Fred Barnes just said that it’s not true that the joint chiefs unanimously oppose an escalation of the war — it’s that they are afraid Bush won’t send enough troops to get the job done and that if it’s a temporary escalation, the whole place will fall apart after we pull those troops back out.
He didn’t think those were important differences of opinion, naturally, because he has once again cast his lot with Junior, but really, these are huge and serious concerns.
It’s clear that Bush is listening to these armchair Neopoleons because they are saying that he can “win” if he just sends in a few more troops for a few months and claps louder. And his generals are all saying that the only way he can “win” is with a massive new army that stays in Iraq forever. That is the reality based choice for “winning.” Period. And it isn’t going to happen because 70% of the country have wised up to the fact that this pony hunt is making the country less safe and it’s costing us our future.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Bush said he has instructed newly sworn-in Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to report back to him with a plan to increase ground forces. The president gave no estimates about how many troops may be added but indicated that he agreed with suggestions in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill that the current military is stretched too thin to cope with the demands placed on it.
[…]
The Army has already temporarily increased its size from 482,000 active-duty soldiers in 2001 to 507,000 today and soon to 512,000. But the Army wants to make that 30,000-soldier increase permanent and then grow an additional 7,000 soldiers or more per year. The Army estimates that every 10,000 additional soldiers will cost about $1.2 billion a year.
The Defense Department has requested $99.7 billion more in emergency funding for Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terrorism that, if approved, would bring war spending in fiscal 2007 to a record $170 billion.
The request is in a 17-page memo approved Dec. 7 by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England that is under review at the White House. About half the new money — $48 billion — would go to the Army, which says its costs have risen sharply as fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan drags on and more equipment is destroyed or damaged.
The request, added to the $70 billion that Congress approved in September, is 45 percent higher than the $117 billion in supplemental funding approved last year. It reflects an earlier England memo telling the services they could include expenses they considered related to the global war on terror even if not strictly to operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Do the American people really want to continue to mortgage their own future and their children’s futures so that George W. Bush can save face? Because that’s what this escalation is all about. Every penny that’s spent on this not only prolongs our involvement in this misbegotten war, exacerbating the horror for the Iraqis and robbing Americans of money that is desperately needed for other things.
Reports of homicides, assaults and other violent offenses surged by nearly 4 percent in the first six months of the year compared with the same time period in 2005, according to the FBI’s latest Uniform Crime Report. The numbers included an increase of nearly 10 percent for robberies, which many criminologists consider a leading indicator of coming trends.
The results follow a 2.5 percent jump in violent crime for 2005, which at the time represented the largest increase in 15 years.
[…]
The numbers come amid heightened criticism of the federal government from many police chiefs and state law enforcement officials, who complain that the Bush administration has retreated from fighting traditional crime in favor of combating terrorism and protecting homeland security. Justice officials dispute those contentions and pointed yesterday to an ongoing study designed to identify solutions to the rise in violent crime.
Bush has not retreated from fighting crime in favor of combatting terrorism. He’s retreated from fighting traditional crime in favor of burnishing the Republicans’ national security image and kicking back taxpayer money to his cronies. We are not safer from terrorism and our entire society is starting to fray around the edges because of inattention to fundamentals, resulting in wage stagnation, health care insecurity, higher crime, crumbling infrastructure, a broken military and failing education.
The Iraq money pit has made things worse for everyone — Iraqis and Americans alike. None of us can afford an escalation of this surreal pony war.
One of the more disquieting aspects of the Iraqi occupation is that the president’s final rationale for it is a cherished, though groundless, liberal belief about freedom.
So Bush/Iraq was a bad idea because it was based on a groundless liberal belief about freedom, says Patterson. The belief, being groundless, is the problem.
But not so fast. In the third paragraph, Patterson writes:
Once President Bush was beguiled by this argument he began to sound like a late-blooming schoolboy who had just discovered John Locke, the 17th-century founder of liberalism.
Huh? Suddenly, it doesn’t matter whether the idea was groundless or an indisputable fact. More important is that Bush’s understanding of Locke – ie, liberal notions of freedom – is that of a late-blooming schoolboy, ie, someone without a deep understanding.
In other words, Patterson can’t make up his mind. Is the problem the groundless liberal belief about freedom, or is the problem that Bush acted on a shallow understanding of what the liberal belief about freedom is? But one thing Patterson tries to make clear: the fiasco of Bush/Iraq is the fault of liberal thinking. Properly understood or poorly, it doesn’t make a difference when it comes to liberal belief.
