The appeal of Jim Webb has been mentioned a few times as having a yet-to-be-defined quality that Democrats find endearing. What I’ve noticed is that he speaks in direct terms, from internalized knowledge, and with little hesitation. In this way, and for lack of a better description, he does not appear ‘politician-like.’ People tend not to trust politicians, but they do trust leaders who are confident, and who fall within a range of sensibilities.
One other thing I’ve noticed about Webb is that when he cites a source as evidence, he uses people his opponents are more likely to deem unimpeachable. This is good polemics. In his State of the Union response, he used Republican Teddy Roosevelt to support the case against class division, and Dwight Eisenhower to suggest how a past Republican ended what seemed an interminable war. Reaching to the other side for evidence can devastate a debate opponent.
For example, if someone like Bob Novak took a big, though legitimate, dump on Republicans, like he did the other day:
The result of McConnell’s tactics is that no resolution will be passed by the Senate anytime soon. The White House was overjoyed. But Tuesday’s headlines indicated a public relations fiasco for Republicans: “GOP Stalls Debate on Troop Increase” (The Post),””In Senate, GOP Blocks a Debate Over Iraq Policy” (New York Times),” “Vote on Iraq is blocked by GOP” (USA Today).” Considering that outcome after a tactical victory, the Republicans might have been better off with a strategic defeat.
And if Novakula even threw John McCain’t into the mix …
McCain was particularly vigorous, antagonizing Reid and other Democrats by contending that anti-surge resolutions say to U.S. troops that “we think they are going to fail, and this is a vote of no confidence.”
… you’d want build on the case that only Republican Neanderthals would suppress the Iraq debate. To do this, I imagine Jim Webb would find sources who are unimpeachable in the eyes of his opponent, less likely sources who exhibit a better appreciation for Democracy than Republicans do.
ANDREA SEABROOK: The House Armed Services Committee room was packed. Two guests faced the rows of lawmakers. They were Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Peter Pace. … Secretary ROBERT GATES (Department of Defense): As a truism from the beginning of time and the time the first Neanderthal picked up a club, you try to see whether your enemies are divided or not, all I would say is that history is littered with examples of people who underestimated robust debate in Washington, D.C. for weakness on the part of America.
I think he just called McCain’t and his ilk “Neanderthals.”
SEABROOK: Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace was even clearer.
General PETER PACE (Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Army): There’s no doubt in my mind that the dialogue here in Washington strengthens our democracy. Period.
SEABROOK: Pace said enemies may watch and take comfort in the debate in Congress, but they have little understanding of democracy, he said. And as far as the support of U.S. troops, said Pace –
General PACE: They understand how our legislature works. And they understand that there’s going to be this kind of debate, but they’re going to be looking to see whether or not they are supported in the realm of mission given and resources provided.
SEABROOK: There were also troops on Capitol Hill today, former soldiers now lobbying against the surge. They made their way from office to office, finally paying a visit to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. John Sults(ph) runs this group of veterans.
Mr. JOHN SULTS (Former Soldier): We’re the troops, we’re here. We are the troops. We’re sitting next to leader Pelosi, because “they” don’t support the troops.
SEABROOK: They, in this case, is the Republicans, says Sults.
Mr. SULTS: If you all want to talk about not supporting the troops, go over to the Republican side ask them how to vote against body armor instead, not once, but twice in 2003. That’s not supporting troops. If you support escalation, you don’t support the troops. Twenty thousand more troops in Baghdad is a backdoor timeline. It is like spitting in the ocean. It will not make a difference. We need a new strategy in Iraq.
That’s how Webb would do it, methinks. Where possible, use sources your opponents respect, even worship, and the cases will almost close themselves.
I realize that to many readers this makes me sound like the immortal Roger De Bris,* but despite having lived through it, and having also read The Hunting of the President pretty closely, I never knew about this truly incredible behavior by WaPo and the other media outlets:
What were the rules in the Clinton era? Consider the Post’s clownish conduct in covering that Lincoln Bedroom matter. First, to swell the number of “overnight guests” at whom the eds could scream in dismay, the Post decided to include—no, we’re not kidding—guests at Chelsea Clinton’s middle-school slumber parties. On Day One, the Post had reported a smaller number of “overnight guests” than the bulk of their clowning competitors. So presto, change-o! On Day Two, they added in Chelsea’s 72 guests, without explanation—thereby producing a larger, more troubling number of White House “overnight guests.”
Yes. They actually did that.
