Despite his work for a Christian pregnancy counseling group that opposes contraception, the physician who yesterday began overseeing federal family-planning programs has prescribed birth control for his patients, a Department of Health and Human Services spokeswoman said.
Out of all the doctors in the country they had to pick one for whom it was necessary to issue a statement like that one. I never thought I’d live to see the day when birth control would once again be a subject of controversy. It’s quite stunning. After all, I’m old. This one, at least, seemed settled.
This is a classic Overton Window deal where it sounds completely out to lunch at the moment but soon will have made its way into mainstream dialog. But it also serves the dual purpose of putting abortion on the negotiating table at a time when all the “reasonable” people are getting together to talk about the need to drastically “reduce” abortion.
There are moral and practical reasons for members of both parties, and combatants on both sides of the abortion question, to embrace this approach.
Liberal supporters of abortion rights should be eager to promote a measure that does not make abortion illegal but does embrace goals, including help for the poor, that liberals have long advocated.
In the meantime, the victories that opponents of abortion rights have won do little to reduce the number of abortions. As Rachel Laser, director of the Third Way Culture Project, points out, even those who would ban late-term or “partial-birth” abortions need to acknowledge that very few are performed, meaning that these laws do little to reduce the overall abortion rate. According to one study cited by Laser, only 0.08 percent of abortions are performed in the third trimester.
The problem is that the forced pregnancy forces are dedicated to a long term process whereby they whittle away at abortion rights. They move the goal posts, little by little with outrageous stunts at the far fringe which allow the “reasonable” people to negotiate away things like parental notice and “partial-birth” abortion. This is where the birth control issue comes in:
Anti-choicers: “Birth control is just like baby killing”
Reasonable Dupes: “Not true! It’s nothing like baby killing. We are against baby killing!”
Anti-choicers: “We don’t believe you. You just want the freedom to put little girls on the pill and when that doesn’t work, you want to yank unborn babies from their wombs against God’s will!”
Dupes: (rolling eyes) “Ok, ok. We’ll prove it. We are willing to outlaw abortion, but you will pry our birth control from our cold dead fingers.
Anti-choicers: “heh”
Moderates and centrists of good will often try to split the difference and find ways to appease all sides when it comes to civil rights and liberties. And they almost always screw things up because fundamental rights are called fundamental for a reason. Once you let go of them all sorts of other things become possible.
I’m reminded of Martin Luther King’s letter from a Birmingham jail. He was, of course, talking about the necessity of activism to gain civil rights for African Americans, but I think the sentiment applies equally well to those who allow the rights and freedoms women already have to be whittled away over time in political negotiations.
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
Like those white moderates of yesterday, the social moderates of today think they can finesse the issue with appeals to change around the edges. But they can’t. I’m sorry the culture war is unpleasant. But it’s happening whether we like it or not. Resolving the issue is not a matter of finding some middle ground or splitting the difference. This is not finesseable with neat slogans or nice little agreements to try to “reduce” the ickiness. Women either own their own bodies or they don’t.
The new, fiercely anti-choice, head of HHS family planning programs has agitated against birth control for years. But it turns out that he “has” prescribed it for some of his patients, so he’s not really outside the mainstream after all. Another win for the voices of moderation.
Perhaps some of you already came across this amazing essay in the American Conservative, but I had missed it. It is written by a lawyer and writer named Austin Bramwell, who was, until recently, a director and trustee for the National Review. It’s an impressive analysis of the failure of the conservative movement and one that I guarantee you will find very interesting.
Here’s a little excerpt:
The movement’s leaders may be better informed, but they have no clearer idea of what they actually think. What they need is analysis: the skeptical tradition extending from Machiavelli to Hobbes, Hamilton, and Burnham that seeks to understand the world as it is rather than as we might like it to be. Analysis, however, requires intellect, but the movement’s mainstream, perhaps to avoid embarrassment (some mainstream figures favorably compared Bush not just to Ronald Reagan but to Abraham Lincoln), has increasingly ostracized its brightest minds.
Sadly, analysis is also often lacking outside the mainstream movement. Every movement throws off disgruntled outsiders (conservatives sometimes call them “paleoconservatives”) who feel bitterly their loss of power. They write obsessively, sometimes quite fancifully, on the alleged perfidies of the mainstream. Often, however, their critiques want credibility.