Liberals’ “cherished” belief about freedom is groundless, he says up front. And Patterson goes out of his way to drive the naivete of liberals home. They might call themselves “neo-conservatives,” but Patterson knows they are really “neo-liberals.”
And so this bizarre essay is really only comprehensible as an exorcism.* As Digby has pointed out on numerous occasions, conservatism can never be wrong, liberalism can never be right. Therefore, if people calling themselves “conservative” (neo, or whatever) are wrong, then they cannot be, in reality, conservatives but misnamed liberals. Once we see that they are not “real” conservatives, they can easily be condemned and conservatism’s infallibility is preserved.
But wait, there’s more! Orlando moves so fast he’s slipped one heckuva strawman past the readers of the Times. And that is the liberal belief about freedom that is at the core of his confused argument, namely
… the doctrine that freedom is a natural part of the human condition.
Nowhere does he provide a quote from what he calls the “liberal past” from any liberal actually believed that. He depends upon our half-remembering Rousseau, Locke, the Enlightenment gang – surely, we assume, one of them said, somewhere or another that freedom is a natural part of the human condition. So Orlando can’t be bothered to tell us exactly where.
And that is for a very good reason. Orlando’s description of the liberal “doctrine” of freedom as a natural condition is a grotesque distortion. Perhaps somewhere Locke actually said exactly that, but Orlando’s ripped it from context, and oversimplified the idea, making it appear self-evidently naive and foolish. It is easy to swat away.
What’s not so easy, and Orlando knows it which why they go unmentioned, is to argue against the real words of Locke regarding man’s natural rights to life, liberty, and property, words which are echoed in the Declaration of Independence. Words which I, being an American, think are rather wise, and not naive. I have no problem asserting them as universal rights for human beings. However, the leap from that to overthrowing Saddam Hussein makes the famous jump cut in 2001 from the apes to the spaceship look like a mere blip. It does not follow that because life, liberty, property, therefore invade and conquer a country that is not a threat and that you know nothing about.
And it certainly doesn’t follow, as Orlando says it does, that
…because freedom is instinctively “written in the hearts” of all peoples, all that is required for its spontaneous flowering in a country that has known only tyranny is the forceful removal of the tyrant and his party.
And I’d be very curious to know where Locke says this.
Speaking of Locke, calling him, as Orlando does, the “the 17th-century founder of liberalism” is a little like calling (the 18th century) Weber the inventor of opera. It is so over-simplified that doesn’t enlighten, except about the blithering ignorance of the person who talks like that. Both, of course, were enormously influential in their respective fields. But Weber didn’t invent opera, and Locke certainly didn’t found liberalism.
No, Orlando, the problem of Bush/Iraq wasn’t a naive liberalism. Nor was it a callow president misunderstanding the liberal founder, Locke. It was stupid, ignornant, malicious people in thrall with an ultra-conservative, fascist ideology that perpetrated Bush/Iraq. It was a terrible idea and only terrible people would act on it. Their worldview – marinated in a foul imperialistic manicheism – is uttlerly illiberal.
The incoherence and disortions noted above in Orlando’s op-ed are inexcuasable. He, like so many others who are now making the case for the “liberal” failure o George W. Bush are just clowning around. For in truth, a genuinely useful American intellectual discourse begins with what Orlando tries to exorcise – the articulation of a 21st century liberalism. One more sleazy attempt to blame liberalism for the obscene, forseeable failures of the conservative movement is the last thing we need.
*I’ll leave for you folks the second half. Honestly, I can’t understand it. It seems predicated on the same simplistic, and wrong, notions of the terms “freedom” and “liberty” as the first part. But like I said, I have no idea what his point is other than we, the free, will prevail over the unfree Chinese. And for this they pay him the big bucks?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the busybody culture seems to be on the uptick. It’s not just the Schiavo stuff, which is the worst of it in that it featured the president himself flying back to Washington in the dead of night to sign special legislation. It’s more than that and it has to do with the religious right,corporations and government all working together (and sometimes using modern technology) to regulate personal behavior. I no like.
You have moral scolds and personal responsibility hypocrites and authoritarians and rapacious business interests that are determined, for a variety of reasons, to erase the idea of personal privacy on the one hand and the idea of redemption and reinvention on the other. Combined with a breathlessly intrusive tabloid media (dripping with hypocrisy and phony sanctimony) and you have a recipe for some very unpleasant social changes.
