Petty Larseny

The First Openly Godless Member of Congress

2007-03-08T22:54:00.000-05:00

On Monday, a member of Congress will step before the cameras and announce to the world that he does not believe in God.

Wow.

I'm a little embarrassed I'm only becoming aware of this now, but apparently this has been an ongoing effort by the Secular Coalition for America. They launched a contest to identify the highest-ranking elected official in the U.S. who is a non-theist. Apparently they found one, and he will be revealing himself at a news conference on Monday.

On the first day of 2007, I speculated that such a person existed. I even listed my top suspects, whom I dubbed the Rational 12. Based on several postings that I came across (but no longer have links for), it appears that this "outing" will be a voluntary one and that the congressman (yes, the Coalition has referred to him as a he) will be participating.

I've seen some guessing games ID Barney Frank and Bernie Sanders as likely candidates. Maybe. I kind of figure Barney Frank for a closet theist. It would be kind of a bummer if it were Sanders, if only because it would provide an excuse for all the silliness about socialism and atheism to re-emerge. So, I'm hoping it's a face that's new to the media, so that they approach the issue with a blank slate, rather than preconceived notions about the specific person.

Oh, and as you'll see in my list of suspects, the Coalition is actually a little late with this. As I pointed out, the new, 110th Congress includes the first Buddhists to sit in the House of Representatives. Buddhists don't believe in God. So, let's hope the media factor them into this story (assuming one of them isn't the person in question) and makes the point that there will, as of Monday, be three confirmed members of Congress who reject the existence of a SuperMagic Deity. It's a start.

Jesus 2008, Part II: John McCain's God

2007-03-07T23:59:00.000-05:00

This is the second posting in a series that will look at each of the major presidential candidates in light of their personal relationship with Jesus. Please continue to check back for additional posts in this series.

Previously, I talked about the sad spectacle of John McCain pandering to the religious right by disavowing all the credit he once gave to his fellow POWs for keeping him alive in Vietnam, to instead credit God for his survival.

But there is another interpretation, one that speaks better of his integrity, but at the same time suggests that the God John McCain believes in...might not be the one he's supposed to believe in.

Here's the video, from McCain's website, of him talking about his faith. Not, it's worth noting, talking about God or Jesus, but talking about his faith.

"My faith has been my salvation. ... My faith has been my anchor and my guide... The reason, the only reason why I'm here today is because I believe that a higher being has a mission for me in my life, a reason for me to be here. Now, that doesn't mean that he wants me to be elected or not, but it does mean that I have a purpose. And that purpose, I think, is to live a life based on Judeo-Christian principles and honor and integrity."

George W. Bush hired a speechwriter to ensure that his public remarks evoked the same God, the same Jesus, that the conservative base believes in: A personal, anthropomorphic God who has preferences when it comes to presidential elections, Grammy results and the Super Bowl. McCain's mistake here is to reveal that he does not believe in this God.

McCain, it is clear, either believes in the progressive, non-literalist left's notion of God, or he believes in the not-really-God that many on the left call God--the god who's just love or fate or an energy that binds us or some other similar nonsense--or McCain is simply lying and doesn't believe in God at all.

After all, it's not God or Jesus who saved McCain, he says. It's faith. In other words, it wasn't the intervention of an external force that saved him, it was an internal phenomenon that saved him: His own mental stance, faith. And McCain clearly does not envision a God of personal preferences. McCain could have said he does not know whether God wants him to be elected. But he didn't. He said he's not claiming that God has a desire one way or another.

And look at the mission McCain's God has for him--to live a life based on Judeo-Christian values. It's the language of a non-religious person trying to fake religiosity. A Jewish God, after all, would want McCain to base his life on Jewish values; a Christian God on Christian values. There's no conceivable God that could want believers to base their lives based on the values of two separate religions. A true believer--in any religion--would have used language that avoided choosing one sect over another. McCain made the mistake of combining them, which no sect's God would ever do.

Furthermore, unlike George W. Bush--whose mother told him the pastor was "talking to you" in talking about God's desire that Americans find a leader--John McCain says the only mission he thinks God has in mind for him is the same one God would have for anyone: Live by good values, don't be a jerk. The God of the religious right has specific missions for each and every person. Preach the gospel, win American Idol, whatever. McCain doesn't get that.

We don't know whether McCain lost faith and found reason in Vietnam. But in his book, "Faith of My Fathers," McCain makes clear that the driving faith in his life has been the faith in country, honor and integrity instilled in him by his military family. His salvation was not Jesus, God or even religious faith. It was the cellmates who kept him going and told him dirty jokes.

It's possible that McCain believes in some sort of magical entity that might qualify as "God." But if he does, it's clear from his own language that this god is the same god that much of the left believes in. But it is most assuredly not the hurricane-causing, miracle-granting, prayer-listening-to, president-rooting-for, political-policy-having god of the religious right.

Jesus 2008, Part I: McCain Betrays His Fellow POWs

2007-03-03T01:17:00.000-05:00

This is the first posting in a series that will look at each of the major presidential candidates in light of their personal relationship with Jesus. Please continue to check back for additional posts in this series.

John McCain's courting of the religious right has been so transparent, even the religious right has not been fooled. And that's saying something.

It has been a sad and disappointing sight, especially for those who appreciated McCain's candor back when he drove his "Straight Talk Express" right past "agent of intolerance" Jerry Falwell during the 2000 campaign. But recently, McCain's courting of the religious right took a turn that betrays a lot more than just swing voters. His desire to win that voting demographic has led him to do what even torture could not make him do: Sell out his fellow POWs from Vietnam.

This video was posted on McCain's YouTube site six days ago. In it, he talks about his faith. Note what he says about Vietnam.

"I went through a very rough experience in my life many years ago, and the only reason why I'm here today is because of the faith that I had in a greater being who sustained me at times when I was under most difficult stress...The reason, the only reason why I'm here today is because I believe that a higher being has a mission for me in my life."

It is a deeply personal, and apparently sincere sentiment. The only person who could refute it would be McCain himself. And that's exactly what he did, back in 1999, when he was still a straight talker, and before Karl Rove made American politicians fear the wrath of the mobilized religious right.

Back then, McCain wrote a book called, "Faith of My Fathers." The faith of the title was not religious faith. It was, literally, his faith in his forefathers, a faith of patriotism, honor and comradeship that you would expect to find in a proud military family. In his book, McCain speaks at great length, more than 150 pages, about his 5-1/2 years in Vietnamese captivity.

He does speak, in several instances, about the role his religious faith played during that awful time. Some are relatively trivial, as when Christmas carols represent respite from atonal Vietnamese hymns.

In most of the accounts he relates, however, the religious element of each circumstance arose externally, either from the arrival of Christmas, or at the instigation of someone else. On 223, a Vietnamese interrogator asks McCain to explain Easter. McCain does so, but not with an explanation of how Jesus died for our sins, but with a matter-of-fact recounting of the bullet points of Jesus' life. It's not personal or emotional.

On 228, a Vietnamese guard draws a cross in the sand. McCain refers to it as an acknowledgment of mutual humanity. But he ascribes no impact to the event. It does not lift his spirits, nor give him hope, nor bolster his morale.

In one two-page sequence, starting on 252, McCain gives his longest account of the role religious faith played during captivity. He begins, however, not by relating the nature of his own personal faith, or his own relationship with Jesus, but instead by telling us that the Code of Conduct and his senior officers stressed three keys to resistance: Faith in God, faith in country and faith in fellow prisoners.

Here are some of McCain's most emphatic pronouncements about faith from that section:

"...keeping our faith in God, country, and one another was as difficult as it was imperative."

And, most vividly, this one:

"I discovered scratched into one of the cell's walls the creed "I believe in God, the Father Almighty." There, standing witness to God's presence in a remote, concealed place, recalled to my faith by a stronger, better man, I felt God's love and care more vividly than I would have felt it had I been safe among a pious congregation in the most magnificent cathedral."

There are a few others, as well. But they are often couched in ways that suggest McCain was drawing strength not from faith in Jesus, but from the power of ritual or community that religion can offer. When he is designated group chaplain and is allowed to copy passages from a Bible to share with the other POWs, he goes to the Nativity. Not the words of Jesus himself. Not the crucifixion of Jesus and his redemption of humanity. He goes for the Hallmark Card kiddie story.

On 206, he tells us he "prayed more often and more fervently than I ever had as a free man." But consider the context:

"...you eventually adjust to solitary, as you can to almost any hardship, by devising various methods to keep your mind off your troubles and greedily grasping any opportunity for human contact.
"The first few weeks are the hardest. The onset of despair is immediate, and it is a formidable foe. You have to fight it with any means necessary, all the while trying to bridle the methods you devise to combat loneliness and prevent them from robbing your senses.
"I tried to memorize the names of POWs, the names and personal details of guards and interrogators, and the details of my environment. I devised other memory games to keep my faculties sound. For days I tried to remember the names of all the pilots in my squadron and our sister squadron. I also prayed more often and more fervently than I ever had as a free man."

His prayers were not answered, nor does he tell us they gave him solace. They were one of a litany of "methods to keep your mind off your troubles."

On 312, McCain tells us he "will never experience again the supreme happiness I felt my fourth Christmas in Hanoi," his first night in Camp Unity. Why? Was it the Baby Jesus? McCain explains: "No other experience in my life could ever replicate my first night in Camp Unity, and the feeling of relief that overcame me to be living among my friends."

The most sacred service of his life, he tells us on 332, was the one he and the other men were allowed to hold without interference. The sanctity comes not from the service itself or from any religious experience during it, but from the very material fact that his captors, this one time, allowed them a moment of liberation.

And that's pretty much the meat of McCain's faith over the course of 150 pages about his captivity. So, how does this constitute a betrayal of his fellow POWs?

Look at what he said about them, and the effect they had on him. Compare these remarks to his remarks about religion--to which he seldom, if ever, attributed long-term, significant impact on his state of mind in captivity. Also, most importantly, compare these statements to his video posted last week. Remember, he called his religious faith "the only reason" he is here today. But here's what he wrote in 1999:

"I could have asked for no better companions. There has never been a doubt in my mind that Bud Day and Norris Overly saved my life."

"The only sustenance I had in those early days I took from the example of [Day's] abiding moral and physical courage."

"Of all the activities I devised to survive solitary confinement with my wits and strength intact, nothing was more beneficial than communicating with other prisoners. It was, simply, a matter of life and death."

"Communicating not only affirmed our humanity. It kept us alive."

"Bob Craner kept me alive."

"I derived my own resolve from the example of Bud Day...and from countless other examples of resistance... I would have been lost without their example."

"I had a nearly devout belief in the restorative power of communicating... my defenses shattered, I had relied on Bob Craner to bring me back from the dead."

And then, there are these, most damning examples, when McCain specifically contrasts the power of faith with the power of solidarity with his fellow POWs.

"We were told to have faith in God, country, and one another. Most of us did. But the last of these, faith in one another, was our final defense, the ramparts our enemy could not cross."

"My first concern was not that I might fail God and country, although I certainly hoped that I would not. I was afraid to fail my friends."

"A filthy, crippled, broken man, all I had left of my dignity was the faith of my fathers. It was enough."

Bob Craner. Bud Day. Norris Overly. There are others, too. These men sustained McCain through hell. Their courage. Their humor. Their fellowship. Their support.

Over the course of more than five years--in which he was beaten, kept in solitary confinement, malnourished and in despair--McCain broke and taped a confession, but he never broke faith with those men.

But now, today, after six years of courting this nation's self-appointed stewards of values, the religious right, McCain has finally betrayed his fellow POWs. He has again made a tape to please his captors. Only this one is playing on YouTube. On this one, he finally relents and pays homage to the God of his latter-day tormentors, the religious right, denying credit to the men who saved him and according it, instead, to a god whose religion barely helped him at all. Unlike the tape he made under duress in Vietnam, this tape, this McCain, finally breaks faith with the men who saved his life.

More on the religious faith of McCain and other candidates in upcoming posts. Please continue to check back with us.

McCain Devolves

2007-02-23T12:51:00.000-05:00

Funny. No mention of today's speech at the creationist Discovery Institute on John McCain's official campaign calendar. Selective amnesia, of course, an occasionally helpful survival trait.

UPDATE: My mistake, the luncheon IS listed. He just doesn't list the fact that Discovery Institute is co-presenter. Kind of appropriate, considering that Discovery Institute denies being creationist.

Jim Wallis Takes the Low Road

2007-02-22T11:11:00.000-05:00

Jim Wallis has been taken to task for claiming that Democrats are anti-religion. Who, exactly, has made these anti-religion statements, he has been asked. Well, now he is refusing to say. Why? He's taking the high road. No, he's taking the low road, the one blazed by Sen. Joe McCarthy.

Unless the people he claims to be quoting had a reasonable expectation of confidentiality, Wallis should name names. The reason he's not, of course, has nothing to do with taking "the high road." It's self-serving, in the following ways:

It allows Wallis to quote people without anyone being able to determine whether the quotes are accurate.
It allows Wallis to characterize these quotes as representative of Democratic thinking, without anyone being able to determine whether he's referring to Howard Dean or Lyndon LaRouche.
It allows Wallis to advance his political position in the guise of responding to these unattributed quotes, which may or may not be mere straw men.
It allows Wallis, as McCarthy did, to advance the generalization that his cause is under siege from evil enemies within.

It's self-serving cowardice and intellectual dishonesty...from a man of faith. No wonder so many Democrats are anti-religion!

Atheists for McCain!

2007-02-20T04:05:00.000-05:00

After six years of George W. Bush, everything beforehand feels like long ago, but politically speaking it wasn't so long ago when John McCain was considered a viable candidate not only by many Democrats, but by many on the left, as well. Why? Because back in 2000, his straight-talk express really did consist of a lot of straight talk. He had disdain for the same bullshit the liberal-media types who covered him had. He had no use for dumb faith-based politics.

How things have changed. Perhaps still smarting from losing the nomination to Bush, McCain doesn't seem to have missed anyone on the Christian right in his Panderpalooza. He's even speaking at the dark heart of anti-science, the Discovery Institute, this month.

All of which is why atheists should support him in his bid for the Republican nomination. Hell, maybe even for the general election. The reason is simple.

Either at the age of 72, he's changed his mind about how the universe works and suddenly believes in an anthropomorphic, intercessory god who wants Texas girls to get cervical cancer...or he's changed his mind about how to get elected.

Bush won by fooling the Christian right into accepting him as "authentic." Little did anyone on the right know that Bush answers to no religious orthodoxy except that of his own subconscious. Little did most on the left guess just how seriously Bush took the overall concept of a personal Jesus, whispering in his ear that he could do whatever he wanted.

So if a guy that we know has no use for the Christian right wants to trick them--yet again--into supporting a candidate who doesn't give a shit about their agenda, shouldn't atheists support that, instead of howling about McCain's hypocrisy?

After all, the more atheists and the left criticize McCain for cozying up to the religious right, the more the religious right is likely...to...embrace.......him.

Er...never mind. DAMN YOU, McCAIN!!!

The Left: Tomorrow's Creationists

2007-02-19T22:27:00.000-05:00

As the Book of Revelation warned us, the First Trumpet shall be sounded by Deepak Chopra.

Now, that day has come to pass. And the ultimate battle between science and religion has begun. But unlike the battle over creationism, this time, much of the left will line up to oppose science. Chopra has volunteered to lead them.

I discussed a while ago how the sequel to the creationism battle will be the battle over the (alleged) human soul. Our increasing understanding of the brain (and ergo the mind) is rendering the concept of a soul obsolete, absurd and quaint.

Unfortunately, a lot of people on the left don't take kindly to the scientific concepts underlying this assault on the soul, and all the warmfuzzy infantilized nonsense that accompanies souls. Enter Deepak Chopra. In a two-part posting at Huffington Post, Chopra takes on the single discipline currently posing the greatest threat to the soul: Evolutionary biology.

For someone with his reputation and presumably enormous brain, Chopra makes a lot of kindergarten-level mistakes not just about the specifics of evolutionary biology, but also in his reasoning.

What's most interesting is that he seems blind to just how well his reasoning parallels the reasoning of creationists. Consider this statement: "...let me take one issue, the claim of evolutionary biology to explain something as complex as generosity, altruism, or music. Such claims are thoroughly bogus. They do not invalidate the whole field of evolutionary biology. they simply step over the boundary of believable explanations."

Even today, creationists still argue that the claim of evolution to explain something as complex as the eye is thoroughly bogus; it simply steps over the boundary of believable explanations. As Marc Maron has summarized this reasoning: "I don't understand it; it must be magic."

And, of course, evolutionary biology makes no claim to causal exclusivity. In other words, it certainly does not reject, as Chopra implies, the impact of "culture, human values, religion, and philosophy."

After all, it's those cultural forces that help shape whether a trait--such as generosity--is beneficial or detrimental to survival. (And, as I'm sure he'd hate to hear, those cultures, values, religions and philosophies were all shaped in part by evolutionary biology...just ask the multitudinous anti-contraception Catholics, or try to find one of the remaining pro-celibacy Shakers and ask them.)

So what's Chopra's real beef? He wants to maintain an irreducible aspect to humanity's mental aspect. Another word for that is the soul.

And a lot of people on the left will sympathize with him. They'll buy into the childish notion that there's something romantic--as opposed to awful and creepy and prima facie paradoxical--about the soul. They'll claim that advocates of evolutionary biology are pushing eugenics or some other immoral viewpoint. They'll say that those who would explain bad behaviors (such as rape, violence, hatred) are in fact excusing them. They'll say lots of these things.

And in doing so, they'll be the next generation of creationists. And they'll help impede the advance of science. And they'll hurt our country as a result (see here and here).

Unless we make it clear it's time to declare a winner in the battle between religion and science.

Screw the Outrage; Ask Romney WHY?

2007-02-19T08:40:00.000-05:00

It's great that there's quick, viral outrage to Mitt Romney's not-particularly-noteworthy remark that "we need to have a person of faith lead the country." (You can see it here, h/t to C&L and Street Prophets...not to mention the MSM). The rationalist left has to learn how to start responding to stuff like this. There are lots of (practiced) ways not to do so. And one enlightening way to do so.

We don't need more howling, however justified, about the Constitution's prohibition against religious tests for office-holders. We don't need to holler about discrimination against atheists (most people like discrimination against atheists. We don't even need to dissect all the intra-religious dynamics of a Mormon seeking the Christian right's support. There's only one thing we need to do when Romney or anyone else proclaims that faith is a requirement, or even an asset, for public office-holders.

We need to ask why.

What is it that belief in magic, and magic beings, gives politicians that rationalists can not offer? Which wars will theists get us into that rationalists will fail to? Which economic policies will atheists fail to embrace, due to the ostensible myopia brought on by not believing in magical people?

The year-long town-hall-palooza of 2007, and the subsequent 2008 primaries, offer us rationalists a unique opportunity. The next time Romney or anyone else in the race extols faith as better than not-faith when it comes to serving the American public, forget the outrage, drop the analysis, and do what journalists should be doing: Ask why. Keep in mind, the answer to this will be additional pablum. Which is why you'll need to be ready with challenging follow-up questions, to get at the alleged reasoning behind the claim, to ensure that his/her fundamental explanation is sufficiently exposed. (See here and here). Is it that accepting Jesus makes you a better person? How? Show us the statistical evidence. Is it that belief in God improves your moral reasoning? How? Show us the statistical evidence.

After 9/11 and George Bush, this should have been the year of the non-religious candidate. Clearly, that ship has sailed. But we can still push back on this discriminatory pandering toward the religious right, by subjecting "faith" to the same level of rigorous scrutiny any other politically self-serving claim would/should get.

In fact, let's all ask him right now and keep asking until the absurdity of his position forces him to recant it.

The Instant, Sure-Fire, Politically Viable, Guaranteed Way to Get Out of Iraq Now

2007-02-13T09:51:00.000-05:00

The Democrats and Republicans who oppose Bush's war in Iraq face a political quandary--pulling the plug on the war seems (or can be portrayed as) pulling the plug on the American troops before they've finished their mission there. But the mission there has become so complex, and so interwoven with other issues, that it's become a Gordian Knot--so intricately interwoven it can not be untangled. Well, the myth tells us that the real Gordian Knot was undone with a simple slice of a sword. Similarly, opponents of the war can slice through it with an equally elegant solution, which can be summarized in two words:

Declare victory.

I know, I know...the war keeps getting deadlier all the time. Bear with me a minute, it gets even more counter-intuitive than that.

First, opponents of the war have to do something painful: Admit that Bush was right on May 1, 2003, when he said major combat operations were over in Iraq, and that the United States had prevailed. When you look at the original, congressional authorization for the use of military force in Iraq, it becomes blindingly obvious: Bush was right. We had prevailed!

At the time, the anti-war left objected to Bush's formulation for an obvious reason--Iraq was a mess and the fighting was still going on. But those conditions didn't stop Bush from declaring victory in Afghanistan and pulling out of there after just a few months. So why didn't he do the same in Iraq?

Why, in fact, did Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld eliminate victory references from Bush's speeches at the time? Keep in mind, before the anti-war left ridiculed "Mission Accomplished," Rumsfeld was against that phrasing, too. Why? He told Bob Woodward it was "too conclusive." I know the anti-war left will have trouble doing this, but it's vitally important that they believe him.

A victory declaration was not too conclusive because it neglected to account for remaining resistance. It was too conclusive, literally, because it meant the conclusion of the war. And that would mean bringing the troops home. And until the rest of the Middle East falls like dominoes into the pro-American free market, the neocons who crafted this war will never let the troops come home.

It's not just that Bush wants war with Iran. Early on in his speeches--when Iraq seemed to be going well--he spoke openly about wholesale, regional transformation. The stated goal, of course, was the lie that free democracies won't produce terrorists (like Tim McVeigh). But the real goal is economic, allowing major, western companies to get into the Middle East bigger than they are now (remember, Halliburton was doing business with Iran even after 9/11 and after the Iraq war), and with fewer nationalist/socialist impediments.

As long as Iraq is going poorly, the president can justify keeping troops there. Opposition sounds anti-soldier, like another Vietnam, like calling our troops losers. And too many politicians are afraid of the name-calling.

So do the opposite.

Call the troops winners--as Rumsfeld didn't want to do. Hail their completion of the missions laid out for them in the original authorization for the use of military force. Instead of non-binding resolutions opposing the surge, introduce binding resolutions declaring the victorious end to hostilities with Iraq, which has now been liberated and stands shoulder to shoulder with the United States as an ally against terror.

Point out, as Sen. Ted Kennedy has, time and again, that the troops have now accomplished, or rendered moot, every single goal we set for them. Rep. Murtha already says the mission has been accomplished. Iraq says their mission is done. Our own generals have said there's nothing more to be done militarily. So stop letting the White House call the troops losers, by continuing to move the bar. First it was get rid of WMD. Then it was liberate Iraq. Then it was establish democracy. Now it's to establish a democracy that meets Mr. Bush's standards. It's a shell game, and the Democrats have to stop playing it.

WMDs? Gone. Anti-American government? Gone. Pro-terrorist government? Gone. UN-defiant government? Gone. Terrorist-harboring government? Gone.

It's time for Democrats to introduce a resolution saying so, and congratulating the troops on what they accomplished. Nothing in it--yet, anyway--about bringing the troops home. Simply a declaration of victory--spelling out precisely all the goals that have been accomplished.

Let the White House and pro-war Republicans object to calling our troops winners. Let them deny our troops the victory they achieved.

In doing so, we can draw the bright, clear line that's so desperately needed in this debate between the Iraq War, authorized and won, and the Middle East War that Bush has begun, and is trying to escalate beyond Iraq's borders. Americans were willing, albeit wrongly, to take on Iraq. But the best way to assure that the nation holds a debate on the next war is to make clear to the world that the first war is over. So far, Democrats have done that by arguing that we're losing. It's time to wake up and smell the victory.

2008: The Question for Candidates

2007-02-12T09:12:00.000-05:00

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Edwards, Bill Richardson, Tom Vilsack, Dennis Kucinich, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and anyone else who's running for president will be making their way back and forth across Iowa and New Hampshire repeatedly over the next year. This year, more than ever, it's vitally important that each of them answer a single question.