Some, for example, carry on the Cold War obsession with the so-called “crisis of the West.” Convinced that history at some point took a wrong turn, they pore over ancient texts in search of some Hermetic insight into the fatal error. (Not surprisingly, this approach has little popular appeal, although it still commands respect among professional conservatives.) The notion of a crisis of the West, however, grossly overestimates the importance of ideas; indeed, it requires an unphilosophical and almost paranoid ability to treat ideologies (most conspicuously, liberalism) as living, breathing omnipresences to which intentions, tactics, strategies, feelings, disappointments, and conflicts can all be attributed. Believers in the crisis of the West rest almost their entire worldview on an elusive notion—modernity—borrowed from a half-formed science—sociology. Crisis-of-the-West conservatism, at one time a fruitful response to the calamities of the 20th century, has become more a posture than a genuine school of thought.
Another group pleads for the conservative movement to return to its alleged first principles. “If only people would still read Russell Kirk,” one hears. But the movement never had any first principles to begin with. Although it boasts a carefully husbanded canon of supposedly foundational texts, the men who wrote them—Kirk, Strauss, Voegelin, Weaver, Chambers, Meyer—were notorious eccentrics given to extravagant claims whose policy implications remain largely obscure. Russell Kirk, for example, even as he shrewdly positioned himself as the intellectual godfather of the conservative movement, had almost no political opinions whatsoever.
What is most refreshing about this piece, and perhaps unprecedented, is that Bramwell does not just fault flawed execution or creeping liberalism. He considers the movement empty in all its forms, even as his temperament and view of human psychology shows him to be what everyone used to think of as a conservative. (After living with “movement conservatism” for so long it’s actually a bit disorienting to see a conservative under the age of 70 or so with intellectual integrity.) And to his credit he doesn’t erect a liberal straw man or hedge his bets by explicitly saying that liberalism is “even worse,” which, considering his history must have been a temptation.
We have all discussed the bizarre parallels to 1984 over these last freakish years, but Bramwell’s observations are among the most entertaining and insightful I’ve read:
First, like Ingsoc, conservatism has a hierarchical structure. Like Orwell’s “Inner Party,” those at the top of the movement have almost perfect freedom to decide what opinions count as official conservatism. The Iraq War furnishes a telling example. In the run-up to the invasion, leading conservatives announced that conservatism now meant spreading global democratic revolution. This forthright radicalism—this embrace of the sanative powers of violence—became quickly accepted as the ineluctable meaning of conservatism in foreign policy. Those who dissented risked ostracism and harsh rebuke. Had conservative leaders instead argued that global democratic revolution would not cure our woes but increase them, the rest of the movement would have accepted this position no less quickly. Millions of conservative epigones believe nothing less than what the movement’s established organs tell them to believe. Rarely does a man recognize, like Winston Smith, his own ideology as such.
It sounds like Bramwell has been having some very unpleasant conversations with conservatives recently. I feel for him. Lord knows I’ve been there. In the intro to the essay he says that he was asked to resign from the National Review by Buckley himself. That certainly sounds intriguing and well worth another article or two, I would think.
As best I can tell, the following is the approximate order in which homo-sapiens came to the land now called America (or parts of Canada.) Some stayed and made themselves at home, some didn’t:
2. The population that came over the land bridge, the ancestry of the people we now call Native Americans.
3. The Vikings, about 1,000 years ago (they apparently didn’t stay.)Next were a couple more European attempts:
[4.] In 1559, Tristan de Luna y Arellano led an attempt by Europeans to colonize Florida. He established a settlement at Pensacola Bay, but a series of misfortunes caused his efforts to be abandoned after two years. [Link below]
[5.] In 1565, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés arrived in 1565 at a place he called San Augustín (St. Augustine, Florida) and established the first permanent European settlement in what is now the United States. [Link below]
6. Then, in 1587, Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition foundered at Roanoke Island, off the coast of what is now North Carolina. The survivors were most likely absorbed into the indigenous population. Those who doubt this should read the remarkable book by author, anthropologist, and ethno-historian, Lee Miller. In her research, Miller dealt first with English political history to determine why these people were abandoned, and then followed with the stunning evidence of what became of them.
On April 30th four centuries ago, our ancestors, led by Don Juan de Oñate, reached the banks of El Rio Bravo (Rio Grande). The first recorded act of thanksgiving by colonizing Europeans on this continent occurred on that April day in 1598 in Nuevo Mexico, about 25 miles south of what is now El Paso, Texas. After having begun their northward trek in March of that same year, the entire caravan was gathered at this point. The 400 person expedition included soldiers, families, servants, personal belongings, and livestock . . . virtually a living village. Two thirds of the colonizers were from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain, Portugal, and the Canary Islands). There was even one Greek and a man from Flanders! The rest were Mexican Indians and mestizos (mixed bloods).