That’s right. Post readers were handed a larger number—because a bunch of 13-year-old girls had been added to the miscreant list. In this manner, the Post made a rolling joke of your discourse—your democracy—all through those vile Clinton years. (Forgive our “poor form” in remembering.)
The things you learn from the blogosphere! I am not suggesting that things are any better today (see, for example, Donohue, William; Beck, Glenn; and of course the moral idiot D’Souza, Dinesh upon whom WaPo recently re-bestowed their imprimatur, going so far as to provide this bilious scoundrel with highly valuable op-ed space to use as a barf bag for his pseudo-intellectual vomit .). Btw, not to be a niggling nitpicker, and a lazy one at that, but Bob didn’t provide links. Anyone got ’em? UPDATE: Total list of Lincoln bedroom guests courtesy reader Poolside. Now, can we get links to the WaPo adding in Chelsea’s classmates?
…Mr. Edwards sets out to cover the uninsured with a combination of regulation and financial aid. Right now, many people are uninsured because, as the Edwards press release puts it, insurance companies “game the system to cover only healthy people.” So the Edwards plan, like Schwarzenegger’s, imposes “community rating” on insurers, basically requiring them to sell insurance to everyone at the same price.
Many other people are uninsured because they simply can’t afford the cost. So the Edwards plan, again like other proposals, offers financial aid to help lower-income families buy insurance. To pay for this aid, he proposes rolling back tax cuts for households with incomes over $200,000 a year.
Finally, some people try to save money by going without coverage, so if they get sick they end up in emergency rooms at public expense. Like other plans, the Edwards plan would “require all American residents to get insurance,” and would require that all employers either provide insurance to their workers or pay a percentage of their payrolls into a government fund used to buy insurance.
But Mr. Edwards goes two steps further.
People who don’t get insurance from their employers wouldn’t have to deal individually with insurance companies: they’d purchase insurance through “Health Markets”: government-run bodies negotiating with insurance companies on the public’s behalf. People would, in effect, be buying insurance from the government, with only the business of paying medical bills — not the function of granting insurance in the first place — outsourced to private insurers.
Why is this such a good idea? As the Edwards press release points out, marketing and underwriting — the process of screening out high-risk clients — are responsible for two-thirds of insurance companies’ overhead. With insurers selling to government-run Health Markets, not directly to individuals, most of these expenses should go away, making insurance considerably cheaper.
Better still, “Health Markets,” the press release says, “will offer a choice between private insurers and a public insurance plan modeled after Medicare.” This would offer a crucial degree of competition. The public insurance plan would almost certainly be cheaper than anything the private sector offers right now — after all, Medicare has very low overhead. Private insurers would either have to match the public plan’s low premiums, or lose the competition.
And Mr. Edwards is O.K. with that. “Over time,” the press release says, “the system may evolve toward a single-payer approach if individuals and businesses prefer the public plan.”
So this is a smart, serious proposal. It addresses both the problem of the uninsured and the waste and inefficiency of our fragmented insurance system. And every candidate should be pressed to come up with something comparable.
Oh, and by the way, Krugman, unlike his employers, knows better than to play along with faux controversies ginned up anti-semitic theocrats: he completely ignores them.
And also by the way, Edwards’ not the only Democrat running who’d be a superb president. And it’s early. Looks like we’ll have many excellent choices.
So I hear through the grapevine that Libby defense fund chairwoman and all around GOP assassin Barbara Comstock turned heads by bringing former Republican Senator and current TV star Fred Thompson to the trial today. (Here’s a news report on it.) I’m sure the town was all atwitter at the return of the glamorous Tennessee hunk.
The New York Post, of all venues, reported recently that the Tennessee senator had of late become something of a sex object for “Capitol Hill hotties,” one of whom complained about “all these other women” who wouldn’t leave the senator alone. “I can’t get up to get a cocktail at a party without coming back and finding some girl sitting at my chair,” the woman was quoted as saying.
Margaret Carlson, the writer for Time and host for CNN, is described this way: “She calls his apartment all the time. It’s the joke all over Washington that Margaret has this huge crush on him. And Fred is clearly not interested.” (To which the gallant Thompson responded: “I generally don’t comment on these matters, but as it relates to the statements made about my friend Margaret Carlson, I should be so lucky.”)
I would feel sorry for poor Margaret except for the fact that she’s supposed to be a journalist and all this insider political/media incest makes me sick. Is it too much to ask that reporters refrain from actually sleeping with the people they are supposed to be covering? It’s bad enough that we have to put up with the cocktail weenie phenomenon.
