Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Letting It Slide

I hardly know what to say about these new revelations about Guantanamo. I wrote many posts about it last summer in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal and it was clear then that we were torturing with impunity. These FBI memos revealed by the ACLU add new details to what was already known and reveal that there was dissent within the government at least at the lower levels that was ignored.

The New York Times has found quite a few people willing to talk, off the record, about what went on down there. If we had a real government the congress would immediately call for hearings and offer immunity to anyone who could speak to these issues. But torture is so 2004, so there will be no further outcry, I’m sure.

The information from the various sources frequently matched, providing corroboration of the use of specific procedures, which included prolonged sleep deprivation and shackling prisoners in uncomfortable positions for many hours. One F.B.I. agent wrote his superiors that he saw such restraining techniques several times. In the most gruesome of the bureau memorandums, he recounted observing a detainee who had been shackled overnight in a hot cell, soiled himself and pulled out tufts of hair in misery.

Military officials who participated in the practices said in October that prisoners had been tormented by being chained to a low chair for hours with bright flashing lights in their eyes and audio tapes played loudly next to their ears, including songs by Lil’ Kim and Rage Against the Machine and rap performances by Eminem.

In a recent interview, another former official added new details, saying that many interrogators used a different audio tape on prisoners, a mix of babies crying and the television commercial for Meow Mix in which the jingle consists of repetition of the word “meow.”

The people who spoke about what they saw or whose duties made them aware of what was occurring said they had different reasons for granting interviews. Some said they objected to the methods, others said they objected to what they regarded as a chaotic and badly run system, while others offered no reason. They all declined to be identified by name, some saying they feared retaliation.

None of these recent stories get into one of the more important aspects of this story which is that a great many of those who were shipped off to Gitmo from Afghanistan in the early days of the war had no intelligence value whatsoever. This was because they were “bought” from the Northern Alliance for $5,000 based on a warlord’s word that they were Taliban or al Qaeda. Nobody knows how many of these people are or were being held down there, but it’s clear that there were many.

They did, apparently, capture at least one allegedly “high value” target whom they proceded to torture in various inventive ways, including forced enemas:

None of the approved techniques, however, covered some of what people have now said occurred. Mr. Kahtani was, for example, forcibly given an enema, officials said, which was used because it was uncomfortable and degrading.

Pentagon spokesmen said the procedure was medically necessary because Mr. Kahtani was dehydrated after an especially difficult interrogation session. Another official, told of the use of the enema, said, however, “I bet they said he was dehydrated,” adding that that was the justification whenever an enema was used as a coercive technique, as it had been on several detainees.

Then again, the boys might have just been blowing off some steam.

This month a majority of the Senate, including many Democrats, will undoubtedly confirm the architect of our torture policy for the highest law enforcement office in the land. They issued new “guidelines” just last week in which they rescinded the finding that torture must consist of pain akin to organ failure so everything’s fine now. It’s time to look to the future. And it’s very likely that we are going to eventually put a war criminal and a soiler of the Bill of Rights on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Left unaddressed in the new memo was the monarch’s limitless power in wartime:

The 17-page memo does not address two of the most controversial assertions in the first memo: that Bush, as commander in chief in wartime, had authority superseding anti-torture laws and that U.S. personnel had legal defenses against criminal liability in such cases.

Levin said those issues need not be considered because they “would be inconsistent with the president’s unequivocal directive that United States personnel not engage in torture.”

The president said he doesn’t condone torture and he meant it. He says what he is and he is what he says. One might make the leap, however, to infer that he does still believe that he has unnlimited power to shred the constitution into little pieces and flush it down the toilet at will when you read this:

Administration officials are preparing long-range plans for indefinitely imprisoning suspected terrorists whom they do not want to set free or turn over to courts in the United States or other countries, according to intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials.

The Pentagon and the CIA have asked the White House to decide on a more permanent approach for potentially lifetime detentions, including for hundreds of people now in military and CIA custody . The outcome of the review, which also involves the State Department, would also affect those expected to be captured in the course of future counterterrorism operations.

If this is true, you have to wonder why a garden variety murder suspect should be allowed due process either. Really, why should we have to let a gang member have a lawyer and access to the courts? Why should a rape suspect from last week be any different than an Afghan driver whom somebody claimed chauffered Osama bin Laden around in 1999? If the criteria is that we can’t take a chance that these people, “whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts” might harm Americans in the future then isn’t our entire system of justice completely superfluous? And who exactly is supposed to stop the executive branch from deciding that very thing?

(Of course, my friend The Talking Dog would be the first to remind us that the Supreme Court has already pretty much held that this is legal under Padilla, so there’s no real surprise. The worst thing that would happen is that lawyers will run out of “erroneous” jurisdictions in which to file.)

It was always supposed to be that the checks and balances of the branches of government and the press would restrain such impulses and that the mob mentality would be balanced by thoughtful, learned citizens of good will who would raise the roof at such affrontery to democratic values. It’s not working. As long as the press believes that the Scott Peterson trial is more important to cover than these grievous assaults on the constitution then most of the country won’t care. And as long as the political opposition continues to validate them by voting to elevate war criminals to high office the entire nation will be implicated in the crime.

If fellows like Peter Beinert have their way, those of us not purged from the left will be forced to goosestep along in the name of fighting the most horrible scourge the world has ever known — since communism, anyway, lo those many (15) years ago. Joshua Zeitz points out in this week-end’s TNR that unrepentant hawkishness has rarely resulted in more liberalism at home. Indeed, it usually results in the opposite:

Beinart asserts that cold-war liberals found special strength for their civil rights program in the “linkage between freedom at home and freedom abroad,” a link that the Wallacites could never have drawn, given their tolerance of communism. Fighting the Soviets and advancing civil rights weren’t mutually exclusive, Beinart maintains; they were mutually reinforcing.