The starting point for the colonists had been in Zacatecas, Nueva España (now Mexico) and by being part of the colonizing expedition they had been promised the title of Hidalgo, men with rights and privileges equal to Spain’s nobility. Juan de Oñate was a man of wealth and prominence, the son of Cristobal Oñate, silver mine owner whose family had come to the New World from the Basque region of Spain. Titles granted to him by Viceroy Luis de Velasco were Governor and Adelantado of New Mexico. The colonists suffered hardships and deprivations as they headed north, but they were also headed toward posterity: they would participate in the first recorded act of Thanksgiving by colonizing Europeans on this continent—22 years before the English colonists similarly gave thanks on the Atlantic coast. The expedition is well recorded by Gaspar Perez de Villagrá, the Spanish poet who traveled with the group. He wrote, “We were sadly lacking in all knowledge of the stars, the winds, and other knowledge by which to guide our steps.”
On April 30, 1598, the scouts made camp along the Rio Grande and prepared to drink and eat their fill, for there they found fishes and waterfowl. Villagrá wrote,
“We built a great bonfire and roasted meat and fish, and then sat down to a repast the like of which we had never enjoyed before.” Before this bountiful meal, Don Juan de Oñate personally nailed a cross to a living tree and prayed, “Open the door to these heathens, establish the church altars where the body and blood of the Son of God may be offered, open to us the way to security and peace for their preservation and ours, and give to our king and to me in his royal name, peaceful possession of these kingdoms and provinces for His blessed glory. Amen.”
Next came some Frenchies:
[8.] In 1604, Samuel de Champlain, along with Sieur de Mont, established what is now known as the first Acadian settlement on the North American continent on the Isle-of-St.-Croix, at St. Croix River near Calais, Maine. After experiencing a harsh winter and extreme cold on this small island, they moved their settlement into the rich agricultural area of the Bay of Fundy, which subsequently became known as Acadia. The permanent French colony of Port Royal was established in 1605. [Link above]
[9.] The islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon were colonized by France in 1604. The colony survived and still exists today on these tiny islands ten miles south of Newfoundland, Canada. The islands still belong to France. Many people today are unaware that France still has territory in North America. [Link above]
Some more English:
[10.] In 1607, some 100 men and boys sailed from England and landed in present-day Virginia and founded Jamestown. They found a hostile environment that probably would have destroyed the colony but for the resourcefulness of Captain John Smith, who managed to organize and motivate the settlers and save them from starvation. [Link above]
French:
[11.] In 1608 Samuel de Champlain established what is now known as Quebec City.
1. And finally you have “the first” to get here, the Mayflower pilgrims, who landed in Massachusetts in 1620 and later celebrated “the first” Thanksgiving.
The United States ranks worst in welcoming foreign business travelers and tourists, due to bureaucratic headaches and rude immigration officials, a survey showed.
The survey by the Discover America Partnership, a business group from the travel and tourism industries, said the cold welcome for visitors could hurt the US economy.
“The US entry process has created a climate of fear and frustration that is turning away foreign business and leisure travelers from visiting the United States — and damaging America’s image abroad,” the group said in a statement.
The study was based on a survey of more than 2,000 travelers worldwide, asked to rate their experience in 16 countries in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America, in addition to the United States.
However, it also found that those with experience visiting America are 74 percent more likely to have an extremely favorable opinion of the country versus those who have not visited recently.
“This study should be a wake-up call for the US government,” said Geoff Freeman, Executive Director of the Discover America Partnership.
“Visiting the United States and interacting with the American people can have a powerful, positive effect on how non-US residents see our country. Unfortunately, perceptions of a ‘rude’ and ‘arrogant’ entry process are turning away travelers and harming America’s image.”
The survey found that the US entry process is considered the “world’s worst” by travelers, by more than a two-to-one margin over the next-worst destination area.
The US ranks with Africa and the Middle East when it comes to traveler-friendly paperwork and officials, the survey concluded, with 54 percent of international travelers saying that immigration officials are rude.
The survey found that two-thirds of travelers surveyed feared they would be detained at the border because of a simple mistake or misstatement.
“Foreign travelers are in agreement: the US entry process is unpredictable and unfriendly to foreign visitors, it is hurting America’s image abroad and deterring many from visiting the US,” said Thomas Riehle, partner, RT Strategies, which conducted the poll.
“These survey results help to explain the 17 percent decline in overseas travel to the US over the past five years and the 10 percent decline in business travel to the US over the past year.”
