Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Stale Cakewalk

by digby

Everybody’s talking about the the neocon rats deserting the sinking ship article that’s coming up in the December Vanity Fair. It’s a doozy. There are two excerpts however that I think are just priceless.

First, there’s Michael Ledeen, who sent his totally inexperienced 29 year old daughter to Bagdad to work as a financial advisor for the Coalition Provisional Authority in the early days of the invasion, blaming it on the bitches:

“Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes.”

The other is Ken “Cakewalk” Adelman:

And if he, too, had his time over, Adelman says, “I would write an article that would be skeptical over whether there would be a performance that would be good enough to implement our policy. The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can’t execute it, it’s useless, just useless. I guess that’s what I would have said: that Bush’s arguments are absolutely right, but you know what, you just have to put them in the drawer marked can’t do. And that’s very different from let’s go.”

The same guy who Bob Woodward spoke to in 2004 for his book “Plan of Attack;”

Former Reagan administration official Kenneth Adelman, a prominent neoconservative, had authored an op-ed piece in the April 10, 2003 Washington Post entitled “Cake Walk Revisited,” gloating over what appeared to be a quick victory in Iraq and reminding readers that, 14 months earlier, he had written that the war would be a “Cake Walk.”

Cheney read the article and congratulated Adelman on his “clever column,” which, he said, “really demolished them.” Cheney and his wife, Lynne, invited the Adelmans to join the Cheneys on April 13 for a “small private dinner” with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby.

Adelman was so happy that he burst into tears at the door of the vice president’s residence that Sunday. He hugged Cheney for the first time in the 30 years he had known him. “We’re all together,” Cheney said. “There should be no protocol; ‘let’s just talk.'”

Wolfowitz proceeded to embark on a long review of the 1991 Persian Gulf war. “Hold it, hold it,” Adelman interjected. “Let’s talk about this Gulf war. I have been blown away by how determined the president is. The war has been awesome.”

Adelman said he had been “worried to death that there would be no war as time went on and support seemed to wane.”

“Yes,” agreed the vice president. “And it all began the first minutes of the presidency, when Bush said they were going to go full steam ahead…This guy was just totally different,” Cheney said. “He just decided here’s what I want to do and I’m going to do it.”

Writes Woodward, “It was a pretty amazing accomplishment, they all agreed, particularly given the opposition to the war. Here was Brent Scowcroft, the pillar of the establishment foreign policy, widely seen as a surrogate for the president’s father. There had been James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state, insisting on a larger coalition of nations.”

Talk turned to the current secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, and there were chuckles around the table. Cheney and Wolfowitz agreed that, as Cheney put it, Powell “was someone who just followed his poll ratings and bragged about his popularity. He sure likes to be popular. Colin always had major reservations about what we were trying to do.” (Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 30, 2004)

Adelman claims that he’s just shocked about Don Rumsfeld’s performance:

“The problem here is not a selling job. The problem is a performance job.… Rumsfeld has said that the war could never be lost in Iraq, it could only be lost in Washington. I don’t think that’s true at all. We’re losing in Iraq.… I’ve worked with [Rumsfeld] three times in my life. I’ve been to each of his houses, in Chicago, Taos, Santa Fe, Santo Domingo, and Las Vegas. I’m very, very fond of him, but I’m crushed by his performance. Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don’t know. He certainly fooled me.”

Uhm no. He was always full of shit and so was Ken Adelman:

March 23, 2003

Kenneth Adelman, a former Reagan arms control official who is close to top Bush military officials and serves on a Pentagon advisory panel, said these weapons are likeliest to be found near Tikrit and Baghdad, “because they’re the most protected places with the best troops.”

“I have no doubt we’re going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction,” Adelman said, though he acknowledged some surprise that they have not been used yet. “One thing we may find is Saddam Hussein ordered them to be used and soldiers didn’t follow the orders. The threat of use goes down every day because adherence to orders goes down.”