And perhaps they could have been. But in practice, the opposite was usually true: Having purged the Wallacites from their coalition, liberals lost their most strident advocates for racial justice. And more often that not, mainstream liberals urged civil rights activists to subordinate their interests to the more pressing need for national unity in the face of Soviet aggression. Far from neatly and conveniently reinforcing each other, the two great moral struggles of the time frequently seemed locked in a zero-sum game.

It will be even worse this time out because the left isn’t actually excusing islamic fundamentalism — indeed we are the last people to embrace an authoritarian theocratic worldview. The problem isn’t that the left is pacifist in the war on terror. It’s that it’s pacifist in the war on liberalism and that’s coming from both within and without.

The old saw about “the terrorists have won” is a cliche to be sure. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true. Bin Laden doesn’t have to invade with an army or even terrorize us further with bombings and terrorist attacks. His job is done. We are now fully engaged in destroying ourselves.

Too Many Brownies

Am I mistaken or is David Brooks saying that the best way to understand natural disasters is to believe that the victims deserved to die? Or is he saying that environmentalists deserve to die? Bush critics? It’s very hard to tell. But somebody must be paying for something or Bobo’s little world just doesn’t make any sense.

One thing we know for sure is that these deaths couldn’t have been the result of a random act of nature. Uh uh. That would be even more repugnant than the repugnance some feel for the idea that those who died deserved it. Perhaps Brooks would feel better if he read the ravings of Fred Phelps, who blames the Swedes.

It’s rarely interesting to read what someone wrote while they were stoned on totally righteous sinsemilla, but the NY Times pays big bucks for it anyway.

Nostalgia

This year is going to be the death of me if this ongoing orgy of self-righteous prattle about morals and culture on the left continues. It would seem that many believe that in order to win we need to adopt a new liberal synthesis of priggishness and hawkery. Why, if we work at it, it’s possible that the neocons will come back home. Oh Goody. Feel the Joementum for 2008.

In today’s LA Times, Jacob Heilbrun argues that the culture war has been ongoing for more than a century and endorses Daniel Bell’s thesis in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“…capitalism, which emerged in the 16th century with the rise of the great European banking houses, originally rested on the Protestant work ethic. It succeeded because it matched discipline with self-denial. But the acquisitive instinct fostered by capitalism would come to subvert the moral basis that initially allowed the system to flourish.

In the 20th century, Bell argued, it created and fulfilled desires the original capitalists never dreamed of. With artists and bohemians (always at war with the values of bourgeois society) leading the way, society jettisoned traditional boundaries and behaviors. Character was out; self-fulfillment was in.

Bell based his arguments on what he scorned as the hedonism of the 1960s, but the dynamic hasn’t changed. Today, you wind up with corporations eager to profit from supplying the worst gangsta rap or the most extreme pornography to consumers for whom nothing is sacred except their own desires.

“The modern hubris,” Bell wrote, “is the refusal to accept limits. The modern world proposes a destiny that is always beyond: beyond morality, beyond tragedy, beyond culture.”

Here’s one of those nasty bohemians who helped jettison those important traditional bounderies writing about his uplifting experiences with the protestant work ethic’s discipline and self-denial in the early part of the 20th century:

It was exhausting work, carried on, hour after hour, at top speed. Out on the broad verandas of the hotel, men and women, in coolwhite, sipped iced drinks and kept their circulation down. But in the laundry the air was sizzling. The huge stove roared red hotand white hot, while the irons, moving over the damp cloth, sent up clouds of steam. The heat of these irons was different from that used by housewives. An iron that stood the ordinary test of a wet finger was too cold for Joe and Martin, and such test was useless. They went wholly by holding the irons close to their cheeks, gauging the heat by some secret mental process that Martin admired but could not understand. When the fresh irons proved too hot, they hooked them on iron rods and dipped them into cold water. This again required a precise and subtle judgment. A fraction of a second too long in the water and the fine and silken edge of the proper heat was lost, and Martin found time to marvel at the accuracy he developed – an automatic accuracy, founded upon criteria that were machine-like and unerring.

But there was little time in which to marvel. All Martin’s consciousness was concentrated in the work. Ceaselessly active, head and hand, an intelligent machine, all that constituted him a man was devoted to furnishing that intelligence. There was no room in his brain for the universe and its mighty problems. All the broad and spacious corridors of his mind were closed and hermetically sealed. The echoing chamber of his soul was a narrow room, a conning tower, whence were directed his arm and shoulder muscles, his ten nimble fingers, and the swift-moving iron along its steaming path in broad, sweeping strokes, just so many strokes and no more, just so far with each stroke and not a fraction of an inch farther, rushing along interminable sleeves, sides, backs, and tails, and tossing the finished shirts, without rumpling, upon the receiving frame. And even as his hurrying soul tossed, it was reaching for another shirt. This went on, hour after hour, while outside all the world swooned under the overhead California sun. But there was no swooning in that superheated room. The cool guests on the verandas needed clean linen.

The sweat poured from Martin. He drank enormous quantities of water, but so great was the heat of the day and of his exertions, that the water sluiced through the interstices of his flesh and out at all his pores. Always, at sea, except at rare intervals, the work he performed had given him ample opportunity to commune with himself. The master of the ship had been lord of Martin’s time; but here the manager of the hotel was lord of Martin’s thoughts as well. He had no thoughts save for the nerve-racking, body- destroying toil. Outside of that it was impossible to think. He did not know that he loved Ruth. She did not even exist, for his driven soul had no time to remember her. It was only when he crawled to bed at night, or to breakfast in the morning, that she asserted herself to him in fleeting memories.

“This is hell, ain’t it?” Joe remarked once.