The collateral consequences for people with criminal convictions are already severe. One misdemeanor can significantly diminish or outright ruin your chances for various types of employment, housing, financial aid, higher education, and licensing (not to mention its potential immigration consequences). These collateral effects of criminal convictions — most severe for people being released from prison — disproportionately harm the poor, creating a miserable cycle that makes it even more difficult for people in economically and educationally depressed communities to better their circumstances.
To make matters even worse, the FBI now wants to go beyond tracking “severe and/or significant offenses” (felonies and significant misdemeanors) and include on criminal history reports (accessed by employers and licensing agencies) “non-serious offenses” – from drinking in public to teenage vagrancy, traffic violations to urinating in public, loitering to disorderly conduct. As Michelle Chen observes in the New Standard, this “would foreclose employment opportunities for an untold number of people, disproportionately impact people of color, and invite the abuse of sensitive information.”
The majority of employers will not hire someone with an arrest or “infraction” history, and even the most meaningless of follies will cause heightened scrutiny of the applicant. Any negative information, no matter how minor or long ago, will inevitably be prejudicial towards the applicant. Compound the stigma of even a non-criminal record with the fact that numerous state and federal laws have made it increasingly easy for employers to perform invasive background checks, and soon people’s lives could be negatively impacted by the revelation of even the most minor indiscretions.
Additionally alarming is the fact that these vast criminal records databases are riddled with mistakes or incomplete — half the arrest records do not contain the outcome of the cases (i.e., dismissal, acquittal, the District Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute, etc.). Not only does the FBI want to allow even greater invasions of our private lives, but such incursions would sometimes uncover false and misleading information — but damaging nonetheless.
Like the bankruptcy bill or these “shaming sentences” this is part of the zero tolerance culture that we see emerging in the courts and elsewhere, where we have ritual public humiliations designed to “send a message” and where people can never escape the mistakes of their youths. This allows the powerful and the sanctimonious to indulge in the fiction that they are morally superior by forcing others to pay both publicly and forever. A zero tolerance society turns into a paranoid society very quickly.
Here’s the thing. I’m not big on American exceptionalism as a rule. But if there’s anything about American culture that makes it unique it is the idea of second chances. After all, the colony and then the nation was settled by refugees and opportunists, petty criminals, fortune hunters and losers who were looking for a chance to start over again. It’s who we are.
I’ll evoke the usual suspect here, even though it’s an unbearable cliche, because it happens to be true:
“Born often under another sky, placed in the middle of an always moving scene, himself driven by the irresistible torrent which draws all about him, the American has no time to tie himself to anything, he grows accustomed only to change, and ends by regarding it as the natural state of man. He feels the need of it, more he loves it; for the instability; instead of meaning disaster to him, seems to give birth only to miracles all about him.”
There’s a lot about that to quarrel with, but I believe it is intrinsic to our success as a nation, whether its the willingness to take risks and create a dynamic, vibrant economy or our ability to come back after having made mistakes and create art and music and technology — or just a decent life for ourselves and our families. When you strip it down to fundamentals, it’s what makes progress possible.
But this new propensity among our institutions to track your every movement and keep secret lists with your data and share it amongst themselves is likely to stifle all that creativity and energy and turn us into a paranoid, withdrawn, insecure culture where one mistake can mean the end of everything. There can be no vibrant capitalism where you cannot afford to take risks. There can be no growth or knowledge or invention if you must watch your every step and know that no matter how trivial your misstep or whether you pay your debt to society, you will always be subject to social, economic and governmental disapprobation.
Every day I hear conservatives talk about freedom and liberty. And every day I see their institutions conspiring (sometimes with the help of well meaning, but misguided liberals) to erode the foundation upon which liberty is built. Of course people must behave responsibly and lawfully. A civil society depends upon us all agreeing to follow its rules. But humans are only human and they make mistakes. If we begin to use this powerful technology to ensure that there is no statute of limitations on life lessons and errors, everyone who doesn’t have the means to game the system will be wearing a scarlet barcode on their foreheads. Because, (I know you’vve heard this before somewhere) nobody’s perfect.
Remember how our president used to say this stuff all the time?