March 30, 2003

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, weapons of mass destruction. Key goal of the military campaign is finding those weapons of mass destruction. None have been found yet. There was a raid on the Answar Al-Islam Camp up in the north last night. A lot of people expected to find ricin there. None was found. How big of a problem is that? And is it curious to you that given how much control U.S. and coalition forces now have in the country, they haven’t found any weapons of mass destruction?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Not at all. If you think — let me take that, both pieces — the area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.

Adelman throwing Rumsfeld under the bus is rich. There is no difference between them. They are both incompetent, ideological zealots who have never been right about anything.

Update: Kevin Drum correctly says this pathetic attmpt by the neocons to separate themselves from the architects of the war should be drowned in the bathtub. Iraq was their baby:

The neocons have always been idealists, and their ideals saw full flower in the Iraq war. A show of force in one country, plenty of threats against its neighbors, a disdain for multilateral action, and an occupation designed to be a showpiece of conservative ideology rather than a serious attempt at reconstructing a society. That’s what the neocons wanted, and that’s what they got. The rest is details.

The failure of Iraq is inherent in the naive idealism and fixated ideology of neoconservatism, and shame on us if we let them get away with suggesting otherwise. This is one rehabilitation project that needs to be stopped dead in its tracks.

The starry-eyed neocons are more than idealists. They are full-on magical thinkers who actually believed that if we deposed Saddam, the mere sight of our mighty army on the field would be enough to make everyone behave exactly as we wanted them to. That what puts the neo in neoconservatism. They are idealistic in the sense that they believe we won’t have to actually kill hundreds of thousands of people but merely rattle our giant codpieces and the enemy would capitulate out of pure shock and awe.

They know even less about human nature than the paleos who, at least, are clued into to the real human id. These guys are dreamier than dreamiest liberal idealist but they love to play with big, loud toys that go boom.

Adelman does say one thing I hope is true in the VF piece:

“the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world”—is dead, at least for a generation.

Good riddance. Consciously letting loose the most powerful military in the world for the pupose of “sending messages” and creating democracy and freedom at the point of a gun is a ridiculous idea. We have many other powerful tools in our toolbox that work a helluva lot better and don’t include “liberating” 600,000 people from their lives.

Update: I just realized that Adelman quoted Cheney saying “it all began the first minutes of the presidency, when Bush said they were going to go full steam ahead…this guy was just totally different, he just decided here’s what I want to do and I’m going to do it.”

Six years later, hundreds of thousands of deaths later, he said almost exactly the same thing to George Stephanopoulos this week-end:

“The president has made clear what his objective is and that’s victory in Iraq. We’re full speed ahead on that…It may not be popular with the public — it doesn’t matter in the sense that we have to continue the mission and do what we think is right. And that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re not running for office. We’re doing what we think is right.”

They have not grown or changed one iota from the first moments of their presidency.

Update II: Weldon has found an amazing example of a fresh faced neocon hanging in there in Foreign Policy magazine. He thought it might be a satire. It isn’t.

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A Message From On High

by tristero

I came across this interesting editorial in The Christian Post on what the National Associations of Evangelicals (NAE) should do now that their president, Ted Haggard, has been exposed as a hypocrite.

First of all, what is the NAE?

The National Association of Evangelicals is a group that is 30-million strong with over 50 years of history. However, in the last few years, its headquarters has moved to an office within Haggard’s New Life Community Church with its staffers fully employed by the church.

Oops.

Most of the editorial consists of practical advice for what the NAE should do now, like move out of Haggard’s megachurch, and elect a temporary president, which assumes they can find a leading christianist who isn’t involved in a sex scandal or batshit crazy like Pat Robertson. Or, like Tim LaHaye, too rich to bother. But I digress.

Sprinkled throughout the editorial, you get lines like these:

…the situation in its entirety is a stark reminder of man’s sinfulness and a dark exposure of how deeply the sin of homosexuality has taken root in the American society. …now would be the time for the Evangelical community look within its own walls and battle against the culture of sin that looms before the Church of Christ…

…fighting more adamantly against the culture of sin…

Get it? It’s the “culture of sin” – that’s liberals to you – that done did in poor Ted Haggard and kicked the 30-million strong NAE in the teabags. (And right around now, if you haven’t been following the American theocracy movement closely, you should be saying to yourself: “A 30 million strong evangelical group! Holy fucking shit!!”)