I heard recently that a lot of financial industry business is shifting to Europe because it’s just too much trouble to get into the country. The visa process is a nightmare even for people who come back and forth regularly. And treatment at the airports is downright frightening. I’m reminded of this story:
Somewhere in central Los Angeles, about 20 miles from LAX airport, there is a nondescript building housing a detention facility for foreigners who have violated US immigration and customs laws. I was driven there around 11pm on May 3, my hands painfully handcuffed behind my back as I sat crammed in one of several small, locked cages inside a security van. I saw glimpses of night-time urban LA through the metal bars as we drove, and shadowy figures of armed security officers when we arrived, two of whom took me inside. The handcuffs came off just before I was locked in a cell behind a thick glass wall and a heavy door. No bed, no chair, only two steel benches about a foot wide. There was a toilet in full view of anyone passing by, and of the video camera watching my every move. No pillow or blanket. A permanent fluorescent light and a television in one corner of the ceiling. It stayed on all night, tuned into a shopping channel.
After 10 minutes in the hot, barely breathable air, I panicked. I don’t suffer from claustrophobia, but this enclosure triggered it. There was no guard in sight and no way of calling for help. I banged on the door and the glass wall. A male security officer finally approached and gave the newly arrived detainee a disinterested look. Our shouting voices were barely audible through the thick door. “What do you want?” he yelled. I said I didn’t feel well. He walked away. I forced myself to calm down. I forced myself to use that toilet. I figured out a way of sleeping on the bench, on my side, for five minutes at a time, until the pain became unbearable, then resting in a sitting position and sleeping for another five minutes. I told myself it was for only one night.
As it turned out, I was to spend 26 hours in detention. My crime: I had flown in earlier that day to research an innocuous freelance assignment for the Guardian, but did not have a journalist’s visa.
Since September 11 2001, any traveller to the US is treated as a potential security risk. The Patriot Act, introduced 45 days after 9/11, contains a chapter on Protecting The Border, with a detailed section on Enhanced Immigration Provision, in which the paragraph on Visa Security And Integrity follows those relating to protection against terrorism. In this spirit, the immigration and naturalisation service has been placed, since March 2003, under the jurisdiction of the new department of homeland security. One of its innovations was to revive a law that had been dormant since 1952, requiring journalists to apply for a special visa, known as I-visa, when visiting the US for professional reasons. Somewhere along the way, in the process of trying to develop a foolproof system of protecting itself against genuine threats, the US has lost the ability to distinguish between friend and foe. The price this powerful country is paying for living in fear is the price of its civil liberties.
[…]
The queue for passport control was short. I presented my British passport and the green visa waiver form I had signed on the plane. The immigration official began by asking the usual questions about where I was staying and why I was travelling to the US. It brought back memories of another trip there to write a series of articles about post 9/11 America for the German weekly Die Zeit. I had written about commuters who preferred the safety of train travel to flying, and about a wounded New York that had become a city of survivors. I had seen a traumatised, no longer cockily immortal America in a profound state of mourning. But it had seemed to me that its newly acknowledged vulnerability was becoming its strength: stunned by an act of war on its own soil, Americans had been shocked into a sudden hunger for information about the world beyond their borders.
“I’m here to do some interviews,” I said.
“With whom?” He wrote down the names, asked what the article was about and who had commissioned it. “So you’re a journalist,” he said, accusingly, and for the first time I sensed that, in his eyes, this was not a good thing to be. “I have to refer this to my supervisor,” he said ominously, and asked me to move to a separate, enclosed area, where I was to wait to be “processed”. Other travellers came, waited and went; I was beginning to feel my jetlag and some impatience. I asked how long I’d have to wait, but received no reply. Finally, an officer said, noncommittally, “It seems that we will probably have to deport you.”
I’m not sure, but I think I laughed. Deport? Me? “Why?” I asked, incredulously.
“You came here as a journalist, and you don’t have a journalist’s visa.” I had never heard of it. He swiftly produced the visa waiver (I-94W) I had signed on the plane, and pointed to what it said in tiny print: in addition to not being a drug smuggler, a Nazi or any other sort of criminal, I had inadvertently declared that I was not entering the US as a representative of foreign media (“You may not accept unauthorised employment or attend school or represent the foreign information media during your visit under this program”).
My protestations that I had not noticed this caveat, nor been alerted to it, that I had travelled to the US on many occasions, both for work and pleasure, that I had, in fact, lived there as a permanent resident and that my husband was a US citizen, as was my New York-born daughter, all fell on deaf ears. He grinned. “You don’t care, do you?” I said, with controlled anger. Then I backtracked, and assumed a begging, apologetic mode. In response, he told me I would have to be “interviewed”, and that a decision would then be taken by yet another superior. This sounded hopeful.
