Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Virgin Legacies

by poputonian

Upon visiting the awe-inspiring Chartres Cathedral in France, Henry Adams, intellectual and sage descendant of two presidents, concluded that the Virgin herself was responsible for its creation:

At last we are face to face with the crowning glory of Chartres. Other churches have glass — quantities of it, and very fine — but we have been trying to catch a glimpse of the glory which stands behind the glass of Chartres, and gives it quality and feeling of its own. For once the architect is useless and his explanations are pitiable; the painter helps still less; and the decorator, unless he works in glass, is the poorest guide of all, while, if he works in glass, he is sure to lead wrong; and all of them may toil until Pierre Mauclerc’s stone Christ comes to life, and condemns them among the unpardonable sinners on the southern portal, but neither they nor any other artist will ever create another Chartres. You had better stop here, once for all, unless you are willing to feel that Chartres was made what it is, not by artist, but by the Virgin.

If this imperial presence is stamped on the architecture and the sculpture with an energy not to be mistaken, it radiates through the glass with a light and colour that actually blind the true servant of Mary. One becomes, sometimes, a little incoherent in talking about it; one is ashamed to be as extravagant as one wants to be; one has no business to labour painfully to explain and prove to one’s self what is as clear as the sun in the sky; one loses temper in reasoning about what can only be felt, and what ought to be felt instantly, as it was in the twelfth century, even by the truie qui file and the ane qui vielle. Any one should feel it that wishes; any one who does not wish to feel it can let it alone. Still, it may be that not one tourist in a hundred — perhaps not one in a thousand of the English-speaking race — does feel it, or can feel it even when explained to him, for we have lost many senses.

Edmund Morris, writing the modern-day introduction to Adams’ 1906 autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, which itself was written uniquely in third-person, tells us that Adams was “too rationalistic to be religious,” but adds that he “nevertheless believed in an ordered universe.” Relating Darwin and religion, Morris further stated that Adams’ reaction to Darwinism “was somewhat blunted by an agnostic unsentimentality.” So where, then, did Adams get his expressive awe of the Virgin Mary? Perhaps the answer is revealed in his third-person autobiography, where he talks about the Virgin as a force, or as a symbol of power:

… he knew that only since 1895 had he begun to feel the Virgin or Venus as force, and not everywhere even so. At Chartres — perhaps at Lourdes — possibly at Cnidos if one could still find there the divinely naked Aphrodite of Praxiteles — but otherwise one must look for force to the goddesses of Indian mythology. The idea died out long ago in the German and English stock. St. Gaudens at Amiens was hardly less sensitive to the force of the female energy than Matthew Arnold at the Grande Chartreuse. Neither of them felt goddesses as power — only as reflected emotion, human expression, beauty, purity, taste, scarcely even as sympathy. They felt a railway train as power, yet they, and all other artists, constantly complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art. All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.

Adams then went on to set mortal men apart from the force of the Virgin, and, perhaps too, from women:

Yet in mechanics, whatever the mechanicians might think, both energies acted as interchangeable force on man, and by action on man all known force may be measured. Indeed, few men of science measured force in any other way. After once admitting that a straight line was the shortest distance between two points, no serious mathematician cared to deny anything that suited his convenience, and rejected no symbol, unproved or unproveable, that helped him to accomplish work. The symbol was force, as a compass-needle or a triangle was force, as the mechanist might prove by losing it, and nothing could be gained by ignoring their value. Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the greatest force the Western world ever felt, and had drawn man’s activities to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or supernatural, had ever done; the historian’s business was to follow the track of the energy; to find where it came from and where it went to; its complex source and shifting channels; its values, equivalents, conversions. It could scarcely be more complex than radium; it could hardly be deflected, diverted, polarized, absorbed more perplexingly than other radiant matter. Adams knew nothng about any of them, but as a mathematical problem of influence on human progress, though all were occult, all reacted on his mind, and he rather inclined to think the Virgin easiest to handle.

Nearing the end of the introduction, Morris writes about Adams:

It is his confidence that Chaos can be controlled, once its hidden energies are understood and embraced, which speaks to us even now, even more than his exquisite prose style. We, no less than the disillusioned generation that made The Education a phenomenal bestseller in the years immediately after World War I, are confronted by a future that seems to reject old certainties. Just as Adams’ first readers had to adjust to a fairly complete transformation of the world’s social and political order, so must his latest confront such imponderables as, say, the decline of print culture in the West, and the unbalancing of the gender equilibrium in Eastern abortion clinics.