To that end, I encourage everyone who lives in one of those states, or who expects to attend a town hall or other event anywhere in the country where you might have access to any of the candidates, to print out and take with you whichever version of "The Question" with which you're most comfortable (feel free to mix and match, if you wish!). Of course, anyone getting an answer is strongly urged to post it back here! (One suggestion--try to get a few friends or fellow travelers in on this, if the candidate hears people clapping when you ask your question, they'll be less likely to dismiss or dodge it.) Here they are:

The Nice Version

It seems these days that just about every campaign has advisors, paid or otherwise, to help ensure that candidates are sensitive to and reach out to just about every religious community: Christians, Jews and Muslims alike. Most surveys in recent years have found that non-religious, atheist and agnostic Americans outnumber the American Jewish and Muslim populations. Can you tell us whether you have any advisors or have made any effort to be sensitive to or reach out to the non-religious, atheist and agnostic communities in this country?

The Provocative Version

Surveys consistently tell us there are more Americans who reject or question the existence of God than there are American Jews and Muslims combined. Our country is embroiled in religious violence overseas. We were attacked by religious extremists on September 11th and the president who misled us into an unjust war has said he is guided by his god, too. According to media accounts, most Democratic campaigns, and certainly some Republican ones, make specific, concerted, strategic efforts to include religious viewpoints and religious advisors. What will you do to ensure that non-religious viewpoints and advisors who espouse them will be a part of your campaign and, if you win, your administration?

The Righteous-Anger Version

I don't believe in any gods. I share Thomas Jefferson's view of Jesus: That he was not divine. And yet, polls show that me and people like me are considered less moral--because we don't believe in magic beings--than people who share the beliefs of George W. Bush, Joe Lieberman or Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Numerous state laws discriminate against me and people like me. The first President Bush did not consider us full citizens. No one representing our views has ever been elected to Congress, even though we outnumber Jews and Muslims combined. Even you, I'm sure, reach out to many communities based on nothing else than their belief in gods or prayer or other forms of magic. To my knowledge, you have never spoken out against this socially-accepted hate against me and my kind. Why is that, and are you willing to oppose this discrimination by including open atheists in prominent positions in your campaign or cabinet?

Fox Admits Its Bias

2007-02-04T09:01:00.000-05:00

Bill O'Reilly seems to think he's scored a journalistic coup on this upcoming Monday's program by somehow piecing together the clues of an NBC conspiracy to pursue an allegedly liberal agenda. But meanwhile, you don't need to do a minute of sleuthing to learn whether O'Reilly has a bias. His own boss just admitted it.

That's right, O'Reilly's oberstboss, Rupert Murdoch, was asked on Friday, Jan. 26, whether his company, News Corp., which owns Fox News and the New York Post, managed to shape the agenda on the war in Iraq. His answer? (h/t Juan Cole and ePluribus Media): "No, I don't think so. We tried."

There you have it. In case anyone still had any doubts. News Corp.--with the knowledge and approval of its leader, Rupert Murdoch, and the assistance of people like O'Reilly who tell Americans they're independent thinkers just doing their best to convey the truth--undertook a concerted, organized, willful effort to lead Americans to think a certain way on Iraq. They report AND decide.

In case his answer wasn't clear enough, by the way, Murdoch went on to say, "We basically supported the Bush policy in the Middle East." And this is in the Hollywood Reporter? As opposed to, say, the news sections of every newspaper in the country?

At the very least, News Corp.'s print rivals, such as the NY Daily News, ought to splash this on their front pages. And News Corp.'s TV rivals ought to be cranking out the promos Monday morning.

They might not make every Fox viewer understand how badly they were deceived. They might not succeed in outraging everyone who mourns the 3,000+ American war dead and WhoTheHellKnows+ Iraqi war dead. But at least they can say, "We tried."

Foolprints in the Sand

2007-01-31T08:23:00.000-05:00

AN HOMAGE TO
"FOOTPRINTS IN THE SAND"

One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord.
Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky.
In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand.
Sometimes there were two sets of footprints.
Other times there was one only.

This bothered me because I noticed
that during the low periods of my life,
when I was suffering from anguish, sorrow or defeat,
like when I contracted AIDS
and when my son's leg was mangled by a thresher,
I could see only one set of footprints.

So I said to the Lord,

"You promised me Lord,
that if I followed you,
you would walk with me always.
But I have noticed that during the most trying periods of my life
there has only been one set of footprints in the sand.
Why, when I needed you most, have you not been there for me?"

The Lord replied,
"The times when you have seen only one set of footprints in the sand, my child,
is when I walked behind you, in your footprints,
so that I would have a better angle to inject you with AIDS
and steer that thresher over your son.
Okay, and one time I had to take off for, like, five minutes,
to create a tsunami.
Oh, and Darfur, obviously.
So two times."

(This poem is dedicated to those smart enough to understand that atheists don't hate god or blame him/them for bad things. They hate the irrationality that leads theists to credit god for the inner strength humans have to endure awful ordeals, but never to fault god for allowing those ordeals to occur.)

The Author of Liberty: An Interview

2007-01-11T00:07:00.000-05:00

Last night, in announcing that he had figured out a way to achieve the victory he wants in Iraq, President Bush revealed that he is placing is trust in "the Author of Liberty" to guide him. In His first sit-down interview, we spoke with the Author of Liberty about this influential work, and His other publications.
Q: Thanks for doing this interview.
A: No problem. Thanks for having me.
Q: You've written quite a few books over the years, under several different pen names. Why is that?
A: Well, I like to have each book taken on its own terms. And, frankly, it's kind of funny sometimes to see a particular book develop its own fan base. Then you end up with people arguing over which author really knows what's going on. It's pretty funny, if you think about it.
Q: So, did You hear the president's speech last night?
A: Actually, I helped write it.
Q: Really? That's pretty impressive. Is this your first collaboration together?
A: Oh, hell, no. We work together all the time. It's really not a big deal. He'll kind of call me up, very casual, and just ask me, you know, "what are some of the fundamental concepts of humanity?" So I tell him what I think. I mean, who's he going to ask for advice? His lower father?
Q: Are you worried that Liberty might not be selling well in Iraq?
A: I think we've all seen the sales figures and, yeah, they're not where We'd like them to be. Some of the guys in marketing suggested that we repackage Liberty, try to sell it as part of a box set with Education, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom of Religion and Minority Rights, but I didn't write those, so the copyright issues are sort of tied up with the lawyers right now. We'll work it out. Eventually, I mean.
Q: What made You decide to write Liberty?
A: Oh, honestly, I was just noodling around with a couple different concepts and that one just really seemed to click.
Q: What other concepts were You thinking about?
A: Um, I guess just, uh, non-liberty.
Q: So You went with liberty.
A: Seemed the way to go.
Q: I can actually see in some of Your earlier works, You seem to be wrestling with those two ideas. Can You walk me through Your decision-making there, how You decided to go with Liberty?
A: Well, I may not have specifically articulated Liberty in the clearest way right off the bat, but that's pretty much where I've always been.
Q: In Your best-seller 2,000 years ago, "The Book," You actually seem pretty much at home with the idea of slavery and even counseled people to respect the reign of Caesar, paying him tribute and so on. How would that square with Liberty?
A: You know, those were really different times. I mean, ask Strom Thurmond. He'll tell you. Really, the kind of Liberty I was addressing in "The Book" was much more of an internal, individual kind of Liberty. A freedom of conscience, if you will. So, uh...well, that's pretty much it.
Q: And yet, throughout "The Book," You Yourself are kind of telling people what to do. You know, when to plant, where to plant, what to eat, who to sleep with, who to worship, when to worship, how to worship, to worship. When exactly did Liberty of conscience, let alone nation-states, assume such importance for You?
A: I suppose I'd have to say it was the 18th century. I really wanted to inspire the American colonies to break away for themselves. I guess I sort of shed my authorial objectivity and took a real personal interest. I don't want to take too much credit. Those guys really took the ball and ran with it.
Q: Wasn't the concept of Liberty really advanced back then by people like Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and, especially, Thomas Paine, who didn't attribute the concept to You so much as to a rational, moral view of the universe?
A: Uh...maybe. I guess.
Q: You guess?
A: I mean, you know, sure, if you say so.
Q: Are You sure You actually wrote Liberty?
A: Of course I wrote Liberty! Hello!
Q: All right, then, what's the ISBN number?
A: What?
Q: The ISBN number of Liberty. What is it?
A: The IS...? Okay, okay! Look, all right? I didn't actually write Liberty, okay? Satisfied? Jesus.
Q: Really? Wow? This is kind of big news. What about all those other books?
A: Look, have you ever heard of ghostwriters? I'm not the only one who does it, you know.
Q: Wait, so You're saying, You pay these people to write these books so You can put Your name on them?
A: Dude, they don't even ask me! They just write whatever they want and slap my name on the cover! No release forms, nothing. I don't even get a taste.
Q: Well, have You ever thought of writing something Yourself?
A: Do you know how disciplined you have to be to be a writer, especially when you don't even exist?
Q: So, what, You can't stop these people from putting out books with Your name on them?
A: Look, most of them are actually very flattering, so I really don't see the harm.
Q: Does that mean we'll see more down the road?
A: Oh, yeah, at this point it's like the Hardy Boys.
Q: You mean because it's for kids, and their favorite one is always the first one they read?
A: No, I meant, because they're always coming out with new ones, and updating the old ones to keep up with the times.
Q: So, what's next for you?
A: Same old, same old.
Q: Which is?
A: Not existing, remember?
Q: Well, good luck with that.
A: Yeah, no kidding. Peace.

The Iraq Debate Debate

2007-01-09T03:33:00.000-05:00

So, you know how the president is going to reveal his thinking about Iraq on Wednesday night, and then the nation will have a chance to engage in serious debate about Iraq and the way forward (or backward or sideways)?

Yeah, well, I've got bad news for you...

At Monday's media conference, Tony Snow said Mr. Bush is "very close" to wrapping up all the details of his plan for Iraq.

However, while James Baker, the U.S. Congress, the media and the American people have been vigorously debating what to do in Iraq for months (and, obviously, for years), the president has refused to enter into that debate. In fact, Snow reiterated that refusal Monday:

...when the President's plan becomes known in detail, then people will be able to talk sensibly about the details and about how the pieces fit together. At this point, I think -- and Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi will have their opportunities to express what they think is necessary for success in Iraq and how they define success. They'll have their opportunity to talk about how they support troops and what they think the troops need. So all of that will be part of the debate.

In other words, we shouldn't be getting into debate based on speculation about what the president's plan might be until we know what the president's plan actually is. He even says: "...wait until you see the whole package and then the debate will begin."

What makes Snow and the White House fundamentally un-American is a little fact that the media didn't seem to pick up on Monday -- namely, that after the president unveils his plan on Wednesday, it'll be too late for debate! Snow himself seems to have performed an act of internal mental dissociation from this fact, referring to the plan as "what the President is proposing." Proposing? A proposal is something the proposee has the option of rejecting. Anyone think that's what we're gonna get Wednesday?

Anyone--especially Tony Snow--who thinks the president will unveil his plan, and then say, "well, what do you think? Mull it over, get back to me and we can bat it around a little before going ahead with anything," is just as deluded as the people who get their guidance from a higher father.

Debate would have been good. Debate would have been American. We're still so used to the concept of debate that it didn't even occur to us, or the media, that the president's speech won't be the start of debate. It'll be the end.

It's just too bad that no one in the media called Snow on having it both ways--opting out of the debate before announcing the plan, because it wasn't ready yet...and opting out of meaningful debate afterward, because by then the debate will be moot.

Signing Statements May Define Battle Over Congressional Oversight

2007-01-09T02:56:00.000-05:00

At a time when the arrival of a Democratic Congress, and President Bush's appointment of a Nixon/Reagan veteran as White House counsel, have raised intense speculation about an imminent constitutional showdown regarding oversight and access to information, a survey of White House signing statements reveals that the president has attempted to wall off Congress from information regarding a wide array of subjects, straying far from issues of national security.

Mr. Bush has famously used his signing statements to claim executive leeway on legislation concerning issues of national security, such as the McCain Detainee Amendment and, as revealed by the New York Daily News, even the ability to open mail without a warrant.

The Daily News story emerged only this year, despite the fact that the signing statement was posted online in December, with apparently no public reaction.

Now, a review of other statements posted online throughout the Bush presidency, shows that Mr. Bush has for years been staking a claim to unprecedented levels of secrecy on issues that have nothing to do with national security, ranging from Medicare to motor-vehicle taxation.

"National security" has long been a favorite refuge of presidents seeking to withhold information from Congress and the public. But a search of dozens of signing statements posted online at WhiteHouse.gov reveals that Mr. Bush repeatedly claims the right to withhold information not just for reasons of national security, but for virtually any reason at all, including:

- Impairing foreign relations (here, here and here),

- Impairing the performance of the Executive's constitutional duties (here, here, here, here, here, here and here),

- Impairing the deliberative processes of the Executive (here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

It should be noted that virtually any information that reflects poorly on the White House could be interpreted as potentially impairing foreign relations. Similarly, any information that reflects poorly on the White House could be construed to impair the president's political heft and thus his ability to do his job. Likewise, damaging information about White House decision-making could impair the deliberative process.

Critics of the White House argue that some information should be revealed precisely so that the White House will pay a price for it, even--or especially--if it impinges upon presidential power. In constitutional terms, impairing the Executive branch is supposed to be one of the central functions of the Legislative branch.

One signing statement even rejects a requirement for information on the basis that disclosing such information might "impair the performance of the Executive's constitutional duties, including the conduct of investigations and prosecutions to take care that the laws be faithfully executed." In other words, the president declined to faithfully execute the law on the grounds it might prevent him from faithfully executing the law.

In fact, even as he has signed bill after bill into law, Mr. Bush has frequently attempted to rewrite portions of those laws that require officials in the executive branch to convey information to Congress or to congressional appointees. Some of the issues on which Mr. Bush has rewritten U.S. laws to block congressional attempts at oversight include:

- U.S. trade, including a provision of the signing statement that converts recognition of human-rights standards from a legislated mandate to a presidential prerogative.

- Prosecutorial decision-making at the Dept. of Justice.

- Justice Department activities related to the constitutionality of laws.

- Crime statistics.

- Investigations of alleged crimes or fraud related to specific National Transportation Safety Board projects.

- Medicare.

- Transportation issues, including motor-vehicle taxation and infrastructure financing.

- Proposed mission changes for agencies within the Department of Veterans Affairs.

- Taiwan's participation in the World Health Organization, the congressional reporting on which Mr. Bush unilaterally reduces from a requirement to "a matter of comity."

- NASA plans, recommendations and budget requests.

Virtually every signing statement was issued regarding laws passed by a Republican Congress. For that reason, Mr. Bush's claim to have the power to rewrite the law has rarely been challenged.

Now that Democrats are in power and vowing to subject administration activities of the past few years to rigorous scrutiny, it remains to be seen which and how many of these signing statements will be challenged, either in court or with new legislation. Furthermore, the Democrats can be expected to send Mr. Bush plenty of new legislation of their own.

It's not yet clear whether Democrats will attempt either to inoculate their bills against signing statements with specific provisions addressing and precluding them, or to rescue their bills by challenging any signing statements in court after the fact.

In either case, both past and future signing statements on the presidential prerogative to withhold information specifically called for by law can be expected to figure prominently at the center of the coming battle over congressional oversight of the executive branch.

Keith Ellison: Tip of the Iceberg

2007-01-01T23:05:00.001-05:00

While everyone goes ooh and ah over new Rep. Keith Ellison's choice of magic book to place his hand upon when he says the magic words that will make the man in the sky ensure that he keeps his promise, folks seem to have missed something. Ellison's status as the first Muslim in the House was just the tip of the iceberg with this new Congress. There's an even bigger milestone that I haven't seen much mention of (with one exception).

In Susan Jacoby's essential "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism," she quotes a North Carolina minister's objection to the proposed U.S. Constitution's ban on religious tests for officeholders. He called it, "an invitation for Jews and pagans of every kind to come among us."

Meet Hank Johnson and Mazie K. Hirono. They're two other members of the 110th Congress who are doing something no one in Congress has done before. Not even Ellison.

They don't believe in God. Not the Judeo-Christian God. Not the Muslim God. They're Buddhists. The first ever in Congress.

For the first time, as far as I can tell, bouncing around adherents.com, the U.S. Congress as of Thursday will now include as members representatives who openly do not subscribe to any version of monotheism.

Johnson is from Georgia (4th district), for Christ's sake. And check out Hirono. She's from Hawaii. What does Hawaii's House Caucus look like in the 110th Congress?

Mazie K. Hirono -- Buddhist.
Neil Abercrombie -- "Non-Affiliated."

Hawaii only has two districts in the House. Neither member of the Hawaii Caucus will be an avowed member of Judeo-Christianity.

In fact, five other members of the House are also listed as "Non-Affiliated" by Americans for Religious Liberty. There's Mark Udall (CO-2), whose dad was raised Mormon and eventually decided he had no use for organized religion. His official bio makes no mention of a god or even church.

Then there's John Olver (MA-1), who's not only non-affiliated, he's a chemistry professor from MIT. Any guesses whether he believes in the god of Judeo-Islamo-Christianity? He's a Massachusetts Democrat, in office since 1991. His seat his safe--it's about time someone asked him point blank.

John Tierney (MA-6) is also listed by ARL as non-affiliated, and doesn't seem to have any overt religious references on his site, either. The others are Earl Blumenauer (OR-3), and Tammy Baldwin (WI-2), who, God bless her, listed her religious affiliation as GLBT. Unless that's a new version of the tetragrammaton, I'm guessing she doesn't have much use for magic super-powers-in-the-sky.

Oh, and according to veteran Washington reporter Jack Germond, speaking just last year, the secret atheists in Congress hide their lack of belief in magic by calling themselves Unitarians. As per adherents.com, Germond is outing Sen. Kent Conrad, and/or Reps. Pete Stark and Nancy Johnson.

Toss in Mr. Ellison, of Minnesota's fifth district, and you're now talking about two non-theists in the House, one non-Judeo-Christian monotheist, six more possible non-theists and two allegedly possibly secret atheists. Add in Conrad in the Senate, and you have possibly as many as 12 members of the 110th Congress who do not subscribe to a Judeo-Christian worldview. By my calculation, that's more than two percent of the new Congress. One in 50. That's still woefully disproportionate to the vast (and growing) percentage of the U.S. population that's tossed off the chains of monotheism. But it's also a staggering leap at a time when the mainstream media is helplessly enamored of the faith-in-politics storyline.

Now, let's see which journalist has the brains and/or nads to start outing the Rational 12.

Jon Meachams and the Parallel Universes

2006-12-31T10:10:00.000-05:00

Newsweek God Boy Jon Meacham tells Drudge that his magazine tomorrow is slapping Gerry Ford, rather than Saddam Hussein, on the cover, because Hussein's "death in 2006 matters less than his removal in 2003 does." As if Ford's death in 2006 matters MORE than his removal in 1977 did?

It's this kind of thinking (i.e., non-) that has so thoroughly defined the Ford coverage. Over on Salon.com, Walter Shapiro tells us that "only the most stubborn and unyielding Nixon haters still question whether the cleanse-the-air pardon was justified." The problem is, the pardon didn't "cleanse" the air. The pardon was Lysol.

Every don't-hate-me-cuz-I'm-liberal pundit is out there now saying, "yes, of course, I see now that the pardon was the wise thing to do, so that we as a nation could heal." Only Nixon-haters, we are told, think otherwise.

The problem with this is that the only way you can know that a pardon "healed" this country better than a trial would have, is if you saw the trial, and the after-effects of it. The only people who have done that are those such as the Flash and the Fantastic Four who are capable of casual travel to parallel universes.

And everyone's prognostications about a trial seem to stop with the trial itself. The trial would be ugly. The two parties would fight over it. People would say mean things. Yeah? So? Then what?

Let's check out Earth-Nixon for ourselves. Maybe there's an ugly trial. Partisan divides run deeper than they did during Earth-Pardon's Reagan-Carter campaign. If anything, conservatives would be even more ticked off than they were. So let's assume Reagan still carries the day.

Is it maybe, just slightly possible that one of the tertiary or, um, four-iary, or five-iary effects of a Nixon trial -- along with humiliating testimony, certainty of guilt and actual punishment -- might have been a chastening of those who sought to expand executive power? Specifically, is it possible that the Nixon/Ford veterans who argued even back in the '70s that the White House can do whatever it wants, might have been humbled or scared enough to rein in those impulses? Or even genuinely question them?

If so, is it possible--just maybe--that by the year 2000, neither Ford/Nixon veteran Donald Rumsfeld nor Dick Cheney would be quite so eager to push their inexperienced new president to unprecedented heights of executive hubris and constitutional violation? I don't know. We'll never know. All the editorial we's out there do seem to know is that...the pardon was right.

If Americans Don't Wake Up There Will Be Many More Christians Elected to Office

2006-12-24T12:01:00.000-05:00

Thank you for your recent communication. When I raise my hand to take the oath on Swearing In Day, I will have the Constitution in mind and no religious text in my other hand. I do not subscribe to using the Koran in any way. Or the Torah. Or the Bible (unless someone fixes it). Virgil Goode, The Christian Representative from Virginia, was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Thomas Jefferson position on separation there will likely be many more Christians elected to office and demanding the use of the Bible. We need to stop eroding separation totally and respect no establishment of religion and end the diversity faith policy pushed hard by President Bush and allowing many persons from the Middle Ages to come to this country. I fear that in the next century we will have many more Christians in the United States if we do not adopt the strict separation policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped.

The Ten Commandments and “In God We Trust” are off the wall. A Christian student came by the office and asked why I did not have anything on my wall about the Bible. My response was clear, “As long as I have the honor of representing the citizens of America as the United States President, The Bible is not going to be on the wall of my office.” Thank you again for your email and thoughts.

Sincerely yours,
Thomas Jefferson
931 Thomas Jefferson Parkway
Charlottesville, VA 22902

The Person of the Year Is Dead

2006-12-16T22:37:00.000-05:00

Time Magazine's Person of the Year for 2006 is (yawn) YOU! Cuz you, y'know, did stuff. You posted videos on YouTube and, um, voted and stuff.

If it feels like another Time Magazine wimp-out, well, that astuteness is just one reason why YOU are Person of the Year.
Five out of the last six Persons of the Year have been bogus, safe, avoid-a-choices. The worst, of course, was Rudolph Giuliani in 2001. Yeah, sorry, no. That would be Osama bin Laden. If anyone's unclear on this, just build yourself a time machine and check out the history books of the future.

We all know that Time's ostensible criteria is not wonderfulness but impact, right? Not a moral choice, but, theoretically, a journalistic choice.

After Giuliani, we've had WHISTLEBLOWERS, SOLDIERS and THREE RICH PHILANTHROPISTS. The whistleblowers might've qualified if we'd had a Congress interested in whistles at the time. The soldiers might have qualified if they had done something other than what they were instructed to do by the commander-in-chief at the time (whose invasion of Iraq in 2003 is really the one thing that historically will justify Bush ever having been Person of the Year). Bono and Bill Gates? And, um, Mrs. Bill Gates?

Yeah, I think the world is still reverberating with the impact of their, um, stuff. What Time Magazine should have done was chosen one or a few of the architects of the Democratic seizure of both houses of Congress. You know -- the way they did when Newt Gingrich spearheaded a LESS successful coup. Howard Dean would have been the obvious choice, though Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer would have been interesting, provocative additions, too.

See, Time seems to have made the mistake of forgetting they're looking for whomever has had the greatest PLURALITY of impact. In other words, assuming no one was responsible for more than 50 percent of the world's direction in a given year (the way, say, bin Laden was), then you go for whomever had not the majority of the impact, but more impact than anyone else.

Time Magazine has now succumbed to what would have been a brilliant Onion reductio ad absurdum of its wussyish inability to actually make a choice the past few years. They can't choose anyone, so they choose everyone. There's only one place to go from here.

In the year 2007, Time will actually have to return to doing journalism and choose whomever actually has the greatest impact on the year, or just give in and name Everything Ever as 2007's Person of the Year.