Finally, after much scurrying around by officers, I was invited into an office and asked if I needed anything before we began. I requested a glass of water, which the interrogating officer brought me himself. He was a gentle, intelligent interrogator: the interview lasted several hours and consisted of a complete appraisal of my life, past and present, personal and professional. He needed information as diverse as my parents’ names, the fee I would be paid for the article I was working on, what it was about, exactly, and, again, the names of people I was coming to interview. My biography was a confusing issue – I was born in one country, had lived in many others: who was I, exactly? For US immigration, my British passport was not enough of an identity. The officer said, pointedly, “You are Russian, yet you claim to be British”, an accusation based on the fact that I was born in Moscow (though I never lived there). Your governor, went my mental reply, is Austrian, yet he claims to be American. After about three hours, during which I tried hard to fight jetlag and stay alert, we had produced several pages that were supposed to provide the invisible person in charge with enough material to say yes or no to my request to be allowed entry. My interrogator asked one last obligatory question, “Do you understand?”
“Yes, I understand,” I sighed, and signed the form. The instant faxed response was an official, final refusal to enter the US for not having the appropriate visa. I’d have to go back to London to apply for it.
At this moment, the absurd but almost friendly banter between these men and myself underwent a sudden transformation. Their tone hardened as they said that their “rules” demanded that they now search my luggage. Before I could approach to observe them doing this, the officer who had originally referred me to his supervisor was unzipping my suitcase and rummaging inside. For the first time, I raised my voice: “How dare you touch my private things?”
“How dare you treat an American officer with disrespect?” he shouted back, indignantly. “Believe me, we have treated you with much more respect than other people. You should go to places like Iran, you’d see a big difference.” The irony is that it is only “countries like Iran” (for example, Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe) that have a visa requirement for journalists. It is unheard of in open societies, and, in spite of now being enforced in the US, is still so obscure that most journalists are not familiar with it. Thirteen foreign journalists were detained and deported from the US last year, 12 of them from LAX.
Nobody cares about foreign journalists, of course, and nobody in our current government is going to stand up for the principle of a free press.(They have reportedly streamlined the journalist visa process, at least.) These are people who are investigating the NY Times for publishing leaks, after all.
But now our terrible image and rude tactics are really starting to interfere with business — and that’s a problem that’s going to get some attention. I’m sure Karen Hughes is out there feverishly chatting up all the soccer moms on the planet telling them they shouldn’t hate us for our freedom, but somehow I don’t think it’s going to help. Being hated all over the world is not just bad for our physical security it’s bad for our economic security too.
I’m wondering if there’s any aspect of life in America (or the world, for that matter) that hasn’t been adversely affected by the Bush administration’s blunderbuss approach to governance. The American big money boyz were very short-sighted when they backed these people. But then, that’s one of their trademarks, isn’t it?
Look who’s going to be writing about religion for the Washington Post.
Of course, gossip, backbiting and social ruin are sacred rites in all royal courts, so I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense for the Mother Superior of the Order of Bored Trophy Wives to exploit some of that olde time religion. She will be joined in this venture by another member of the nfashionable, religious in-crowd, Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek, who once wrote this in the magazine:
The uniqueness—one could say oddity, or implausibility—of the story of Jesus’ resurrection argues that the tradition is more likely historical than theological.
I’m sure this new WaPo feature will be a fascinating trek through the minds of the bosses wife and a trendy mainstream religion peddler. Naturally, they enter the scene just as it passes from hip to kitch and have no idea that it’s happened. This is not unusual among the DC cognoscenti.
On the evening of Nov. 14, Quinn took her message to the grass roots, addressing approximately 70 folks at a meeting of the Citizens Association of Georgetown. Speaking from the pulpit of St. John’s Episcopal Church, Quinn said that she had gathered enough information to “scare you a lot.”
[…]
Your N95 Mask: The Building Block of Emergency Prep. At her talk, Quinn held this particle-filtering device to her mouth and said that she’s “never without it.” She also stuffs one into the briefcase of her husband, former Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, who she says “grouses” about the precaution.
Pick a Room and Stock It. You need water and food to last a week, a battery-powered radio and flashlight, planned emergency routes, contact numbers for the family, the antibiotics Cipro and doxycycline, a first-aid kit, and plastic sheeting and duct tape. Quinn herself keeps all these things in her home’s laundry room, because it’s “easy to seal off.” Also, her food supply is heavy on the beans, “because they’re nutritious.”