It’s not the kind of war that we’re used to in America. The Greatest Generation was used to storming beachheads. Baby boomers such as myself, were used to getting caught in a quagmire of Vietnam where politics made decisions more than the military sometimes. Generation X was able to watch technology right in front of their TV screens — you know, burrow into concrete bunkers in Iraq and blow them up.
I learned some good lessons from Vietnam. First, there must be a clear mission. Secondly, the politics ought to stay out of fighting a war. There was too much politics during the Vietnam War. There was too much concern in the White House about political standing. And I’ve got great confidence in General Tommy Franks, and great confidence in how this war is being conducted. And I rely on Tommy, just like the Secretary of Defense relies upon Tommy and his judgment — whether or not we ought to deploy and how we ought to deploy.
The Bush administration is split over the idea of a surge in troops to Iraq, with White House officials aggressively promoting the concept over the unanimous disagreement of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to U.S. officials familiar with the intense debate.
I think he wants to escalate so badly he can taste it. Fred Barnes says:
It turns out you only have to attend a White House Christmas party to find out where President Bush is headed on Iraq. One guest who shook hands with Bush in the receiving line told him, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” Bush, slightly startled but cheerful, replied, “Don’t worry. I’m not.” The guest followed up: “I think we can win in Iraq.” The president’s reply was emphatic: “We’re going to win.” Another guest informed Bush he’d given some advice to the Iraq Study Group, and said its report should be ignored. The president chuckled and said he’d made his position clear when he appeared with British prime minister Tony Blair. The report had never mentioned the possibility of American victory. Bush’s goal in Iraq, he said at the photo-op with Blair, is “victory.”
(Of course, Fred also thinks we were on the verge of a great victory in Vietnam in 1974 until the congressional hippies cut off the funds so I think he may have had a bit too much of the eggnog.)
This should be very, very interesting. Rummy’s gone. What are the Joint Chiefs going to do?
Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, who blocked the confirmation of a woman to the federal bench because she attended a same-sex commitment ceremony for the daughter of her long-time neighbors, says he will now allow a vote on the nomination.
[…]
Mr. Brownback, who has been criticized for blocking the nomination, said he would also no longer press a proposed solution he offered on Dec. 8 that garnered even more criticism: that he would remove his block if Judge Neff agreed to recuse herself from all cases involving same-sex unions.
In an interview last week, Mr. Brownback said that he still believed Judge Neff’s behavior raised serious questions about her impartiality and that he was likely to vote against her. But he said he did not realize his proposal — asking a nominee to agree in advance to remove herself from deciding a whole category of cases — was so unusual as to be possibly unprecedented. Legal scholars said it raised constitutional questions of separation of powers for a senator to demand that a judge commit to behavior on the bench in exchange for a vote.
Mr. Brownback said that he believed Judge Neff’s attendance at the 2002 ceremony merited further investigation, but that he had not meant to set any precedent with his proposal. “It was the last day of the session and I was just trying to provide some accommodation to see if we could make this thing go forward,” he said.
He said that “this is a big hot-button issue” and that Judge Neff had not made it clear that her presence at the ceremony did not mean she could not rule without bias in deciding cases involving same-sex unions. “I’d like to know more factually about what took place,” he said
I’ll bet he would. Was it two women or two men? How were they dressed? Did they kiss a the alter? Tongues?
This, by the way is the same guy who’s involved in one of the freakiest sideshow cults in DC:
Brownback is also reticent about his membership in The Family, a shadowy Christian-right group comprising all-male elites. Some of its most famous members have included Watergate crook Charles Colson, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint and the brutal Somalian former dictator, Mohammed Siad Barre. “The goal [of The Family] is an “invisible” world organization led by Christ–that’s what they aspire to,” Jeff Sharlet, a journalist who revealed The Family’s inner workings in Harper’s Magazine, said in an interview with Alternet.
I can understand the press being interested in the idea of what Bill Clinton’s role would be in a Hillary Clinton white house. It makes sense. There’s never before been a case where an ex-president might be married to a current one. But someone becoming president eight years after a close family member left the white house isn’t exactly unprecedented now is it, so it’s not so freakish that we can’t imagine it. In fact, one could even say that it was once considered a benefit — all that wise counsel from “grown-ups” and all.
Never the less, I would expect that the political world would be particularly interested in how Bill and Hillary might conduct themselves in this situation because they have always been partners and because Hillary would be the first woman president. One could imagine a line of inquiry that wonders if Bill would really be in charge or if Hillary would be considered more “viable” among men because she has an experienced man backing her up right in the white house.