Oh, and I don't want to appear ungrateful to Time, of course, so, um, thanks for the recognition. It's going on the resume.

Baracklash

2006-12-13T11:09:00.000-05:00

This actually isn't about Barack Obama. It's about...BARACK OBAMA. It's about the fact that, if Barack Obama is a presidential frontrunner, the Democratic Party is in trouble. I don't mean they're in electoral trouble because Obama is unelectable. He seems quite electable to me.

I mean that his status as a frontrunner indicates that the party has failed to use the example of the past six years to redefine the paradigm of presidential candidates and electability. George W. Bush won, in large part, because he had (to some people) more charisma than Gore or Kerry. He also won because he knew how to treat the media: Like dirt. Gore and Kerry treated the media as if they deserved respect, which, of course, the media knew not to be true and therefore reciprocated with contempt. Paging Groucho Marx.

Obama hasn't even announced (I'm not convinced he will, either) and already some of the savvier observers out there are giving the media shit for their boosterism. Nicole at Crooks and Liars thinks the media attention is disproportionate to the electoral support. And on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart's "correspondent" Samantha Bee gushed about Obama's Jesusian qualities.

In other words, he's winning on all the things the media wants in a candidate. By now, the Democrats should have changed the way the media and the public think about their candidates. That a senator with two years of experience in national politics is considered a frontrunner tells me that we're still -- despite Tora Bora, Iraq and Katrina -- treating this job as though it were class president.

It's time we started choosing presidents the way we would brain surgeons--based on track record, experience and competence, not on whether we'd want to have a beer with them. If Democrats don't start insisting on those boring criteria, it's only a matter of time until the Republicans whip up a machine that's better at generating flashy, pizzazzy candidates primed to lure away all the voters responding to whatever's sparkly and shiny.

Let God Sort 'Em Out

2006-12-10T22:53:00.000-05:00

I don't know if what I'm about to say is right or not. I'm not advocating it as a thought-out plan that I can defend rationally. This is an emotional response to Iraq, though I'd be interested in hearing what a political/historical/rational rebuttal would be.

David Brooks' Sunday column in the New York Times (free here) looks back from some unspecified day in the future to assess the damage done by a U.S. pullout from Iraq circa next year. As you might expect, the Middle East has fallen apart...from its, um, y'know, terrific current state.

I've opposed the Iraq War from the start. Call me nuts, but as a New Yorker, I was kind of interested in finishing the fucking job in Afghanistan/Pakistan. That said, once we went in to Iraq and fucked the place up, in a weird kind of way, the U.S. failure there made me, in essence, pro-war. Meaning, in Powell's phrase, I bought the idea that "we broke it, we bought it." I thought we had a moral obligation to protect the Iraqis from the chaotic forces we had unleashed. Now, it seems pretty clear, the Iraqis want us out.

And I'm a lot less sure these days that they, or the rest of the Middle East, deserve having American blood spilled to preserve their stability. And the reason for that is the rise of the militias. I'm sure there are lots, maybe millions, of Iraqis who embody the ideal Iraqi we were told about: The secular, free-market, tolerant, modernist Iraqi. There just aren't enough of them willing to fight for that kind of society.

So, to David Brooks, I'm inclined to say, basically, bring it on. Let the Middle East go. If they want to kill each other over which descendant of Mohammed is Allah's real best buddy, well, then--what's the phrase?--fuck 'em. Are we really worried about what these messed up morons would do if they got a nation-state of their own?

Please.

At least we'd know where to find them. And I wouldn't mind giving Osama bin Laden the added burden of having to keep the potholes filled in whatever backwater state would have him as boss. What Bush has wrong about Iraq is that democracy is not a cure-all. The founding fathers knew you need more than just democracy. You need things like freedom of the press and religion. You need education.

Without those things, democracy can yield leaders like Hezbollah and Muqtada al-Sadr. The founding fathers also said you get the leaders you deserve. Maybe it's time to give radical, fundamentalist Islam a shot at the big time. If that's the way Iraq wants to go, or any other country, maybe we should allow the world to see how it fares. Not like Iran -- where the zealots inherited a western-style infrastructure in toto -- but starting fresh.

I think radical, fundamentalist Islam is incompatible with a successful nation-state. I don't think Iran's going to make it for the long haul in its current state.

And if such a state were successful, then what? Fight us? Fight Europe? Good. Any bets on how long that conflict would last?

I don't know, maybe all this makes me a conservative, or even a neo-con, but I do think to some extent the people of a society are responsible for the leadership they tolerate. If the Iraqis don't want us there, and don't have the collective will to support secular institutions, well, shit, what are we doing there?

I'm not saying we shouldn't have some kind of mechanism for helping or extricating modernist Iraqis if their fellow countrymen want to turn their country into a war of rival religious factions, but to keep propping up a TYPE of society that so few of them seem committed to (and voter turnout is not, as President Bush would suggest, endorsement of a TYPE of democracy, just of their willingness to choose) for such ill-defined goals seems criminal at this point.

Islamic fundamentalism wants a chance to run countries. Lots of Arab Muslims want to live in such a country.

Osama bin Laden was a bigger threat to us than Afghanistan was. As we saw, it's a lot easier to fight the Taliban. Maybe if we had more Talibans, we'd have fewer bin Ladens.

At least we'd know where to drop the bombs. If anyone wants to talk me off the ledge, I'm open to it.

Kristof's Laziness and Lies

2006-12-03T12:19:00.000-05:00

Nicholas Kristof's meek, predictable, unintelligent column in today's New York Times is headlined, unironically, "A Modest Proposal for a Truce on Religion." I say unironically, because whoever wrote the headline seems to be oblivious to the fact that "A Modest Proposal" was, in fact, an awful, hideous, stupid idea. As is Kristof's.

For one thing, the very concept of calling for a "truce" is disingenuous. A "truce" is generally something that benefits and harms both sides equally. Stop fighting, a truce says. But what Kristof is actually calling for is an end to the debate between those who argue that a truce is possible, and those who say it isn't. Which, of course, puts Kristof on the side of those who say a truce is possible.

Which side is that? The religious side, of course. There are three possible positions to take on atheism/reason/science vs. religion/faith/theism. You can argue that atheism/reason/science is right -- which some people do today. You can argue that both have their place -- which many/most people do today. Or you can argue that religion/faith/theism is right -- which virtually no one does today.

BECAUSE THAT VIEW LOST.

The idea that religion/faith/theism is right, without a place for atheism/reason/science, had a pretty good run. We now know it as the Dark Ages. Against religion's best efforts, the idea that humanity could/should rely on something other than faith to advance itself took hold in the Enlightenment.

That left religion two options: Give up, or start pushing the idea that, hey, it's a big world, there's plenty of room for our two contradictory epistemological systems to BOTH be right! With help from folks like Steven Jay Gould, eager to secure some safe territory for science, this view has come to predominate.

It has lots of appeal, because it LOOKS like moderation or compromise. Which may be fine things when you're not talking about determining objective truth. But it was a bogus compromise back when science needed it to survive, and it's a bogus one now that religion needs it, too.

Kristof exposes his bias, and agenda, in several lines. He cites both Richard Dawkins and a web site arguing that God hates amputees, to make the case that there is an "an increasingly assertive, often obnoxious atheist offensive...a militant, in-your-face brand of atheism that he and others are proselytizing for."

Assertive? Sure, but...so? Obnoxious? Compared to what? Godhatesfags.com? Pat Robertson? I'm not sure how Kristof defines obnoxiousness when he applies it to the side that uses sarcasm rather than to the side that says atheists are going to Hell.

Then he takes on the "acerbic" Sam Harris. What awful thing does Harris say?

Mr. Harris mocks conservative Christians for opposing abortion, writing: “20 percent of all recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage. There is an obvious truth here that cries out for acknowledgment: if God exists, He is the most prolific abortionist of all.”

There's no mockery there. There's no nyah, nyah. There's no name-calling. There's an argument. Kristof has bought into the lie that applying reason or logic to religious claims is out of line somehow. But if we're supposed to accept Kristof's claim that the two can coincide, shouldn't we ALWAYS apply reason to religion, in order to determine which parts of the world fall into which jurisdiction?

After referring to fundamentalist religions, Kristof makes this comparison: "Yet the tone of this Charge of the Atheist Brigade is often just as intolerant — and mean. It’s contemptuous and even ... a bit fundamentalist."

Intolerant -- and mean. Contemputous...fundamentalist. Is Kristof saying that the (non-existent) Atheist Brigade's methods are all these things? Their legislative agenda? No. Their tone. Boo-fucking-hoo. Jesus, grow up.

Kristof overlooks the obvious question: Are they RIGHT? If they're wrong, hit them on that. But if they're right, then, duh, is there any reason their "tone" shouldn't be intolerant or contemptuous? Of course, dealing with whether they're RIGHT would be a lot tougher for Kristof. He'd have to deal with tough things like science and facts. Not to mention public outcry.

So he takes the classic easy-media-way-out: Call for a truce between two sides whose positions can and should, instead, be rationally debated and assessed. But Kristof is too focused on debating at the level of the average high-school sophomore:

Granted, religious figures have been involved throughout history in the worst kinds of atrocities. But as Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot show, so have atheists.

Moreover, for all the slaughters in the name of religion over the centuries, there is another side of the ledger. Every time I travel in the poorest parts of Africa, I see missionary hospitals that are the only source of assistance to desperate people.

Okay, maybe we can address these tired and moronic points once and for all. Zedong, Stalin and Pol Pot might or might not have been atheists. What's meaningful is not whether they as individuals were, but whether they as leaders were. They were not. To whatever extent they eradicated religion in their regimes (and Stalin let it back in when it served his ends -- proving that atheism was not his end), it was to the same extent that they eradicated, co-opted or seized control of every other social institution. Does anyone really think that if the United Atheist Alliance had been a powerful political force in Cambodia -- lobbying for legislation, pushing policies, endorsing candidates, whatever -- that Pol Pot would have said, "Keep up the good work, guys! I'll be over here oppressing everyone else if you need me!"

Atheism isn't right or necessary or valuable because it will eradicate all evil in the world. It's just as stupid to advance an anti-atheist argument on that basis as it is to argue against a cure for cancer because there will still be AIDS. And the fact that religious people in religious institutions do good certainly doesn't undermine the argument that the world would be better off without religion.

Who knows, maybe if more people understood that goodness doesn't come from god, we might make it easier for other people to join and form organizations devoted to doing good. We might even use the collective power of our governments to do so. And even if there were some good in the world that religion -- and only religion -- could bring us, that still doesn't justify propagating or even tolerating it. Without heroin we wouldn't have the works of William S. Burroughs. Kristof should not be in the business of weighing the relative benefits of believing in something, he should have the balls to assess whether that thing is true or not.

He doesn't, which is why he closes with this laughable observation:

Now that the Christian Right has largely retreated from the culture wars, let’s hope that the Atheist Left doesn’t revive them. We’ve suffered enough from religious intolerance that the last thing the world needs is irreligious intolerance.

For one thing, who knew that the Christian Right had largely retreated from the culture wars? You'd think that kind of thing would have merited coverage on the front page of Kristof's paper. No such luck.

But more importantly, Kristof closes with the lie that atheists are just as intolerant as the religiously intolerant. What Dawkins and Harris and others won't tolerate is the notion that we're supposed to treat religious beliefs as though they have passed the laugh test. Other than that, Kristof's implication that the intolerance of both sides is somehow equal is the kind of false, poisonous slur that's only tolerated by people unwilling to do the hard work of following the facts.

Webb v. Bush: Who Swung First?

2006-12-01T00:30:00.000-05:00

The big debate, spurred by George Will's obtuse column, over whether incoming Sen. Jim Webb was rude to Pres. Bush in their exchange about Iraq, ignores the fact that Bush was rude first.

As Will put it, Bush merely "asked a civil and caring question, as one parent to another." If that were the case, Will would be right: Webb would have been rude.

But Will is wrong. Bush is not "one parent" asking a "civil and caring question." Bush is the man who put Webb's son in harm's way. If one parent who had put another parent's son in a dangerous situation then approached that parent to inquire about how the son was doing in that dangerous situation, the natural response of ANY parent would be what Webb's instincts told him to do: Belt him in the face.

The reason Bush asked this question is not that he is civil and/or caring (does anyone really still think either?) but that he is a bully. It was a bully's question because Bush instinctively understood that he could ask it safely behind the protection of the same office he abused to put Webb's son in jeopardy.

Anyone who gets Bush should understand the following: Bush was testing Webb. Bush was pushing Webb to see how much deference the presidency would buy him.

He got his answer.

Noonan

2006-10-28T10:34:00.000-05:00

Despite the proliferation of flat-out wrong sweeping generalities about, um, all 300 million Americans, Peggy Noonan's latest represents not just yet another crack in the theocon foundation, but a whistleblower's report that some of the very pieces of the foundation want it to crumble, too.

"United 93" - Why We're Not Ready

2006-04-14T16:17:00.000-05:00

"United 93" opens next week. But even before the critics got to see it, the first reviews were in. "Too soon," came the cry, literally, from the audience watching the trailers. "We're not ready," said the headlines.

Too soon. We're not ready.

These aren't complaints about the movie. It wasn't, "Too graphic!" Or, "You're insensitive!" The complaints about the movie were statements about us. It's too soon for us. We're not ready.

It's the same lament I used to have when I had failed to prepare for a test. I hadn't done my homework. I hadn't mastered the lessons. I hadn't read the books. It was too soon. I wasn't ready.

That wasn't the case after Pearl Harbor. "Remember Pearl Harbor" opened on May 18, 1942. That was less than six months after Japanese fighter planes had swarmed over American soil, killing almost 2500 people and destroying 12 American warships and 188 American planes. Well before the war even ended, it was the subject of countless films. America wasn't just ready for those films, they were hungering for them.

Sixty years later, aren't we supposed to be more inured to violence? Aren't we more sophisticated about our art, our visual media? What happened to that ironic distance we hide behind? If any audience should be able to stomach an intense account of an attack on our nation, shouldn't it be the media-savvy sophisticates of 2006, rather than the rubes of 1942? What's the difference between then and now?

The difference is pretty simple, actually. In the 1940s, America, government and populace alike, responded with terrible and awesome resolve, united in a purpose that assumed primary importance in everyone's lives. Four years after Pearl Harbor, America and its allies had defeated the enemy by taking the fight to them. On the home front, civilians bought war bonds. They planted Victory Gardens (which eventually would supply an astounding 40% of domestically consumed vegetables for the purpose of allowing the military to purchase canned vegetables cheaper). They rationed everything: Paper, rubber, food. They rationed food, ferchrissakes.

What have we done? How have we earned the sacrifice of United flight 93?

We have rationed nothing. Not even the oil that pays the terrorists' bills.

When our military had the killers of September 11th cornered at Tora Bora, our government backed off, and allowed them to escape. But we scoffed at the men who told us that, and re-elected that government anyway.

For years since, we have allowed the killers of September 11th safe harbor in Pakistan, because our government does not want to upset the political balance there. But out of ignorance or apathy, we go along with our government's fiction that Pakistan is an ally. And we re-elected that government anyway.

Our government exploited our fear and grief to sell us on a military goal they had cherished since well before September 11th. And when a few men and women dared to tell us the truth, to object to this craven desecration of flight 93's sacrifice, our leaders belittled them or questioned the one thing that obligated them to speak up: Their patriotism.

Instead of rejecting use of the weapon responsible for September 11th, religious fundamentalism, our government exalted and embraced it, claiming it as a basis for government policy.

Instead of admitting laxity and culpability in the days before September 11th, our government tried to cover up the truths. And even after those truths were revealed in documents such as the Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6, 2001, we re-elected that government.

Instead of demanding that our media return to its original intended function of keeping us informed about the world in which we were now supposed to be fighting a deadly struggle, within a few months we embraced the pap that was so much easier to produce.

And our media embraced and sold the conceit that they were refraining from showing the awful toll of war -- bodies falling from skyscrapers, carnage on the ground -- in order to protect our delicate sensibilities. In fact, they acted out of fear that we would judge them not as responsible journalists -- showing us painful but important images -- but as the entertainers they had become, focused on trivia and prurience and therefore suspect in their motives for showing us anything shocking or horrific. And, in fact, serving witness to the awful fate of our fellow Americans would have been the least we could have done and, at best, might actually have motivated sufficient anger and passion to guarantee an effective, sustained, meaningful response to the attack. Thankful for not having to bear the burden of those awful images, we congratulated our media for protecting our fragile eyes.

And that made it easier to return to watching pap. Why shouldn't we, when we never had to confront the specific realities of what had happened to 3,000 Americans?

If our government was failing to inspect more than 1 in 20 of the cargo containers entering America's ports, we didn't mind. We didn't even care enough to know about it.

If it took another planeload of civilians -- rather than aviation security -- to stop Richard Reid even after September 11, could we be bothered to hold a single agency accountable? To demand even one firing, let alone a transfer? Apparently not.

And when another terrorist struck on American soil, targeting not just civilians but citadels of our government with anthrax, were we able to stop our attackers or even identify them? Did we demand accountability among those charged with defending us?

And after such vulnerabilities were exposed, what did we do to prepare? Four years later, a simple thing like preparation of mobile hospitals goes unfinished.

And if we can't be bothered to remain informed about our enemy, or our own efforts or lack thereof to thwart the enemy, how do honor the heroes of September 11th?

Pat Tillman sacrificed fame and fortune and fun in professional sports to serve his country in its response to September 11th. But our government sent him to Iraq. And when he finally got to Afghanistan, his death by friendly fire was covered up by the military. And covered up again. And again.

And though Pat Tillman questioned both religion and the existence of a god, our media continued to spoonfeed us one of our favorite slurs -- no atheists in foxholes -- slandering Pat Tillman as he lay in the dirt unable to defend himself against the very people he died defending.

And to this day, the people he died defending consider him -- and anyone who dares reject their god -- as morally inferior even to those followers of the same faith that motivated September 11th.

New York City Detective James Zadroga gave his life for the city, succumbing this year to the effects of serving for hundreds of hours at Ground Zero. But even while our government was reaping political capital from New York's agonies, its leaders were lying to James and to the stricken city about the aid they would give us and about the very safety of that site. Their lies literally added to the death toll.

And what about the heroes of flight 93 themselves? They died to defend a free society. And yet, their sacrifice was invoked as somehow justifying measure after measure designed to restrict our freedoms. And because we lacked the bravery that arose on board flight 93, we shrank from the prospect of choosing freedom over security.

And then there's Mark Bingham. He was a rugby player on board flight 93. He assisted in rebelling against the hijackers. He gave his life to defend America's lawmakers, the targets of those hijackers. So how did they repay him? They condemned him. They said that Bingham didn't love the right way. They said that Bingham, were he alive today, would have no right, should have no right, to marry whomever he wanted. They used the gift he had died to give them -- their very lives -- to slander him for his love. And we re-elected them.

We spat on Pat Tillman's grave. We killed James Zadroga. We defamed Mark Bingham's love. Of course some of us aren't ready to experience the sacrifice of flight 93. We have squandered that sacrifice. Our cowardice made it a vain one. At every opportunity we have had to act nobly, to choose freedom, to honor the ideals of self-sacrifice and dedication to a cause, we have chosen the path of scared, lazy, callow children.

I know I haven't done all I could. And I've known a huge and awful shame at America's failure to prove worthy of the sacrifices of September 11th. I don't know whether I'll watch this movie. But if I don't, it won't be because they were wrong to make it. It will be because I and my country haven't done what we should have by now. Of course it's too soon. Of course we're not ready. We will never be ready, until we've earned it.

Godless

2006-04-10T09:15:00.000-05:00

Drudge Report is reporting that Ann Coulter's new book is entitled, "Godless." It's meant, of course, as a slur. And the problem with Democrats is that that's how they'll take it. They'll respond defensively. Because they haven't learned a thing from the last two elections.

President Bush won by not apologizing for what he was. But Democrats will sputter and insist, "We're not godless! We love God! Almost as much as you do!"

Which, of course, is precisely the wrong way for them to reply. What they should say is, "Yes, some of us are godless. Some of us aren't sure about God. Some of us believe in God with all their hearts. Our politics don't impose anyone's god on anyone else. Our politics are true to the Constitution of the United States, not someone's personal idea of what god wants. If our politics are godless, if our party is godless, it's because our party has room for everyone's idea of god, whatever it might be."

The way to beat the Christian Right is to marginalize it, to claim everyone (you know: The MAJORITY OF AMERICA) who doesn't self-identify as Christian Right. Making a blatantly disingenuous play for Christian votes is the one thing guaranteed to fail.

Libby's Secret Target: It Wasn't Just Wilson

2006-04-08T11:30:00.000-05:00

Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff, I. Lewis Libby, wasn't just out to sink the credibility of Joseph Wilson when he met with New York Times Reporter Judith Miller on July 8, 2003. He had another target, too.

We've known for a while that Miller agreed to falsely attribute the information Libby fed her to a "former Hill staffer." But the new filing by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, as revealed by the New York Sun, makes clear not only that Libby specifically requested to be identified as a "former Hill staffer," but, according to Fitzgerald:

In fact, on July 8, defendant spoke with Miller about Mr. Wilson after requesting that attribution of his remarks be changed to “former Hill staffer.”

Changed. Intriguingly, Fitzgerald never identifies what attibution Libby previously requested. Was it "White House insider"? "Senior White House official"? "A knowledgeable source in the executive branch"?

Why a "former Hill staffer"? Why not a former Defense Dept. staffer? Or a former State Dept. staffer? He's worked for both. If Libby wanted the intelligence on Iraq to be seen as credible, why not attribute it to one of them, either of which would be closer to the source of the information than the Hill?

It's true, Libby's work as a "former Hill staffer" was more recent. But let's look at a chronology of his work history to see whether that's really sufficient to make it an appropriate way to attribute intelligence about Iraq:

2001-2005 - Assistant to the President, chief of staff to the Vice President and national security affairs adviser to the Vice President
2000 - Adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney in the 2000 presidential campaign
1995-2001 - Dechert, Price & Rhoads, Attorney
1992-1995 - U.S. Department of Defense, deputy under secretary-policy
1989-1992 - U.S. Department of Defense, deputy undersecretary-strategy and resources
1985-1989 - Dickstein, Shapiro & Morin, attorney
1982-1985 - US Department of State, Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, special projects director
1981-1982 - US Department of State, policy planning staff, member

Libby's congressional staff position doesn't even rate a mention. Is it possible that he lied to Miller, or that he and Miller agreed to publish a blatant falsehood by referring to him as a "former Hill staffer"? Not exactly.

The official appendix of the Cox Committee confirms that Libby served as a "legal advisor." But the committee's appendix also specifically says that it was in operation for a "limited time...(effectively from July 1998 to the end of December 1998)..." Six months. And not only was it just six months, but those six months came while he had a day job as an attorney. So it could hardly have been a full-time effort.

And what was the Cox Committee investigating, anyway? Iraq? Proliferation of WMDs? After all, that would explain why Libby's work with them would be relevant to his citation as a source for Iraq intelligence. Here's how the committee report itself explains its mission (starting with its official title):

The Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China (the Select Committee) was established pursuant to House Resolution 463, adopted on June 18, 1998 (included at Appendix C). The Resolution authorized the Select Committee to investigate a broad range of issues relating to the transfer of U.S. technology to the People's Republic of China.

Not Iraq. Not the Middle East. The People's Republic of China.

So, six months of work, on a part-time basis, with no relevance to Iraq, eight years ago. How and why would Libby choose this particular part of his life for Miller to use in identifying to the world the source of classified information about Iraq?

The answer is not just to insulate the White House. He could have done that in ways that would have given the Iraq intelligence more credibility. It's not that he views his Hill position as particularly important work. On the site where he's trying to drum up support and cash, his time at the House of Representatives is listed last.

He chose Congress because the White House has consistently tried to undermine legislative oversight of the executive branch by trying to make Americans think members of Congress can not be trusted with classified information, that Congress might even leak classified information, for political purposes. President Bush has tried to push this notion in order to win support for his attempts to escape congressional oversight.