[…]
Two Words: Peanut Butter. Along with a supply of water, Quinn keeps a “large jar” of peanut butter in her car, primarily for the protein. Even a small amount of this staple, says Quinn, will sustain the terrorism victim for quite some time.
Keep the Kayak in the Garage. In a 2003 Post piece, Quinn advocated the use of inflatable kayaks as an evacuation mode for those who live near water. The mass hysteria following Hurricane Katrina, though, has apparently soured Quinn on riparian retreat. “Somebody would stick you up with a gun,” said Quinn of an evacuee headed to the river with a portable craft.
Don’t Bother Putting Masks on Your Dog. At the Georgetown speech, an audience member suggested placing masks on pets to keep them from spreading contagions. Quinn responded that she’d tried putting an N95 on Sparky, her now-deceased Shih Tzu, but it didn’t work.
In this new online feature, Meacham can be counted upon to continue to help us understand that the more implausible a thing is, the more likely it is to be true. And Quinn will hopefully put the same kind of serious thought into spirituality that she puts into risk management. Sounds like a winner.
The other day I was listening to Al Franken and Jonathan Alter chatter about a speech they’d heard President Clinton deliver at a dinner for the 20th anniversary of Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. (This is the speech in which he said “people didn’t give Democrats a mandate.They gave us a chance.”)
Franken made the interesting observation that in a room filled with journalists he was the only one taking notes — which explains why there was so little coverage of the event and the speech. Alter (one of the few who wrote about it) has an excellent memory, however, and described what Clinton said in some detail on Franken’s show, focusing on a specific point that Clinton made:
“America rejected shorthand, people are thinking again.”
This was, apparently (I can’t find a copy of the speech anywhere) a bit from a long passage explaining how this election reflects America’s return to empiricism. Alter doesn’t discuss this aspect of the speech in his piece, linked above, in Newsweek. And since virtually the entire elite press corps who were present didn’t bother to write about it, it’s hard to know exactly what he meant. But it certainly seems likely that he was at least obliquely referring to the press corps, considering the venue.
On Franken, Alter did not mention that possibility and instead went on to use Clinton’s theory that Americans had voted for empiricism as an opportunity to lecture liberals that they were in danger of becoming like conservatives because they hadn’t learned to rein in their own faith-based fanaticism. He used the teachers unions as an example of how the liberals refuse to admit empirical evidence that might endanger their power base. (I know. That’s right up there with denying global warming and saying that abortion causes breast cancer.)
As I listened to this I was once again struck by the lack of self-awareness in the media. You have the former president saying this to a crowd of elite journalists and they don’t seem to think it could apply to them — the very institution that is in charge of getting out the facts to the public. (The same institution that is now giving respect to such empirically nonsensical notions as creationism.)
I have long thought that one of liberalism’s biggest problems is its liberal pundits. Alter is a good guy who is more often right than wrong and so I don’t mean to pick on him here. But his comments are revealing. While he takes the opportunity to scold liberals for their own weakness in this area, he doesn’t acknowledge his own.
Sometime back I took him to task for his lazy adherence to the tired beltway theme about McGovernite retreads. But Alter is not one of the worst purveyors of this tired trope. A much better example of egregiously obtuse liberal punditry — the kind that would likely make me become a conservative if I were young and didn’t know better, just because I wouldn’t want to be associated with it — is Richard Cohen talking about the Vietnam and Iraq wars today:
I would have fought neither war.
Before you protest “of course, Cohen,” let me explain that the “I” in the foregoing sentence is really four people. There is the “I” who originally thought the Vietnam War was morally correct, that the communists were awful people and that the loss of South Vietnam (the North was already gone) would result in a debacle for its people. That’s, in fact, what happened. It was only later, when I myself was in the Army, that I deemed the war not worth killing or dying for. By then I — the second “I” — no longer felt it was winnable, and I did not want to lose my life so that somehow defeat could be managed more elegantly.
Things are precisely the same with Iraq, and here, too, I — No. 3 — originally had no moral qualms about the war. Saddam Hussein was a beast who had twice invaded his neighbors, had killed his own people with abandon and posed a threat — and not just a theoretical one — to Israel. If anything, I was encouraged in my belief by the offensive opposition to the war — silly arguments about oil or empire or, at bottom, the ineradicable and perpetual rottenness of America.
On the contrary, I thought. We are a good country, attempting to do a good thing. In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic. The United States had the power to change things for the better, and those who would do the changing — the fighting — were, after all, volunteers. This mattered to me.