And then the editorial closes with a common invocation of Jesus, who rules over us sinners. Admittedly, we’re not really supposed to read the words so much as feel the goodness and strength that comes whenever Jesus is mentioned with love. But let’s read it anyway:

After all, no matter how sensationalized the reports and how deep the sin, it is Christ – not Ted Haggard – who is the head of this Church.

If that is so, that “Christ is the head of this Church,” then Christ has just sent his Church – through the travails of Ted Haggard – an unequivocal message to stop bashing and obsessing over gays. And stop forcing them to hide in closets.

Since Haggard before his fall was consumed with making marriage for certain Americans constitutionally illegal, Christ now is telling evangelicals to behave with mercy and grace towards gays, to stop obsessing over the gender of two people who love each other, but to accept them, to love them.

And if I were a member of “this Church,” I’d very much attend to this message Christ has sent our way.

Update: Digby here. Just thought you’d enjoy this from Jerry Falwell. Turns out some of the big boys were already mad at Haggard for calling them out for their anti-Muslim slurs. Also notice that Falwell uses political terms to describe critics such as Haggard:

The fact is that we, as Christian leaders, do have a biblically-ordained responsibility to reach out with the Gospel of Christ to all people, including Muslims. This is not a popular concept with many on the left. But our responsibility is to Christ, and not our earthly critics, as we strive to do His will.

I suspect Haggard is going to become the poster boy for the (liberal) “culture of sin.”

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Blue Heroes

by digby

As we close in on the election, with our prospects looking good, I think the netroots and the blogosphere deserve a little pat on the back and none moreso than the Blue America Pac, which raised more than half a million dollars this cycle for a very specific and original purpose:

The Blue America PAC was formed on August 24 to raise money to put “Have You Had Enough” on the radio in the form of 30 second advertising spots for various Blue America candidates. As you can see from our list, most of our candidates are in low-cost media markets where just a few dollars will go a very long way. We have no candidates in expensive media markets like NYC or Boston or Los Angeles or Chicago. These are “dollah a hollah” markets. We’re hoping to have people humming their way into the polling booths come November. The story of the song is here and please watch Firedoglake, Crooks and Liars, Music For America and Down With Tyranny for updates—and for the videos.

Howie Klein of Down With Tyranny has posted this letter from the campaign manager of an oregon candidate named Carol Voisin that really does my heart good and shows how valuable these kinds of projects are to the grassroots of the Democratic party:

I’m Carol Voisin’s campaign manager, and as we get to the end of the campaign I wanted to thank you again for all that you and the Hadenough/BlueAmerica team have done for us and the other candidates. As you and Rick Brown wrote in the Voisin DownWithTyranny writeup, this is one of those campaigns that has such structural disadvantages (Dems lose by 45%+), that it typically never gets off the ground, with a downward spiral of no belief and no money. This year has been different because Carol is a great candidate and she came together with some highly motivated volunteers, several of us from the netroots. Our weakness was also a strength, as the lack of professionals and insiders has allowed us all to keep the campaign in line with our ideals– we’ve made things up as we went along while running an honest and positive campaign that has shined a big spotlight on Greg Walden’s record.

Without Hadenough we wouldn’t be running any commercials. As soon as we saw it on fdl we put it on Carol’s website (with Walden’s numbers next to an explanation about how Coleen Rowley was running against rubberstamper John Kline). Just asking you all if it could get adapted for us seemed like a big deal, yet the answer was always yes, all the interactions were always easy and fast, and soon we were running our own 60 second spot in our only two “metro” areas of Medford and Bend. Since we didn’t have much money the ads, played sparsely, were sort of symbolic, but most everything about this campaign has been sort of symbolic, and it felt good.