Martin nodded, but felt a rasp of irritation. The statement had been obvious and unnecessary. They did not talk while they worked. Conversation threw them out of their stride, as it did this time, compelling Martin to miss a stroke of his iron and to make two extra motions before he caught his stride again.

On Friday morning the washer ran. Twice a week they had to put through hotel linen, – the sheets, pillow-slips, spreads, table- cloths, and napkins. This finished, they buckled down to “fancy starch.” It was slow work, astidious and delicate, and Martin did not learn it so readily. Besides, he could not take chances.

Mistakes were disastrous.

“See that,” Joe said, holding up a filmy corset-cover that he could have crumpled from view in one hand. “Scorch that an’ it’s twenty dollars out of your wages.”

So Martin did not scorch that, and eased down on his muscular tension, though nervous tension rose higher than ever, and he listened sympathetically to the other’s blasphemies as he toiled and suffered over the beautiful things that women wear when they do not have to do their own laundrying. “Fancy starch” was Martin’s nightmare, and it was Joe’s, too. It was “fancy starch” that robbed them of their hard-won minutes. They toiled at it all day. At seven in the evening they broke off to run the hotel linen through the mangle. At ten o’clock, while the hotel guests slept, the two laundrymen sweated on at “fancy starch” till midnight, till one, till two. At half-past two they knocked off.

Saturday morning it was “fancy starch,” and odds and ends, and at three in the afternoon the week’s work was done.

“You ain’t a-goin’ to ride them seventy miles into Oakland on top of this?” Joe demanded, as they sat on the stairs and took a triumphant smoke.

“Got to,” was the answer.

“What are you goin’ for? – a girl?”

“No; to save two and a half on the railroad ticket. I want to renew some books at the library.”

“Why don’t you send ’em down an’ up by express? That’ll cost only a quarter each way.”

Martin considered it.

“An’ take a rest to-morrow,” the other urged. “You need it. I know I do. I’m plumb tuckered out.”

He looked it. Indomitable, never resting, fighting for seconds and minutes all week, circumventing delays and crushing down obstacles, a fount of resistless energy, a high-driven human motor, a demon for work, now that he had accomplished the week’s task he was in a state of collapse. He was worn and haggard, and his handsome face

drooped in lean exhaustion. He pulled his cigarette spiritlessly, and his voice was peculiarly dead and monotonous. All the snap and fire had gone out of him. His triumph seemed a sorry one.

“An’ next week we got to do it all over again,” he said sadly. “An’ what’s the good of it all, hey? Sometimes I wish I was a hobo. They don’t work, an’ they get their livin’. Gee! I wish I had a glass of beer; but I can’t get up the gumption to go down to the village an’ get it. You’ll stay over, an’ send your books dawn by express, or else you’re a damn fool.”

“But what can I do here all day Sunday?” Martin asked.

“Rest. You don’t know how tired you are. Why, I’m that tired Sunday I can’t even read the papers. I was sick once – typhoid. In the hospital two months an’ a half. Didn’t do a tap of work all that time. It was beautiful.”

“It was beautiful,” he repeated dreamily, a minute later.

Martin took a bath, after which he found that the head laundryman had disappeared. Most likely he had gone for a glass of beer Martin decided, but the half-mile walk down to the village to find out seemed a long journey to him. He lay on his bed with his shoes off, trying to make up his mind. He did not reach out for a book. He was too tired to feel sleepy, and he lay, scarcely thinking, in a semi-stupor of weariness, until it was time for supper. Joe did not appear for that function, and when Martin heard the gardener remark that most likely he was ripping the slats off the bar, Martin understood. He went to bed immediately afterward, and in the morning decided that he was greatly rested. Joe being still absent, Martin procured a Sunday paper and lay down in a shady nook under the trees. The morning passed, he knew not how. He did not sleep, nobody disturbed him, and he did not finish the paper. He came back to it in the afternoon, after dinner, and fell asleep over it.

So passed Sunday, and Monday morning he was hard at work, sorting clothes, while Joe, a towel bound tightly around his head, with groans and blasphemies, was running the washer and mixing soft-soap.

“I simply can’t help it,” he explained. “I got to drink when Saturday night comes around.”

Another week passed, a great battle that continued under the electric lights each night and that culminated on Saturday afternoon at three o’clock, when Joe tasted his moment of wilted triumph and then drifted down to the village to forget. Martin’s Sunday was the same as before. He slept in the shade of the trees, toiled aimlessly through the newspaper, and spent long hours lying on his back, doing nothing, thinking nothing. He was too dazed to think, though he was aware that he did not like himself. He was self-repelled, as though he had undergone some degradation or was intrinsically foul. All that was god-like in him was blotted out. The spur of ambition was blunted; he had no vitality with which to feel the prod of it. He was dead. His soul seemed dead. He was a beast, a work-beast. He saw no beauty in the sunshine sifting down through the green leaves, nor did the azure vault of the sky whisper as of old and hint of cosmic vastness and secrets trembling to disclosure. Life was intolerably dull and stupid, and its taste was bad in his mouth. A black screen was drawn across his mirror of inner vision, and fancy lay in a darkened sick-room where entered no ray of light. He envied Joe, down in the village, rampant, tearing the slats off the bar, his brain gnawing with maggots, exulting in maudlin ways over maudlin things,

fantastically and gloriously drunk and forgetful of Monday morning and the week of deadening toil to come.