One may take such new issues and leaf through The Education in search of applicable wisdom. Almost at once the book falls open at:

Of all movements of inertia, maternity and reproduction are the most typical, and women’s property of moving in a constant line forever is ultimate, uniting history in its only unbroken and unbreakable sequence. Whatever else stops, the woman must go on reproducing, as she did in the Siluria of Pteraspis; sex is a vital condition, and race only a local one. If the laws of inertia are to be sought anywhere with certainty, it is in the feminine mind.

By his shock use of the word mind, instead of body, Adams at once transmits a message of comfort. Unable as he naturally was to imagine social engineering by sonogram, his faith in das ewig Weibliche, and his “Dynamic Theory of History” (which perfectly fits today’s explosion of cybercommunications), persuade us that sooner or later, oppressed women in China and India will get wired, and wise to, the manipulation of their wombs by men.

Now I understand everything.

May the force (de femme) be with you.

Merry Christmas.
UPDATE: For clarity, I should be more explicit in saying that I believe Adams was fascinated by the power of the female, or das ewig Weibliche. I do not think that Adams was endorsing religion. I believe he was laying out a connection between the female role in the continuity of history, the symbolic power of the Virgin, and the role of men, who historically have always had to be busy ‘doing things’ — like building churches and burning bridges. As people here have probably gathered, I am not a religious person and what Adams penned above helps convince me of the practical manifestations of religion, both good and bad.

Celebrating In Court

by digby

Like Christy I regret not being around to celebrate Festivus with my readers yesterday, but it seems like it comes earlier every year, doesn’t it?

You know an American holiday is taking off when people start fighting over trademarks and patents:

A FESTIVUS MESS-TIVUS

A pole war is threatening to ruin Festivus.
Three manufacturers of the holiday decoration invented in a 1997 “Seinfeld” episode are in a battle over who deserves the right to trademark the name “Festivus pole.”

On Dec. 26, 2005, Mountainmen Enterprises of Belle Vernon, Pa., applied to trademark the term for its metal holiday ornaments.

Nine months later, the Wagner Companies of Milwaukee, Wis., filed a counterclaim, saying it had been selling Festivus poles well before then.

Enter TheFestivusPole.com of Arlington, Va., which says its online business pre-dates Wagner’s.

Three weeks ago, after Mountainmen failed to respond, the Patent and Trademark Office ruled for Wagner, though Mountainmen has until Jan. 6 to appeal.

This is actually in keeping with one of the most important Festivus rituals — the airing of the grievances.

Happy belated Festivus everyone.

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Snooker List

by digby

Eleanor Clift put together a column in which she outlines a few of the Bush administration lies for the year. (I’m sure we could come up with a list that goes on for days with that one.) But what is more interesting to me is the following:

The administration had the media snookered much of the time. Stories that were underreported largely because they ran counter to administration spin include:

• A study that shows the death toll among Iraqis has reached as high as 655,000. Extensively researched by teams of doctors commissioned by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Md., the study—and the controversy over its sampling methodology—was given scant attention by the media because it was so far out of line from the administration’s projection of perhaps 50,000 civilian deaths. That’s still a horrendous death toll of innocents in a country the size of Iraq. Now, 100 bodies routinely turn up every day in Baghdad’s morgues, the victims of sectarian violence, and the report, published in October in The Lancet medical journal, seems to be closer to the truth than anything the Bush administration has acknowledged.

• Private contractors in Iraq. There are 100,000 government contractors in Iraq, a number that rivals the 140,000 U.S. soldiers in the country. It’s dangerous work; some 650 contractors have died there. They do a lot of the jobs the military used to do, everything from providing security and interrogating prisoners to cooking meals for the soldiers. They work for military contractors like KBR and DynCorp International, which are helping train the Iraqi police force. This is the largest contingent of civilians ever operating in a battlefield environment, and there’s been no congressional oversight or accountability. That should change with the Democrats taking over the investigative committees on Capitol Hill. The abuses may be just waiting to be uncovered.

• America’s secret torture prisons, whose existence Bush acknowledged as part of his tough-guy campaigning this fall. Set up in the aftermath of 9/11 to hold suspected terrorists indefinitely, the legality, morality and practicality of these so-called “black sites” have come under scrutiny. After a brief flurry about the use of torture tactics like “water boarding,” where a prisoner is made to feel he’s drowning, the story of these CIA-operated overseas prisons faded. Yet they contributed to the central tragedy of the Bush administration, the collapse of America’s standing around the world.