Is it me, or does Mary Matalin sound like she’s issuing some sort of threat here:
I want you to understand the gravity of what you’re doing here. In 15 years I have never called you back, when you’re jerking my chain 24-7. I’ve never done this. It’s not about my chain. It’s about clarifying and disallowing you to twist my words. If Scooter wrote it down, then I said it. I’m not contradicting Scooter—Is that clear? Are looking at me? Are you listening to me? Ok.
Wow. Somebody needs to stop watching “The Sopranos.” (And somebody’s lawyer (or vice president) must have been mighty concerned.)
Christy has all the Matalin backstory on this at FDL and it’s very entertaining.
But answer me one thing. If Matalin is threatening as she sounds like she’s threatening, what exactly is she threatening to do?
And also, what’s this comment about Matthews all about?
So it’s not what I think about him. I think he’s an incredible human being who has overcome a lot. I love his wife and when his show was first on it was must see TV. And now I can’t trust… if I know for a fact that everything he’s saying about things in which I’m involved are wrong then I can’t trust anything else that he says
.
What’s he overcome?
(And why is she continuing to lie when we have seen the document and heard the testimony that proves her little “damage control” operation was a smear job at the behest of the vice-president. Can’t she stop?)
I’m enjoying watching this sick social/professional clusterfuck unravel. It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys.
Update: I understand from the comments that Matthews has both conquered a drinking problem and is battling complications from diabetes. That’s probably what Matalin was referring to.
I continue to be impressed by Jim Webb. I don’t know what it is that makes him so straightforward and honest about what is really going on, but he is, and I’m grateful.
Yesterday he appeared with Chris Matthews and blew me away with this analysis, which was right on. (Try to ignore Tweety’s inane ramblings) :
WEBB: …One thing that we‘re going to see, however, is that when the—after we do the continuing resolution, when we have the 9/11 report coming to the Senate floor they‘re going to allow amendments. There are going to be a number of amendments on Iraq. I‘m actually considering putting in an amendment about Iran.
MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about Iran, because a lot of people, me included, wonder whether this administration might get us involved in a second war in that part of the world—the Mideast—in other words, get into a war with Iran. Does the president have the constitutional authority to go to war with Iran without checking with your branch of government?
WEBB: I don‘t believe he does, and there are two situations with respect to Iran. The first is, as I said yesterday on the issue of Iraq and how to move forward—the great frustration that I have is that we don‘t even have half a strategy here.
We have a continuing military policy—every time there is an escalation of the violence inside Iraq, but we have not had an aggressive diplomatic offensive by this administration that matches the quality of our military performance and that would embrace these countries in the region in a way that we can get a diplomatic solution.
You‘re not going to do that unless we go to Syria and Iran, as many people have said. Now, with respect to the administration and Iran specifically, I asked Secretary of State Rice, last month in a hearing—I read the presidential finding on the—on the resolution of ‘02 which basically said from this administration that they believe they have a lot of requisite authority, and possibly including Iran.
I asked her to clarify that. I have not received a clarification and I‘m considering putting a resolution in that basically says that no previous resolutions, no previous law empowers this administration…
MATTHEWS: Wow.
WEBB: … to unilaterally go into Iran.
MATTHEWS: I don‘t know the number of countries in the world right now, senator, maybe you know, it‘s probably under 200 but does the president hold authority to attack any one of them if he wants to, under this requisite authority that‘s mentioned here?
WEBB: This is a big problem.
MATTHEWS: I would say so. He could attack England basically on this reading.
WEBB: Yes, if you look at the framers of the constitution, they wanted to give the president as commander in chief the authority to repel sudden attacks.
That is totally different than conducting a preemptive war. And you know one thing, if you look at where we are in the Persian Gulf right now, when I was secretary of the Navy and until very recently, we never operated aircraft carriers inside the Persian Gulf because, No. 1, the turning radius is pretty close. And No. 2, the chance of accidentally bumping into something that would start a diplomatic situation was pretty high.
We now have been doing that, and with the tensions as high as they are, I‘m very worried that we might accidentally set something off in there and we need, as a Congress, to get ahead of the ball game here.
MATTHEWS: Before Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt was known to have engaged in that kind of activity in the North Atlantic, creating perimeters out there and daring the Nazi fleet—the U-boats to attack within that perimeter and basically month after month, increasing that perimeter until he thought he had perhaps been in a situation to gin up a war with a country he hated and wanted to see us fight.