A third week went by, and Martin loathed himself, and loathed life. He was oppressed by a sense of failure. There was reason for the editors refusing his stuff. He could see that clearly now, and laugh at himself and the dreams he had dreamed. Ruth returned his “Sea Lyrics” by mail. He read her letter apathetically. She did her best to say how much she liked them and that they were beautiful. But she could not lie, and she could not disguise the truth from herself. She knew they were failures, and he read her disapproval in every perfunctory and unenthusiastic line of her letter. And she was right. He was firmly convinced of it as he read the poems over. Beauty and wonder had departed from him, and as he read the poems he caught himself puzzling as to what he had had in mind when he wrote them. His audacities of phrase struck him as grotesque, his felicities of expression were monstrosities,

and everything was absurd, unreal, and impossible. He would have burned the “Sea Lyrics” on the spot, had his will been strong enough to set them aflame. There was the engine-room, but the exertion of carrying them to the furnace was not worth while. All his exertion was used in washing other persons’ clothes. He did not have any left for private affairs.

He resolved that when Sunday came he would pull himself together and answer Ruth’s letter. But Saturday afternoon, after work was finished and he had taken a bath, the desire to forget overpowered him. “I guess I’ll go down and see how Joe’s getting on,” was the way he put it to himself; and in the same moment he knew that he

lied. But he did not have the energy to consider the lie. If he had had the energy, he would have refused to consider the lie, because he wanted to forget. He started for the village slowly and casually, increasing his pace in spite of himself as he neared the saloon.

“I thought you was on the water-wagon,” was Joe’s greeting.

Martin did not deign to offer excuses, but called for whiskey, filling his own glass brimming before he passed the bottle.

“Don’t take all night about it,” he said roughly.

The other was dawdling with the bottle, and Martin refused to wait for him, tossing the glass off in a gulp and refilling it.

“Now, I can wait for you,” he said grimly; “but hurry up.”

Joe hurried, and they drank together.

“The work did it, eh?” Joe queried.

Martin refused to discuss the matter.

“It’s fair hell, I know,” the other went on, “but I kind of hate to see you come off the wagon, Mart. Well, here’s how!”

Martin drank on silently, biting out his orders and invitations and awing the barkeeper, an effeminate country youngster with watery blue eyes and hair parted in the middle.

“It’s something scandalous the way they work us poor devils,” Joe was remarking. “If I didn’t bowl up, I’d break loose an’ burn down the shebang. My bowlin’ up is all that saves ’em, I can tell you that.”

But Martin made no answer. A few more drinks, and in his brain he felt the maggots of intoxication beginning to crawl. Ah, it was living, the first breath of life he had breathed in three weeks. His dreams came back to him. Fancy came out of the darkened room and lured him on, a thing of flaming brightness. His mirror of vision was silver-clear, a flashing, dazzling palimpsest of imagery. Wonder and beauty walked with him, hand in hand, and all

power was his. He tried to tell it to Joe, but Joe had visions of his own, infallible schemes whereby he would escape the slavery of laundry-work and become himself the owner of a great steam laundry.

“I tell yeh, Mart, they won’t be no kids workin’ in my laundry -not on yer life. An’ they won’t be no workin’ a livin’ soul after six P.M. You hear me talk! They’ll be machinery enough an’ hands enough to do it all in decent workin’ hours, an’ Mart, s’help me, I’ll make yeh superintendent of the shebang – the whole of it, all of it. Now here’s the scheme. I get on the water-wagon an’ save my money for two years – save an’ then – ”

But Martin turned away, leaving him to tell it to the barkeeper, until that worthy was called away to furnish drinks to two farmers who, coming in, accepted Martin’s invitation. Martin dispensed royal largess, inviting everybody up, farm-hands, a stableman, and the gardener’s assistant from the hotel, the barkeeper, and the furtive hobo who slid in like a shadow and like a shadow hovered at the end of the bar.

Yeah. The good old days of the 19th century when happy workers respected the value of work and believed in character instead of self-fulfillment.

The reason that the protestant work ethic went “out of fashion” had a lot less to do with libertine artists than with the fact that most of the people who lived under it were virtual slaves. It was never a matter of character and self-discipline vs culture or righteousness. It was a matter of survival. Let’s not get confused about that.

We can inveigh against popular culture and try to contain it (and further empower those who want nothing more than to restrict all of our freedoms while doing it) but please, oh please, let’s not fool ourselves into believing that there was some virtue for the common man in working himself into an early grave. The nineteenth century culture was a depraved cesspool of unhumanity in many, many ways.

It is very dangerous to play with conservative nostaligia for times that never were. All it ever really adds up to is exploitation. Funny that. Inveigh against the culture all you want. But, be very careful who you cozy up to in the process. This kind of conservatism tends to have some very unpleasant consequences.

Waves Of Despair

I suppose that everyone has his or her particular nightmare. You know, the one where you wake up in a pool of icy sweat, breathing heavily, heart pounding like bass line of “I Wanna Be Sedated.” Mine is tidal waves. I have dreamed of tidal waves since I was a child.

This doesn’t make me fear the water or the beach — I live just blocks from the beach in a prime earthquake zone. It isn’t really about tidal waves. It’s a dream of being engulfed, drowned by something huge and unstoppable that is out of my control.

The real thing, of course, is a living nightmare for those who went through it and those who are dealing with the aftermath. It is, as president Clinton so prosaically (yet so perfectly) observed, “like a horror movie.” How else would this culture relate to such a huge and terrible thing except to relate it to the entertainment nightmares we have seen so many times, sitting in the dark, clutching our popcorn, scared and yet not really? I suspect that most of us saw 9/11 the same way. Except, of course, those who actually went through it. For the victims it isn’t a reality TV show or a shared “event” or even a nightmare. It is horribly, painfully, shockingly real.

As I sit here I have Capitol Gang on in the backround where flatulent hack Robert Novak is making lame excuses for Codpiece’s lazy, half hearted response by claiming that the criticism is part of a long standing desire of socialists to transfer wealth from the rich countries to the poor. This is not the first time he’s made that charge:

NOVAK: So, you think — you think it is the obligation — it’s very interesting. I always love — I always love to get this insight into your thinking.