And then a couple of days ago the Democratic Party of Oregon sprung $10,000 for us to run the ad the last week of the campaign. This is enough so that it will really get seen, and really will bring in some votes. The fact that the DPO wanted to spend money on these ads when the Oregon House is in play signifies that they know that it is helping both Carol and all the down ballot races. People see it and they immediately understand and remember the song and the images, and it pushes them across the action-inaction line. I know I’ll never get it out of my head. Our grateful thanks to everyone who gave their time and talent to make this happen, and all the FDL and C&L and other people who make Blue America possible…[there’s more.]

This is how you create a majority party, my friends. You make people believe in the party and support them even when they are not immediately “winners” by creating a feeling of solidarity. You make it feel good to be a Democrat again.

Klein called on his pals in the music industry, the Squirrel Nut Zippers and Ricki Lee Jones, and put together a jingle that could be used by candidates all over the country for free and which they adapted for each candidate who wanted to use it. Then they raised money to put it on the radio and the web. It’s catchy and fun and gets right to the main question of this election — “have you had enough?” And whether or not it made a difference in these individual races (it probably did) it certainly gave all these campaigns a lift and an identity and a belief that it was worth it to spend all this time and energy working to get Democrats elected even when it seemed hopeless — which we now know is something you should never assume.

So, hats off to the Blue America Team, particularly its hardest worker and leading visionary, Howie Klein, who didn’t wait for the party to do something and didn’t whine about what they weren’t doing — they just went out and did it.

If you haven’t seen it, here’s the web ad for Darcy Burner:

Question: Has Scott Ritter Ever Been Published/Extensively Interviewed In “Vanity Fair?”

by tristero

The reason I ask is that right now, “Vanity Fair” is wasting paper preparing to print the utterly worthless opinions of the murderous morons who sold the Bush/Iraq war to the American people. Meanwhile Ritter, who was absolutely right about Iraq, has published an extremely important article on Iran – which, unlike the neo-cons, he has taken the trouble to actually visit extensively – in The Nation, where it will receive perhaps 1/10th the coverage it would if it were in Vanity Fair.

And so I ask: Has Scott Ritter ever been prominently published/featured in “Vanity Fair”? A quick Google search seems to answer “no” but maybe someone can remember something.

If the answer really is “no,” then perhaps a letter or 3 million to the VF editors is in order…

[UPDATE: Apparently, “Vanity Fair” has never published or extensively interviewed Scott Ritter. You can write the editors here. h/t Dave in comments.]

Children’s Crusade

by digby

I suppose a lot of people have already written about this at length, but it’s so stunning I have to highlight it here.

When it was revealed yesterday that the internet document dump to the “Army of Davids” contained plans for building nuclear weapons in arabic, I knew that the 101st Keyboarders and Pete Hoekstra and Rick Santorum had been agitating for it for some time. I also knew that Stephen Hayes had been saying that the “proof” of Saddam’s huge cache of weapons and terrorist ties was in those documents and that the braindead intelligence agencies were either incapable or were liberal hippies and could therefore, not be trusted to do it right.

What I didn’t know was that George W. Bush himself considered this a personal project and specifically ordered the program.

March, 2006

Pence framed his response as a question, quoting Abraham Lincoln: “One of your Republican predecessors said, ‘Give the people the facts and the Republic will be saved.’ There are 3,000 hours of Saddam tapes and millions of pages of other documents that we captured after the war. When will the American public get to see this information?”

Bush replied that he wanted the documents released. He turned to Hadley and asked for an update. Hadley explained that John Negroponte, Bush’s Director of National Intelligence, “owns the documents” and that DNI lawyers were deciding how they might be handled.

Bush extended his arms in exasperation and worried aloud that people who see the documents in 10 years will wonder why they weren’t released sooner. “If
I knew then what I know now,” Bush said in the voice of a war skeptic, “I would have been more supportive of the war.”

Bush told Hadley to expedite the release of the Iraq documents. “This stuff ought to be out. Put this stuff out.” The president would reiterate this point before the meeting adjourned. And as the briefing ended, he approached Pence, poked a finger in the congressman’s chest, and thanked him for raising the issue. When Pence began to restate his view that the documents should be released, Bush put his hand up, as if to say, “I hear you. It will be taken care of.”