I would add the anti-science campaign being waged by the Republicans and the return of the Taliban to that list.

Anyone care to add more? (I’ll print the entire list in a couple of days, just for fun.)

Update: Theresa at Making Light made a list earlier of underreported stories. Some of them run counter to administration spin and some are just plain underreported. I hadn’t heard of a couple of them and I read a lot of papers.

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And Then What Happened…?

by digby

Via Steve Gilliard I see that some conservative evangelicals have decided to deal with all the closeted homosexuality in their clergy by starting a homo-rehab program:

Recent gay-sex scandals involving evangelical pastors have prompted much soul-searching among conservative Christian leaders.

No one has proposed rethinking the theology that homosexuality is a sin. Instead, there’s a growing consensus that the church must do a better job of helping pastors resist all immoral desires, such as a lust for pornography, an addiction to drugs or a lifelong same-sex attraction.

Seminary professors, Christian counselors and veteran clergy say the best way to help pastors fight temptation is to get them talking — even about their most shameful secrets. They don’t want a sordid tell-all from the pulpit each Sunday. But they would like pastors to bare their weaknesses and admit their lapses before a small group of “accountability partners” — friends committed to listen with empathy, then rebuke or advise as needed.

J. Edgar Hoover liked to keep tabs on all teh gays too. And then he owned them.

The thing I don’t get about this is that these people are absolutely sure that homosexuality is a choice. But evangelical pastors are obviously not “choosing” to have a hidden gay life. They believe it’s sinful and they hate themselves for it. They, of all people, would not “choose” such a thing. It must be such a strong, fundamental question of identity that they are unable to resist it. (Either that or they just fast-talking religion hustlers who are completely full of shit. There are probably some of both.)

But there is actually some good news in this, I think. Under these peoples’ belief system, being gay is one of the worst sins around. Yet they are carving out a moral exception for gay preachers — the men who are supposed to set the standards and lead the people. Would they allow murderers to keep preaching? Thieves?

It seems to me that they are slowly but surely coming to realize that homosexuality knows no bounds, even among evangelical preachers, Catholic priests and other religious leaders who can’t practice what they preach. If so, it’s a good step in the right direction, no matter how small. Maybe if some of these people actually have to hear the stories of torment among their own small, elite group they’ll get some empathy — something Jesus Christ thought very highly of, if I’m not mistaken.

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We Won’t Forget

by digby

The problem with letting bygones be bygones for war crimes is that some people who suffered might just rise to prominence and be unwilling to let things go:

Gen. Augusto Pinochet died this month without ever being held legally accountable for human rights abuses that occurred during his dictatorship. But his subordinates are now facing a new threat: President Michelle Bachelet is pushing to invalidate an amnesty law that for nearly 30 years has exempted them from prosecution on murder and torture charges.

General Pinochet originally decreed the amnesty in April 1978, four and a half years after he seized power in the coup that overthrew an elected president, Salvador Allende. According to official reports of government commissions, his dictatorship was responsible for the deaths of at least 3,200 people, the bulk of which occurred before the amnesty edict, and the torture of 28,000 more.

“This government, like other democratic governments before it, maintains that the amnesty was an illegitimate decision in its origins and content, form and foundation,” Ms. Bachelet’s chief of staff, Paulina Veloso, said in an interview at the presidential palace here. “Our conviction is that it should never have been applied at all, and certainly should never be used again.”

The modern free-market Chile that the wingnuts claim is Pinochet’s finest accomplishment is not quite ready to admit that all the killing, disappearing and torturing was worth it. After all, President Michele Bachelet was one of the people they tortured.

Accountability is a necessity for democracy to work. There are many ways to do it, from war crimes trials to truth and reconciliation commissions. But it must be done and it must be done publicly. If you sweep it under the rug it will fester and ultimately make a society very ill. Fair, open inquiry under the rule of law is required for a free society to move forward after a period of authoritarian, illegal rule.

There are lessons to be learned here.