You’re my congresswoman, and I’d really like to know what you’re thinking. Do you think that it is the obligation of the United States to take its wealth and transfer it to the Third World? Is that what you’re saying?

NORTON: I certainly think it’s the obligation of the United States to share its wealth with the Third World in a time of the most horrible disaster in memory. Yes, I do think so.

Of course, he isn’t alone in this thinking. On the very same show you had Jim Gilmore, erstwhile chairman of the RNC saying that the American taxpayers were already overburdened:

BEGALA: Now, Governor, let me raise an issue that I raised on this broadcast a week ago, before the disaster of America and our president, rather, our president welshing on America’s obligations to help the poor. This is a story that was in “The New York Times” last week. “With the budget deficit growing and President Bush promising to reduce spending, the administration has told representatives of several charities it was unable to honor some earlier promises. The cutbacks, estimated by some charities to add up to $100 million, come at a time when the number of hungry in the world is rising for the first time in years. As a result, Save Our Children, Catholic Relief Services and other charities have suspended or limited programs intended to help the poor feed themselves.”

Now, what would Jesus do? Would he welsh on $100 million?

(APPLAUSE)

GILMORE: You know…

BEGALA: What would he do, Governor?

GILMORE: Here’s my answer.

BEGALA: Would he lie to Christian groups like this?

GILMORE: A president has to look at entire big picture of the obligations that the United States has both domestically and foreign. We have education commitments. We have infrastructure commitments. We have humanitarian commitments around the world. Frankly, an awful lot is loaded on the taxpayer of the United States.

This was last Tuesday. The day that Bush emerged from the brush and announced that something serious had occurred — four days late. We’ve seen them loosen the pursestrings a bit since then. Apparently, it has been decided that the American taxpayer can afford to help out after all. But it’s an interesting insight into their black souls isn’t it?

I particularly like the contribution from the Ayn Rand institute, repository of wisdom for the rightwing bodice ripping set:

Every dollar the government hands out as foreign aid has to be extorted from an American taxpayer first. Year after year, for decades, the government has forced American taxpayers to provide foreign aid to every type of natural or man-made disaster on the face of the earth: from the Marshall Plan to reconstruct a war-ravaged Europe to the $15 billion recently promised to fight AIDS in Africa to the countless amounts spent to help the victims of earthquakes, fires and floods–from South America to Asia.

[…]

The reason politicians can get away with doling out money that they have no right to and that does not belong to them is that they have the morality of altruism on their side. According to altruism–the morality that most Americans accept and that politicians exploit for all it’s worth–those who have more have the moral obligation to help those who have less. This is why Americans–the wealthiest people on earth–are expected to sacrifice (voluntarily or by force) the wealth they have earned to provide for the needs of those who did not earn it. It is Americans’ acceptance of altruism that renders them morally impotent to protest against the confiscation and distribution of their wealth. It is past time to question–and to reject–such a vicious morality that demands that we sacrifice our values instead of holding on to them.

The favorite political philosophy of teenagers expressed by someone who writes like one. Still, you can see the threads of the impractical Randian selfishness in Novak and Gilmore’s words. These people really don’t give a shit. And they can’t quite cover their lack of basic human decency. It’s just too fundamental to who they are.

CNN (which by the way has seen a huge boost in ratings over Fox during the past week, proving once again that FOX is not a news channel, it’s a partisan political channel) has been on the disaster 24/7 letting the story unfold naturally with footage and stories and tales of heroism and horror. That our president was unable to grasp the significance of these pictures and these stories and feel empathy for the victims is bad enough. That he didn’t see the opportunity to mend some of the wounds he has created and allowed to fester is a failure of leadership so profound that I wonder if it may not define his presidency.

But then, he’s never been very swift off the mark in a crisis, has he? The Mahablog reminds us that he sat paralyzed reading about goats to second graders when informed that the United States was under attack. He then dithered about for hours flying all over the country while Dick Cheney issued orders to shoot down aircraft. There was also this:

The President of the United States made no comment on November 2, 2003, which was the bloodiest day so far for U.S. troops in Iraq. On that day, 16 U.S. soldiers died and 20 were wounded in a single helicopter attack. Three other soldiers died in Iraq that day in separate incidents.

President Bush was resting on his Texas ranch that day, a Sunday, enjoying a “down” day between campaign appearances on Saturday and Monday.

The White House staff was reluctant to involve the President in a “politically perilous fray,” an Associated Press story said. A White House spokesperson read a generic statement to the press about continuing attacks on Americans. The spokesperson declined to comment on the President’s personal reactions to the tragedy of that day.

It’s a pattern with him. He is slow to react. (Compare and contrast with the now universally despised John Kerry.) I wonder just when he would have come forward if Bill Clinton hadn’t been asked about it on a BBC radio show and answered like a normal human being, thereby forcing the Republicans’ right knees to jerk convulsively and hit them right between the eyes.

This disaster has made my tidal wave dreams more turbulent than they’ve ever been and it’s not because of the frightening images of the tsunami surge and the people running for their lives. It’s because we are ruled by people with no empathy, no competence and no limits. It’s because, more than ever, I feel engulfed by powerful forces over which I have no control.

Oh Holy Night, Batman

I’m going into the heart of the beast and visiting my fiesty, 82 year old, extremely conservative father for Christmas. He’s been ill, so we haven’t gotten into the election results until now. He’s feeling better. Woah, Nellie.

Since the family consists of Jews, Christians, atheists and sundry wierdos, our holidays are pretty much all about food. But, without knowing it, we’ve been celebrating Festivus for years — particularly the sacred “airing of grievances.” Wish me luck.