It was not the first time Bush has made clear his desire to see the Iraq documents released. On November 30, 2005, he gave a speech at the U.S. Naval Academy. Four members of Congress attended: Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who chairs the House Intelligence Committee; Sen. John Warner, the Virginia Republican who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee; Rep. John Shadegg of Arizona; and Pence. After his speech, Bush visited with the lawmakers for 10 minutes in a holding room to the side of the stage. Hoekstra asked Bush about the documents and the president said he was pressing to have them released.

Says Pence: “I left both meetings with the unambiguous impression that the president of the United States wants these documents to reach the American people.”

Negroponte never got the message. Or he is choosing to ignore it. He has done nothing to expedite the exploitation of the documents. And he continues to block the growing congressional effort, led by Hoekstra, to have the documents released.

Negroponte caved, as we know, and the atomic secrets landed on the internet.

This isn’t just another instance of “the buck stops here” accountability. This is an instance of direct, personal intervention by the president who countermanded the advice of his experts and ordered something to be done that resulted in nuclear secrets, written in arabic, landing on the internet.

He did this because he listened to the crew of childlike idiots, both in the congress and on the radio and internet, who comprise the heart of his political movement. It illustrates something I don’t think I’ve ever fully understood before. Bush listens to the 101st keyboarders and believes their delusionary drivel. In essence, the nation is being led by Limbaugh, Powerline and Michele Malkin.

If that doesn’t scare the hell out of you, I don’t know what will.

Update:

Q Mr. President, thank you, sir. Are you going to order a leaks investigation into the disclosure of the NSA surveillance program? And why did you skip the basic safeguard of asking courts for permission for these intercepts?

THE PRESIDENT: Let me start with the first question. There is a process that goes on inside the Justice Department about leaks, and I presume that process is moving forward. My personal opinion is it was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war. The fact that we’re discussing this program is helping the enemy.

You’ve got to understand — and I hope the American people understand — there is still an enemy that would like to strike the United States of America, and they’re very dangerous. And the discussion about how we try to find them will enable them to adjust. Now, I can understand you asking these questions and if I were you, I’d be asking me these questions, too. But it is a shameful act by somebody who has got secrets of the United States government and feels like they need to disclose them publicly.

It’s almost unfathomable to me how anyone can suggest that this man should be allowed these extra-judicial powers in light of what he has done. When the FISA debate comes up again, I would hope that the congress will hang this 101st Keyboarder fuck-up around George W. Bush’s neck.

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Tales Of The American Gulag

by tristero

Wow:

The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the “alternative interrogation methods” that their captors used to get them to talk.

The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation’s most sensitive national security secrets and that their release — even to the detainees’ own attorneys — “could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage.” Terrorists could use the information to train in counter-interrogation techniques and foil government efforts to elicit information about their methods and plots, according to government documents submitted to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton on Oct. 26.

The battle over legal rights for terrorism suspects detained for years in CIA prisons centers on Majid Khan, a 26-year-old former Catonsville resident who was one of 14 high-value detainees transferred in September from the “black” sites to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents many detainees at Guantanamo, is seeking emergency access to him.

The government, in trying to block lawyers’ access to the 14 detainees, effectively asserts that the detainees’ experiences are a secret that should never be shared with the public.

Because Khan “was detained by CIA in this program, he may have come into possession of information, including locations of detention, conditions of detention, and alternative interrogation techniques that is classified at the TOP SECRET//SCI level,” an affidavit from CIA Information Review Officer Marilyn A. Dorn states, using the acronym for “sensitive compartmented information.”

Gitanjali Gutierrez, an attorney for Khan’s family, responded in a court document yesterday that there is no evidence that Khan had top-secret information. “Rather,” she said, “the executive is attempting to misuse its classification authority . . . to conceal illegal or embarrassing executive conduct.”

Joseph Margulies, a Northwestern University law professor who has represented several detainees at Guantanamo, said the prisoners “can’t even say what our government did to these guys to elicit the statements that are the basis for them being held. Kafka-esque doesn’t do it justice. This is ‘Alice in Wonderland.’