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Pastimes

by digby

I have to agree with Frank Rich that the Time Magazine person of the year was a little bit absurd — but then so is his column about it:

This editorial pratfall struck me, once a proud Time staff member, as a sign that my journalistic alma mater might go the way of the old Life… Let’s hope publishing history doesn’t repeat itself. So in Time’s defense, let me say that the more I reflected on its 2006 Person of the Year — or perhaps the more that Mylar cover reflected back at me — the more I realized that the magazine wasn’t as out of touch as it first seemed. Time made the right choice, albeit for the wrong reasons.

As our country sinks deeper into a quagmire — and even a conclusive Election Day repudiation of the war proves powerless to stop it — we the people, and that includes, yes, you, will seek out any escape hatch we can find. In the Iraq era, the dropout nostrums of choice are not the drugs and drug culture of Vietnam but the equally masturbatory and narcissistic (if less psychedelic) pastimes of the Internet. Why not spend hour upon hour passionately venting in the blogosphere, as Time suggests, about our “state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street”? Or an afternoon surfing from video to video on YouTube, where short-attention-span fluff is infinite? It’s more fun than the nightly news, which, as Laura Bush reminded us this month, has been criminally lax in unearthing all those “good things that are happening” in Baghdad.

So, just like George Will, Rich sees the blogosphere as masturbatory and narcissistic fluff —- why, it’s more fun than the nightly news! Apparently Rich and Will want us to believe that they spend their days and nights reading policy papers and holding seminars on the important issues of the day while the rest of us passionately vent about “our state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street” — which sounds suspiciously like a cocktail party in Manhattan or Georgetown.

I won’t go into why the political blogosphere is both entertaining and influential because if you read blogs you already know why. If it is escapism, it’s a form that creates community and makes people better informed and more actively involved in citizenship — so I’m hard pressed to see why this should be considered masturbatory and narcissistic.

Whatever. The blogosphere is something new and like most new things, much of the staid establishment fails to accept it until it’s already out of fashion. I’ve watched this phenonmenon my whole life. (I remember when the politicians started growing their sideburns in the 70’s. Oy.)

But as much as I’ve liked Rich over the years, I have to agree with Big Tent Democrat that when he gets a little too superior toward hoi polloi he needs to be reminded of this, by Bob Sommerby:

Why has a “liberal” like Rich been so tough on Gore through the years? Why did he invent Love Story in 1997? Throughout the course of Campaign 2000, why did he keep pretending that Bush and Gore were a perfectly-matched pair of bumblers? When Gore spoke out on Iraq in 2002, why did Rich attack him again (inventing his facts as he went)? And in his new column, just two weeks ago, why did he nit-pick those ludicrous complaints about Gore? For example, why did he pretend—in that pathetic example—that Gore “waffled” on creationism in 1999? For the most part, readers have no way to evaluate such claims. Why does Rich just keep making them up?

Rich was one of the pathologically unserious who treated the 2000 election as if it were a seventh grade girls slumber party. Considering the consequences, a little humility is in order.

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Saturday Night Before Christmas At The Movies

Ye Olde Dysfunctional Family Xmas

by Dennis Hartley

Ho Ho Ho! I thought I’d dig out an old holiday chestnut for your Christmas creel this week. The Lion in Winter is a brainy, brash medieval talkfest that may disappoint the Society for Creative Anachronism types for its paucity of swordplay, but delight those who prefer a bit of spirited wordplay. A boisterous Peter O’Toole plays England’s Henry II like a true Christmas ham, and along with his acid-tongued Queen Eleanor (Katherine Hepburn, in an Oscar-winning performance) proceeds to (verbally) carve the family up for holiday dinner. O’Toole and Hepburn are crackling good in all their scenes together, gleefully tearing into each other like Edward Albee’s George and Martha transplanted into a drafty 12th century English castle. Henry, who has been holding his queen under house arrest for some time, has precipitated a family reunion by letting Eleanor “out” for a Christmas furlough. The “boys” are home for the holidays too, and they are not exactly “My Three Sons”! Led by the devious Richard the Lionhearted, (Anthony Hopkins) the trio of siblings argue, intrigue and swap inner-family alliances several times before the yams are even done (politics have not really changed much in 900 years). Look for a very young Timothy Dalton as Phillip of France, who has some nasty tricks up his Christmas stocking as well. Screenwriter James Goldman (“Robin And Marian”) delivers a script chock-a-block with many a well-turned phrase and dead-aimed barb. It is not too difficult to see how Hepburn walked away with her 1968 statue, spouting scenery-chewing one liners like “Well now, what SHALL we hang first-the holly…or each other?” Fill your grail with nog and let the yuletide backstabbing begin!