President Bush limited what his staff are allowed to tell Congress (see the memo here). He disputed legal requirements on executive-branch disclosures to Congress (here). (The Federation of American Scientists has a great set of links here.)

Here are some of Bush's public comments disparaging openly, or by implication, the trustworthiness and patriotism of politicians other than himself and his staff.

In discussing the Plame leak itself:

This is a town of -- where a lot of people leak. And I've constantly expressed my displeasure with leaks, particularly leaks of classified information...

In discussing his clampdown (see above) on releasing information to Congress:

We had some security briefings take place up on Capitol Hill that were a discussion about classified information and some of that information was shared with the press...

These are extraordinary times. Our nation has put our troops at risk. And therefore, I felt it was important to send a clear signal to Congress that classified information must be held dear, that there's a responsibility that if you receive a briefing of classified information, you have a responsibility. And some members did not accept that responsibility, somebody didn't. So I took it upon myself to notify the leadership of the Congress that I intend to protect our troops.

And that's why I sent the letter I sent. It's a serious matter, Dave, it's very serious that people in positions of responsibility understand, that they have a responsibility to people who are being put in harm's way. I'm having breakfast tomorrow with members of Congress. I will be glad to bring up this subject.

I understand there may be some heartburn on Capitol Hill. But I suggest if they want to relieve that heartburn, that they take their positions very seriously, and that they take any information they've been given by our government very seriously. Because this is serious business we're talking about...

Pres. Bush has had a lot of success demonizing Congress. The right wing has picked up on the idea that America is endangered if Bush shares information with Congress (see one representative rant here).

Libby chose to have Miller lie to the world and claim that classified information about America's enemy, Iraq, was leaked not from the White House (which claims it had legal authority to do so, and therefore should have had no motive to shield its identity as the source) and not from State or DOD (which would have reduced suspicions of political motivation while also boosting empirical credibility), but from Capitol Hill. It wasn't an honest attempt to characterize Libby as something other than a White House staffer. And it wasn't just a passing slur on the nation's legislative branch. It was part of a consistent White House message -- still in effect -- that Congress shouldn't have oversight of the White House because Congress can't be trusted.

Thanks to Fitzgerald, its a lot clearer now who can't be trusted, and who needs oversight now more than ever.

Double Standards

2006-04-08T09:02:00.000-05:00

When this religious fanatic kills people for God, Americans vote that insanity is at work.

When this one does it, not so much.

Unger

2006-04-07T09:41:00.000-05:00

When I was at CNN, I worked with both Keith Olbermann and, on a different show, with Brian Unger (a former Daily Show correspondent). I'm a fan of both guys, and it turns out that Brian is filling in for Keith Olbermann tonight on his MSNBC show, Countdown. I don't normally tout Keith's show because, frankly, everyone's already talking about it.

But I want to put everyone on notice that Brian is smart, sharp, really funny and, although I have no clue what he's got in mind for tonight, I can certainly vouch that it's worth checking out. Let me know how you think he does.

How Bush Will Finesse the Libby Leak

2006-04-06T18:45:00.000-05:00

The media went nuts today over the Sun's report that Bush authorized Libby to leak information to the New York Times. How will Bush parry this? Very easily.

Bush will admit it. He did nothing illegal. It’s within his right to declassify information however he wants. So what?

Remember that Tom Clancy/Harrison Ford movie (I'm thinking it was "Clear and Present Danger") where the White House wrestles with how to explain the president’s friendship with a man killed in a drug war? The president’s aides suggest downplaying the friendship, saying the two men had met, but weren’t friends.

Harrison Ford says, no, “If they ask you whether you were friends, say, ‘No, we weren’t friends. We were good friends.’ Give them nowhere to go.” That’s what this administration does, and very well. They give the media nowhere to go, because the media are going for the gotcha, rather than the meaning of the gotcha. If the gotcha moment is undercut from the media, they don’t know how to proceed to the meaning of the gotcha, because they view that as “subjective” territory.

And once the media have to deal with something that can be construed as subjective, whether it is or not, they're lost.

Air America Saved?

2006-04-05T14:34:00.000-05:00

According to Radio Equalizer, Danny Goldberg's days are over at Air America Radio. I had a feeling that, after killing Morning Sedition, Goldberg's stock had gone down with the board.

Whether Goldberg's departure comes in time to save Air America, I have no idea. A lot of it will depend on whether the board is smart enough to bring in someone who knows what they're doing and is willing to work closely with the people -- those who are still left -- who made Air America a success, rather than continue to be bamboozled by the people who excell at claiming to have made Air America a success.

Maybe We Should Invade?

2006-04-05T12:28:00.000-05:00

Iraq's leader defies U.S., U.K. and the international community!

We can't wait for the U.N. to dither and delay while Ibrahim Jaafari continues to consolidate his power and thumb his nose at the world. We must take action now!

AP, CNN.com: Fuck the Facts, Fuck the Future, Fuck America

2006-04-04T07:50:00.000-05:00

CNN.com is headlining an Associated Press story this way:

Officer: 'Miracle' that everyone survived.

Plane size, position of fuel may have helped

Here are the top two grafs:

DOVER, Delaware (AP) -- A huge military cargo plane faltered after takeoff and belly-landed short of the Dover Air Force Base runway Monday, breaking apart and drenching some of the 17 people aboard with fuel but causing no fire or life-threatening injuries.

"It is a miracle. Absolutely a miracle," said Lt. Col. Mark Ruse, commander of the base's 436th Air Wing Civil Engineering squadron.

Not until the ninth paragraph is there a suggestion that forces other than magic were at work:

Pilots familiar with the plane say its sheer size -- roughly that of a football field -- likely contributed to the fact that there were no deaths.

"Contributed," meaning, I suppose, made it easier for The Lord?

Only by the 11th and 12th paragraphs do we find out that actual people -- employing actual knowledge and actual skills acquired during lifetimes of actual education and training -- played some role:

The fact that the fuel is stored in the wings, which unlike many other planes are mounted atop the fuselage, may explain the absence of fire, said Larsen [no relation], director of the Institute for Homeland Security, a think tank in Arlington, Virginia.
Larsen also said that if the crew was able maintain some control of the aircraft, it was not surprising that they survived.

The headline and article itself represent an obvious violation of the Ten Commandments of Covering Religion, of course. In this case, it results from a few unfortunate tendencies in journalism (opposition to which is usually pooh-poohed as fuddy-duddyism): Lack of training and familiarity with matters of math, engineering and science;Easy sensationalism; the mindless feel-good-ism wrongly associated with supernatural intervention.

Ironically, in the American past so longed-for by the Christian right, journalists would have played this story very differently. Back in the Eisenhower era, especially after Sputnick, some smart journalist -- hell, some smart agency flack -- would have tracked down the engineer responsible for the fuel-tank placement and made a hero out of them. We would hear all about the exacting training and top-notch skills of the pilot, co-pilot and their team.

And some kid seeing that story -- and, yes, covetous of the glory -- would aspire to design planes, or build them. In short, once upon a time we recognized rational, adult modes of causality (investment in and prioritization of design, training and education yields superior planes and superior crews and American technical and military superiority) and that led us to make investments wisely and to vote for politicians who valued those causes and to raise children who idolized the people and systems devoted to those causes.

We no longer have that. Now we have a brain drain. CNN and the Associated Press are contributing to this culture that denigrates hard work, intelligence, skill and rationality, and exalts juvenile, simple-minded superstitions. I wish I could say the consequences are so far off that our kids will pay the price. They will, but we already are.

DeLay: This Is the Day

2006-04-04T07:06:00.000-05:00

In his interview with Time, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay rationalizes why he's a whining little quitter who knows he'd get his ass kicked in November if he didn't drop out of the race.

Here's the money quote, (which Time's Mike Allen would have challenged, had he not chosen to violate the Ten Commandments of Covering Religion):

My main point was that this country was built on morals and religion. Our greatest leaders were very strong believers. There is a connection between religion and politics, and religion and government. There has to be for this country to have accomplished all it's accomplished and for its future. How many times have the great leaders—Ronald Reagan, Roosevelt, Lincoln, George Washington—have said there is a connection between morals and religion. And there has to be. The people that go to church understand that a country has to be based on some sort of religion and fear of God because they understand that.

Any member of Congress so ignorant of or willing to distort the beliefs of the general who fought the Revolutionary War and then led the country as its first president, doesn't deserve to be in Congress. Here are some of Washington's actual thoughts about religion and morals:

There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.

To give opinions unsupported by reasons might appear dogmatical.

Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause.

...I beg you be persuaded that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution.

...the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction. (This in response to the day's DeLay analogues, who whined that the Constitution didn't mention their boyfriend, Jesus).

In discussing how events might unfold, he said of "the great ruler of events":

...we may safely trust the issue to him, without perplexing ourselves to seek for that which is beyond human ken, only taking care to perform the parts assigned to us in a way that reason and our own conscience approve of.

You can find more here. And more here. One of the things DeLay will be packing up from his Washington office is a plaque that eloquently combines mystery and certitude in referring to the magical return of Jesus. "This could be the day," it says. Well, apparently, it didn't come soon enough for Tom. ("Where's your savior, now?")

Instead, he's running away because earthly justice is coming for him and making it impossible for him to remain in office. In his attempt to hijack Washington's clear preference for reason over religion in political matters, DeLay is leaving office as he attained and held it: As a liar.

Wanted: Impotent Scapegoat

2006-04-02T10:48:00.000-05:00

The New York Times has a great piece on President Bush's inability to find someone willing to take Michael Brown's old job as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They've done a nice bit of digging to root out several people who've turned down the FEMA job.

But I think they could have done a lot more in explaining why. The Times suggests that the top candidates are "unconvinced" that the administration is serious about "fixing" FEMA. But the reality is, whether the job candidates were being diplomatic or not, the administration has, if anything, been serious about breaking FEMA. I'm talking about Bush's vision for FEMA from before 9/11 and Katrina -- when there was no political motive for concealing his true ideas of what FEMA should and should not be. Here are the specifics on why the job is so undesireable:

President Bush came into office openly praising the job FEMA had done under President Clinton.

But as soon as President Bush took office, he began dismantling FEMA. Project Impact and the ANSS were among the first to feel the pain.

Then, Bush's budget guy, Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels, made clear what the administration's view of FEMA was. In April, 2001, he reportedly said: "The general idea--that the business of government is not to provide services, but to make sure that they are provided--seems self-evident to me."

The next month, Bush's first FEMA director, Joe Allbaugh -- like his successor, Michael Brown, a political appointee -- made similar remarks before the Senate. I've emphasized language Allbaugh used to signal that, under Bush, FEMA was to assist and encourage LOCAL disaster responses, rather than take the lead in preparing and responding itself, around the nation. Specifically, he said:

During my tenure in this position of public trust, we will...

* Implement pre-disaster mitigation programs that encourage the building of disaster resistant communities;

* Guide the Federal Insurance Administration to implement policies encouraging the purchase of flood insurance and reducing the costs of flood related disasters...

* Pay special attention and strengthen those volunteer and non-governmental organizations responding to disasters...

In recent decades, we have seen Federal emergency management swing from overly prescriptive preparedness programs and a single focus on response and recovery, to a more comprehensive approach that incorporates mitigation, by taking prudent protective measures to reduce losses. At the same time, we have seen soaring disaster relief costs that need to be managed more effectively.

The Administration's budget request for FEMA this year will build on this progress by emphasizing Responsibility and Accountability. This budget request asks individuals, communities, States, and FEMA to take on an appropriate degree of responsibility while empowering them with the tools to accept greater responsibility. Built into this budget request are sound public policy tools to ensure greater accountability to each other and the American taxpayer...

Two things to note here. One is the mindset that the federal government is apart from the people. Most people, I think, consider the federal government a device that the people themselves have created and support in order to do things exactly like respond to disasters. In reality, however, President Bush sees people as individually responsible even for such matters as disaster preparedness and response. And his vision of government denies them the ability to act together, collectively, in ways that not only pool individual resources (i.e. tax dollars), but also allow them to deal from a position of strength. In other words, if individuals are responsible for disaster preparedness, they're stripped of the power collective bargaining would give them in dealing with contractors, suppliers, insurance companies, etc.

More from Allbaugh:

Disaster mitigation and prevention activities are inherently grassroots. These activities involve local decision-making about zoning, building codes, and strategy planning to meet a community's unique needs. It is not the role of the Federal Government to tell a community what it needs to do to protect its citizens and infrastructure.

It's a nice formulation, but it denies the reality that local communities -- such as New Orleans pre-Katrina -- have been trying to tell the federal government what IT needs to do to protect its citizens and infrastructure. No one has advocated for an imperial federal disaster agency, which is why such an agency is a straw man argument. Advocating for an active, federal lead in disaster response does not automatically mean advocating an authoritarian policy-making federal agency.

The original intent of Federal disaster assistance is to supplement State and local response efforts. Many are concerned that Federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program and a disincentive to effective State and local risk management.

Translation: The Bush administration views your claim that the government protect you from floods and fires and terrorist attacks as an "entitlement," and views local government as failing to view floods and fires and terrorist attacks as sufficient disincentive on their own.

Expectations of when the Federal Government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level. We must restore the predominant role of State and local response to most disasters. Federal assistance needs to supplement, not supplant, State and local efforts.

Having Federal assistance supplement, not supplant State and local efforts is, most likely, going to be one of the more difficult measures aimed at responsibility and accountability that this Administration will have to work through.

At last, something we can all agree on. But what's really telling about this remark, is that it reveals our current problems with FEMA as not the fault of Michael Brown, or even government "bureaucracy," but as the fault of the fundamental vision Bush has for what FEMA should be. What's truly frustrating, of course, is that by implementing his vision of an impotent, useless FEMA -- and then blaming its failings not on his emasculation of it, but on individual personnel and the mythical "bureaucracy" beast -- he can make the case that it, and government, are not up to the task, rather than the fact that he, and his administration, don't want or believe in the task.

More Allbaugh:

We will pay special attention to volunteers and non-governmental organizations responding to disasters. Disasters hit hardest in communities and neighborhoods, and our solutions to disaster problems rely on local solutions. Faith-based groups at the community level, like the Salvation Army and the Mennonite Disaster Service, play critical roles in disaster relief, as does the American Red Cross...

As the President's Director for emergency management, I am also aware of the expectations of our citizens that their government protect their lives and property when an emergency or disaster occurs, whether it is a hurricane, earthquake, flood, tornado, or as the result of an act of terrorism.

As we implement criteria empowering State and local governments to assume greater responsibility for people and property, we need to equip them to do this.

One reason the Bush administration wants smaller, decentralized disaster response is that it's easier for the powers that be, whether it's big money, big business or big religion, can more easily influence faith-based organizations, state and local governments, than they can the federal government. Why? Primarily because it's much more difficult to rally significant opposition to that influence. What public accountability is there for faith-based organizations? How much do you know -- and how much do your local media cover -- the ins and outs of your state or even local government?

As President Bush said in his February address to the Joint Session of Congress, "Our new governing vision says government should be active, but limited; engaged, but not overbearing." We think you will see that the budget proposal for FEMA truly reflects the President's goal of restoring a proper balance - moving away from the expectation that the Federal Government is the option of first resort to the option of last resort.

Exactly. Katrina didn't reveal FEMA's shortcomings, it accelerated Bush's goal for FEMA: Does anyone today still have expectations that the federal government is the option of first resort? Mission accomplished.

Even after Katrina, the media continued to miss the telling ways Bush's language revealed his vision for FEMA. I dissected one particularly telling speech here. The reality is, that American cities and towns don't have the money to each develop and maintain standing disaster-response teams on the same level the federal government can muster. It would be silly, redundant and wasteful even if every city and town were capable of it. That leaves only the corporate option -- turning to private contractors for emergency disaster response. That's real end-game here, taking the federal government out of the equation, so that people are forced to turn to Halliburton and friends.

What the New York Times misses, I think, is that no respectable disaster specialist wants this job, because the job doesn't entail disaster response or preparedness any more. Thanks to a concept of the role of federal government that has been consistent from day one and has withstood the onslaughts of 9/11 and Katrina, FEMA and the federal government are, just as Bush wanted, no longer in the disaster business.

Ironically, Bush has so effectively disabled America's ability to respond to a disaster that now FEMA really, finally, actually is an appropriate position for Joe Allbaugh or Michael Brown.

Solid Journalism Doesn't Have a Prayer

2006-03-31T06:49:00.000-05:00

Watch the news today to see the anchors and correspondents struggle awkwardly with how to report the massive study that showed third-party prayers have no effect on the recovery of heart patients. The bad journalism has already begun.

I haven't read the Times piece yet, but you can find it here.

The Associated Press has a truly awful, one-sided, aggressively biased piece that you can find here.

I haven't read the Reuters piece yet, but just its headline tells you that someone fucked up. The study didn't "fail" to find prayer's power any more than telescopes fail to find the gleaming spires of heaven. Telescopes showed us that heaven ain't there. This study has SUCCEEDED in showing us that heaven ain't there.

Can you imagine if the study had shown a better recovery rate among patients who had been prayed for? The TV anchors would be positively gleeful today -- and you can bet they'd be playing the story higher than they will be now.

This outcome, however, will see them somber and neutral. Count on some bubble-headed hairdo to tag out of a piece with some moronic attempt at feel-goodity like, "well, a lot of people know that prayer works for them!" or some other such horseshit.

What most people fail to understand is that a universe in which prayer worked would be a miserable, frightening, awful place. Imagine if physical causality were not the
chain that led to illness or recovery. Imagine if there really were an invisible magic man making life-or-death decisions based on, well, his whim. Would you really feel better in a world where we had no hope of and no reason for pursuing advances in medicine? Would you really feel better knowing that, at any second, for any reason (including, but not limited to, moral judgment of who you are, or the pleading of people who just don't like you) you could be stricken with a flesh-eating virus? Imagine how stigmatized sick people would be in this world (the way they used to be) if everyone knew that Magic Man had decided not to heal them. How would you feel toward Magic Man if he let your Mom waste away from cancer? How would other people feel about your Mom if Magic Man decided she wasn't worth saving from cancer? Listen for half a second to people today who believe in god when they struggle to understand why he didn't save them or their loved ones from 9/11, Katrina, the tsunami, whatever. Do they seem happy and comforted by their faith?

Fuck, no. But that won't stop the media from happily reporting on efforts to keep them in fold, or soft-pedaling this study in order to minimize the potential bummer effect.

It would be nice to see someone with credibility and skepticism report this story. Like Peter Jennings.

Please everyone, post here your thoughts on the coverage of this story. All anecdotes and links appreciated!

Blind Spots

2006-03-30T19:48:00.000-05:00

I witnessed a car accident today.

It was a three-lane service road. The right-hand lane peeled off into local traffic. Ahead of me, in the leftmost lane, was a blue compact car. Immediately prior to the point at which the right lane split off, the blue car veered suddenly and sharply to the right, in a clear, last-minute bid to try to make the turn-off.

Unfortunately, there was another car in between her and the turn-off. She slammed right into it.
I pulled over ahead of the two cars, got out and checked with their respective drivers. Both women were fine. I gave my name and number to the woman whose car had been struck and told her I'd be willing to give a statement saying what I had seen.

The other woman was a little shaken. She kept repeating how the other car had been "in [her] blind spot." As I prepared to leave, I told her that if I were asked, by the police or insurance companies, I would tell them that I saw the whole thing and that, in my view, the accident was clearly her fault.

The woman then became pissed at me -- not raging or anything, but irritated and frustrated. She repeated her previous statement, emphasizing that the other car had been in her blind spot.

I almost wish I had had the time to discuss this with her. Clearly, the fact that the other driver had been in her blind spot was supposed to change my assessment of culpability. Leave aside for the moment the fact that she had veered so suddenly there hadn't been a realistic window of time in which she could have adequately checked her path. In her view, it was reasonable to believe that:
a) She was in the right to have driven into another lane without checking to make sure that there was a car in her blind spot
b) The fact that she didn't see the car absolved her of blame in hitting the car
c) Other people (e.g., me) would understand these views.

Basically, she didn't know whether there was a car in her path, and therefore, she wasn't morally responsible for hitting it.

In reality, of course, she had two other options: Slow down enough to look before switching, or don't switch. Instead, her ignorance became her excuse. Ignorance is supposed to -- and, I think once did -- constitute a reason for caution, rather than an excuse for the consequences of lack of caution.

I have no evidence for this, but I feel as though this is not an uncommon mindset. I'm not just referring to the obvious political analogies. I'm also referring to the people who vote for these politicians. I'm referring to everyone out there who thinks they're free of a moral burden to apply rigorous logic to their place in the world and the consequence of their actions. I've written before that I think a stereotypically liberal mindset -- that we're all due respect, every emotion and impulse we have is great and worthwhile, feelings are all that matter, logic is bad, etc. -- has enabled the emergence of a political culture in which people actually vote for president based on the having-a-beer-with criteria, and think that's okay.

Ignorance is not an excuse. We have a moral duty to stop exalting emotion and instinct at the expense of logical assessment. We have to start embracing what once were stereotypically conservative values -- hard-headed rationality -- if we want to get back to a government and a politics that holds people -- politicians included -- accountable for their actions.

The Secret War of Christianity

2006-03-30T09:33:00.000-05:00

I love crooksandliars.com, and I'm glad they nailed it here, but I think they missed a larger point. At best, you can argue that there is a war on government endorsement of Christianity. That war was started by the founding fathers when they wrote the First Amendment. That war also helps to ensure that Christianity thrives as much as it has in this country (as opposed to other nations that nominally endorse specific denominations).

But while I'm glad C&L pointed out the war on gays and science, the reason that war is possible is that the real theological war in this country is being waged against atheists. Here's the proof. Gays and minorities still, clearly, suffer from discrimination. But there are gay and black and Latino and Asian members of Congress. Are there any atheists?

Atheists make up a comparatively large percentage of the nation's top scientists, leading America in technology and research. The most praised casualty of the war on terror was a man whose family said had no use for religion. Atheists base their morals on rational choices, rather than on the coercion of unseen forces. That makes them MORE moral, not less. And yet, still, people in this nation treat them like moral lepers. Fortunately, our numbers are growing. The internet is allowing more and more people to escape the cognitive confines of even the most remote, shuttered communities. We're making progress, but we won't make real strides until we can get the mainstream media -- or even our friends at C&L! -- to recognize that atheists are a disenfranchised, persecuted target of religious-based bigotry. Everyone who champions tolerance ought to make sure that they're including atheists (and, of course, agnostics), among the ranks of those being defended.

Your Soul Is Keeping Us in Iraq

2006-03-30T08:39:00.000-05:00

When we think about religion and politics, we tend to think in terms of religious leaders and demographic blocs exerting political influence. But that's not the most pernicious effect religion has on the public sphere. The most insidious religious beliefs, the ones that damage our society and culture most, are the ones that are held by everyone of a religious bent, from fundamentalist conservatives to the most radical lefties who say they reject god and superstition yet cling to superstitious, religious notions such as souls and spirituality and even fate.

For instance, if you believe in such a thing as souls, you're a part of the reason for some of the support he still has for the U.S. war in Iraq. Here's how.

On Wednesday, President Bush spoke yet again about the war. He made one interesting comment which got a lot of play on cable news, but I haven't seen it picked up in print yet. I suspect that's because the certainty of his delivery made for good TV better than the insubstantial content made for good print. Here's what he said about the (presumably monolithic) enemy in Iraq:

They're not going to shake my confidence, I just want you to know. I understand their tactics and I know their designs. But I also believe that Iraqis can and want to self-govern. That's what I believe. And so when you see me make decisions, or make statements like I make, you've got to understand it's coming from a basic set of beliefs. That's what I believe. And that's what a decision-maker ought to do. The decision-maker ought to make decisions based upon deep-seeded beliefs. You don't need a President chasing polls and focus groups in order to make tough decisions. You need Presidents who make decisions based upon sound principle. Now, people may not agree with the decisions; I understand that. But I hope after this talk, those of you who didn't agree at least know I'm making my decisions based on something I believe deep in my soul.

There are, in fact, people who are uncertain (at the very least) about this war, but who actually do take solace in the fact that his decision to send U.S. troops to invade another country was based on a belief that's located not just in his soul, but deep within it, away from the surface of it.