I’m at a complete loss for words.

ht Mark Kleiman

Full Speed Ahead

by digby

Andrew Sullivan just said on NOW that he doesn’t like the idea of voting for the Democrats but it’s the only way to get through to Bush.

Sadly, I fear that it isn’t going to work:

Four days before the election, as Republican candidates battle to save their seats in Congress amid a backlash over the war in Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney told ABC News the administration is going “full speed ahead” with its policy.

“We’ve got the basic strategy right,” Cheney told George Stephanopoulos in an interview to be broadcast Sunday on “This Week.”

Watch the full interview this Sunday morning, including the vice president’s candid comments on John Kerry’s gaffe this week and Hillary Clinton.

October was one of the deadliest months in Iraq for U.S. troops. Cheney said that while the administration’s policy may not be popular, “This is the right thing for us to be doing.”

In the most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, 57 percent of Americans said that the war was not worth fighting. The poll also showed President Bush’s job approval rating dropped to 37 percent, the second-lowest mark of his presidency.

Cheney said that even with pollsters predicting that Democrats would likely make gains in both houses of Congress Tuesday, voter sentiment would not influence Bush’s Iraq policy.

“It may not be popular with the public — it doesn’t matter in the sense that we have to continue the mission and do what we think is right. And that’s exactly what we’re doing,” Cheney said. “We’re not running for office. We’re doing what we think is right.”

As much as I want to resist Billmon’s dark prognostications, I feel I have no choice but to ponder this dark scenario:

George Will has noted that the 2008 election will be the first election since 1952 in which neither a sitting president nor a sitting vice president are running for the top slot. Neocon Robert Kagan notes that this situation will free Bush from any need to worry about the consequences of his actions over the next two years — in the way that Ronald Reagan had to keep George Bush’s political interests in mind in 1988 and Bill Clinton tried to protect Al Gore’s chances in 2000. That is, unless Shrub also cares about improving John McCain or Rudy Guilani or Mitt Romney’s electoral chances. But when did a Bush ever give a shit about anyone not named Bush?

To me, the need and temptation for the White House to try to do something “bold” seems only heightened by the way Bush and Rove have painted themselves into a corner. Their whole strategy (and, in some ways more importantly, their political style) is based on operating from a position of strength, and smashing down any opponents — John McCain, Max Cleland, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, John Kerry again — as brutally as possible. It’s what the base expects and what the broader public has been conditioned to see as Bush’s concept of “leadership”.

Even leaving aside the tremendous ill will and cravings for revenge this style has created among the Democrats, I have a very hard time seeing the Rovian White House completely reinventing itself and taking a consensual, compromising approach towards a Congress it can no longer treat like domestic servants. Dick Cheney would probably shoot someone first.

We can only hope Lind’s “Okhrana” isn’t reading the tea leaves correctly. War with Iran would be a special kind of disaster. But there are plenty of other places in the world where Shrub and company could cause trouble, plenty of other crises they could use or create to demonstrate their continued relevance.

Which is why if the Dems do win on Tuesday, and win big, they better get the celebrating out of the way fast, and start thinking about how they’re going to handle a very angry, very rejected but still very powerful president with points to prove and scores to settle. Because if he goes critical on them (and us) the next big wave could wash us all out to sea.

In many ways, losing liberates the conservatives. Don’t underestimate them.

Update: You can add the military to the list of apostates:

An editorial set to appear on Monday — election eve — in four leading newspapers for the military calls for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The papers are the Army Times, Air Force Times, Navy Times and Marine Corps Times. They are published by the Military Times Media Group, a subsidiary of Gannett Co., Inc. President Bush said this week that he wanted Rumsfeld to serve out the next two years.

“We say that Rumsfeld must be replaced,” Alex Neill, the managing editor of the Army Times, told The Virginian-Pilot tonight in a telephone interview. “Given the state of affairs with Iraq and the military right now, we think it’s a good time for new leadership there.”

The editorial was written by senior managing editor Robert Hodierne, based on a decision of the publications’ editorial board, Neill told the paper.