I enjoy re-screening It’s A Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street or Christmas Story as much as the next guy, but if you feel you have finally reached your lifetime quota… here’s some less traditional alternatives: Bad Santa , The Ref, Diner, The Godfather (Okay, that last one is a bit of a stretch-but remember Duvall with an armload of Christmas gifts? “Get in the car, consigliori. If I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead already.” After all, isn’t that what the holidays are really all about-spending time with The Family?).

And hey-have yourself a merry little Ramakwanzakah!

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Beware of Immigrants

by poputonian

We should be very careful when criticizing the anti-Muslim, anti-immigration remarks made by Republican Representative Virgil Goode of Virginia. Sometimes it becomes necessary to defer to the sage wisdom of our elected officials. Goode (rhymes with “screwed” as Interrobang notes), no doubt recalls clear examples in history where immigrants flooded America, “swamped” the resources (as he puts it), took over all civil jurisdictions, and then manipulated the legislative process to favor their own kind and color. By the time this ugly cycle was complete, the original domestic structures of culture, power, worship, government, and tradition had been superseded by the superior values proclaimed by the immigrating people. And remember, Goode is taking the long view when he says, “I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies.” When he says that, he is acknowledging that cultural eradication can be a gradual process occurring over decades, even hundreds of years. As a pre-emptive visionary, he’s looking out for everyone’s best interest, understanding that immigrants can infiltrate and take over.

For example, in one of the earliest anti-immigration utterances on record, an Ohio Valley Indian said this to an English missionary:

“We have great reason to believe you intend to drive us away, and settle the country; or else, why do you come to fight in the land that God has given us?”
…
“Why don’t you and the French fight in the old country, and on the sea? Why do you come to fight on our land? This makes everybody believe you want to take the land from us by force, and settle it.”

The author who reported the above quotes also described how the immigrants elbowed their way into the neighborhood, basically shitting on the people who were already there:

White settlers and traders aggressively pushed into that region and prevented accommodation between the British and the Ohio Indians. These “Frontier People” sought not accommodation with the Ohio Indians but rather their removal. Compromise did not enter their thoughts, and magnanimity never governed their actions. Respecting personal freedom more than law and advocating their right to take unused land rather than to await negotiated settlements with trans-Appalachian Indians, these frontier people moved relentlessly into the Ohio Valley. By 1774, approximately fifty thousand whites lived on the trans-Appalachian frontier, and the British army could not control them. By that time, the British no longer remained the principal enemy of the Ohio Indians. Instead it was the relentless westward-moving Americans.

The Indians fought for a while, hoping to deter the unfettered waves of immigration. Eventually, though, the indigenous Indians thought it best to try to accommodate the immigrants. In 1786, the United Indian Nations sent a message to Congress. Author and professor Ralph Young writes about this in his new book called Dissent in America:

As Americans continued to encroach upon Indian lands, the native people decided to take a page out of the newborn republic’s history book. The only hope to resist American expansion was for the Indian nations to unite, just as the 13 states had united, and so, in 1786, representatives of the Shawnee, Delaware, Huron, Cherokee, Wabash, Chippewa, Ottawa, Pottawatomie, and Miami formed the United Indian Nations. They issued a message to the U.S. Congress in which they insisted that the Ohio River remain the boundary between the United States and Indian territory and that any further agreements, treaties, or sales of land had to have the unanimous consent of the United Indian Nations.

Protest To The United States Congress, 1786
SPEECH AT THE CONFEDERATE COUNCIL, NOVEMBER 28 AND DECEMBER 18, 1786
[Excerpt]
…
We are still of the same opinion as to the means which may tend to reconcile us to each other; and we are sorry to find, although we had the best thoughts in our minds, during the before-mentioned period, mischief has, nevertheless, happened between you and us. We are still anxious of putting our plan of accommodation into execution, and we shall briefly inform you of the means that seem most probable to us of effecting a firm and lasting peace and reconciliation: the first step towards which should, in our opinion, be that all treaties carried on with the United States, on our parts, should be with the general voice of the whole confederacy, and carried on in the most open manner, without any restraint on either side; and especially as landed matters are often the subject of our councils with you, a matter of the greatest importance and of general concern to us, in this case we hold it indispensably necessary that any cession of our lands should be made in the most public manner, and by the united voice of the confederacy; holding all partial treaties as void and of no effect.