It turns out that of course that Pearl Harbor intervened. Is this president trying to do the same thing, do you think? Trying to create a situation where it‘s easy for Ahmadinejad to do something wrong and create an act of war?
WEBB: Well there are again—even on the military side, there are two different situations. One is if there are Iranian military people actively involved inside Iraq as a former marine, I would support the notion of tactically engaging them. I haven‘t seen concrete evidence of that, but that‘s one situation.
The other situation, I do think that this administration has been pushing the envelope and we need a clear set of guidance from the Congress about when you can conduct preemptive war. Preemptive war is—was not even a concept until about 13 or 14 years ago.
MATTHEWS: What‘s the difference between being preemptive war and starting a war? It seems to me preemptive war is what I think Hitler did against Poland. I mean, what is preventive mean? It seems like you start a war, but you call it a preventive war. Isn‘t that simply nomenclature? If you started military action against another country, you‘ve started the war, haven‘t you?
WEBB: We‘ve always had a concept of a preemptive attack—if you see for instance a terrorist element getting ready to hit you…
MATTHEWS: That‘s preemptive. How about preventive?
WEBB: … you can hit them first.
MATTHEWS: Because Bush talks about preventive, not preemptive. He doesn‘t say like Israel did back in ‘67, when they saw the screws being tightened and war coming and everybody mobilized. They said we‘ve got to act. That‘s preemptive. Preventive is when you just say we don‘t like the other guy‘s cut of his jib. We‘re going after him.
WEBB: I don‘t think we should be doing either in terms of a war, preemptive or preventive. And the language if you look at the presidential finding on the ‘02 resolution is very loose. It even goes to threats or other concerns and that‘s why we‘re going to be seeing Secretary of State Rice in the next day or two—I‘m going to again present this to her and if they don‘t give us a clear answer, I‘m going to introduce a resolution.
MATTHEWS: I thought the Democrats back when they went along with this war, people like Gephardt, especially Gephardt, managed to get one bit of concession out of the administration that the war on Iraq would only be the war they were going to fight, that they didn‘t give them a complete blank check to fight any country in that region around the world. Maybe we should both do some legislative history checking here, but I do wonder where the Democrats didn‘t get that small concession from President Bush when they agreed to basically tow his line.
WEBB: They certainly didn‘t, if you read the presidential findings.
They have thought that they did, when they were debating it, but as you know, I and a number of people including Tony Zinni and General Hoar, two former CentCom commanders, would basically say this is not the way to deal with the war against international terrorism. You don‘t tie your military up into one spot and create essentially a strategic mousetrap.
It was a very bad strategic decision for us to go in Iraq in the first place and we‘re not going to get out of there until we have the right kind of diplomatic environment.
See, that isn’t so hard. It’s the truth and it’s also a strong, believable Democratic critique.
Most importantly, he goes directly at the Bush Doctrine of preventive war and rules it out completely. This is the single most important thing he said and it’s vitally important that other Democrats follow his lead. It’s not hard to say that they will always defend this country, but the Bush Doctrine has made us untrustworthy in the eyes of the world and we need to go back to adhering to international law.
This is beyond politics. The Republicans apparently believe that they can say anything and then govern according to their whims. The Democrats can’t. Somebody has to fix this mess. Democrats need to start speaking about this issue in realistic terms.
Update: I meant to also mention this article in Vanity Fair which explores this Iran issue in some depth. Very interesting.
One little nugget:
Baker’s realpolitik is anathema to neocons, but it is worth remembering that Bush, despite pursuing a neoconservative agenda in Iraq, is not a dyed-in-the-wool member of their group. “The president is a true believer in the policies the administration has been engaged in,” says one former N.S.C. staffer. “When it is applied to the policies regarding the Palestinians, Hamas, or Iran, there is a common thread. It is not pure neoconservatism, nor is it the pragmatic realism we saw under Bush One.”
Bush showed his willingness to depart from the neocon line a year ago, when he received an unusual proposition from Israeli officials together with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud “Abu Mazen” Abbas, and a top administration neoconservative, Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams. According to a Middle East expert, the Israelis and Abbas had determined that Hamas was positioned to fare strongly in the upcoming Palestinian elections, so they came to the administration with a plan to postpone them. “The Israelis and the Palestinians together had worked out a way to do it,” says the expert. “The Israelis were going to say that Hamas candidates could not run in Jerusalem, which was under Israeli jurisdiction, because they did not recognize Israel’s right to exist. And Abu Mazen was going to say if they can’t run in Jerusalem, then we can’t have an election now, [because] it wouldn’t be fair to Hamas. It was all worked out.”