There are actually people in this country who believe that and, worse, think that it matters. If you believe in souls, then you have to support the idea that they matter (in some way, somehow), in which case, you can't logically deny Bush the political shelter he's just claimed by ascribing his war-mongering (which we know is actually politically motivated) to the soul (which, of course, we all know, is where purity and "essential" goodness reside).

In a world where journalists observed the Ten Commandments of Covering Religion, Mr. Bush's remarks would have demanded several follow-up questions from the journalists in attendance, such as:

Why should people care whether this belief is held in your soul, rather than in your brain?
Is a belief that resides in a soul intrinsically better or more credible than a brain-based belief?
We have it on good authority that other people believe in their souls -- at an equal depth -- that the war in Iraq is wrong. What mechanism can you suggest for comparing and assessing soul beliefs that are held at equal depths?
Why does it matter to you that other people know where you hold this belief?
Have any other of your soul beliefs -- of equal or greater depths -- ever turned out to be wrong?
Have any soul beliefs of yours at any depth ever been proved wrong?
What is the greatest depth at which a soul belief of yours has turned out to be wrong?
By what mechanism did your soul communicate this belief to your brain?
How did your brain recognize this belief as originating from within the soul and how can you assure the American people that this belief was not planted either in your soul or in your brain by Satan?

If the American president will reap political gains by ascribing beliefs to an ethereal, supernatural expression of some essential "self," then American journalists have a duty to pursue all of these questions and more. But as long as you treat souls like real things -- with an understood but unchallenged (and absurd) set of governing principles -- then journalists will have no reason to ask precisely the questions that would deny him the political safe haven that has afforded him the ability to start and wage this war.

Card Shuffled Out; New Head Waiter Installed

2006-03-28T08:51:00.000-05:00

Andy Card has resigned as White House chief of staff. He's being replaced by Josh Bolten.

Bolten will now assume the responsibility of obtaining for the commander-in-chief his presidential cheeseburgers.

Nothing will change about the Bush administration or its impact on people's lives. Who implements Bush's orders will not matter unless Bush decides to start listening to people who disagree with him and applying logic and empirical results to differing arguments, and choosing courses of action based on those results, rather than on the same "gut" that told him to ignore the Aug. 6, 2001, PDB; dismantle FEMA; invade Iraq rather than pursue Osama bin Laden; vacation during Hurricane Katrina; violate U.S. laws against warrantless wiretaps; detain alleged terrorists without affording them due process; dismantle Iraq's army; endorse Vladimir Putin, Michael Brown, Julie Myers, Harriet Miers......

The Ten Commandments of Covering Religion

2006-03-28T08:16:00.000-05:00

For too long, American journalism has treated spirituality with condescension, neglect or disdain. This was a moral and professional error even before this nation was both attacked by and led by people who define themselves in religious terms. It is an even more grievous error now. And the time has come for a change.

From this day forward, let every journalist who wishes to call himself or herself a thorough, responsible, thoughtful journalist know that religion can no longer be ignored. Religious coverage can no longer be relegated to the ghetto of the so-called culture wars, focusing on trivial issues such as ritual language and symbols, while ignoring the profound consequences religious thought has had for the course of history.

Journalists must now elevate religion to the same status as other areas of legitimate inquiry. They must accord it the same weight. They must address religious issues in every story to which those issues relate. They must apply the same tools, the same methods of inquiry. They must utilize the same sharpness of eye and pursue the same depth of inquiry. To that end, journalists must observe the following ten commandments:

The Ten Commandments of Reporting on Religion

1. Thou shalt have no other god without confirmation. Journalists must confirm, specifically, which god is being worshipped and which religious system has been chosen. If a politician claims to have "faith" or belief in "God," a good journalist must ask that politician to identify their specific denomination, as well as their specific concept of "God," so that people might know whether the politician believes merely in something as vague as "a sense of connectedness," or in the actual definition of "God" as a sentient, all-powerful, all-knowing creator. If they swear to belief in the Bible, that belief must be elucidated: How do they reconcile its internal contradictions and errant prophecies? Do they believe in a literal interpretation? If not, how do they decide which parts to take literally and which to treat as metaphor? How do they know that their method of distinguishing is reliable?

2. Thou shalt not make the grave mistake of assuming uniform adherence to denominational tenets. If a politician claims to be a Methodist, a good journalist must ask what kind of Methodist, and whether they diverge from any tenets of their branch of Methodism. Once that politician's religious beliefs have been fully articulated, then the good journalist must hold them accountable for adherence to or departure from those beliefs. The politician enjoys political benefits from espousing that belief; it is a journalist's job to ensure that those benefits are not falsely gained from a populace left unawares by the journalist's failure to scrutinize that belief.

3. Thou shalt not take the Lord's word in vain. The word of God comes not just through scriptures, but also through preachers. A good journalist should identify the preacher or preachers chosen by the politicians they cover, hold politicians accountable for the content of those sermons, and pursue with those preachers the precise meaning, logic and sourcing of their messages.

4. Remember the soul, to keep it wholly in mind. The concept of a soul has been a cherished one throughout recorded human history. Any assault on the soul must be chronicled in full. Even the tiniest conceptual shift could have far-reaching implications for societal notions about psychology, sociology, justice, motivation, causality and the very self. Already, advances in neuroscience are rendering obsolete traditional claims that mental phenomena such as love and even religious faith originate from an eternal, ethereal spirit-self, rather than from the brain itself. A good journalist should not report on new findings in neuroscience without explaining the implications for widely embraced beliefs about souls.

5. Honor thy first source and thy second source. A good journalist does not merely rely on two sources before repeating a claim; a good journalist relies only on sources uniquely positioned to know, empirically, the truth value of their claim. For instance, the claim that dead people somehow go to "a better place" is a claim that no one can empirically prove, let alone know, and therefore ought not be repeated as fact by a good journalist, no matter how many sources claim it as fact.

6. Thou shalt not kill heterogeneity. Every faith differs from every other faith. Every denomination of a faith differs from every other denomination. Every adherent of a denomination differs from every other adherent. Some politicians will try to sway journalists into treating believers, denominations, faiths, or even all religions, as monolithic. They are not; a good journalist will explore and illuminate the differences.

7. Thou shalt not commit adulteration. If a politician says that they believe in "God," or "fate" or "heaven," a good journalist shall not condescend to that politician and substitute their own meaning for these words. A good journalist shall consult their dictionary and treat that politician as they would anyone else who claims belief in supernatural phenomena. Journalists shall pursue the implications of these beliefs to their logical ends. For instance, a politician who espouses belief in evil spirits -- such as Satan -- that cause wrongdoing in this nation, ought to be asked to outline their plan for researching (the way prayer's impact on health has been researched) the method through which evil spirits influence our nation, and methods our nation might employ to insulate or defend ourselves against such influence.

8. Thou shalt not steal the boundaries between faith and reason. A good journalist knows that every religion ultimately rests on faith. But a good journalist also knows that many believers start with a premise of faith and then use reason to extrapolate or justify rules about the world and about moral behavior. A good journalist should never presume to know where someone's logic ends and faith begins. Until the source specifically says that they have reached the end of reason and must now rely solely on faith, it is a journalist's duty to pursue the logic of any religious claims. Further, in those matters when someone employs logic for their claims, a good journalist will subject that logic to the fullest rigor, including but not limited to extrapolation of their reasoning and comparison to past acts and statements.

9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor's religion or lack thereof. Now that religion has assumed a place in the marketplace of ideas, a good journalist shall no longer weight stories in favor of religion. Thus, a good journalist will not refer to unexplained phenomena as miraculous phenomena; a good journalist will not refer to belief in a supernatural being or beings as a mark of character or integrity; a good journalist will not presume to know whether a violent sect or a pacifist sect more accurately represents their faith; a good journalist will not ascribe purity or innocence to motives of a religious rather than rational nature; a good journalist will not conflate religion with ethics, or a lack of religion with a lack of ethics; a good journalist will not assume that the having of faith or reclamation of faith are intrinsically good things or that the absence of faith or eschewing of faith are intrinsicaly bad things.

10. Thou shalt not covet privacy for religion. The taboo against discussing religion and religious beliefs ended when religious advocates won a place for religion in the town square. If the town is to accommodate religion in the marketplace of ideas, the townspeople must be free to examine, discuss and assess all aspects of any religion or religious belief wishing to compete in an atmosphere of free intellectual trade.

Until now, some -- be they atheists, secular humanists or simply members of the political left -- might have considered journalistic neglect of religion to be appropriate. They are wrong. And the time has come for a revolutionary change in American journalism: The full embrace and engagement of religion as a viable, vital topic.

Religious people of every political stripe have long called for journalism to recognize and address the religious component of life in America. This call has come most vocally, but by no means exclusively, from the Christian right. That has, unfortunately, made it easy for the gatekeepers of supposedly mainstream media to write off such calls as politically motivated, intended to demonize the media or to promote the agenda of the Christian right.

It's time for that to end. Regardless of the agenda pursued by some of its supporters, the notion that journalism must confront religion and religiosity head-on is indisputable. The only question should be, "How?" Some guidelines can be found in the aforementioned commandments. But the focus ought not come solely on the religious right. When Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), for instance, railed against immigration laws because, she said, they might have criminalized the Good Samaritan or Jesus, a smart reporter should have held her to her reasoning and asked whether she supported abolition of any laws that Jesus or those he held close might have transgressed. Did he disturb the peace or trespass when he chased the moneychangers from the temple? Would he have co-sponsored laws legalizing prostitution? If not, how does Senator Clinton select which Biblical edicts to incorporate into U.S. law and which ones to ignore? What is it about her methodology that she feels ought to make American voters comfortable with this decision-making?

As I've mentioned previously, Dan Dennett's important new book, "Breaking the Spell," is calling for a scientific inquiry into the nature of religious belief. I believe it is equally urgent, if not moreso, that journalism incorporate the same sort of inquiry into its pursuit of truth. In a nation whose government funds initiatives based on religious faith, the people have a right to know all there is to know about those faiths. The general assumption of a monolithic, but vague and ephemeral, religious aspect of this nation and its people has long outlived any use it might once have served. The time has come to explore exactly what people believe, why they believe it, and how those beliefs shape our lives and the course of our country's future.

Breaking the Spell

2006-03-27T16:31:00.000-05:00

The current issue of the New Yorker includes H. Allen Orr's review of "Breaking the Spell," Daniel Dennett's new book calling for scientific inquiry into the phenomena of religious belief. Dennett, as I mention at every opportunity, was my faculty advisor in college, so his position is not surprising to me.

Orr's review ends with the usual, waffly, ahistorical science-and-religion-explore-different-terrain silliness. Here's a prime example:

Science can certainly undermine particular factual claims made by religion (the universe was created in six days), but it’s far less clear that it can challenge religion’s general metaphysical claims (the universe has a purpose). To insist on this distinction is to recognize what it means for something to be a metaphysical, not a physical, claim. What experiment could prove that the universe has no purpose? To suppose that a kind of physics can demolish a kind of metaphysics is to commit what philosophers call a category mistake.

That may well be (my scholarship was sufficiently slovenly that I don't recall what a category mistake is) but it's also a mistake to claim, as Orr does, that saying the universe has purpose is to say something metaphysical rather than physical. Who says? There are two possible meanings to the phrase, "the universe has a purpose." One is that the universe was created to fulfill an end. The other is that the universe itself has intentionality. Both of these interpretations belong just as firmly in the realm of the physical as does the claim, "Britney Spears has a purpose." If someone created her to fulfill an end, that is something that can be determined physically. If Britney Spears herself has some purpose of her own, that, too can be determined physically. Eventually, we will be able literally to see that purpose as a neurochemical configuration in the brain of either Britney Spears or, if she was created to fulfill an end, in the brain of her creator. The MEANING of the universe may be a metaphysical debate, but whether it - or its creation - is or was imbued with intentionality, is not.

That said, I've been thinking a lot about Dennett's challenge to science, that it confront religion head on, not as an adversary but as a subject. I think the time has come for journalism to do the same thing, and in my next post, I'll attempt to lay out what a Journalism of Religion ought to look like.

Law and Order Democrats

2006-03-13T19:46:00.000-05:00

Sen. Russ Feingold has a short, effective explanation up at dailykos of his call to censure President Bush. I think it's particularly meaningful that Feingold begins by reminding us of how we all felt on September 11, 2001. I think the right wing (i.e., not all Republicans, and not all conservatives) doesn't necessarily appreciate just how supportive millions of Americans who hadn't voted for him felt toward President Bush then.

I didn't vote for him, and I viewed him as an embarrassment. In the first few days after September 11, 2001, President Bush disappointed me because he wasn't tough enough. Remember? His very first outings were tentative and meager. He didn't yet appreciate the scope of what had happened. He spoke in terms that were criminal, rather than martial. I was enraged. I wanted vengeance. I wanted hell unleashed.

Finally, after almost a week, either someone made things clear to Bush or the impact of coming here to New York genuinely hit him. He vowed that America would respond mightily and I was behind him all the way. He gave the Taliban a chance to turn over bin Laden and, when they failed to do so, he waged war on them. And I was behind him all the way.

Let me repeat that for emphasis: I backed President George Bush, wished him well and cheered his war on Afghanistan.

That's what the right wing doesn't get. Criticism of Bush from the left doesn't come (primarily) from radicals, people constitutionally incapable of backing him. It comes from mainstream people on the left -- who've even crossed party lines on occasion -- who were willing and eager to put aside their partisan (or non-partisan) assessments of Bush in order to support him as our president in a time of war.

Ideally, I'd prefer that Bush were censured, impeached, convicted, imprisoned not just for lying to the American people to mount an elective war that has killed 2,300 American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis, but for the dereliction of duty he displayed in NOT mounting the war necessary not just to roust the Taliban, but to accomplish the entire point of rousting the Taliban: Capturing Osama bin Laden. There are millions of Americans just like me who don't mind that American troops are deployed overseas -- We just wish they were in Afghanistan and Pakistan, wrapping up the War on al Qaeda, rather than in Iraq, perpetuating the definitionally-unwinnable War on Terror.

But I don't know that we have the body of evidence we need for that.

We do, however, have the body of evidence we need to convict President Bush of wiretapping. Namely, his confession. President Bush won't be convicted, of course. He won't be impeached. He won't even be censured. But just because you know your position won't rule the day doesn't mean you ought not stand by it. It's not going through the motions, it's not even futile. It's denying those who would defend President Bush the ability to claim that no one disagrees with them, that no one cares. If we can do nothing else, we can do that at least. Call, e-mail or write your senator. Let them know we want a party of law and order.

Why the Left Should Concede that Iraq Had WMDs

2006-02-27T07:42:00.000-05:00

The right-of-Bush news site WorldNetDaily is claiming that a recent, private, intelligence summit was targeted by members of the U.S. intelligence community, trying to quiet or discredit news emerging from the summit that Iraq was, in fact, working on WMDs and trying to conceal those programs from U.N. inspectors. The idea, of course, is to rehabilitate George Bush's initial, and most effective, rationale for the war in Iraq -- especially now that support is crumbling from the very pillars of the right. We should let them do so, and help them.

Thanks to the war, Iraq's lack of WMDs can never be positively proven. And yet, for some reason, Bush has jumped onto the no-WMDs bandwagon. Why would have done that, when there way to prove him wrong? Perhaps because his advisors realized that continuing to claim that Iraq had WMDs is a political time bomb that he had to ditch as soon as possible. The left should put it back in his hands, by not only conceding the right's claim that Iraq had WMDs, but shouting it from the rooftops. Here's why.

Prior to now, the left's opposition to the war has, sensibly, centered around the notion that Iraq did not have WMDs and, therefore, President Bush was wrong to wage war with Iraq. The obvious instinctive sense of this argument has pushed President Bush to change (time and again) his war rationale -- ending up lately with the toughest-to-disprove, unrefutable-in-the-short-term argument that the war will, eventually, allow some form of democracy to take root and that, eventually, that democracy will provide for stability which will, eventually, make it tougher for terrorists to operate in Iraq.

There are several advantages to arguing that Iraq had WMDs. One, it protects the left's credibility in the event some shred of evidence turns the tide on public opinion. Two, it reminds people that Bush's rationales have shifted on the war. But, most importantly, it forces people to confront a brand new, and starkly terrifying reason why Bush's war was not only a failure, but proof that he and the Republicans are not only inept at anything but talking about national security, they're actually detrimental to it.

Remember, the war was justified as an attempt not just to deny Saddam the possibility of using WMDs, but to keep those WMDs out of the hands of terrorists. It would be bad enough if the war failed to do so, but what if the war were the very thing that made it possible for terrorists to acquire WMDs? George Bush would have helped the terrorists more directly and undeniably than all the journalists and dissenting Democrats of the last four years combined.

So, in the campaigns for Congress this year, Democratic candidates should stake out very clear ground declaring the war a failure. When Republicans call them on "declaring defeat," Democrats should simply respond that the goal of the war in Iraq was not to triumph over insurgents, but to stop terrorists from getting WMDs. If Bush was wrong and there were none, the war was a failure from the beginning. If Bush was right and there were WMDs, the war itself made it possible for terrorists to get them. And they should quote this concession of the fact that the United States government can not assure us the weapons did not fall into the hands of America's enemies:

They could have been destroyed during the war. Saddam and his henchmen could have destroyed them as we entered into Iraq. They could be hidden. They could have been transported to another country.

That was George W. Bush talking -- admitting, though the mainstream media failed to notice it, that the war may have led to the weapons making their way into some other country, into the hands (since we haven't heard about it) of an enemy. As more time passes, the less likely is the scenario that the weapons were hidden. So let's start conceding the right's point -- Iraq had WMDs. They're gone now. Our enemies have them. And that's George Bush's fault.

Listen

2006-02-25T12:49:00.000-05:00

If you liked Air America Radio's Morning Sedition, there's good news. I wrote earlier about how the show I helped launch (as its co-creator and first producer) was cut off at the knees, rather than supported, by new AAR CEO Danny Goldberg (whose explanations for his decision-making I've previously addressed). To his credit, Goldberg did give Rachel Maddow (whom I also produced) more exposure. But his canning of Morning Sedition was universally panned, both outside Air America and inside. Well, Goldberg's apparently been forced to address his mistake, albeit in a slightly face-saving way. Morning Sedition lead host Marc Maron is back. And, no, I've actually got no inside information on this, but from AAR's release, it looks like Maron's new show will return to the airwaves most, if not all, of what people liked about Morning Sedition.

The Cardinal is back.
So is Lawton Smalls.
Even Johnny K. Street, against all odds.

And I'm pretty sure that uber-producer Brendan McDonald is on board, too. Most importantly, though, Maron's getting two hours, rather than just one. I know that many of the people who praised Morning Sedition cited the chemistry of the on-air pairing as a crucial element. And, yes, it was fun. But please trust me when I say that the chemistry was not the catalyst for the show's unique identity. The chemistry was merely a prerequisite for two people to share the mike. With one person owning the mike, chemistry is no longer relevant -- and if you liked Morning Sedition, I can pretty much guarantee you'll like the new show just as much, if not more. (To get a sense of just how electrifying Goldberg's Maron-less mornings have proven, check out the fiery energy on full display at the show's web site.)

Not surprisingly, AAR's release doesn't make clear exactly where or when Maron's show will air, outside Los Angeles. But it apparently will be available through alternate venues, as a podcast, at least. Although we created Morning Sedition together, I can't pretend to know Maron's mind. But I do suspect that, without having to work as part of a team -- and to honor that on-air partnership -- Maron is capable of exploring territory and plumbing depths on his own that might not have been appropriate for a duo. In other words, if you thought Morning Sedition was groundbreaking radio, The Marc Maron Show has the potential to take groundbreaking to new heights.

It starts Tuesday. Please post your thoughts here if you get a chance to hear it.

Forced Fertilization

2006-02-25T11:38:00.000-05:00

I don't know where I stand on abortion. Neither should you. Our notions about taking life are complicated, and still evolving. We wrongly share with nations like Iran and China the distinction of killing people when we don't like things they've done. We also rightly make it possible, in some cases, for people to take their own lives when they've decided they don't want them any more.

Both of these examples involve issues of consent and autonomy. Capital punishment is always wrong for the same reason suicide (and its cousin, euthanasia) are sometimes right -- because of the intentionalities of the person being killed.

That's part of why abortion is a complicated issue. It not only involves an entity possessing no conscious intentionality (though an inferrable one: To live), but prohibiting abortion to preserve the autonomy of the unborn is an infringement on the autonomy of the mother.

Abortion is also complicated because of the nature of the entity being aborted. Birth itself no longer seems a reasonable time at which life ought to be accorded equal rights and protections under the law. Any time you draw a line, in this issue, it's going to be arbitrary on some level. That's why it is, or should be, impossible given our current scientific knowledge to know for certain when and why abortion is okay, if you think it ever is.

South Dakota is about to pass an unconstitutional law banning almost all abortions. (Despite the outcry, the bill is at least logically consistent: If your premise is that a fetus is a life, that life is surely not less valuable or deserving of protection depending on the circumstances -- i.e., rape or incest -- of its conception). The point, of course, is to give the new Supreme Court a chance to overturn Roe v. Wade. And while it's hardly a sure bet, there's certainly reason to think the court might.

The problem with the South Dakota bill is that it makes no distinctions based on anything. A zygote is a fetus is a life. If you don't care about the nature of that life, or the degree of differentiation, or the qualia of that life, then it's a fine argument. But maybe rather than oppose this approach, pro-choice forces ought to start educating people on the logical implications of this slippery slope, by pushing the amniotic envelope, as it were.

If every embryo is entitled to equal protection under the law, and maternal autonomy carries no legal weight, then science has opened the door to a dystopian conclusion that, it would seem to me, the anti-choice forces can not escape: Forced fertilization.

Specifically, if the embryonic claim to life trumps female claims to autonomy, should not the same law that calls on us to force women to deliver children also call on us to force women to bear children? After all, it's not the fact that a woman chose to create life that legally obliges her to carry it to term -- or else South Dakota would have exempted rape. That leaves only the fact that her womb represents the embryo's sole chance for life as the legal motive for forcing her to bear the child. And if that's the case, there's no reason the law shouldn't also start assigning the excess embryos that result from in vitro fertilization to fertile women.

The South Dakota bill addresses only the reality that a woman's choice to withhold her womb -- whether she chose to conceive or not -- can lead to the death of an embryo. The pro-choice movement should take it the next step and start lobbying South Dakota to take similar steps to protect the untold thousands of embryos -- which deserve no less protection under the new law! -- by forcing women to carry them.

And if that doesn't work, let's put some scientific effort into bio-engineering a male capability for carrying embryos, so that all these undiscerningly anti-choice men can start saving embryos by spending the rest of their lives carrying them to term.

If Iraq is the New America, Both Countries Are in Big Trouble

2006-02-25T08:06:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, as Iraq tried desperately to avoid spinning entirely out of control, President Bush tried to assure us that the hundreds of sectarian attacks throughout Iraq are just part of that nation's growing pains as it becomes a free, democratic society. Here's the analogy he drew, addressing the American Legion yesterday, to assure us that everything would be all right:

Yet history teaches us that the path to a free society is long, and not always smooth. I've seen that in our own history. In the years following the American Revolution, there were riots and uprisings and even a planned coup. In 1783, Congress was chased from Philadelphia by angry veterans demanding back pay, and Congress stayed on the run for six months. It was then that Congress learned, don't mess with America's veterans.

It's important to remember that our first effort at a governing charter, the Articles of Confederation, failed, and it took over a decade after independence before we adopted our Constitution and inaugurated George Washington as our first President.

Riots? Uprisings? A planned coup? Let's consider exactly what the awful events Bush describes suggest about the future of Iraq.

There are three possibilities here: He's wrong and Iraq will take longer than America did to achieve peaceful, democratic stability; he's wrong and Iraq will take less time than America did, or he's right and Iraq will take exactly as long as America did to achieve peaceful, democratic stability. If he's wrong and was overly pessimistic about Iraq's current path, it would probably be the first time this administration has erred on the side of caution regarding Iraq. However, even if he's right, we should not be assured by his analogy, we should be horrified.