But these volunteers are now fighting a war few envisaged and no one wanted — not I (No. 4), for sure. If at one time my latter-day minutemen marched off thinking they were bringing democracy to Iraq and the greater Middle East, they now must know better. If they thought they were going to rid the region of weapons of mass destruction and sever the link between al-Qaeda and Hussein, they now are entitled to feel duped by Bush, Vice President Cheney and others. The exaggerations are particularly repellent. To fool someone into sacrificing his life to battle a chimera is a hideous abuse of the public trust.
Everything about that screams shallow, unsubstantial, flip-flopping fool. This is the face of liberalism that the right loves to use as an example of our dizzy, deer-in-the-headlights intellectual fecklessness. And if we were like him, they would be right.
It was one thing for Cohen to have followed that path the Vietnam war. He was a young man. He was also part of a culture that was drenched in the WWII ethos of American military dominance. Cohen’s journey during Vietnam is that of many Americans. What is not acceptable is that in middle age he shows exactly the same naivete as if the previous experience never happened — much like Bush and the Neocons who apparently never got past it either. This is the most embarrassing public confession I’ve read in a long time.
But that wasn’t the worst of it:
If anything, I was encouraged in my belief by the offensive opposition to the war — silly arguments about oil or empire or, at bottom, the ineradicable and perpetual rottenness of America.
On the contrary, I thought. We are a good country, attempting to do a good thing. In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic.
The “prudent use of violence could be therapeutic,” (for whom, he doesn’t say, but I must assume it wasn’t those who were on either the delivery or receving ends — I doubt it’s very therapeutic for them.) And in the same breath he says he was encouraged in his beliefs because of the “offensive” and “silly” opposition to the war which was “at bottom” a bunch of believers in the “ineradicable and perpetual rottenness” of America.
This isn’t just any Joe Schmoe. He’s a top liberal columnist in the national capitol’s premiere newspaper and he’s not only a trafficker in cliches so musty they smell like Robert Novak’s crypt, but he’s apparently so muddle headed that he doesn’t know when he sounds like a sociopath. (But I suppose sociopaths never know when they sound like sociopaths, do they?)
This statement actually does raise an important question: would the judgment of America as being “rotten” actually be all wrong if it were proven that most Americans were the type of people who think that the “prudent use of violence is therapeutic?” I think it might. It would certainly prove that most Americans are offensive.
As it is, I doubt that very many people really believe that a prudent use of violence is therapeutic. Only rich, rheumy-eyed, dissolute courtiers who live in a rarified world in which patriotic “volunteers” administer the beatings for them would think such a thing. (Or S&M porno afficionados, which I suspect may include many of the same people.)
If Clinton is correct and the American people are thinking again, it’s quite clear that Richard Cohen has not joined their ranks. He’s still splashing about in his own alternate reality, fighting the straw hippies he still sees around every corner and sharing a lifelong personal journey in which he managed to get from the toilet to the sink and back again. Jonathan Alter may be right that liberals have their own faith-based problems, but our much bigger problem is the total incoherence of people like Cohen who are paid big bucks to represent us in the media.
Update:Hilzoy says Richard Cohen should get a new job. .
Something strikes me as truly weird about this story. See if you agree:
The Dyersburg Youth Minister accused of raping a 14 year old girl has resigned from his position as Youth Minister of Music at Springhill Baptist Church.
44 year old Timothy Byars submitted his resignation to the church’s pastor over the phone. Byars was released from jail in Knoxville Sunday November 19, 2006 on a $50,000 bond.
The teenage girl claims Byars raped her while she, Byars and three other young girls were attending a track meet in East Tennessee.
While the investigation continues in the case, Springhill Baptist Church Pastor, James Branscum says he and the church members will pray for Byars.
Police say Byars may have also raped another young girl in Nashville.
See what I mean? Pastor Branscum says he and his church members will pray for the accused rapist. And that is very Christian of them, I”m sure.
But I think they forgot someone else to pray for. Maybe two someone elses…
A 14-year-old girl said Coach Timothy Byars, 44, raped her while at a tournament over the weekend in East Tennessee.
Knoxville Police said the attack happened in a parking lot, as Byars, his two daughters, the victim and her older sister slept in his SUV before a track meet. The girl text messaged her parents after the attack happened.
Her parents flew to East Tennessee to get their daughter. Soon after, Knoxville Police arrested Byars for rape.
A 19-year-old also accused Byars of inappropriate behavior, and said he touched her inappropriately as she drove the team van through Nashville.
“It was not a situation of it occurring just for a second or two. She said the inappropriate contact occurred for a time as they were on I-40, we believe in Nashville,” Metro Police spokesperson Don Aaron said.