There was just one problem: Bush, whose enthusiasm for spreading democracy had led him to actively lobby for the elections, didn’t want to go along. “The president said no,” the expert says. “He said elections will be good for Hamas. They would have to be responsible. They expected Hamas to do well, but not get a majority. Now they’ve become the government and it’s a big mess.” If anything, Bush had shown himself to be less pragmatic than his neocon advisers.
When you have a man with a fifth grade worldview (shared by Cheney, by the way) this is what you get.
And then there’s this little bit from Frederick Kaplan about the AEI surge recommendation report:
“There was no contact with the Bush administration. We put this together on our own I did not have any contact with the vice president’s office prior to … well, I don’t want to say that. I have had periodic contact with the vice president’s office, but I can’t tell you the dates. If you are barking up the story that the V.P. put this together, that is not true.”
The Edwards campaign is standing by their bloggers as they came under assault by the rightwing noise machine and good for them.
But this is going to be the pattern unless the news media recognises that they have a substantial number of readers who will not tolerate a reprise of the kind of rightwing smear job collusion we’ve seen in the past. No matter how tittilating the story, when a conservative hitman like William Donohue comes calling with a sob story about how “offended” he is by someone’s “vulgar” language, professional journalists should put his phony complaints into context. There’s no excuse for this failure to expose the agenda of the rightwing noise machine anymore. With lexis-nexis and Mr Google, it’s just too easy to research the accuser and put his comments into context before they breathlessly rush to report the latest little GOP oppo nugget of misinformation. In many cases, if they do this, they will see that the story is not newsworthy in the first place and if it is, it is much more complicated (and interesting!) than the faux outrage.
When a reporter gets information from a partisan source, they have an obligation to thoroughly vet that information and ensure that their outlet is not being used as a political tool — and if they are, and the story is newsworthy, they owe it to the reader to present both sides of the story. This is not “he said/she said,” as some commenters have assumed. (That is an entirely differEnt phenomenon, which is giving the impression that one opinion or conclusion is equal to another as a way to appear non-partisan.)
If an accuser or the beneficiary of a political hit is guilty of the thing of which they are accusing others, the press has an obligation to point that out. The readers have a right to know the full set of facts.
Tim Russert has been squirming on the witness stand for two days, attempting to explain his lazy and self-serving journalistic ethics. The most important fact to emerge is that he very rarely seemed to consider telling the public the whole set of facts on anything, preferring instead to dole out little bits as needed in order to keep his access and ensure that he didn’t upset the social rules of washington DC. The end result is that he told the wrong story.
Today we see the press running with another manufactured scandal about Pelosi’s airplane travel with all the glee of a bunch of 7th grade schoolkids on their way to the beach.
Enough is enough. Blogpac has put together a campaign to hit the news organizations that ran with the blogger story yesterday without providing any context on Donohue or the McCain staff. It’s great that Edwards didn’t cave on the issue, but this will not be the last of it. They are running with Clinton Rules again and this time they are going to get some grief for it.
Update: William Donohue responded to the Edwards campaign decision:
“We will launch a nationwide public relations blitz that will be conducted on the pages of the New York Times, as well as in Catholic newspapers and periodicals. It will be on-going, breaking like a wave, starting next week and continuing through 2007. It will be an education campaign, informing the public of what he did today. We will also reach out to our allies in the Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist communities. They worked with us before on many issues, and are sure to do so again. What Edwards did today will not be forgotten.”
The question is, will they work with a man who went on the radio and said:
“Just imagine if a white guy is performing oral sex on a statue of Martin Luther King with an erection. Do you need to see it to know it’s ugly?”
and
“Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, okay?
And I’m not afraid to say it. … Hollywood likes anal sex. “
Racial bigotry, bizarre and vulgar sexual images, anti-semitism and anal sex all in two little quotes. He’s quite the fine representative for conservatives all over the nation.
If you doubt that we are now operating under Clinton Rules, just check out C-Span right now where you will see Dan “Scumbag” Burton railing on the floor of the House about Nancy Pelosi wasting money by requesting a huge airplane to ferry her and her entourage back and forth to gay orgies in San Francisco. (Ok, I made up that last part.)