As Bush rightly points out, America in its earliest days was beset by violent strife. Was it comparable to what Iraq is experiencing? For one thing, all of it was localized. For another, consider the nature of the grievances:

There were the folks pissed off at doctors for graverobbing, dissecting, and playing mean pranks with the bodies. Really.

Then there were the Scottish distillers pissed off that the tax on their moonshine was higher than the tax on larger distilleries. That's why it wasn't called The Sectarian Rebellion, but The Whiskey Rebellion.

And if anyone can tell me exactly what the New York City Brothel Riot was about, I'd be obliged.

Then there were the organized movements actually aimed at overthrowing the fledgling government. There was the Newburgh Conspiracy, such a fiendish plot that it was stopped only by George Washington reading the conspirators a letter, and so heinous that one of its leaders went on to become the first secretary of the Treasury.

And, of course, there was the Shays Rebellion. What sinister ends did Shays and his zealots pursue? They stormed courthouses, lynching judges and killing bystanders. And by "lynching" I mean "prevented from holding court" and by "killing bystanders" I mean "sought to prevent the imprisonment of American citizens guilty of nothing more than being in debt."

The key difference between early America and early Iraq is that the early disturbances here were (sometimes) violent expressions of legitimate, or at least genuine, concerns about fairness and the appropriate nature of America's government. They weren't trying to prevent the establishment of government, in some cases, they supported a stronger central government. They were on the same team and their grievances were not of such nature that they had to be overcome and only then could the "real" Constitution take hold -- their grievances brought to light problems with the existing Articles of Confederation, making clear why changes were needed.

For Bush's analogy to hold, he should address whether he thinks the insurgents in Iraq have legitimate grievances and, better still, he should identify what constitutional changes he thinks are necessary to transform Iraq's current equivalent of the Articles of Confederation into a workable analogue to the Constitution. If he thinks the government and its charter are fine, then he can't argue that Iraq's violence is analagous to America's. If he thinks they're not fine, he ought to specify how and suggest ways to fix them.

Furthermore, even if his logic were somehow reconcilable, consider the timetable President Bush is implying we've got in store. Let's call 2005 Iraq's 1776. Here's how the future of Middle East plays out, if America follows America's path:

2005 - Iraq achieves true independence.
2018 - Iraq's Constitution goes into effect.
2094 - Iraq's civil war ends, with all its citizens equal
2196-2197 - A series of Civil Rights Acts ensure legal protections for all Iraq's citizens regarding everything from access to the courts, to voting, to jobs and housing.
???? - Iraq elects its first atheist-Jew lesbian president.

Iraq is not America. The fact that America -- which was an experiment to determine not how democracy should work in a specific country, but how it should work at all -- endured minor, localized strife over financial and judicial matters should not be a balm to those concerned about Iraq's religious, ethnic and tribal violence.

And, perhaps most damning against our president, if Iraq's status as a democracy strong enough to ensure it's free of terrorist havens is such a distant dream, then -- if America's safety really was the motive for invading -- our country would have been better off leaving Saddam in power (isolated and defanged) and focusing our military and policy energies on the immediate threat: Osama bin Laden.

We chose not to do that, and the further off a stable, free, democratic Iraq is, the less and less certain we can be -- because who knows what alternate events might have transpired? -- that invasion was the best course of action.

Why Democrats Don't Need a Plan

2006-02-22T20:25:00.000-05:00

A common refrain we hear from Republicans -- and even from the pundits and commentators -- in response to Democratic criticisms is that Democrats, in order to be taken seriously as critics or as election-day alternatives, need to offer specific plans of their own first. They don't. And they can win without them. Here's why.

For one thing, I would be mightily surprised to hear of a single president, or even a senator, who won because of a single plan or even a set of plans on how to address anything -- the economy, a military foe, job creation, etc. Bush didn't. Clinton didn't. (Yes, they offered plans, but those plans were not meaningful elements of their success). Democrats shouldn't feel like they need to, individually or even as a party. (And media gatekeepers should stop acting like plans are prerequisites for valid criticism: No one requires theater critics to rewrite scenes before explaining why a play stinks).

In fact, Democrats should let the Republicans run on plans. Democrats should stipulate that they're not running on the basis of plan superiority. Democrats can run and win, instead, not just on personality superiority (which, unfortunately, looms far too largely in electoral decision-making) but also on philosophical superiority. Because where once the parties shared the same goals and basic philosophies of American governance, that's no longer the case. The White House has opened up a philosophical divide and most of the Congressional leadership has followed. Democrats should make the next elections a referendum on the philosophies on either side of that divide.

This country wasn't founded on plans for how best to organize executive-branch agencies or how to ensure independence from foreign supplies. This country was founded on the philosophy of how to go about deciding our plans and what system best embodies that philosophy. That system was intended to be both open and adversarial. We -- Americans -- were and are supposed to know as much as we can about everything, and then fight about it. That's why the plans were less important than establishing a system of three branches -- each somewhat insulated from and answerable to the others -- to determine the plans.

President Bush and the Republican Congress have not wounded this country's economic strength, its national security and its standing in the world because they had bad plans -- they have done so because they formulated and executed their plans by rejecting and subverting the governing systems that embody core American principles.

This fact is central to understanding the political and popular fallout from the Dubai Ports deal, the Katrina failures, the wiretapping debate, renditioning, Abu Ghraib and the war with Iraq itself. Each and every one of these was made possible by congressional abdication of its role as a check on the executive branch. Even the Cheney shooting gained traction because it embodied both the administration's lack of accountability and its lack of communication internally and externally.

Democrats don't need to run on lengthy, detailed plans for how they propose not to let companies owned by foreign dictatorships run our ports, not to botch disaster preparedness and response, not to violate the Constitution by spying on Americans without warrants, not to torture people and not to launch pre-emptive wars based on not skewing and not cherry-picking intelligence instead of not not continuing the hunt for Osama bin Laden. All that Democrats need to run on is a return to the American way of life: Engaging all of America's voices in healthy debate about America's future and then building consensus for how to get there. That's how we used to do things in this country not that long ago. Polls historically have shown that Americans are happiest, in fact, when neither party controls both the legislative and executive branches.

The only argument Bush has had to justify not governing this way has been the need for secrecy that national security entails. The reason that argument no longer holds is that Americans have now seen enough empirical evidence -- Iraq, Katrina, wiretapping, Dubai -- that the Bush administration lacks the basic competence we were promised from the wartime, CEO president. That means Americans are no longer willing to defer to him. And that means Democrats can and should run on one plan and one plan only: Expanding American-style democracy to America.

How Bush Sold the War on Terror

2006-02-21T07:48:00.000-05:00

The Associated Press is reporting that Malaysia's former prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, claims that Jack Abramoff was paid $1.2 million to arrange a meeting for Mohamad with President Bush.

According to the article, the 2002 meeting was not Mahathir's idea, it was suggested by the Heritage Foundation. What did the Heritage Foundation have to gain by this? Here's one clue.

So, Prime Minister Mahathir, whose policies had been rebuked by both the Clinton and Bush administrations, was told by the allegedly conservative alleged think tank that he could patch up his relations with Washington by meeting with Bush. How to arrange such a meeting? Here's what Reuters said regarding coverage by the Bernama news service of Mahathir's recent remarks:

Mahathir said it was the practice of the U.S. government to ask people who wanted to meet the president to use the services of lobbyists and this was not viewed as a form of corruption, Bernama added.

And what lobbyist did Malaysia turn to? According to the L.A. Times, Jack Abramoff back in 2002 allegedly took credit for setting up Mahathir's meeting with Bush, with help from his old buddy Karl Rove.

The White House told the Times the meeting was arranged through "normal staffing channels." Which is a classic way of getting to sound like you're denying something, when you might actually be acknowledging that you do it all the time.

Why does any of this matter? Because it wasn't just a corrupt lobbyist selling out to an anti-Semitic, anti-democratic national leader. It wasn't just the Heritage Foundation doing a complete 180 from its previous, principled opposition to Mahathir. It wasn't just President Bush somehow getting duped into meeting with the wrong guy. It was the executive branch of the United States of America selling itself by selling Mahathir to the American people as an ally and a friend.

Bush met with Mahathir, the White House told America, "to discuss Malaysia's role in the war on terrorism." But that's not what Mahathir thought he was paying $1.2 million for. Here's how the Associated Press reported Mahathir's comments Monday:

Mahathir said the Heritage Foundation believed he could help "influence (Bush) in some way regarding U.S. policies."

And Bush himself was asked after that May 14, 2002, meeting, what the point was of meeting with Mahathir. Here's what Bush said, according to the White House transcript:

Q Mr. President, can you tell us what you -- what we can expect of future Malaysia-U.S. relations as a result of these talks that are taking place today?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think you can expect continued cooperation -- intelligence sharing, for example. Let me finish, please.

One of the things that we're finding is that our enemy is shadowy. They lurk behind civil institutions and then they strike. They -- they're not like an enemy we've known before. And in order to make sure our respective societies are as secure as possible, we must share intelligence. We find out a lot about movements throughout the region, and we're more than willing to share with the Prime Minister's government what we know. And vice versa, and that's important. That's incredibly important. My most important job -- I remind this to the American people -- is to secure our homeland.

Q Not more extensive than that --

THE PRESIDENT: There's a lot more. We'll talk about trade. We'll talk about economy. There's a lot more to talk about. But when it comes to the security of a homeland, that's about as extensive as it gets. You see, I'm not going to let our nation forget, or our friends in the world forget what happened to us on September the 11th. It could happen to somebody else, as well, and the Prime Minister understands that.

The point of laying all this out is not to launch into a gratuitous opportunity to bash the president. It's to point out the striking familiarity of the language he used back in 2002 to explain his meeting with Mahathir. He acknowledged that trade and economic issues were on the table, but he refused to talk about them, steering the issue right back to the safety of his even-then-tired rhetoric about terrorism. It's fair to wonder what's not being said the other times he hews to that rhetoric.

Bottom line: An un-democratic country wanted to do business with America, so they made friends with influential people at the Heritage Foundation and they poured $1.2 million into a bogus foundation set up by an American lobbyist who called his friend Karl Rove and arranged to have the president of the United States -- for whom the lobbyist had raised more than $100,000 -- appear on national television to look the American people in the eye and tell them that he was meeting with a man previously found abhorrent by Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Colin Powell and the Heritage Foundation itself, in order to pursue the war on terror.

This is called war profiteering and the White House is now officially a part of it.

Drudge REPOrt

2006-02-14T08:06:00.000-05:00

I'm sure there were a zillion better ways to do this, but I'm an HTML idiot, so I just copied the entire page. That said, can anyone explain to me why Drudge, in a headline/link about Sen. Hillary Clinton, chose to spell the word "aids" entirely in capitals? (UPDATE: Drudge has now removed the headline entirely. Wonder why?) In any case, you can still see what the page looked like beforehand here:

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The Left Screws Up on Global Warming

2006-02-11T17:48:00.000-05:00

This past week, 86 Christian evangelicals issued a statement acknowledging the abundance of evidence that global warming is real, and that mitigating action should be taken. The response from the left was pretty predictable: Lauding this development and trumpeting its support for the cause. The instinct behind this reaction is understandable. Acting on it is stupid and short-sighted.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those people who rejects any endorsements from the right, or from religious people, for the causes I favor. Hell, I agree with some of their positions. And in the past, I've specifically argued that the left ought to applaud right-wing nutjobs when they see the light on any particular issue. In that case, I was talking about Rick Santorum, who is, whether we like it or not, due to his office, involved in every issue. But, in general, I was referring to the kinds of issues that are, essentially, subjective matters of public policy. The kinds of issues on which everyone has a voice.

Global warming is not such an issue. Global warming is science. It's very new science, and it's very complex science, and it's very uncertain science. But it's still science. That's why the correct response to 86 evangelicals, or 8600 evangelicals, should be the same as if they had weighed in on the fine points of brain surgery, or the principles of building a suspension bridge. The only correct response is: Who gives a fuck what you say?

Yes, it's tempting to say that we serve a greater good by hailing this announcement and praising the evangelicals who made it. After all, that could, in theory, help lead to some positive policy changes. But it would also be helping to perpetuate the same dynamic that has allowed religion to hobble science for, well, always.

Why? Because religion -- most notably Christianity -- has been at odds with science since day one. And religion has virtually always done whatever was within its power to stifle any scientific advances that challenged its tenets or its power or its authority. Only at those junctures when empirical evidence is so overwhelming that broader society has stood up to defend science has science (i.e., rationality) been able to prevail.

And the only reason religions have managed to withstand these challenges is that they -- with unwitting irony -- evolve new adaptations that enable them to survive. When their anti-Copernican cosmology became untenable, for instance, they revised their claims about what the Bible says about Earth and the heavens. Religions have consistently retreated when faced with common-sense evidence of scientific reality -- in order to avoid the jeopardy to their credibility that would ensue if they maintained their opposition.

When you praise the recent evangelical announcement as meaningful, let alone laudatory, you're essentially helping to perpetuate their hold over people who should be looking to the scientific community, rather than the religious community, for guidance about scientific issues. When you appeal to evangelical worshippers to support environmental progress because their evangelical leaders do, you're perpetuating the power those evangelical leaders have to dictate scientific policy not just now, but in the future. In fact, there's a very easy way to determine how much this announcement is genuinely about seeing the light on science, and how much is about maintaining their own credibility and power. How?

Well, if they are sincere in their intentions, and sincere in wanting to remedy their past wrongs (i.e., their vocal support for anti-environmental politicians), they would say the following: We were wrong to stake a claim to leadership on scientific issues; we hereby renounce any and all authority on empirical matters and we urge those in the evangelical community to turn in the future to the scientific community for guidance and leadership on such issues. But that would mean giving up their power.

So, we're left with the absurd spectacle of allegedly "green" evangelicals battling it out with the old-school evangelicals. That's right, such stalwarts as Colson, Wildmon and Dobson released their own manifesto in response to the 86. You can read it here, but please don't bother. The idea that anyone is going to listen to what either side of this supposed debate believes their magic book tells them about planetary climatology is almost obscene. Throughout history, scientific and medical advances have been delayed and thwarted by the forces of religion. Imagine how much further humanity might have advanced by now if religions hadn't opposed advances in astronomy, physics, germ theory, evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, dissection, reproductive medicine, stem-cell research, etc. Imagine how much better your life would be. Speculate for a minute on how many years of scientific progress have been lost to religious interference. One? Ten? A hundred? Who would still be alive if not for religion? How much longer would you live, and with how much greater a quality of life? How much pain will your children endure, thanks to the scientific progress religion has impeded? When you suggest that evangelicals have a credible voice on global warming, you become a part of this problem.

In each and every field, religions have retreated only when evidence became so overwhelming that their opposition became untenable. When we endorse the notion that evangelical Christians have a place in the field of climatology, we perpetuate a cycle that has been detrimental to humanity throughout history.

When religions get on board with the latest scientific advances, it's not evidence that religions are somehow improving. Religions have always survived by flexing enough to accomodate prevailing notions of reality. The Christianity of the year 100 A.D. could never survive today. It would have to redefine itself to conform to modern notions of reality in order to survive. That's all these evangelicals are doing: Surviving long enough to keep fucking up our future, just as their predecessors survived long enough to elect the anti-science politicians determined to fuck up our present.

Response to the Washington Post...

2006-02-08T23:10:00.000-05:00

Emily Messner of the Washington Post quotes my attack on the journalistic outlets claiming to cover the cartoon controversy, while opting not to show the cartoons. Here's what she writes:

The Petty Larseny blog says that "American and western media outlets that cover the cartoon controversy without showing the cartoons are cowardly, hypocritical, un-American and sometimes all three. The notion that they might cause offense is, itself, offensive."

I hope the Petty Larseny blog and others who take that position would also defend other cartoons that some people find offensive, such as the widely-misinterpreted Tom Toles cartoon depicting Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as stretching the military too thin and not being concerned enough with the number of war wounded and the severity of their injuries. (Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt addressed both the Toles and the Prophet Mohammed issues in a column earlier this week.)

I'm not sure whether Messner is genuinely uncertain of the position I and others of like thinking on this issue would take, but I'll try to be as clear as I can be: Yes, I would defend every cartoon that any person found offensive. I don't care whether Tom Toles draws me as a quadruple-amputee getting gang-raped by Jesus, Mohammed and Dakota Fanning, I will defend it. Hell, I promise to post a link, okay?

The Cartoons: Stunning, Irrelevant Revelations!

2006-02-08T22:10:00.000-05:00

We've been treated to two seemingly important takes on the Mohammed cartoon controversy during the most recent news cycle:

The original cartoons were published in an attempt to inflame!
The violent response was, itself, provoked and incited!

The only appropriate response to both of these, um, shocking twists(????) is this: So the fuck what?

There is only one question worth asking about the cartoons in a civilized, free country: Can they be published? If the answer is yes, then everything else -- questions of intent, taste, offensiveness, blah blah blah -- is just subjective, thumb-sucking blather. Anyone who addresses whether the paper had the right to publish them with "Yes, but they shouldn't have," is a weasel. If you've been asked whether you support free speech, don't interpret that as an invitation to serve as a critic, too. It's a yes-or-no question.

On the flip side, there is one, and only one, question worth asking about the criminal and violent response to these cartoons: Is it permissible? If the answer is no, then everything else -- whether rioters were "inflamed," or embassy ransackers were responding to a broader cultural climate of American-Islamic tensions -- is irrelevant. Defending free speech means condemning -- and using force of law against -- those who try to abridge it. Whether you disagree with the speech, or even concur with the sentiments of those acting criminally in opposition to it, is irrelevant. Stop the violence. Period. (I'm not saying it's not journalistically and diplomatically of interest if some governments have fueled the protests; I'm addressing this purely in regard to issues of free speech).

Furthermore, from a journalistic point of view, all the hand-wringing today about whether the Danish paper was out to provoke controversy (that used to be a goal of journalism in this country, too, when we still had journalism) or whether the outcry in response (legal and otherwise) was fueled by advocacy, misses the point entirely.

What makes this story so fascinating -- to me, anyway -- and, I think, important, is that it does precisely what the Danish newspaper set out to do: It explores a fundamental difference between two differing cultures.

And let's not make the mistake of thinking this is a question of predominantly Christian culture on one hand, and Islamic culture on the other. It's not. It's a question of a predominantly secular culture on one hand, and religious culture on the other.

Politicians supposedly of the world's free societies miss the point when they apologize for the cartoons by explaining that sometimes free speech leads to offense. No. That's not how it works. Offense isn't a regrettable by-product of free speech: It's the point. Bad ideas, offensive ideas, wrong ideas aren't something we tolerate because free speech is an otherwise good thing. The entire point of free speech is to ensure that bad ideas, offensive ideas and wrong ideas are exposed to the light of day. Free speech is not something we protect because it allows us to share good ideas. Free speech is the mechanism by which we identify good ideas. We can only be sure we are doing so if we vigorously promote not just the right to discuss bad/offensive ideas, but the airing of those ideas themselves.

That's why this is not a Christian-Muslim clash. Because many Christians -- including many in this country -- don't believe in free speech, either. And many Muslims, even in countries that are not free, are considerably more sophisticated and pro-free speech than some "western" theocrats. In this country, the theocons try to decide not just their own viewing fare, but what the entire country can choose to watch, as well. And Christians believe stuff just as dumb as Muslims do. The Bible bans "graven images." Many Jews write "G-d" because YHWH will get mad if they type an "o" in the wrong place. It's all superstitious idiocy. And there are adherents of every stripe willing to die and/or kill to support their own brand of it. So let's not get too smug about how our superstitions are much more sophisticated than theirs. (See this bit of bonding across national boundaries, thanks to the magic of religiously fueled hate).

What this really is is a test of which countries and which politicians have the understanding of human rights and the conviction of democratic principles to both know and say that the only response to people upset by the cartoons is: Too bad. Anyone who doesn't get that really does hate us for our freedoms. And anyone who argues for sacrificing our freedoms in response -- free speech or any other civil liberty -- does, too.

How To Call Iran's Cartoon Bluff

2006-02-07T21:40:00.000-05:00

The Iranian newspaper, Hamshahri, has begun a contest to the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten's publication of a dozen cartoons of Mohammed that spurred deadly violence by Muslims in several European and Mideast countries. The Danish paper commissioned depictions of the alleged prophet of Islam, Mohammed. The Iranian contest, in reply, is seeking Holocaust cartoons -- and daring western newspapers to print them the way they have printed the cartoons of Mohammed.

There's an easy way to respond to the seeming quandary of Iran's bluff.

Print the Holocaust cartoons.

Better yet, reprint the most famous Holocaust cartoons: The Pulitzer-Prize-winning Maus.

The dare is, of course, disingenuous. As Maus so ably illustrates, there is no western or even Jewish prohibition against depicting the Holocaust. Remember, the Danish cartoons did not run afoul of Islam because of HOW they depicted Mohammed, but because they depicted him at all. Liberals will be making a big mistake if they don't side with conservatives on this one: Any version of Islam that endorses bans on OTHERS depicting Mohammed is fundamentally in conflict with basic tenets of western civilization. Just as are those versions of Christianity that, based on literal readings of the Bible, forbid any "graven images" of god or anything else.

The American and western media outlets that cover the cartoon controversy without showing the cartoons are cowardly, hypocritical, un-American and sometimes all three. The notion that they might cause offense is, itself, offensive. As Tucker Carlson correctly pointed out on MSNBC today, lots of things in the news might cause offense. What makes the media honor this potential offense? Is it the number of adherents? Is it the violence they might do in response? If so, then any journalistic outlet hiding behind this rationale ought to be clear about what its policies are:

How many adherents must a religion have in order to have its prohibitions followed by the particular media outlet?
What level of violence will be sufficient to cow the particular media outlet into observing a religion's teachings?

Better yet, what is the ratio? For instance, if 1 billion Muslims oppose depictions of Mohammed, and 10 people will die in anti-Mohammed-depictions-violence, is that a sufficient ratio to make ABC, CBS and NBC observe Islam's ban on depictions of Mohammed?

If so, does that mean a religion of only 100 million adherents only needs to kill 1 person to get its bans followed? Or does it work in reverse, that if I only have, say, 10 million people in my religion, I'd have to up my violence quotient to compensate?

Any allegedly journalistic outlet that doesn't have the balls to show the cartoons at the root of this controversy ought to make clear what its policies are about which religions get to determine their editorial coverage, using how much violence.

Conversely, those journalistic outlets -- such as Fox News and the Philadelphia Inquirer -- ballsy enough to display the Mohammed cartoon ought to send an equally clear message by printing Iran's Holocaust cartoons. The best way to prove that we really do have free speech is to exercise it. The best way to demonstrate that bad ideas are best defeated by exposure, rather than suppression, is to do it.

Oh, and before I forget, here, in flagrant defiance of the Koran, are my own depictions of Mohammed, in two very different moods:

:)
:(

Remember Conservatives?

2006-01-10T09:10:00.000-05:00

While we tend to talk in general terms about a conservative president and a conservative Congress, the reality is we have neither. Genuine conservatism opposes rampant deficit spending, expansion of government and aggressive internationalism, all hallmarks of this administration.

But now, the theo-con president and theo-con Congress have been sufficiently weakened by the consequences of their devastating actions that, much like disenfranchised liberals, disenfranchised conservatives are daring to assert themselves. The Washington Times reports that conservatives want the House leadership battle to address not just the theo-con's unending power-hunger, but also fundamental principles about the party and its philosophical approach to the nature of governance.

Whichever side you're on politically, it seems to make sense to with them luck.

WCWJWD?

2006-01-10T08:53:00.000-05:00

According to the Christian-right WorldMagBlog, former Sen. Gary Hart's latest book is just the latest instance of the left making a grab for the Jesus brass ring. Hart reportedly questions how Jesus would have felt about such presumably right-wing priorities as gun ownership, the death penalty and "foreign adventuring."

The implication, of course, is that Jesus was actually a leftie (a radical leftie, some argue) and that this constitutes an endorsement of many policies favored by the left: Opposition to the death penalty, a strong resistance to "pre-emptive" wars such as Iraq, aggressive assistance for the poor, etc.