What one shouldn’t have to imagine is stuff like this:
But there will be questions aplenty. How could there not be? The Clinton marriage fell into political soap opera with the troubles of Bill’s White House years, with nothing but question marks hovering overhead, for a time. Was he contrite? Had she forgiven him? Would she stay? The woman whose earlier assertiveness as first lady rankled some now was tagged with a new set of labels: Hillary the martyr. Hillary the steadfast, for sticking with her man. Hillary as Machiavelli, accepting marital humiliation as the price of power.
The whole article is so sickening I can’t even bear to deconstruct it.
This is not serious political journalism. The only people who really care about this garbage are the superficial morons who inhabit the DC media claque and the gossipy, pitchfork wielding denizens of “the town” who are, apparently, as substantial as cotton candy.
But what is truly insidious about this is something else. This is the press announcing that they have decided what the narrative should be and it is clearly designed to make people shudder with revulsion at the prospect of having to put up with more of this nonsense for another presidency. One of my good friends said to me at dinner last night that she was already exhausted at the prospect of this whole thing — not because she cares about what Bill and Hill do in their personal lives, but because the DC tabloid political media are going to force it on her.
I am not carrying a brief for Hillary and I don’t have an opinion on whether she should run. What I strenuously object to is the idea that the press is going to decide this for us by shoving their sick obsession with the Clinton’s marriage and sex life down our throats whether we care about it or not. The whole damned world seems to be on the verge of exploding — nobody’s interested in explosions in any politician’s pants at the moment.
These gossipy harpies are apparently determined that the nation will not have Hillary Clinton as president. Some of you may be glad about that and are cheering them on. But be advised — they don’t really want ANY Democrat to be president and they will create some demeaning narrative for each of them. They just have a particular score to settle with the Clintons — and the narratives already been written so it’s first out of the box.
Hey, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they’ll fall in love with a Dem this time and treat him with the kid gloves with which they treated Bush in 2000 — he was just a good ole MBA cowpoke from Midland and Kennebunkport who was gonna be decent and honorable and wear a big white hat just like in the movies. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll decide that John Edwards is their guy this time. Or Obama. Or Chris Dodd. And maybe they’ll skew the coverage our way and find some repellant narrative about the Republican that will ensure us a victory. That would be great. We’ll probably win.
But you know, I think it would be a really neat change of pace if the American people got to pick their own president this time. I’m afraid I’m not all that satisfied with who the media and “the townfolk” have chosen for us these last few years. (Their record of Democratic candidate destruction, however, is truly impressive.)
The pundit and kewl kidz primary in which they put us on notice as to which candidates they plan to destroy so we won’t go near them isn’t anticipated in the constitution. If you hate Hillary, that’s your privilege and it’s also your privilege to decide if she should be president. I don’t think it’s good for our politics to let the kewl kidz take that privilege away from us.
A lot of people are talking about this call by Juan Cole for Bush to fire Elliot Abrams, and for very good reason. It’s a great idea, but since it took six years for him to dump Don Rumsfeld, I’m not holding my breath.
What caught my eye in his post outlining Abrams’ long history of crime and perfidy, though, was this:
In 1991, Abrams pled guilty to two misdemeanor counts of lying to Congress under oath. Without the plea deal, he was facing felony charges, since what he did was in fact a felony.
Congress pledged that Abrams would never work at a high level in government again. But by the time the Neoconservative cabal in the Bush administration got Bush to appoint him to the National Security Council, there had been so much turn-over in Congress that, one member told me, “no one remembered who Abrams was.”
Please, someone, tell me this isn’t true. Elliot Abrahams was one of the most evil members of the Reagan administration. He was pardoned by poppy on Christmas eve 1992, just before he left office. He was notorious, infamous.
Unless Democratic staffers and members are all under the age of 40, there is absolutely no reason for them not to have already known who Elliot Abrams was. In any case, their job is to look into the president’s appointees and had anyone done that they would have seen that they were going to be allowing a war criminal back into the government. Then again, he’s just one of many in this administration (that has created a whole new generation of war criminals themselves), so perhaps they just thought that was a prerequisite for the job.
Abrams, unsurprisingly, is back to his old tricks. He’s a very, very bad man and should not ever have been let anywhere near government power again. But he’s one of those awesome Republican “grown-ups” the kewl kids were just thrilled to have back in Washington. I hope they are really enjoying those cocktail weenies.