Proving that cultural erosion can result from being “weak on immigration,” Professor Young documented another Indian message, this one delivered twenty-three years later:

In 1809, while Tecumseh was undertaking his diplomatic mission, William Henry Harrison, the Governor of the Indiana Territory, negotiated a treaty with several of the Ohio tribes to purchase three million acres of land in southern Indiana. Outraged, Tecumseh wrote a letter to Harrison in which he vehemently protested this purchase, which had not been unanimously endorsed by the United Indian Nations.

LETTER TO GOVERNOR WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON, 1810

“The being within, communing with past ages, tells me that once, nor until lately, there was no white man on this continent; that it then all belonged to red man, children of the same parents, placed on it by the Great Spirit that made them, to keep it, traverse it, to enjoy its productions, and to fill it with the same race, once a happy race, since made miserable by the white people, who are never contented but always encroaching. The way, and the only way, to check and to stop this evil, is for all the red men to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first, and should be yet; for it never was divided, but belongs to all for the use of each. For no part has a right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers who want all, and will not do with less.”

See, the immigrants are taking over. And pretty soon, the only political representation for the superseded culture comes from fringe outcasts whose voices never figure prominently in political outcomes. In 1830, US Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey gave a speech in protest of the Indian Removal Bill, which was written to force those who got here first from their native lands, to be replaced on the same land by the immigrants:

Our ancestors found these people, far removed from the commotions of Europe, exercising all the rights, and enjoying the privileges, of free and independent sovereigns of this new world. They were not a wild and lawless horde of banditti, but lived under the restraints of government, patriarchal in its character, and energetic in its influence. They had chiefs, head men, and councils. The white men, the author of all their wrongs, approached them as friends — they extended the olive branch; and being then a feeble colony and at the mercy of the native tenants of the soil, by presents and profession, propitiated their good will. The Indian yielded a slow, but substantial confidence; granted to the colonists an abiding place; and suffered them to grow up to man’s estate beside him. He never raised claim of elder title; as white man’s wants increased, he opened the hand of his bounty wider and wider. By and by, conditions are changed. His people melt away; his lands are constantly coveted; millions after millions are ceded. The Indian bears it all meekly; he complains, indeed, as well, but suffers on; and now he finds that his neighbor, whom his kindness had nourished, has spread an adverse title over the last remains of his patrimony, barely adequate to his wants, and turns upon him and says, “away we cannot endure you so near us! These forests and rivers, these groves of your fathers, these firesides and hunting grounds, are ours by the right of power, and the force of numbers.” Sir, let every treaty be blotted from our records, and in the name of truth and justice, I ask, who is the injured, and who is the aggressor?

Young elaborated on the Indian Removal Bill:

Although Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen strongly opposed Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Bill that stipulated sending the Cherokee from their native Georgia to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), the bill passed both houses of Congress in 1830. The Cherokee themselves were not silent in standing up for their rights and made a strong effort first to challenge the law and then to forestall enforcement of it. Their case made it all the way to the Supreme Court. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia and in Worcestor v. Georgia, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled in the Cherokee’s favor. Unfortunately, a contingent of Cherokee, without the authorization of the Cherokee nation, met with representative of the U.S. Government at New Echota, Georgia, and signed a removal treaty. Once the Senate ratified the Treaty Of New Echota, President Jackson had the authority he needed to force the removal.
…
[The Cherokee were ] forced … at bayonette point from their lands in Georgia and relocated to a reservation in present-day Oklahoma. It has been estimated that as many as 15,000 of the 60,000 Indians died on the “Trail of Tears.”

Give immigrants an inch and they’ll take a country. Can you blame Representative Goode for wanting to forestall his own removal to a reservation in Oklahoma, or somewhere else in the interior of the country? The man has vision.

Hallelujah

by digby

Here’s another one of those creepy articles about religious zealots who are trying to blow up the world and bring on the bridegroom. Fine, whatever. There have always been end-of-the-worlders around.

But really, how do these nuts get to be so involved in the highest reaches of the US Government? (From last summer):

As I reported for the Nation in my most recent article, “The Birth Pangs of a New Christian Zionism,” the White House has convened a series of meetings over the past few months with leaders of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), a newly formed political organization that tells its members that supporting Israel’s expansionist policies is “a biblical imperative.” CUFI’s Washington lobbyist, David Brog, told me that during the meetings, CUFI representatives pressed White House officials to adopt a more confrontational posture toward Iran, refuse aid to the Palestinians and give Israel a free hand as it ramped up its military conflict with Hezbollah.