The timing of the editorial was coincidental, Neill said. But he added, President Bush came out and said that Donald Rumsfeld is in for the duration … so it’s just a timely issue for us. And our position is that it is not the best course for the military” for Rumsfeld to remain the Pentagon chief.

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Going Normal

by digby

It looks like the good and decent people of South Dakota are going to reject the Sodomized Virgin exception. Say Jalapeno!

According to a Mason Dixon poll commissioned by the Argus Leader, the supporters of the abortion ban are trailing the in the polls 52 percent to 42 percent with 6 percent still undecided.

I have no way of knowing for sure what will happen on Tuesday, but it looks as if common sense may be starting to reassert itself after a fairly intense period of mass hysteria. Perhaps I’m being too simplistic, but I honestly think the turning pointwas in the spring of 2005 when Bush flew home from his 689th Crawford vacation to sign that Terry Schiavo legislation. Even though people may not have know it at the time, and even though it may not have registered as being important, I think it was the sight of this that broke the trance:

Suddenly the spectre of the radical left didn’t seem a potent as it once did. The old image of the dirty hippies had been replaced by something much more contemporarily radical.

And now we have the leaders of the Christian Right and the Republican moral majority proving their decadent hypocrisy on top of an ideological and administrative failure of epic proportions. The veil has fallen.

Update: I am remiss in not acknowleging that where Bérubé goes, trouble follows. Might I suggest that his publicist schedule a stop in Phoenix and Memphis over the next few days?

The Moral Good And Christianism

by tristero

Part One

It is rather interesting to read some of the evangelical websites grapple with the Haggard story. And in a very real sense, the hypocrisy is simply mind-boggling. I have heard rightwing evangelicals oppose gay marriage by describing anal sex in graphic detail. I have read descriptions of evil gay demons from Haggard’s own church. The uproar over the Lawrence decision was literally apocalyptic.

But Haggard, as odious a man as modern christianism has produced, a man who was on the verge of running for political office, he’s a “good” Christian who gave into temptation.

Nope. And let’s use a little of the terminology the christianists employ – sin – to show why that won’t fly.*

Haggard’s sins – or to be more precise, the only sins that concern the public – are not that he may enjoy methamphetamine or sex with other guys. It may not be healthy for Haggard to take speed, but that’s his own problem. And if he’s breaking his marriage vows, that’s for his family to deal with.

The Haggard sins that concern us are different. And one crucial thing to realize about them is that they are common to all christianist leaders:

1. By shamefully asserting that “intelligent design” creationism had equal plausibility to evolution, Haggard made a covenant with his own ignorance, actively celebrating his lack of knowledge as well as his inherent incapacity to apprehend the world. Worse, he advocated that others emulate him by remaining ignorant of science, and urged them to privilege ignorance – not religion, but simply ignorance – over reason.

2. Haggard, by advocating a unique state of grace for his particular set of beliefs, propagated not only a sinful lack of intellectual curiousity among his followers, but also the most disgusting kind of moral relativism.

He told his followers that when they do wrong, that their state of grace, as followers of Haggard, meant they will enter Heaven (after some penance, of course, and I’ll bet it involved donations to Haggard’s groups). But regardless of whether Gandhi did great deeds, he suffers in Hell. Haggard’s attempt to express tolerance of other faiths was, at best, tepid, and at worse a wink-wink to those in the know that “political correctness” required him to pretend he was tolerant so he could advance the Cause.

This isn’t the mindset of a genuine religious leader. This is the mindset of a fascist cloaking his will to power in the robes of pseudo-religion.

3. Haggard’s enjoyment of a particular kind of physical intimacy is absolutely immaterial to the damage he’s done to others by falsely characterizing same-sex relationships as innately sinful. Even if James Dobson has never fellated another man and therefore is not the hypocrite Haggard is, that hardly makes Dobson a higher paragon of virtue. The attitude of christianists towards gay relationships, that they are perverted merely because two guys or two girls enjoy sex together, is simply bigotry of the ugliest sort.

Of course, it is morally indefensible for Haggard to advocate such garbage and to campaign against equal social rights for all couples who ask that society recognize their relationship. But it is equally morally indefensible for a heterosexual James Dobson to do so.