Considering that I’ve been writing about aristocracy a lot these days, this is actually kind of amusing:
To: The Honourable Senator Olympia Snowe (Republican, Maine) The Honourable Senator John D. Rockefeller (Democrat, West Virginia)
Madame, Sir,
Uphold Free Speech About Climate Change Or Resign
The US Constitution guarantees the right of free speech. It is inappropriate for elected Senators such as yourselves to suggest that any person should refrain from exercising that right, as you have done in your letter of October 27 to the CEO of ExxonMobil. That great corporation has exercised its right of free speech — and with good reason — in openly providing support for scientists and groups that dare to question how much the increased concentration of CO2 in the air may warm the world. You must honour the Constitution, withdraw your letter and apologize to ExxonMobil, or resign as Senators.
You defy every tenet of democracy when you invite ExxonMobil to deny itself the right to provide information to “senior elected and appointed government officials” who disagree with your opinion. You are elected officials yourselves. If you do not believe in the right of persons within the United States to exercise their fundamental right under the world’s greatest Constitution to petition their elected representatives for the redress of their grievances, then you have no place on Capitol Hill. You must go.
[…]
You will rightly deduce from Beckett’s sinister remark that after a decade of Socialist government freedom of speech does not figure in our constitution. But let me quote the First Amendment to yours: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the Press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
I call upon the pair of you to live by those great words, or to leave.
Yours truly,
MONCKTON OF BRENCHLEY
One does feel the sting of the whip more keenly when it comes from one’s betters, doesn’t one? But this is no joke. It is a letter written by a real Viscount Mockton of Brenchley to two US Senators.
The story is related to my aristocrat series not just because some slice of irrelevant peerage decides to lecture US citizens in the tone of Henry the VIII, but because it is another example of big, big money financing their pet conservative causes by creating bogus think tanks and “institutes.” It’s just a little bit unusual that they have put an actual aristocrat up front. The aristocrat, however, has a long conservative political and journalistic history and currently “acts as trouble-shooter and corporate thinker to leading businesses.” (The first viscount Monckton was Chairman of the Iraq Petroleum Company.)
Lord Monckton is an ardent global warming science foe who recently published an exhaustive 52 page roll of toilet paper on the subject for The Telegraph. (George Monbiot explains the whole thing in this article in the Guardian.)He has no degree in any scientific subject and has never done any work in the field. Lately, he’s best known for his (admittedly impressive)jigsaw puzzle design. But he styles himself an expert, writes nonsensical papers and then demands the resignations of anyone who disagrees with him. I think there was more intellectual rigor involved in Galileo’s trial.
But this is how it works. I find it amusing that Exxon has actually engaged a real blueblood to make its dishonest pitch, but maybe they are getting desperate. They aren’t even trying to hide it.
I think everyone knows I’m a godless hippie and all, but I am fascinated by the subjects of politics and history so naturally I find myself constantly reading about religion. It’s all related.
So this story by Bruce Wilson at Talk to Action about the Episcopalian break-away over gay rights piques my interest:
Yesterday, seven Virginia Episcopal churches including two of the largest and wealthiest in the American Episcopal Communion voted to break away and, as a New York Times story written prior to the vote put it, “report to the powerful archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, an outspoken opponent of homosexuality who supports legislation in his country that would make it illegal for gay men and lesbians to form organizations, read gay literature or eat together in a restaurant.” ” Commentor Jim Naughton, who writes the “Daily Episcopalian”, noted “this no longer seems to be a debate about the proper role of gay and lesbians Christians in the Church, but about the moral legitimacy of rolling back human rights for minorities”…
It doesn’t get more political than that. But this highlights something that’s going on in the world of religion that I don’t think most people are aware of: the right is systematically attacking the liberal churches from within.
For instance, it so happens that the ever so mainline Episcopal church has been under assault from big money wingnuts for some time. This article by Max Blumenthal in Salon from 2004 reveals this pet project of rightwing freakshow Howard Ahmanson:
In the summer of 2000, a group of frustrated Episcopalians from the board of the American Anglican Council gathered at a sun-soaked Bahamanian resort to blow off some steam and hatch a plot. They were fed up with the Episcopal Church and what they perceived as a liberal hierarchy that had led it astray from centuries of so-called orthodox Christian teaching. The only option, they believed, was to lead a schism.