The White House instructed Brog not to reveal the names of officials he met with, Brog said.

Brog, the former chief-of-staff to Arlen Specter, is now the first full-time lobbyist for the Christian Zionism movement.

Chief of staff to token Pro-choice Republican Arlen Specter? It was bad enough that the Republicans sell their souls to big business, but they also appear to be willing to take money from total nutballs who want to end the world. (It’s entirely possible, of course, that he agrees wholeheartedly with the agenda — but he’s still a paid lobbyist.)

As we watch a new naval carrier group steam toward Iran in order to “send a message” you have to wonder whether these people might just be speaking in the ever more desperate George W. Bush’s ear.

Oh, and then there’s this stuff:

“My first priority is my faith in God, then my family, and then my country. I share my faith because it describes who I am,” Gen. Catton says in the video. “You have many men and women who are seeking God’s council and wisdom as we advise the Chairman and the Secretary of Defense. Hallelujah.”

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Signing On

by digby

So the generals have done the big el-foldo and are going along with the McCain escalation plan. (I’m sure we’ll be hearing from these profiles in courage when they whisper in the ears of the media that they were only following orders.)

K-Drum says what I think a lot of us are reluctantly thinking:

Still, honesty compels me to say that I’m glad this is going to happen. I know this makes me a bad person with no concern for human life etc. etc. (feel free to expand on this sentiment in comments), but at some point we have to come to a conclusion on this stuff. Conservatives long ago convinced themselves against all evidence that we could have won in Vietnam if we’d only added more troops or used more napalm or nuked Hanoi or whatever, and they’re going to do the same thing in Iraq unless we allow them to play this out the way they want. If they don’t get to play the game their way, they’ll spend the next couple of decades trying to persuade the American public that there was nothing wrong with the idea of invading Iraq at all. We just never put the necessary resources into it.

Well, screw that. There’s nothing we can do to stop them anyway, so give ’em the resources they want. Let ’em fight the war the way they want. If it works — and after all, stranger things have happened — then I’ll eat some crow. But if it doesn’t, there’s a chance that the country will actually learn something from this.

I wish it were otherwise. But it isn’t.

There is no chance this is going to work, so I do not hold out even the smallest hope that this could be worthwhile in literal terms. It is purely to save face for George Bush. The American involvement in this war is over — they’re just delaying the inevitable until he can crawl back to Crawford and dump the whole disater in the next guy’s lap.

As for the long term, it doesn’t matter how spectacularly they fail, they will never admit it. We would have won “if only” no matter what actually happens. If only we’d put in more troops earlier, or more troops now, or reinstituted the draft or dropped some daisy cutters or whatever. These people live in a fantasy world in which they are always right but others are continuously conspiring to rob them of whatever they really need to prove it. In the long run, they will insist that the war could have been won if only the wimps hadn’t lost their nerve. And they will persuade a fair number of people that this was true — Americans don’t like losers and don’t like to think of themselves as losers. The paranoid strain will be happy to re-argue, re-litigate and re-write history down the road to say that America was betrayed from within. It’s what they do.

There is some short term political gains to be had, however sick it is to think in these terms. In the long run they will create their own myth but in the short term, they are going to have to deal with the reality that is going to continue to appear on people’s televisions every night. And that will rebound to St. John McCain and any other Republicans who jump on this bandwagon as it hurls over the cliff.

This is McCain’s plan. He’s been clamouring for more troops for a long time and he specifically says today that 20,000 to 35,000 will do the trick. He’s now going to have to get into those John Kerry style explanations whenever it comes up (“I was for more troops before others were for more troops and it would have worked if only they’d done it earlier but I thought that it was worth sending in more anyway and in fact we need more troops even now.”) There’s no pithy sound bite to explain why he still thought sending in more troops after the war was already lost would be a good idea.

So, there’s a very, very thin silver lining. Other than that, this is a disastrous failure on top of a disastrous failure and the military, which took great pride in learning the lessons of Vietnam, is once again playing the part of political pawn. Every American who dies from this point forward, dies for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s vanity.

Update: Haha. As usual, Atrios got there first.

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