I’ll be back after Christmas and we’ll party like it’s 1899. In the meantime, go over to The American Street and vote for the Peranoski Prize. Fun for the whole blog family. (And while you’re there, drop a couple of bucks in the tip jar. Kevin Hayden, the hardest working man in Blogovia, could use a little help with the bandwidth.)

Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Joyful Kwaanza, Glad Solstice and, most importantly, may everyone have a Jubilant After-Christmas-Sale Day— the most religious American holiday of them all.

Back To The Future

I haven’t written much about the UCC ad controversy because, as an atheist, it seems a bit presumptuous to weigh in on issues such as this except to say that I think that freedom of speech demands that all voices should be allowed on the public airwaves.

That article, however, makes me a little bit sad and I can’t help but feel that all this is leading to the kind of intra religious fighting we haven’t seen for decades in this country. For quite a while everyone had been getting along pretty well, religiously speaking.

My grandfather was what was known as an anti-papist. (He didn’t think much of Jews either.) A good portion of his life was defined by his religious identity as an Episcopalian and freemason who hated Catholics. He was born in 1886, so it wasn’t all that unusual. During his lifetime, which ended in 1972, it became less and less acceptable to hold the views he held until, at the end, he was an anachronism. I always thought that was a good thing and in a perverse way to hear him rail against the Pope in the 1960’s always reinforced in me a strong belief in social progress. His old fashioned ideas had been completely discredited by mainstream society during his own lifetime.

Now we are seeing the re-emergence of intra Christian rivalry (along with hostility to non-Judeo Christian religions in general) and the infighting has begun again. The lines are breaking down now between fundamentalism and liberalism, but really it’s the same old shit.

And it illustrates the real reason why the founders insisted on separation of church and state. It wasn’t in service of secularism; it was in service of religion. When one sect gains the power of the state, the others have no choice but to fight for their rights. This UCC controversy is, I fear, the beginning of another episode of religious war between the Christians. Two steps forward one step back.

But I have to say that I have no idea why, in the midst of this religious rivalry, nobody gives a shit about this:

Rather than the traditional egg hunt, this group, calling itself the American Clergy Leadership Conference, sponsored a nationwide “Tear Down The Cross” day for Easter, 2003. Last week, leaders in this radical cause presided over a Washington prayer breakfast featuring messages of thanks from the presidents. Former Senator Bob Dole came in person.

[…]

Moon was keynote speaker last week, declaring in remarks reprinted by the Times that “God’s heart is under confinement.” In some ways it was a repeat performance of the Senate coronation ceremony, which the New York Times editorial page compared to an act of the mad emperor Caligula.

You may remember that Senator John Warner and other Congressmen unloaded on Moon’s entourage for “deceiving” them into sponsoring a ceremony where America “surrendered to [Moon] in the king’s role,” according to an internal church memo. “America is saying to Father, ‘please become my king,” claimed Moon minister Chung Kwak. The versatile Kwak is currently wearing a second hat as head of the UPI news agency, added to Moon’s collection of media properties in 2000.

Strangely enough, last week the hosts of the “surrender” ceremony weren’t blasted but blessed by two presidents of the United States. The same faces were there: George Stallings, Jr., the flamboyant ex-archbishop who bellowed at the March dinner for America to open up its heart to Moon; Michael Jenkins and Chang Shik Yang, hosts of past “Tear Down The Cross” rituals; and former Democratic D.C. representative Walter Fauntroy, who shares the Moonies’ opposition to gay civil unions (Moon calls gays “dung-eating dogs”; Fauntroy calls same-sex marriage “an abomination”). Congressman Davis did not attend.

Like the Senate party, this conference climaxed with a new Crown of Peace awarded to Moon by his own organization, though in this case they held off on the royal treatment until the following evening. The award was reported by UPI.

According to a report in the Washington Times as well as video found on the Moon-affiliated Web site FamilyFed.org, the elder Bush made a taped appearance before the ACLC’s 3,000-strong crowd, which he thanked for their work. “I thought about parachuting into the building,” he joked about wishing he could make it. And he paid lip service to Moon’s unwieldy religious jargon, using phrases like “peace centered on God,” a goal that he called “right on target.”

His son, George W. Bush, wrote a warm letter of support presented at the event by a state senator, in which the president and his wife Laura sent his best wishes to the sponsors — and thanked them for rallying his “armies of compassion.

Picture if you will, Bill and Hill and Al and Tipper doing this.

Why doesn’t anybody confront the wingnut political and religious gasbags with this crap? How could Bush or Falwell or O’Reilly or any of the other self-appointed guardians of Christianity defend this wierd nonsense?

Gosh, it almost make you think that the Republican and Christian Right leadership are actually simple whores for money.

Who Us?

As I was navel gazing about how to win elections, I came across this article (via the Left Coaster) that reminded me of the pitfalls of losing sight of our commitment to civil liberties in the quest for votes and crossover appeal.

In the past week, new revelations of vast abuses of U.S. prisoners being held in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay have appeared in the news. Yet, many of the same people who condemn these atrocities are quite willing to see government officials engage in the same behavior toward Americans. While abuse, torture, and outright lying and criminal behavior by participants in the “justice system” are common, the public gives a collective yawn and juries continue to swallow the lies that prosecutors feed to them. Although the accessible examples of such behavior are legion and have been well-documented elsewhere, I will give some of my own.

Judge Andrew P. Napolitano in a recent article gave a couple of terrifying but all-too-typical stories of torture and abuse of people in this country. The first involved the accusation (almost surely false) of massive child molestation against two owners of a Florida daycare center in 1984. The chief accuser was then-Dade County State’s Attorney Janet Reno (yes, that Janet Reno) who was in the middle of a tough re-election campaign and was determined to get a guilty verdict.