We’re back on the tarmac with Republican spendthrifts accusing the democrats of being wealthy elitists who are ripping off the taxpayers. They do this by picking one little example, usually false or exaggerated, and then ppound on it relentlessly, getting the utterly irresponsible morons in the press to turn it into a “scandal.” Get ready for “scandal” after “scandal” after “scandal.” They haven’t missed a beat.
We have just lived through a dozen years of these miserable crooks stealing the country blind. Many of them, including Burton, are under ethical clouds and others are literally in jail for ripping off the taxpayers. The country is in such breathtaking debt that it will take a generation to fix it, if we can. They rubber-stamped the most unpopular, failed presidency since Hoover for six long years until the American people finally got sick of it. And here they are unctuously whining for hours about how they are just trying to “save the taxpayers money” by having a hissy fit over Nancy Pelosi’s travel.
But here we are. CNN is lapping it up, suggesting that Pelosi should be willing to puddle jump through the nation if she doesn’t have a tailwind that night, and generally giving this completely bullshit (Pentagon lie) story legs. All the cable bloviators are shivering with excitement about covering their favorite kind of story again — trivial, bitchy, tabloid stories about Democrats. Yum.
The good news is that I just heard Anthony Weiner refer repeatedly to the “Republic” party on the floor of the House. I like it.
In re the Edwards bloggers dust-up many people including Digby have correctly pointed out that when it comes to religious bigotry (and bigotry towards gays), William Donohue is such a loathsome, anti-American theocrat as to be beneath notice when he rails against the presumed motes in the eyes of others.
I’ll leave it to you to decide whether the Edwards bloggers themselves crossed the line. Me, I don’t have an opinion beyond thinking that what was reported was so dull that I can’t see how it had the potential to interest, let alone offend, anyone. Nevertheless, much of our rhetoric about religion vis a vis politics remains naive, often obnoxious, unfocused, ill-informed, and counterproductive.
That this is so today, after 30 plus years of relentless assault by christianists (ie, fascists like Donohue who maliciously exploit this rhetorical failure for secular gain), is simply mind-boggling. It’s high time to develop a genuinely effective rhetoric to confront christianism. To be specific: It is one thing to criticize a person’s political actions, all of which are fair game. It is quite another to insult their religion, which is not.* Why? It’s not because it’s rude, it’s more important than that:
To attack the religious beliefs of someone like Donohue is to completely miss your target. That’s right, to mock Donohue’s religion is tactically useless. Because his christianism, not his Catholicism, is the danger. And it is a very, very grave danger.
Stated another way, the argument is that Donohue’s religious beliefs and practices are none of my, or anyone else’s business other than those in his church. His political actions most certainly are, and they deserve our full, uninhibited, and completely withering contempt. As for his craven hiding behind the skirts of priests to deflect criticism, Donohue and his fellow christianists, whatever their denomination, deserve widespread denunciation from the larger Christian community.
By blaming Catholicism for his vile politics, Donohue has hijacked the spiritual beliefs of all Catholics and demeaned their religion. I suspect that there are not a few extremely thoughtful and pious Catholics who are utterly disgusted by Donohue’s bigotry, which simply reeks of ignorance if not outright blasphemy.
Again, it is quite possible to respect a person’s religious beliefs while attacking them, without mercy, when they advocate theocracy and/or fascism. And it’s high time we did it better.
*I’ll leave for another time to discuss Dawkins’ and others who object to religious practice on principle. To place their arguments within the context of the American discourse on religion is not a trivial task. Suffice it to say that the Constitution and American jurisprudence is clear about a wall of separation so in a sense, whether religion per se is a good thing or a bad thing is not directly relevant here. American tradition is simply not to privilege one religious tradition over another.
The president of the Catholic League, William Donohue says on the radio (7:34):
“Just imagine if a white guy is performing oral sex on a statue of Martin Luther King with an erection. Do you need to see it to know it’s ugly?”
This is the man who the American media invited all over television and on to the pages of the major newspapers yesterday to breathlessly complain about the offensive, bigoted language of the Edwards bloggers.
Is it really too much to ask that when the media gets a nasty, tabloid tid-bit from the rightwing character assisins that they at least find a religious spokesperson who isn’t guilty of the thing of which they are accusing Democrats?
Why is it that so many of the rightwing scolds turn out to be closeted gays, or crooks or vulgar racial bigots themselves? Maybe the media ought to take it on faith that when one of these accusers turns up feverishly clutching his pearls about the offensivness of liberals that they should investigate them for the real story. It’s always much juicier.