This little detail leaped out at me:
In Dyersburg, people found the allegations against the father of seven hard to believe.
Sounds like maybe we got one of those staunch, pious Quiverfull patriarchs the press has been fawning over recently.
A perverse question. Let’s say the girl was in fact raped and becomes pregnant. Do you think Byars could win if he sued to prevent an abortion? After all, the rightwing has been shrieking for years on the subject of the father’s rights in re: abortion.
Like I said, a perverse question, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if someday it happens, even if not in this case.
Atrios links to this post by Robert Reich in which he says that McCain wants higher troop levels in Iraq because it will raise morale. Ok.
But he also says something else that I think is important and have been meaning to discuss:
I think McCain knows Iraq is out of our hands – it’s disintegrating into civil war, and by 2008 will be a bloodbath. He also knows American troops will be withdrawn. The most important political fact he knows is he has to keep a big distance between himself and Bush in order to avoid being tainted by this horrifying failure. Arguing that we need more troops effectively covers his ass. It will allow him to say, “if the President did what I urged him to do, none of this would have happened.”
This is obviously his plan. But from what I’m reading there is likely to be a plan that will do exactly what McCain wants and if it’s implemented it’s going to screw him good.
The Pentagon’s closely guarded review of how to improve the situation in Iraq has outlined three basic options: Send in more troops, shrink the force but stay longer, or pull out, according to senior defense officials.
Insiders have dubbed the options “Go Big,” “Go Long” and “Go Home.” The group conducting the review is likely to recommend a combination of a small, short-term increase in U.S. troops and a long-term commitment to stepped-up training and advising of Iraqi forces, the officials said.
I do not want to see anybody sent into that meat grinder and I’m not sure they can do it. But if they do, it will stab St. John right in the back. His rationale for winning in 2008 hinges on his calling for more troops and the Bush administration not listening. (Whoever wins the Republican nomination in 08 must run against both Bush and the Democrats.)
McCain made a tactical error when he asked for a specific number recently. If they give him what he wants and it fails, which it will, his rabid support for the war becomes a huge liability:
Mr. McCain contends that the war in Iraq is worth fighting and is worth winning. He has said consistently from the start of the conflict that the only way to prevail is to send enough soldiers to do the job. His current proposal is to send 20,000 additional troops in hopes of bringing Baghdad and the restive western provinces under control.
The alternative, he said, is humiliation for the United States and disaster for Iraq.
He’s going to be left with no option but to call for even more escalation going into ’08 if they do this. I can’t help but wonder about the political implications. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that the number is the same and that Abizaid famously said recently that the extra 20,000 weren’t necessary. If the Bush administration now “gives” McCain exactly what he’s asked for they are effectively passing off the war to him. McCain is positioning himself to be Lyndon Johnson in this thing without even becoming president.
I will confess something. About halfway through this brilliant, eloquent takedown of Bush’s remarks in Vietnam, my eyes teared up and I could barely continue. I remembered the horror of opening up Life Magazine, over 35 years ago now, I guess, that famous issue of photos of one week’s dead soldiers in Vietnam. You turned those pages of pictures with a combination of grief at the loss and fury at the sheer senselessness of it. Then my mind turned back to the rising death toll in Iraq. No matter how many times I’ve read about about the latest casualties, it still hits me in the gut, each and every time. And the same with the spotty coverage of the Iraqi dead, stories of the most horrific atrocities, all triggered by the lunatic orders of a sociopath who lied to his people, a people, terrorized by 9/11, who were all too willing to trust him. Atrocities for which all Americans, even those of us who devoted enormous effort to prevent the war, will be blamed by the communities Bush brutalized.
The tired question all of us have been asking for years now about America is, “Where’s the outrage?” Well, watch Olbermann, who can barely restrain himself. There’s the outrage.
I hope Olbermann’s comments spread like wildfire until every last person in this country hears them. Don’t miss this video.
Reading Digby’s recent post finally jogged my memory. All this talk about compulsory breeding being good for the race – the race being “Christians” these days – where had I heard that before?
General ‘Buck’ Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn’t that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious… service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
Ambassador de Sadesky: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.
It’s a somewhat different solution to the problem than the quiverfulls, but the desired outcome is the same. And in this case, as the General points out, rather than forcing one woman to endure a lifetime of pregnancy, it is the man who would have to sacrifice the most, by giving up his monogamy.
It’s time, given the rise of islamofascistliberalvegetarian immigrant-type people, to have a serious, thoughtful discussion of the Dr.’s ideas. Not to be willing to do so just shows that liberals are truly small-minded and unwilling to entertain refreshingingly unusual ideas.