Reno was able to have then-18-year-old Ileana Furster, Frank Furster’s wife, held without bond. Furthermore, the young woman was placed nude in a solitary confinement cell, being in full view of male and female guards. In 1998, Ileana described some of her treatment:

They would give me cold showers. Two people would hold me, run me under cold water, then throw me back in the cell naked with nothing, just a bare floor. And I used to be cold, real cold. I would have my periods and they would wash me and throw me back into the cell.

(Note: This action came at a time when prosecutors around the country were engaging in child molestation witch hunts against day care owners, the original accusations stemming from the encouragement in the 1974 Child Abuse Prevention Act, better known as the Mondale Act. It provided federal money to states that prosecuted alleged child abuse, and prosecutors were all-too-happy to jump into the mix. Many of the accusations were outlandishly false, but prosecutors and their media stooges managed to keep the enterprise going until the accusations collapsed under the scrutiny of a particularly egregious set of charges mounted in Wenatchee, Washington, a decade ago. However, even today, some people are serving life terms for “child molestation” crimes they almost certainly did not commit. Frank Furster is one of them.)

Finally, Reno began to visit Ms. Furster on a regular basis and browbeat her with accusations and promises of a life sentence unless she cooperated (that is, told the jury what Reno wanted her to say). Further visits from psychiatrists who allegedly specialized in “recovering memories” – which has turned out to be another form of government quackery – finally got their intended results. Ileana haltingly accused her husband in court (she has since recanted) and Frank Furster was found guilty.

This isn’t hyperbole. Here’s the transcript from the Frontline documentary about the child abuse witch hunts of the 1980’s.

It wasn’t right wingers who perpetuated these miscarriages of justice — it was misguided liberals who thought they were protecting kids and ambitious liberal politicians who needed to appear to be tough on crime, acting out of a belief that the accused child molesters were so evil that it excused any kind of conduct. Neither party can claim a perfect record in this regard.

The only thing that can protect our country from losing its soul (if it isn’t already lost) is a sincere and unbending commitment to civil liberties and the letter and spirit of the Bill of Rights. Once you start tweaking at the edges the whole house of cards falls in. As we look at how far we are willing to compromise, appease, reframe and redirect, it’s awfully important that we keep that in mind. Otherwise, we’re just as phony as the other side.

Update: In a related article, William Pfaff posits that the torture in Iraq and Gitmo was really more “Shock and Awe”:

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Bush administration is not torturing prisoners because it is useful but because of its symbolism. It originally was intended to be a form of what later, in the attack on Iraq, came to be called “shock and awe.” It was meant as intimidation. We will do these terrible things to demonstrate that nothing will stop us from conquering our enemies. We are indifferent to world opinion. We will stop at nothing.

I seem to recall quite a few liberal voices thinking this was quite a good idea. Take our good friend, the thoughtful and measured Tom Friedman:

No, the axis-of-evil idea isn’t thought through – but that’s what I like about it. It says to these countries and their terrorist pals: “We know what you’re cooking in your bathtubs. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do about it, but if you think we are going to just sit back and take another dose from you, you’re wrong. Meet Don Rumsfeld – he’s even crazier than you are.”

There is a lot about the Bush team’s foreign policy I don’t like, but their willingness to restore our deterrence, and to be as crazy as some of our enemies, is one thing they have right. It is the only way we’re going to get our turkey back.

Even intellectuals have lizard brains and know how to use them.

Mmmmm. Wine

Dr. Vino will be raffling off a case of very nice wine to someone who has completed his 2004 wine quiz correctly.

(Hint: Google)

Let My People Go

ChristianExodus.org is coordinating the move of thousands of Christians to South Carolina for the express purpose of re-establishing Godly, constitutional government. It is evident that the U.S. Constitution has been abandoned under our current federal system, and the efforts of Christian activism to restore our Godly republic have proven futile over the past three decades. The time has come for Christians to withdraw our consent from the current federal government and re-introduce the Christian principles once so predominant in America to a sovereign State like South Carolina.

THE PROBLEM

Christians have actively tried to return the United States to their moral foundations for more than 30 years. We now have a “Christian” president, a “Christian” attorney general, and a Republican Congress and Supreme Court. Yet consider this:

* Abortion continues against the wishes of many States

* Sodomite marriage is now legal in Massachusetts (and coming soon to a neighborhood near you)

* Children who pray in public schools are subject to prosecution 1

* Our schools continue to teach the discredited theory of Darwinian evolution

* The Bible is still not welcome in schools except under unconstitutional FEDERAL guidelines

* The 10 Commandments remain banned from public display

* Sodomy is now legal AND celebrated as “diversity” rather than condemned as perversion

* Preaching Christianity will soon be outlawed as “hate speech” 1 2

Attempts at reform have proven futile. Future elections will not stop the above atrocities, but rather will exacerbate them and lead us down an even more deadly path.

THE SOLUTION

So what can be done? ChristianExodus.org offers the opportunity to try a strategy not yet employed by Bible-believing Christians. Rather than spend resources in continued efforts to redirect the entire nation, we will redeem States one at a time. Millions of Christian conservatives are geographically spread out and diluted at the national level. Therefore, we must concentrate our numbers in a geographical region with a sovereign government we can control through the electoral process.

ChristianExodus.org is orchestrating the move of thousands of Christians to reacquire our Constitutional rights and, if necessary to attain these rights, dissolve our State’s bond with the union. Click on our Plan of Action page to find out how we can experience God-honoring governance once again.

If you are tired of government-endorsed sin, then stand up and be counted!

(Do you suppose we ought to tell them about Lindsay?)

Thanks to BCforum for the link

Reframing Respect For Life

…in all its complexities.

Via Avedon Carol, I found this post by Max Blumenthal about the new It-Democrats, Democrats For Life. This article is fascinating, too.

I do give them credit for being impressively morally consistent. They are for the abolition of abortion rights, right to die legislation, the death penalty and stem cell research. (And they are members in good standing of the Democratic party, so the tent must not be so damned small after all.)