Part Two

Right now, we have a good opportunity to confront naive followers of christianism who are just spiritual seekers gulled by their bullshit. And it is important that we do so, not so much in the hopes that many will come to their senses, but rather that some may, and that others who have given the Haggards and the Dobsons a free pass, might look a little more askance at the very real, very dangerous theocracy movement. And we can confront them to a great extent on christianist morality, or rather, the lack of any.

For instance, David Wayne is clearly dismayed at Haggard and seeks a lesson for Christians to take away from it. Like La Shawn Barber, David – perhaps without realizing it – thinks he can finesse the issue of christianist immorality by turning Haggard’s tale into the oldest cliche in the book: we’re all sinners:

But lets also be careful that we not assume some moral superiority to, or moral authority over, Ted Haggard. Those of us who do not base our ministries on moral superiority and moral authority may feel morally superior to those who do. We may feel morally superior because we rely on grace not moral superiority.

The truth is, I am Ted Haggard, we are all Ted Haggard, and Ted Haggard is all of us.

The hell he is. Ted Haggard and I have in common only the fact that we both perform the bodily functions all humans must to live.

But I don’t go around telling people they’ll go to hell because the way they fuck doesn’t meet with God’s approval. I don’t go around advocating that bad theology be taught in public school science classes. I don’t go around defending coerced religious participation in the military. I don’t go around telling people that they can be confident that, no matter what, they are in a state of grace with God, while Jews can’t get into heaven no matter what. And I don’t bilk followers of millions upon millions of hard-earned cash while I’m doing so.

Do I feel morally superior to Ted Haggard? Damn right I do. And I don’t feel morally superior because I “rely on grace.” I don’t. In fact, I don’t “rely” on anything other than my ability to reason and to feel. So, I think this:

I am thrilled when two people who love each other wish to celebrate that publicly. I don’t care what their genders are. I think such an attitude is morally good.

I am curious about the world we all share and am starved for real information about how it works. I am humbled by my lack of scientific knowledge and strongly support rigorous science education. I think such an attitude is morally good.

I think knowing whether any human being is in a state of grace with God is impossible. Following Joan of Arc, the strongest attitude I think any religious person can honestly assert is to pray that if they are not, that God will lead them to grace. And if they are in a state of grace, that God will lead them to stay there. I think such an attitude is morally good.

As a corollary, I am equally respectful of all religious belief and observance, be it mainstream Christian or Inuit. More importantly, I am curious about these beliefs and want to learn more about how different people worship. I think such an attitude is morally good.

I think that some, not many, practices associated with particular religious beliefs are repugnant and it is only natural for me to object loudly to them. Among them are the mutilation of women and the attempt to eliminate the hard-fought wall of separation between church and state. I am strongly opposed to the corruption of Christian worship into fascist mega-churhes of Haggard’s sort. I think any genuinely pious religious leader rejects attempts to claim a unique grace, but rather encourages tolerance and privileges the essential sameness of the religious impulse across cultures. I think such an attitude is morally good.

I have my faults and God knows they are legion. But, David, I am no Ted Haggard. And I suspect you aren’t either. However, I will join you in hoping that God will show him some mercy. But given the amount of harm he’s done to non-christianists, to countless gay people, to intellectually curious children, and to the truly decent religous people in the US, I have precious little to show him.

*There are complex and, to some, fascinating epistemological issues swirling around a rhetorical discourse focused on the notions of sin and sinfullness, but they are not germane to this particular discussion which takes place, as does christianism in a much distorted fashion, within that discourse and doesn’t question the basic assumption.

Falling Further

by digby

You can’t help but feel kind of sorry for Ted Haggard (if it weren’t for his virulent homophobia and phony moral superiority, of course.) He’s digging himself in deeper. He just admitted to a TV reporter that he bought the meth a few times but says never used it and threw it away.

He also says he met the gay hooker through a referral for a massage from a hotel he can’t remember.

I don’t think even the true believers can buy that one. I’d put the guy on 24 hour watch. He looks haunted.

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