But Hart and the left are making a big mistake by playing the Christian right's game. As soon as they credit the question "What Would Jesus Do?" with legitimacy, they've lost. Why? Two reasons. One is the non-Christian assertion that Jesus was just a guy, and one not elected to office in the United States of America, and that if his positions are so clearly the right way to go, they ought to be able to win in the marketplace of ideas without reference to their source. The second is the more important reason, and one that even Christians ought to endorse: That we don't and can not know what Jesus would do, because the one meaningful source of insight on this question -- the internally inconsistent and self-contradictory Bible -- has shown itself through history to be infinitely malleable and interpretable. In other words, as soon as we endorse the concept of crafting national policy based on what Jesus would do, we toss rationality out the door and, with perhaps more fearful implications, open the door to the next demagogue able to use Jesus to sell irrational, anti-Democratic policies. Sound familiar?

Give me a Democrat -- Christian or otherwise -- with the balls to say that we ought to hold our debates in the present, using facts and the insights that 2,000 years of progress have brought to light.

If What Bush Says Is True...

2006-01-01T16:29:00.000-05:00

I've tried in the past to avoid the lazy stereotyping of President Bush. I don't believe I've ever called him stupid or evil. I don't think him stupid or evil -- the left isn't supposed to think that way about people, right? And I've usually thought that his own internal logic held up pretty well, at least, when you accept his premises. But the wiretap tap-dancing has reached some pretty bizarre realms of ratiocination. Look at the questions that arise if we accept what Bush has been saying as true.

He's defended his actions -- most recently today, when the Associated Press asked him about revelations that the National Security Agency, without warrants, listens in on phone calls made to Americans. But his logic makes no sense. And it almost seems as though the media no longer themselves understand logic well enough to pursue the president's line of thinking. Here are some of the questions they should be asking:

If leaking news of this NSA program is a crime, why didn't President Bush order the DOJ to investigate the leak a year ago -- when he knew the Times had found out about it -- rather than only after the Times published its story?

If what the president is doing has been legal all along -- and got a legal boost, as he claims, from the congressional authorization of force -- and the president has always said he'd use every means of combating America's enemies, then is there any reason to think the enemy wouldn't have put two and two together and concluded that, since domestic wiretapping was legal (as the president claims), the government must be doing it?

If the war in Iraq is what's making us safe, why do we still need domestic spying?

And, most troubling, if the war in Iraq is what's making us safe, what happens when we win it?

ITEM: Associated Press Utilizing Psychic Abilities!

2005-12-30T08:08:00.000-05:00

Psychic powers are a boon to any reporter. So it's good to know that the Associated Press, the dominant wire service in America, has now got someone on staff who's got psychic powers and knows how to use them. Those powers are on full display in their latest dispatch on the National Security Agency.

Here's how the AP story starts off:

NEW YORK (AP) -- The National Security Agency's Internet site has been placing files on visitors' computers that can track their Web surfing activity despite strict federal rules banning most of them.

These files, known as "cookies," disappeared after a privacy activist complained and The Associated Press made inquiries this week, and agency officials acknowledged Wednesday they had made a mistake.

The psychic powers come in to play with the choice of the word "acknowledged." You can only say something has been acknowledged when you know that thing to be true. You can't, for instance, acknowledge that the world is flat. So for the AP to say that the NSA "acknowledged" that it made a mistake in utilizing computer technology that allows it to track the usage of visitors to its site means that the AP somehow knows this actually was a mistake.

Now, the AP might, in its modesty, claim that it doesn't know due to psychic abilities, but due to statements from the NSA. That would be just silly, however. Because any first-year journalism student (and, really, it shouldn't take much longer than that) knows that just because someone tells you something -- particularly something that's to their benefit -- doesn't mean it's true.

That's why reporters often use such technical language as: "Said," or "claimed." The fact that the AP chose not to use such journalistic jargon in this case leaves only two conclusions: That the AP chose to trust the secretive spy agency or that the AP has psychic powers.

Obviously, in this climate -- in which we see one story after another of the government trying to maintain secrecy about its surveillance and other activities -- no responsible journalist will simply take the word of a spokesman paid to protect the reputation of a secretive spy agency. Which means the AP must, therefore, have psychic powers.

Sweet.

Bravo, Rick Santorum

2005-12-28T09:23:00.000-05:00

There. I said it. Philadelphia Senator Rick Santorum has done A Good Thing. And we (take your pick: liberals, atheists, smarty-pantses) ought to applaud him for it.

Santorum is, make no mistake, a douchebag. But we should not be so blinded by his douchebaggery that we fail to see positive moves and, as good behavioralists, reward them.

Right now, the liberal blogosphere (notably, Americablog, via Buzzflash) is going nuts hammering Santorum for hypocrisy or flip-flopping, or whatever, after he's renounced his support for the Dover, PA, school board and the various sham groups that backed its attempt to inject creationism into American classrooms.

I understand the reaction. There's blood in the water. Start chewing. And there's something to be said for the take-no-prisoners approach, for the idea that it's better, in some respects, to have our opponents assume their most radical form, that Americans might more easily recognize them for what they are.

But this isn't just a philosophical battle. It's not a game. This is an ongoing, real, practical battle being waged every day for control of our schools, our towns and our country. Real people pay the price every day. Students are having their educations -- i.e., their framework for understanding the entire world -- short-changed every day due to religious zealotry. We should therefore, I think, not penalize those of our enemies who see the light on particular issues. We should praise them. We should reward and defend them. Or else, we make conversion to our positions a no-win proposition.

And besides, as we've seen from how Republicans embrace Sen. Joe Lieberman, there doesn't have to be a realpolitik down-side in doing this, either, even on a strictly strategic level. Have Republicans lost anything by rewarding Lieberman for his adoption of their military tenets? No. If anything, they've used the opportunity to build bridges and make inroads. They look non-partisan, plus they get to use Lieberman, and their embrace of him, to appeal to fence-sitting voters. Democrats shouldn't be pouncing on Santorum. They should be pounding on his voters.

Define "Crazy"

2005-12-28T08:19:00.000-05:00

A Mexican judge has ruled that a family's fatal exorcisms qualifies them for as long as 40 years in psychiatric hospitals (Mexican psychiatric hospitals, of course).

What's unclear is what makes them nuts (okay, aside from the catatonic one).

Is it their belief in demons and devils?
Is it their belief that said demons and devils are capable of corporeally possessing human beings?
Is it their visions of supernatural entities?
Is it their belief that deadly violence was the only remedy for possession?

The first three beliefs are relatively common among average Americans. Most Americans believe in a bad man named Satan. The Holy Roman Catholic Church not only ascribes the power of possession to Satan, it teaches some of its members how to combat that power. And right this moment, MSNBC is talking about the "holy bun" -- the latest object in which thousands of Americans have seen some sort of sight they interpreted as divine or of divine origin.

So, the only difference these "crazy" Mexicans have with many, if not most religious Americans, is their differing ideas on how to remedy demonic possession. It's not clear to me why that particular delusion makes them any more crazy than the other three do. Unless it's simply that it's not held by a majority.

Phelps Strikes Again

2005-12-27T22:31:00.000-05:00

My friend Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (nee Operation: Truth), has forwarded this blog posting to me, with the hope of getting it noticed by people. Paul and Anthony Lappe (of GNN) and I had the Rev. Fred Phelps on the air when I produced a couple of their fill-in stints on the Mike Malloy Show on Air America Radio, to discuss precisely this issue.

The issue, in short, is that Phelps and his fag-hating friends, show up at the funerals of KIA Americans and, in essence, applaud the deaths. They do so because they view America's military casualties as divine retribution for America's tolerance of homosexuality. Which, as we all know, God hates.

Paul, I believe, abhors Phelps for his message, his lack of respect, his insanity and the pain he inflicts on friends and kin already in pain. I'm with Paul on all of this.

But I also think Phelps has something to teach us -- and, specifically, to teach Christians. I've written before that I find Phelps to be among the most logical and consistent Christians. What his actions ought to do is challenge current Christians to assess why they don't endorse Phelps. Do they disagree that the Bible condemns homosexuality? Well, then they're nuts, because the Bible is clear as day that homosexuality is an abomination in the eyes of, y'know, the Lord.

The only way modern-day, sophisticated Christians can dismiss Phelps is if they're willing to say that the Bible is open to interpretation. And once you've said that, you've taken a massive leap -- and you should recognize that you've done so. Because, if you don't accept the Bible as the literal word of your god, then you might as well file it on the bookshelf with any other cafeteria-style parable that helps you -- and acknowledge that you've elevated reason above faith (because reason, after all, is the tool you use to interpret the Bible), and see where that elevation takes you.

Activist President

2005-12-27T10:14:00.000-05:00

President Bush is justifying his violations of the Constitution based on two related premises, that the United States is at war and that he will do whatever is necessary to defend the American people.

But that's not his job. The oath he swore upon taking office says:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Not preserve, protect and defend the United States. Not preserve, protect and defend the people of the United States. But preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

That's it. Do the job.

That Sounds About Right...

2005-12-22T20:09:00.000-05:00

Here's how the White House starts off its list of the president's accomplishments during the past year:

Fact Sheet: President Bush's Accomplishments in 2005

A Week Of Accomplishments

If that.

When David Brooks Is You

2005-12-22T12:22:00.000-05:00

Let's play "You're the columnist." Let's put you in the media bubble and see what kind of columns you write in real-world circumstances.

Because you are a columnist, you are expected to be brief about terrorist threats and other issues in this country. This brevity makes you as psychologically complex as an episode of "24," with descriptions of specific bad guys and their activities.

This has had a cumulative effect on your psychology. While many of your fellow citizens have relaxed as 9/11 has faded into history, you don't have that luxury. Your brevity, and the terrifying false alarms you hint at to the public, keep you in a perpetual state of high readership.

You know that one of the few advantages America has over the terrorists (other than military, economic, intellectual and numerical superiority) is technological superiority. You make it sound sure that the president should use every geek, every computer program and every surveillance technique at your disposal to prevent a future attack. You acknowledge that existing FISA laws enable and regulate intelligence gathering. You deem it a pretty good process. You acknowledge that the system works quickly and even, when you deem it appropriate, retroactively.

But you fail to point out that FISA's shortcomings are inescapable consequences of a governing system predicated on keeping power in check. First, you claim that FISA is predicated on a division between foreign and domestic activity that has been rendered obsolete by today's mobile communications, without mentioning the fact that the division between foreign and domestic activity was predicated on the desire to prevent the executive branch from gaining excessive power to monitor American citizens on American soil. Second, you isolate FISA as involving cumbersome paperwork and bureaucratic foot-dragging, neglecting to point out that the current president's has had four years to reduce or eliminate both not just in the FISA process but in every aspect of defense and homeland security, rather than maintain these problems as scapegoats to justify increases in his power. Finally, you remind people that FISA's premise of case-by-case surveillance does not easily address new information-gathering technologies, which could allow the federal government to access private information about its citizens on an indiscriminate, wholesale basis.

Over time, you've become convinced that these new technologies are run by National Security Agency professionals who are shielded from political influence. You cite the self-serving claim that these new surveillance techniques helped foil an attack on the Brooklyn Bridge, without questioning whether physical structures are the only American features worth defending. The question you assume the president asked himself is, How do you regulate the new procedures to protect liberties?

You claim there are only three options. First, you say the president can ask Congress to rewrite the FISA law to keep pace with the new technologies. This has some drawbacks, you helpfully point out. How exactly do you write a law to cope with this fast-changing information war, you ask, as if the president would know how to write any law to cope with anything, and as if the U.S. Congress were not the most qualified legislative body in history, with a staggering array of resources, to address precisely this task as it has addressed other issues involving national defense and fast-changing information technology. Even, you ask, if the president could set up some sort of procedure - such as an electronic-mailing account, perhaps -- to get warrant requests to a judge, how would that judge be able to tell which of the thousands of possible information nodes is worth looking into, or which belongs to a U.S. citizen? You pause to congratulate yourself on the construction of this quandary, which is rendered unsolveable by the helpful absence of any case-specific details that would have generated and accompanied an actual warrant request. Swamped in the alleged data-fog that you have stipulated, you assert that the courts would just become meaningless rubber-stamps, blatantly exposing your utter lack of irony. Finally, you claim without any possible quantifiable methodology, there is at least a 50.01% chance that some member of Congress would leak details of the program during the legislative process, which you claim without explanation would destroy the program (as if the NSA has given up on warrantless wiretaps now that the cat's out of the bag).

Your second option is to suggest that this executive branch could plausibly consider itself qualified to self-police anything, with or without the Justice Department or the N.S.A.'s inspector general. This option, too, you allow, has drawbacks. First, it's legally dubious, or, as other columnists more committed to brevity might say, illegal. Second, you say, casting unfounded aspersions on the whistleblower, it's quite possible some intelligence "bureaucrat" -- damn those serving-their-country pencil pushers! -- will leak information about the program, especially if he or she is crazy enough to think voters should know which laws the president breaks before they vote. Third, you reiterate your baseless claim that exposure of this program will not only destroy the program, you predict -- and lament -- that executive power might actually be curbed as a result.

Your third option is to suggest what you might call informal Congressional oversight. You could congratulate your readers by pulling them into your fantasy and saying: "Look, given the allegedly fast-moving nature of this conflict -- which has lasted four years despite its allegedly fast-moving nature -- there is no way we can expect politicians to follow rules about what is permissible and impermissible. Instead we can trust them to trust each other with matters of national security and work out disagreements in a responsible manner."

These are your three options, Mr. columnist, and these are essentially the three options David Brooks limited himself when he hacked out his latest column last night. (He chose all three.) But before you decide, let me tell you one more thing:

But before you decide,
These are your three options, Mr. President, and these are essentially the three options George Bush faced a few years ago. (He chose Option 2.) But before you decide, let me tell you one more thing: Options 1 and 2 won't work, and Option 3 is impossible.

Options 1 and 2 won't work because your readers, the American people, know better than to scrap the legislative process that has served us so well for more than 200 years. Option 3 is impossible because your readers, the American people, know that the executive branch and members of Congress keep national-security secrets all the time, and they won't yield to your self-serving pessimism just because you suggest that they'd be sophisticated to do so. We don't have that kind of mistrust in America today.

That leaves you with Option 4: Face the fact that you will not be using your best thinking to address how we ought to use our best technology to monitor the communications of known terrorists. Face the fact that the odds of an attack on America will always be higher than they could be if we were willing to sacrifice all the principles that make us America.

What Comes After Creationism?

2005-12-21T19:14:00.000-05:00

The history of science has, for centuries, involved its conflict with religion. Yes, apologists on both sides have said -- and still say -- that there is no inherent conflict. They are wrong, as the history books, newspapers and professional prognosticators can attest.

Religion espouses magic. Science espouses empiricism. As long as religion stakes a claim to the material world, there will be conflict. The ruling in Dover is a long way from ending the Christian right's attempt to roll back the clock to before Darwin opened the door for modern biology. But we are no longer in an era when only one monument of science, one advance in human understanding, will face the full wrath and malice of fundamentalist religion. Once, we got one Copernicus or Galileo or Darwin or Scopes per century. That won't be the case any more. Two battles are just over the horizon. One of them will likely remain at a negotiable, unchallenging detente for, um, god knows how long.

And that is the origin of the universe. I'm not up on my astronomy, or my astrophysics, let alone my quantum physics. But for a few decades now we've been in a period where scientific advances -- such as the Big Bang and theories I'm not even passingly familiar with about heat and light and such -- will seem poetically consonant with some of the metaphorical interpretations of Genesis. And that'll keep the Christian right at bay for a while.

That's not the real battle. The origin of the universe has nowhere near the immediate impact of the real battle. And it's real not only because it will fundamentally challenge how we think about ourselves, but it's also real because the factual arsenal that will come into play will be much more accessible to lay people than will discussion of heat-whatever and 11 dimensions and super-string theory and whatever else lies at the heart of universe creationism.

The real battle -- and you can already hear the weaponers at work -- will be over your soul. Literally.

The mainstream media, and national culture, haven't paid too much attention, but behavioral/evolutionary psychology have pretty much done away with Freudian thinking. And as the understanding grows of how the mind/brain works, the line between those two will vanish and the resultant understanding of human mental phenomena will not only leave no room for the concept of a soul, it will specifically, directly contradict it.

It's not instantly intuitive how this could be so. The soul, after all, is defined by its intangibility, its non-ness. It is by its very nature something outside the material realm. How could science, the study of material things, measurable, physical things, have anything to say about the soul? Let alone disprove its existence?

All true enough. But Christianity does make one material claim about the soul -- its necessary interaction with the mind. And the mind's status as an existential thing is dwindling rapidly. What happens when everything that happens in the mind is something understandable as something that happens in the brain? What happens when we can know the physical and electro-chemical causes of any given thought, any dream, any artistic inspiration? Where will that leave the soul?

And what about the soul's irreducibility? We are supposed to believe that a human soul is eternal somehow. Well, does that mean the everlasting human soul is a snapshot of our final mental state? Our first mental state? Some intrinsically, essentially unchangeable mental state? Well, the more we come to understand about the brain, the more apparent it is becoming that no "golden nugget" known as an intrinsic self resides within the brain. Our understanding of mental phenomena is becoming increasingly atomistic, which is decidedly not what souls are all about.

Consider commissurotomies. This procedure -- developed, if I remember my Philosophy of the Mind class, as a way to halt the spread of electrical seizures in epileptics -- involves severing the nerves that connect the two hemispheres of the brain. What researchers have found is that one of the "selves" residing in that severed brain can know things and even communicate things that the other "self" does not know. Literally. Sometimes, whether the person knows something depends entirely on how the knowledge was presented, and how information about that knowledge is queried. For instance, I forget exactly how hand/eye/mouth/speech/sight functions line up, but this example I'm creating isn't too far off:

I show a picture of a cat to someone who's had a commissurotomy. I ask him to tell me what he sees. He tells me, "cat." But if I ask him to write down what he sees, he gets it wrong, makes it up, or writes nothing. Why? Because the part of his brain that controls writing can't communicate with the same part that sees the card (again, I'm making up the specifics and may be getting them wrong, but the point of the example holds) and therefore legitimately does not know.

So, does this person's soul see a cat?

In the light of new understanding about the mind/brain, just asking the question becomes ludicrous. But the consequences of clinging to "the soul" are not. For our society to advance -- in education, social progress, crime prevention, medical treatment, psychological treatement, the war on terror -- we need to understand better how the mind/brain works. You think religion has taken a toll on society because of how its objections have impeded the progress of biology and medicine? Wait until the battlefield moves from our physical selves to our mental non-selves. You think creationism is bad? Wait until the Christian right has to fight a battle to defend its very soul.

Why "Intelligent Design" Still Lives

2005-12-21T16:41:00.000-05:00

Slate's Will Saletan asks "where to go from Dover"? He has some interesting answers about where the debate over so-called "intelligent design" goes from here. But he's left unanswered the bigger question of which scientific advance will provide the next challenge to historically unchallenged religious teaching. There are two answers. Both will redefine everything. But one will merely change the universe. The other, far more significantly, will change the world.

But first, Dover revisited. Saletan (whom I'm pretty sure was one of our guests when I was working on Jeff Greenfield's CNN program) seems to have cheated by reading Judge John Jones' entire opinion. These days, that practically counts as investigative journalism.

But Saletan (who is, as they say, A Smart Guy) stumbles a bit, I think, in his critique of Jones' opinion. He says:

The "contrived dualism" objection pretty much captures what's wrong with ID. But it also captures what's wrong with Jones' opinion. "Since ID is not science, the conclusion is inescapable that the only real effect of the [Dover] ID policy is the advancement of religion," he writes. The effect of the policy, in which the Dover school board instructed ninth-grade biology teachers to criticize evolution and mention ID, "was to impose a religious view of biological origins into the biology course, in violation of the Establishment Clause." Note the dualism. ID theorists assume evidence against evolution is evidence for ID; Jones assumes any unscientific theory is religious and therefore forbidden.

The "contrived dualism" to which Saletan refers is the implication by "ID" supporters that there are only two explanations for biological complexity -- evolution and "intelligent design" -- and that, therefore, where evolution fails, "intelligent design" must reign. But this alleged dualism (which we see in the "god of the gaps" fallacy) is NOT what's wrong with "ID."

What's wrong with "ID" is not some logical fallacy in its juxtaposition with evolution. What's wrong with "ID" is that it's wrong. It's both empirically wrong and a priori wrong -- any "theory" that complex stuff is so complex it must have been designed by something complex which can not be explained deserves to get laughed out of kindergarten, not dignified with a refutation as highfalutin as "contrived dualism."

And Jones doesn't assume "any" unscientific theory is religious and therefore forbidden. He marshals considerable evidence not just that "ID" is intrinsically, irreducibly unscientific, but that its genesis was overtly, intentionally, intrinsically, irreducibly religious.

Saletan goes on:

Jones acts like it's no big deal to declare ID unscientific, since science is just one kind of learning. "Supernatural explanations may be important and have merit," he says. "ID arguments may be true," could have "veracity," and possibly "should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed." But if unscientific theories are religious, and religion can't be taught, it's unclear how notions related to ID could be debated in schools, or how their truth or merit could be entertained. And that's bad news for science, because it offers people with creationist sympathies—roughly half the American public—no outlet in the public education system outside of the science classroom.

Boo fuckin' hoo. Is it bad news for racists that they're denied outlets in public-education discussions of slavery? Is it bad news for UFO enthusiasts that they're denied outlets in public-education discussions of the pyramids? Is it bad news for me that Petty Larseny isn't in curricula around the country? No one has ever argued or ruled that "intelligent design" ought not to be discussed in public schools. It should (as Saletan goes on to suggest) be discussed in Social Studies classes. It also would serve very well as a fitting example of how the scientific method renders some alleged theories unworkable on their face. Religion can be taught, and should, as a social force, not as theology or cosmology. And definitely not as biology.

More Saletan:

As Jones makes clear, the Dover case is lousy with evidence of explicit religious motivation on the part of local ID proponents. But is ID, by virtue of being unscientific, wholly and inherently religious—or is there, contrary to the judge's dualism, a third category?

There is, though, as I said, I think Saletan has misread Jones. Jones doesn't assume "ID" to be unscientific and THEREFORE religious. Jones has determined "ID" to be unscientific AND religious. Religion is a subset of unscientificness and nothing I've seen from Jones suggests that he's not open to the existence of a non-religious subset of unscientificness. Regardless, Saletan makes an important point about "ID"'s future:

Statements by ID leaders "reveal ID's religious, philosophical, and cultural content," [Jones] writes. A strategy document developed by the "Center for Renewal of Science and Culture" is full of "cultural and religious goals, as opposed to scientific ones." Proponents of ID fear "evolution's threat to culture and society," and the Dover board's collaborators have "demonstrably religious, cultural, and legal missions." Cultural, cultural, cultural. Not scientific, not necessarily religious, but cultural.

Is the pseudo-science of creationism ultimately being driven by religion? Or is this brand of religion, in turn, being driven by cultural anxieties? Is it possible to open a conversation with these folks and their kids, not in biology class but in, say, social studies?

What's puzzling about Saletan's conclusion here is his use of the word "or." It feels as though he wants us to experience this choice as a profound insight into the nature of the "ID" conflict, but the reality is that virtually every significant religion is inextricably intertwined with its host culture. (Natural selection abets the survival of religions that evolve parasitic traits.) The Christian right is certainly both a religious and cultural movement. But I'm not sure what Saletan has bought us by suggesting we see it not as the former, but as the latter. I think he's suggesting that the issue can be defused, and approached from a scholarly viewpoint. In which case, it's a really naive argument to advance, given how consistently the Christian right wields its religion as the shield of its unchallengeable exceptionalism. Look at what happened to the class in Kansas that proposed discussing creationism as a cultural phenomenon. And that was a college-level course.

Saletan's next, concluding paragraph is particularly confusing. See if you have the same trouble I did:

According to Jones, the founder of the ID movement has written that evolution contradicts "every word in the Bible." Every word? You mean, including the part about not killing or stealing? No wonder so many people cling to creationism. And no wonder scientists and judges can't make it go away.