But this would take money. After the meeting, Anglican Council vice president Bruce Chapman sent a private memo to the group’s board detailing a plan to involve Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., a Southern California millionaire, and his wife, Roberta Green Ahmanson, in the plan. “Fundraising is a critical topic,” Chapman wrote. “But that topic itself is going to be affected directly by whether we have a clear, compelling forward strategy. I know that the Ahmansons are only going to be available to us if we have such a strategy and I think it would be wise to involve them directly in settling on it as the options clarify.” It was a logical pitch: As a key financier of the Christian right with a penchant for anti-gay campaigns, Ahmanson clearly shared the Anglican Council’s interest in subverting the left-leaning church. Moreover, Ahmanson and his wife were close friends and prayer partners of David Anderson, the Anglican Council’s chief executive, while Chapman and his political team were already enjoying hefty annual grants from Ahmanson to Chapman’s think tank, the Discovery Institute.
Are we getting the picture?
The institute is directed by Diane Knippers, an evangelical Episcopalian and writer who also happens to be a founding member of the Anglican Council and its acting executive director. She is the chief architect of the institute’s Reforming America’s Churches Project, which aims to “restructure the permanent governing structure” of “theologically flawed” mainline churches like the Episcopal Church in order to “discredit and diminish the Religious Left’s influence.” This has translated into a three-pronged assault on mainline Presbyterian, Methodist and Episcopal churches. With a staff of media-savvy research specialists, the institute is able to ply both the religious and mainstream media, exploiting divisive social issues within the churches.
[…]
The campaign against the Episcopal Church climaxed on Aug. 5 last year, just a day before the Rt. Rev. Eugene Robinson was scheduled to be elected as the church’s first openly gay bishop. In a column titled “The Gay Bishop’s Links,” Weekly Standard editor and Institute board member Fred Barnes alleged that the Web site of a gay youth group Robinson founded contained links to “a pornographic website.” Further, Barnes alleged, Robinson “put his hands on” a Vermont man “inappropriately” during a church meeting “several years ago.” The institute shopped the column to various cable news networks but only Fox News broadcast it. Barnes did not return calls seeking comment.
Though Barnes’ smear was discredited by a panel of bishops investigating the charges, it helped widen the rift within the Episcopal Church and isolate it from its global affiliates. Since Robinson’s Nov. 2 consecration, 13 dioceses affiliated with the Anglican Council have threatened to break with the Episcopal Church and form a renegade network. Though the network has yet to congeal, the momentum for a full-blown split continues to build. And the Nigerian and Southeast Asian churches, which, like the Episcopal Church, belong to the global Anglican Communion, have broken off contact with the Episcopal Church.
Once again you see the nexus between big right wing money, media and power — and not just in government, but all aspects of society. (I will talk about Wal-Mart’s stated desire to export its “culture” another time.) I’m not sure that there is anything the right does that is a true grassroots effort. When you peel away the layers you always find the same people spending a huge amount of money to buy off the leadership and brainwash the folks. Every time. Why, if I didn’t know better, I’d think a bunch of rich white people were looking to perpetuate an aristocracy.
And in other religious news, here’s a story in the NY Times today that just floored me:
Before David Paszkiewicz got to teach his accelerated 11th-grade history class about the United States Constitution this fall, he was accused of violating it.
Shortly after school began in September, the teacher told his sixth-period students at Kearny High School that evolution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark, and that only Christians had a place in heaven, according to audio recordings made by a student whose family is now considering a lawsuit claiming Mr. Paszkiewicz broke the church-state boundary.
“If you reject his gift of salvation, then you know where you belong,” Mr. Paszkiewicz was recorded saying of Jesus. “He did everything in his power to make sure that you could go to heaven, so much so that he took your sins on his own body, suffered your pains for you, and he’s saying, ‘Please, accept me, believe.’ If you reject that, you belong in hell.”
The student, Matthew LaClair, said that he felt uncomfortable with Mr. Paszkiewicz’s statements in the first week, and taped eight classes starting Sept. 13 out of fear that officials would not believe the teacher had made the comments.
[…]
Greice Coelho, who took Mr. Paszkiewicz’s class and is a member of his youth group, said in a letter to The Observer, the local weekly newspaper, that Matthew was “ignoring the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gives every citizen the freedom of religion.” Some anonymous posters on the town’s electronic bulletin board, Kearnyontheweb.com, called for Matthew’s suspension.