I must point out, however, that I am against the death penalty and also pro-choice, pro stem cell research and pro right to die. And that view is also perfectly consistent and moral because I simply don’t believe that a tribunal or a judge or, least of all, a politician, is capable of making these complicated moral decisions about life and death. If I had my way, I’m sure that some guilty people who deserve to die would live to be 90 (imprisoned, I trust) because of this stand. And I assume that some women would have abortions for selfish and shallow reasons. But until human perfection can be achieved, which is never, these extremely complicated moral issues cannot be dealt with through law without often being immoral themselves. It is not capable of sorting out the morality involved when a desperate 36 year old woman with three kids finds herself pregnant after her drunken ex-husband begged for forgiveness for his philandering and she gave in. You can’t say that the death penalty is consistent when the legal system cannot account for lawyers and judges who just aren’t very good or witnessess who truly believe they saw something they didn’t see. It doesn’t make sense to say that nobody should be allowed the right to die when you look at an old man who is dying in terrible pain and just wants to be set free.

I’m reminded of a very thought provoking article by William Saletan, in which he frames the argument exactly as I see it:

[S]ome conservative evangelicals and progressive Catholics are proposing to broaden the debate[on capital punishment]. While we’re rethinking capital punishment, they say, we ought to rethink another kind of killing as well: abortion. But their analogy is upside-down. The reason we’re rethinking the death penalty today is the same reason we liberalized abortion laws 30 years ago: We’re learning that the state is too clumsy to handle it.

To abortion opponents, the essential principle in both cases is life. “If people on the so-called liberal spectrum of American politics are against capital punishment, then they certainly should be against the taking of innocent life of the unborn,” Robertson argued on “Meet the Press” last month. Writing in The New York Times Magazine two weeks later, Andrew Sullivan challenged anti-abortion conservatives and anti-execution liberals to embrace the Catholic “seamless garment” doctrine, which holds that, on both subjects, “life is life is life. From conception to natural death, our first duty is to defend it.”

But there’s another, less obvious connection between the two issues. The administration of capital punishment, like the regulation of abortion, depends upon agents of the state–legislators, judges, pardon boards, governors–to translate morality into law. And, in both cases, much is lost in the translation. Nearly everyone agrees that abortion is morally troubling and that murderers should be punished. Most people concede that some abortions ought to be forbidden and some murderers ought to die. But it’s quite another matter to sort out exactly when. What about the 16-year-old girl knocked up by her abusive boyfriend? What about the career criminal scheduled for lethal injection because a fellow inmate pinned a murder rap on him in exchange for time off? People who support the death penalty in principle are getting cold feet about its application because they are coming to doubt that the government makes these decisions wisely. That kind of doubt is not a reason to support tougher abortion laws. It’s a reason to oppose them.

[…]

This kind of piecemeal uncertainty, not moral revelation, is what’s driving today’s reevaluation of the death penalty. Robertson, Ryan, and Will still support capital punishment in principle. What they question is the government’s competence to decide fairly or accurately who should receive it. Texas’s execution of Karla Faye Tucker–who, according to Robertson, was “out of her mind” when she committed murder and was later “born again” in prison–shook Robertson’s faith that the state could be trusted to distinguish killers who deserve death from killers who don’t. Meanwhile, the post-conviction exonerations of numerous death-row inmates prompted Will to counsel “skepticism” about the death penalty, on the theory that “it’s a government program and will be messed up.”

[…]

Will a similar anxiety about the state’s sloppy management of life and death affect the abortion debate? It already has. Four decades ago, when abortion was prohibited, stories of illegal abortions and the wretched circumstances that drove many women to seek them began to penetrate public consciousness. Americans disliked abortion in principle, but the more they heard about the moral complexity of these cases, the more uncomfortable they became with the procedure’s criminalization. They began to suspect not that abortion was defensible in general but that the laws against it failed to recognize circumstances in which it might be justified. Many states created or broadened loopholes to permit the procedure. By 1973, when the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade, the country’s abortion laws were already unraveling.

The question of abortion, like that of execution, can be put in practical terms: How confident are you of the state’s ability to comprehend and resolve the morality of each individual case? If you have misgivings about both the death penalty and broad restrictions on abortion, are you inconsistent in your respect for life? Or are you consistent in your respect for life’s complexity? At its core, this perspective isn’t about saving lives or fighting for women’s freedom. It’s about the limits of our ability to apply rigid principles. It’s about humility.

This is the lesson Casey taught about capital punishment. The more he examined death-penalty cases, the more he second-guessed the system. Judges and legislators, he realized, lacked the dexterity to apply shared values to such diverse circumstances. The assembly line’s flaws generated telltale errors: the moral kind that shattered Robertson’s confidence in the clemency process, and the factual kind that convinced Ryan to halt executions in Illinois. In various ways, they are all raising the same question: whether decisions about capital punishment are too complicated to make on an assembly line. Maybe, just maybe, they should ask the same question about abortion.

The answer is yes.

So, the Democrats want to reframe the social issues. Here’s one way to think about it. I know it doesn’t involve any fun Sistah Soljah shaming or sexy self flagellation so perhaps it won’t be as satisfying for the media. And the religious right is assured of the morality of its position in all things, so I’m afraid they won’t be rushing into our big tent with this sort of argument. But there might just be a few voters out here in the western part of the country who agree that the blunt instrument of politics isn’t a very good tool for regulating the most delicate matters of life and death with which even the philosophers and theologians struggle for clarity.

Instead of trying to convince people that we are moral because we share their discomfort about our deeply held principles, perhaps we should instead just hold to our deeply held principles and explain why they are moral in terms they can understand. I think that’s what reframing is all about, actually.