after all.
But the war will not disappear just because the media finds it dull. It is our single most important national security challenge and it’s costing the taxpayers a mint and still killing and maiming thousands of people. If Democrats don’t make this election a referendum on this war, keep it on the front burner and offer solutions, Bush’s plan to dump this thing in the lap of the Democrats and then blame them for the failure will succeed and the politicians in the next congress and the white house will be under tremendous pressure to keep it going forever. That is, after all, how Cheney designed the war. (You’ll notice that oil companies and military contractors are showing record profits. Again.)
The good news is that Democratic challengers (26 and counting)are out on the stump at town meetings and fund raisers all over the country with their responsible plan to end the war in Iraq. It challenges the conventional wisdom and gives Democrats a way to explain in coherent fashion how the war can be brought to an end — and what a holistic liberal foreign policy might look like. The plan challenges the foreign policy paradigm with which we are all familiar — carrots and sticks, military vs diplomatic — and brings in some of the other important issues such as the media, the usurpation of the constitution and energy policy to address the fundamental problems we confronted during this lawless regime. Problems which resulted in the illegal and immoral quagmire of Iraq.
The plan is designed for candidates who need to show their constituents the way out and for all Democrats to begin to change the conversation on national security. It can be useful for the rest of us for the same purpose as we chatter about politics on our blogs, around the water cooler and over our holiday dinners.
You can access the plan at their web-site and endorse it yourself if you’d like.
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