On the sidewalks outside the high school, which has 1,750 students, many agreed with 15-year-old Kyle Durkin, who said, “I’m on the teacher’s side all the way.”
While science teachers, particularly in the Bible Belt, have been known to refuse to teach evolution, the controversy here, 10 miles west of Manhattan, hinges on assertions Mr. Paszkiewicz made in class, including how a specific Muslim girl would go to hell.
“This is extremely rare for a teacher to get this blatantly evangelical,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a nonprofit educational association. “He’s really out there proselytizing, trying to convert students to his faith, and I think that that’s more than just saying I have some academic freedom right to talk about the Bible’s view of creation as well as evolution.”
Even some legal organizations that often champion the expression of religious beliefs are hesitant to support Mr. Paszkiewicz.
“It’s proselytizing, and the courts have been pretty clear you can’t do that,” said John W. Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, a group that provides legal services in religious freedom cases. “You can’t step across the line and proselytize, and that’s what he’s done here.”
[…]
…Andrew Lewczuk, a former student of Mr. Paszkiewicz, praised his abilities as a history teacher but said he regretted that he had not protested the religious discussions. “In the end, the manner in which Mr. Paszkiewicz spoke with his students was careless, inconsiderate and inappropriate,” he wrote to The Observer. “It was an abuse of power and influence, and it’s my own fault that I didn’t do anything about this.”
One teacher, who did not give his name, said he thought both Matthew and his teacher had done the right thing. “The student had the right to do what he did,” the man said. As for Mr. Paszkiewicz, “He had the right to say what he said, he was not preaching, and that’s something I’m very much against.”
Where to begin? That last comment alone is stunning coming from a “teacher.” The man is recorded saying in a public school:
“If you reject his gift of salvation, then you know where you belong. He did everything in his power to make sure that you could go to heaven, so much so that he took your sins on his own body, suffered your pains for you, and he’s saying, ‘Please, accept me, believe.’ If you reject that, you belong in hell,”
If that’s not preaching, I can’t imagine what goes on in that man’s church. Clearly, this is completely unacceptable; even John Whitehead says so and he’s a raving. religious wingnut.
There are many things about this that are disturbing, of course — the fact that nobody said anything before this kid — the fact that everyone in the community seems to think this is just fine. But I think one of the things that disturbs me the most is that this guy is teaching the class that evolution is not scientific and that dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark. Dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s Ark. In a high school history class. And everybody is saying what a good teacher he is.
Am I nuts or have people become so religiously correct that they can’t say that a man who teaches his students that dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s Ark cannot, by definition, be a good history teacher?
Still, the kid has a lot of guts and he sounds like he’s tough enough to take all this. That’s not true of a lot of other kids who aren’t as temperamentally defiant and who will sit through that sermon and even participate just to fit in socially or get a good grade even though it goes against their own religious teachings (or their own knowledge that it has no basis in fact.) These kids are trapped in a church that’s being run by the government and that’s unconstitutional.
Still, even though Matthew is a bright kid who will do just fine, you have to feel a little bit sorry for him. High school is a terrible place even for the popular:
Matthew said he missed the friends he had lost over his role in the debate, and said he could “feel the glares” when he walked into school.
Instead of mulling Supreme Court precedents, he said with half a smile, “I should be worrying about who I’m going to take to the prom.”
It will be a girl with exceptionally good judgment and courage who agrees to go with him.
Now that the Democrats run Congress, the question becomes, “What should they do?” Yes, raise the minimum wage. And yes, fix the Medicare drug program. But will this bind a new majority to the party? We’re often told, “Democrats have no ideas.” But that’s a silly thing to say. Washington, D.C., is crawling with foundation-types bubbling with new ideas, and if anything, the Democrats are awash with new ideas. Many of these new ideas may make their way into law. And we need not have the cynicism of Mario Cuomo, who once said, “In America, a new idea is a cereal that grows hair.” But what the Democrats don’t have is a serious commitment–the political nerve–to make people happier in the only way they can: by raising people’s taxes. How happy more of us would be if only we could pay higher taxes! More of us at last could joyfully retire. In May 2005, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) put out a sort of Michelin Guide to the pensions of the world’s 30 wealthiest nations: the United States, Ireland and their ilk. While the United States is rich, comparatively it’s a beggar at the bottom, with a…