Saletan seems to undercut the argument he made in the previous paragraph. As he suggests, the proponents of "ID" have made damn sure to cast this discussion in religious, specifically Christian, specifically Biblical terms -- when they're talking to supporters. When they're talking to the outside world, they mask "ID" as something else. But the reality is that, to its supporters, "Intelligent Design" isn't a scientific issue. It isn't an empirical issue. It's a MORAL issue.

What Saletan -- and maybe Jones -- doesn't get is that the only way this country will succeed in killing off "ID" and other creationist mutations, is not by making logical, fact-based arguments. The "ID" proponents have revealed themselves not just immune to, but dismissive of, reason and fact-based reality. No, the only hope of killing "intelligent design" is to acknowledge that it really is a moral issue. But it's not just about the alleged morals of serving an alleged deity, it's about the morals of serving our real country and our real children. If we really want to kill creationism, it may be time, as I've written before, to confront this issue not based on the facts behind it, but based on the reality ahead of it; to portray it as a choice, with the lives of our children at stake. Because that's what it is.

(PS: I haven't forgotten my pledge to discuss the next scientific/religious battles; I just got a little more caught up in Saletan than I expected. Stay tuned!)

Bush Is a Coward

2005-12-21T08:46:00.000-05:00

I try not to indulge in attacks that are gratuitously -- okay, solely -- ad hominem. And I don't automatically disagree with everything President Bush says, or attribute to him every negative trait possible. But in the last week it's become increasingly clear to me that President Bush is a coward, and that this aspect of his personality is at least partly responsible for a number of the awful things he is doing to this country.

We've seen two signs of cowardice in the last couple of weeks. He's panicking, and he's lying to cover up his cowardice. Remember how shaky the president was in his first remarks after being informed of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Remember the look on his face when he was first told what had happened, and remained seated in a Florida classroom rather than rise immediately, excuse himself and go do his scary job.

Remember that Bush's very first reaction to the attacks was to treat them like criminal acts to be dealt with by law enforcement. Only when the scope of the nation's outrage revealed itself did he get serious. But then, like a child terrified that something bad might happen again, he pledged not just to get al Qaeda, but "to rid the world of evil."

President Bush said in the first days after Sept. 11, 2001, that part of the nation's responsibility now was "to rid the world of evil." I think, at the time, many of us saw this as rhetorical hyperbole referring to al Qaeda. I no longer think so. I think Bush was speaking literally. He was so terrified by what had happened, of its recurrence, of being blamed, that his instinct really was to eliminate any and all bad men. That's not how rational, calm, brave men respond to danger. They confront the danger. They don't panic and call for the end of all potential dangers. That's why the first President Bush, who had personal experience facing physical danger, could let Saddam Hussein remain in power -- because he could handle the reality of knowing that a bad man was still at large. Because he knew his job wasn't to eradicate all evil, but to protect the American nation and the American character.

President Bush keeps talking about how Sept. 11 has changed everything. Well, it didn't change everything, and it shouldn't have. Yes, preceding presidents could have and should have done more to bolster our defenses against asymmetrical attacks and to eradicate the source of those attacks. But they didn't need to see a Sept. 11 made manifest to understand its theoretical possibility. They recognized that possibility and yet still refrained from the sweeping overhaul and contravention of our nation's laws undertaken by the current President Bush.

When a previous president confronted the dangers of violent Muslims taking American hostages and commandeering American craft, he responded not by rewriting America's character, as expressed in its laws, but by defiantly proclaiming, "Millions for defense, but not a penny for tribute." Pres. Thomas Jefferson was talking about using military sacrifice to maintain American principle. He was, in essence, saying that submitting to blackmail would violate America's character and that he would rather spend the millions necessary to defend that character, and risk the lives of those Americans in harm's way (both the military and the hostages) than sacrifice a single aspect of America's character.

Pres. Bush has done precisely the opposite. He has stated, repeatedly -- even before, supposedly, he knew who had attacked us -- that they "hate us for our freedoms." Like a bully's victim, he responded almost immediately by working to erase those things he proclaimed made us a target: Our freedoms.

Pres. Bush is working to make us absolutely safe. What he fails to understand is that this is a fundamentally un-American goal. America, at its best, understands that freedom is not about safety. Freedom is a risk, one that, as Mr. Jefferson so calmly, confidently accepted, makes American deaths not just a likelihood but almost a necessity. The loss of American life in defense of liberty is not restricted to the actions of men and women in uniform abroad. It is also a price incurred by civilians, here at home. It was a price paid by men, women and children in Oklahoma City. But, perhaps because its methodology was familiar to us and its perpetrators not exotic to us, the attack led to a relatively restrained legislative response. And even then, there was considerable debate -- among honorable members of both parties -- about how far to go beyond chemically tagging fertilizer.

Not so with President Bush and Sept. 11. He has advocated wide-ranging abandonment of long-held, time-tested American principles about the necessary restraints on executive power. I no longer believe it's just because he's power-hungry. I believe he's scared and, feeling helpless and out of control, seeks to compensate by trying to accumulate as much power and control as he can. That's part of why, failing to get Osama bin Laden, he set his sights on an identifiable target (remember Rumsfeld's desire to hit Iraqi targets due to accessability, not Iraqi culpability) that his advisors assured him he could get. And then he began to act as though bin Laden weren't an issue to him, whistling past the graveyard.

In other words, when the issue is his failure to get bin Laden, bin Laden isn't important. But when the issue is how much power Bush should have, the answer is that his fear has driven him to seek virtually unlimited power, and the reason is bin Laden, even when the reasoning is unsound. Pres. Bush has suggested that those who disagree with him don't understand the situation, don't appreciate its gravity or lack his conviction in addressing it. None of those is true. They lack his fear. They're not so scared of terrorism or even death that they're willing to do anything, to sacrifice any American principle, to avoid it. In fact, they often summon the bravery to defy the president, and even the law, to defend both American principles and the American public's right to know when those principles are being subverted. So outraged was the president by the revelation -- which he knew was coming -- of how far his fear has driven him, that he not only took the highly unusual step of acknowledging what he had done, but he mounted an attack on the unknown patriot who exposed him. He said, "the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk." He was RIGHT. What his cowardice blinds him to is the reality that patriots WANT to be at risk. They don't believe that absolute national security is worth the price. "Give me liberty or give me death," wasn't just bravado, it was the expression of the new American ethos -- that some things were more precious than life itself.

Bin Laden's goal was not to physically destroy America. It was to isolate America and to turn America into something un-American. His weapon was not four airplanes. It was fear. The point of terrorism is not to kill, but to wield fear in such a way that it motivates your enemies to change the way they act. By this measure, Pres. Bush is losing the global war on terror and his own personal war with terror. Because, judging by our nation's recent laws, and the executive-branch violations of our fundamental, literally constitutional principles, we are no longer the home of the free. And judging by our president, we are no longer the home of the brave.

Intelligently Decided

2005-12-21T00:09:00.000-05:00

John Jones, a federal judge appointed by President Bush, has struck down the Dover, PA, school board's creationist policies. "Smackdown" might actually be more appropriate. The ruling was so clear, so uncowed, so matter-of-fact, that it offers a template for how the left ought to start addressing the wacko Christian right that has managed to erode the scientific and cognitive underpinnings of this nation's entire educational system.

Look at what he says about testimony from supporters of so-called "Intelligent Design."

although Buckingham, Bonsell, and other defense witnesses denied the reports in the news media and contradicted the great weight of the evidence about what transpired at the June 2004 Board meetings, the record reflects that these witnesses either testified inconsistently, or lied outright under oath on several occasions, and are accordingly not credible on these points.

They "lied outright" and are "not credible." Would a Democrat be so bald? I'm tempted to say that's not a rhetorical question, but a plea. The case, Jones wrote, brought out "compelling evidence that Bonsell and Buckingham sought to conceal the blatantly religious purpose behind the ID Policy."

The proponents of "Intelligent Design," in other words, had a religious intent, denied they had religious intent and actively worked to conceal the reality that they had religious intent. And Jones called them on it. He didn't whine. He didn't scold. He didn't even go out of his way to condemn. He simply stated the clear, irrefutable facts.

Here's the conclusion of his ruling, in its entirety:

The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board’s ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause. In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.

Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.

To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

To preserve the separation of church and state mandated by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and Art. I, § 3 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, we will enter an order permanently enjoining Defendants from maintaining the ID Policy in any school within the Dover Area School District, from requiring teachers to denigrate or disparage the scientific theory of evolution, and from requiring teachers to refer to a religious, alternative theory known as ID. We will also issue a declaratory judgment that Plaintiffs’ rights under the Constitutions of the United States and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania have been violated by Defendants’ actions.

Defendants’ actions in violation of Plaintiffs’ civil rights as guaranteed to them by the Constitution of the United States and 42 U.S.C. § 1983 subject Defendants to liability with respect to injunctive and declaratory relief, but also for nominal damages and the reasonable value of Plaintiffs’ attorneys’ services and costs incurred in vindicating Plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.

Jones blunders, in my admittedly atheistic view, by deeming it "ironic" that those who tout their own religiosity would act unethically in defense of that religion. Jones has confused religion with morality. The proponents of "Intelligent Design" are not espousing Jesusian behavior, they are espousing Christian theology. There's nothing ironic about their willingness to sin in doing so. If anything, he could have substituted the phrase "time-honored." Also, it would have been nice if Jones had pointed out that the "bona fide" and "deeply held" beliefs of "intelligent design"'s proponents are not mitigating factors, but in fact the root of the problem. "Intelligent design" isn't their belief's side effect, but its weaponization. Biblical fundamentalism leads inevitably to creationism, which leads inevitably to anti-Darwinism which has been led by the forces of social selection (i.e., the courts) to "intelligent design." In other words, Jones is wrong when he implies that "intelligent design" is a random mutation; it is, in fact, a survival mechanism that has been selected for by environmental factors. If Jones were interested in making me utterly happy, he might also have pointed out the logical problem with a theory that explains complexity by attributing it to an unexplained complex being (i.e., alien or deity).

That said, Jones nailed this one as well as we could have hoped for in Bush's America of 2005. He refutes the "god of the gaps" by noting that a scientific theory's incompleteness does not constitute a fatal failure. If it did, of course, science itself would not be able to exist. And Jones also denies "intelligent design" the very camouflage it has sought all along: The notion that "ID" is just another scientific theory. Jones has not only made the point that "ID" is not science, he has revealed the contortions its proponents have undergone to portray it as science.

Not only are its proponents liars, the theory itself is fundamentally dishonest.

But what's so truly heart-breaking about Jones's ruling is that it's the epistemological equivalent of Nixon going to China. As unacceptable as the Christian right will find this ruling, can you imagine the reaction if a Democratic judge, appointed by Bill Clinton, had issued it?

Frankly, I have a hard time imagining it myself. And part of the reason for that is that Democrats long ago embraced this asinine notion of universal niceness and baseless respect that compels them to entertain every proposition and consider every position. It's exactly that tolerance -- there, I said it -- that allowed George Bush to get elected. Because a nation that understood how to draw lines between bullshit and reality would have laughed Bush off the stage at the first Republican primary. Instead, we've taught our children that everyone deserves respect, there are no dumb questions, everyone's opinions count and all this other garbage that flings our cognitive doors wide open for the stampeding ranks of the horseshit parade.

Judge John Jones sounds like what a Republican used to sound like -- the kind of guy who didn't have time or patience or respect for liars and prevaricators and dummies. We don't have enough of those Republicans around any more, and it's nice to see one poke his head up in a political shooting war as fierce as evolution. But what we really need is for Democrats to renounce the emotion-based, self-exalting, anything-goes ethos perfected by President Bush to the long-lasting detriment of this nation and the world.

In other words, as Jones has reminded us, what the country needs now is for Democrats to embrace some good, old-fashioned, American conservatism.

The Meaning of the Meaning of Christmas

2005-12-13T22:28:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking a lot about the real reasons behind the allegations of the existence of a "war on Christmas." At first, I thought that Fox News and the Christian right were hurting their own cause, because they're diluting the religious messages historically associated with Christmas. Then I realized, that's not an accidental side effect, that's their purpose. And I think I know why.

First, how are they diluting the religious message of Christmas? Well, both the New York Times and Salon had excellent pieces on the background of Christmas recently. As the Times reported, the first Europeans to settle here didn't even celebrate Christmas, due to the fact that its origins lay in paganism, not the Bible (a beliefnet.com search of the King James version turns up not a single mention), and due to the fact that celebrations of it tended to be irreligious (i.e., prone to drinking and swearing and other awful things).

Celebrating Christmas was a crime for years in colonial Massachusetts. It wasn't, in fact, until the tame, family-friendly domestications of Clement Moore and Thomas Nast rendered Christmas innocuous, that Christmas began to enjoy broad-based support from both the Christian clergy and the lay community. (Both the Times and, especially, Salon, have a lot of fascinating such tidbits on Christmas history). And despite what the Christian right would have us believe about a recently emerging "liberal" or "secular" war on Christmas, it was only a generation or two after Christmas was popularized in the U.S., that the backlash arose -- from neither "liberals" nor atheists...but from Christians and Jews.

They had different laments. But interestingly, and tellingly, we only hear one today. Jews at the time had the audacity to oppose the fact that they were sending their kids to their public schools to have their teachers, paid with their tax dollars, lead the class in Christmas carols. That battle -- to end official, governmental endorsements of Christmas (as specifically prohibited by the First Amendment) -- still continues. The other part of the backlash came from Christian clergy who felt that the commodification of Christmas, and its implementation as a sales tool, watered down their intended message for the holiday (peace and love, I guess; the usual claims).

But today, it's only freaks who still fight that battle. We don't hear the commentators on Fox News decrying commercialization. We don't hear today's Christian leaders calling for an end to Christmas sales. These factions are the ones demanding Christmas sales, Christmas flyers, Christmas banners and Christmas marketing plans.

Why have today's defenders of Christianity championed the one element of Christmas rejected by the Christianity of that early-to-mid-20th-century era so cherished by the Christian right? I asked myself why we don't see Fox News, or the Christian right, demand the universal embrace and proclamation of Easter. The difference is that Easter has no competition.

It's the fact that Christmas has (admittedly scant) competition that makes the Christian right so nuts. That's why we don't hear them hollering about stores that have NO banners up and NO sales this time of year. It's not about ignoring Christmas; it's about including other people.

The one defining feature of modern, fundamentalist, conservative Christianity is its claim to exceptionalism. We saw it in the literally violent backlash against a proposed college course that dared not just to criticize so-called "intelligent design," but worse: Treat it as just another creation myth.

It's the one thing they can't stand -- the notion that their religion and their holidays and their slogans are just another constellation in the pantheon. That's why a Wal-Mart employee was fired for his e-mail about the origins of Christmas; not because he denied its religious message, but because he exposed the fact that it was a hodge-podge of elements from other religions. They don't care whether Christmas is commercialized. They don't care whether Christmas loses the original religious (or spiritual, if you must) message.

Because modern-day, American, conservative Christianity is not about active pursuit of the principles and social radicalism attributed to a guy named Jesus in a book of questionable authorship. Modern-day, American, conservative Christianity is all about claiming a personal relationship with a god that just happens to endorse all the stuff you believe.

That's why Fox News commentators want Christmas acknowledged by name, but not in principle. I originally thought they and the Christian right were losing the alleged Christmas war by fighting for commercialization of Christmas, and for its osmosis into a generic, essentially secular event, devoid of challenging Jesus stuff. But that's not a loss for them. That's a victory. They want something they can use, not something they have to serve. Because the Christianity they want to see prevail isn't a text-based Christianity; it's the Christianity of President Bush, a Christianity that makes no demands, that requires no introspection, that elevates one's alleged "heart" to the status of divine interlocutor.

The Christianity they want to see triumph is just as valid an interpretation of the Bible as any other (that's the beauty of a vague, self-contradicting, maybe-it's-literal-maybe-it's-metaphorical, committee-edited mess). But its validity isn't the point. The point is that they want their version of Christmas, and Christianity, to triumph not in order to serve some beneficial ethic underlying it, but because their version serves them. In other words, they're fighting their own war on both the historical and religious Christmas for one simple reason: They consider it better to receive, than to give.

Suck It, New Orleans

2005-12-11T22:21:00.000-05:00

Back when Hurricane Katrina first struck, and the magnitude of its devastation -- and ineptitude of the response -- were becoming clear, I planned to write three postings on why Katrina wouldn't change a thing. I only got to one, on the media. I had two others planned. The next would be on how politicians wouldn't change. Reality overtook me on that one, making it almost immediately clear that politicians and American politics wouldn't change.

Now, it's becoming strikingly clear just how indifferent President Bush and his administration really are to the plight not just of a city that's a genuine American, and world, cultural treasure but of the entire, stricken gulf region.

Thanks to Think Progress for finding and posting word from the Washington Post that the White House has moved on. The New York Times this morning went into some detail on the subject. (Tip to MyDD)

Why don't the media and politicians give a shit? I don't think the easy, quick answers are the right ones. Okay, sure, there's some element of truth to them. But it's silly to suggest that they don't actually give a shit. They do care -- in some way that feels like caring. The Washington Post is asking about it. Meet the Press is talking about it. The New York Times is opining about it. In Vanity Fair, Brian Williams said, "I watched Americans die for lack of food and water...in my own country, before my very eyes. If this disaster doesn't lead us into a national conversation on the subjects of class, race, urban planning, the environment, Iraq, and oil, then we have failed."

They care. Williams clearly cares. By his own criteria, he's also clearly, spectacularly failed. But why should the disaster have led us into a national conversation on the subjects of class, race, urban planning, the environment, Iraq, and oil? Why couldn't BRIAN WILLIAMS lead us into a national conversation on the subjects of class, race, urban planning, the environment, Iraq, and oil?

Well, the answer to that leads me to the final thing I wanted to write about, the final thing that I thought wouldn't change after Katrina. And that final thing was you. Or, to be fair, us.

Please don't misread this as some lament about how young people today suck and things were better in the olden days. That's usually horseshit and it's definitely horseshit today. Young people today are, basically, less violent and more responsible than several preceding generations of Americans have been. I'm not talking about young people. I'm talking about their parents, and the generations of Americans who actually run things these days.

We care about the wrong things. We cry over sad pictures. We feel genuine anguish over the despair of others. But it's as if we've bought the Baby Boomer myth of never having to grow up, and perverted it to mean that we never have to take responsibility. Growing up is supposed to mean that you don't need sad pictures or sad stories to understand that people are suffering, to follow the causality of public policy, to imagine the impact of our decisions on people we will never know anything about. We're supposed to care about the Army Corps of Engineers before hurricanes happen, before sad pictures make us cry and inept politicians make us mad, and we're definitely still supposed to care long afterwards. Because that's what grown-ups do. They remember why bad things happen and how to prevent bad things from happening in the future. They don't just react emotionally to immediate, proximal stimuli and then move on. They fix things. The Christian Right's alliance with a particularly venal and ugly strain of corporate capitalism isn't winning because they outnumber the rest of "us" or even have more money than "we" do. They're winning because they actually get off their asses and take care of fucking business.

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" doesn't refer to the need to watch our borders. It refers to every single citizen's duty to participate in government and the body politic, to be informed, to understand the principles that we're supposed to hew to especially in times of fear and panic. It's boring, boring stuff. That's the goddamn point. If it were sexy, it wouldn't require our vigilance; we'd be riveted by it. Instead, we feel as though we're vigilant because in our heart we experience something that feels like caring; we feel bad when we catch a glimpse of poor, sad, black people on the TV; we blog and read blogs. For some reason, we no longer guard the most important element of American freedom -- our nation's character -- with the zeal and vigilance that are required, choosing instead the exciting, adrenalizing "vigilance" of obsessing about terrorism or the easy, fun, undemanding "vigilance" of just railing against whomever we don't like and characterizing them as our enemy. And because we've elevated the pure, good-intentioned "heart" in society over the callous, calculating "brain," we've lost sight of what patriotism, vigilance and true, meaningful caring actually mean.

(Here's a good definition of meaningful caring: Caring that leads to action. So: Crying about sad TV pictures and then flipping the station is not caring; crying about sad TV pictures and then sending money that will momentarily alleviate someone's suffering but change nothing in the long term is okay caring; voting against the politicians responsible is okay caring; pressuring local media to cover relevant issues in such a way that politicians will respond and minimize chances of repeat occurrences -- and then patronizing media that actually respond to your pressure -- that's a lot closer to meaningful caring, and it's a template for how the evil Christian Right get their work done).

Anderson Cooper, quoted in the same, aforementioned issue of Vanity Fair, also clearly cared. He said, "The anger's here. It's not frustration. People are not frustrated -- people are dying. I am lucky. I can ask people questions. But there are no answers, just questions."

It's a common, revealing and fundamentally wrong conceit. THERE ARE ANSWERS. And more to the point, we don't need the news media to ask people questions. We need the news media to acknowledge that there are answers, even though that creates, for them, the burden of doing the work to identify them, and taking the heat for revealing them. This is a causal world. It's complicated, yes, but no less causal for that. We don't need the media to care for us. We need the media to give less air time to caring and to asking questions than it does to unearthing and sharing the answers.

Even after it was revealed that two out of the top three national disasters predicted by FEMA had come to pass, no one has even tried to launch a national discussion about the third. The problem isn't that we don't care, the problem is that we think we do. And the bigger problem is, we think that's enough. In reality, we've lost the right to claim we give a shit about New Orleans. The reality is, we don't. That's why we're still willing to risk another 9/11 and another New Orleans; because we haven't changed the fundamental notions we hold about how we think, what caring is, and what we consider patriotism.

Because, in the 21st century, the price of freedom isn't eternal vigilance. It's internal vigilance.

Bush Doesn't Know Jesus, Kristof Does

2005-12-11T21:47:00.000-05:00

Nicholas Kristof has imagined what would happen if President George Bush were to meet Saint Peter at the pearly gates of Heaven. The dialogue is destined to make the rounds of both secular and religious liberals. They will laugh at it and append remarks to their e-mails, such as:

"Funny!"

"So true!"

Some particularly droll wag will remark, "as if George Bush would even get to heaven!" Delicious!

I guess I'd be considered on the left, politically. I certainly oppose just about everything there is to oppose about George Bush. And yet, my reaction to Mr. Kristof's mischievous, impertinent fiction is, in essence, "And who the fuck are you?"

After all, if arrogance is one of Bush's failings, along with his religious certitude, then what the hell is the point of Kristof asserting that HE knows what the arrayed forces of heaven (not just Jesus, but all of heaven) REALLY want George Bush to spend his time doing? (UPDATE: In fact, in his latest column, Kristof asserts this knowledge again, juxtaposing Bill O'Reilly with "authentic" religious conservatives. Why exactly does Kristof get to designate religious authenticity?)

Kristof is making the exact same argument that Bush is making: Each suggests they represent the "real" Christianity. Bush has done this not just with his own religion, but with others, as well. He has told us what "real" Islam is and is not.

The reality is, neither Bush nor Kristof get to define Christianity or Islam. Who does? Christians and Muslims. Is Christianity a religion of violence? Yes. Is Islam a religion of peace? Yes. Is Christianity a religion of peace? Yes. Is Islam a religion of violence? Yes.

Is Kristof right, that Christianity is "supposed" to be all about lepers and prostitutes? Or is Bush right, that Christianity is about knowing something in your heart that you call Jesus? Yes. And yes. And both are wrong when they deny the "reality" of anyone else's Christianity or Islam or other religion.

The reality is that most successful religions succeed by NOT being any one thing. Most successful religions -- like most successful species -- succeed by dint of adaptations and mutations that allow them to evolve. Christianity has been violent when violence best propagated it. Christianity has been peaceful when peace best propagated it. And it can do both at once. This is not an accident of Christianity or Islam, this is the one, essential feature of both.

C.S. Lewis wrote in "Mere Christianity" that "Christian" was not a synomym for "a good person." A "Christian," he wrote, was merely someone who believed that Jesus is humanity's savior. The Bible, and the Koran, were written, edited and, most importantly, interpreted throughout history in ways that allowed them to survive in hostile environments and allowed them to spread in nurturing ones. The entire idea of the "Rapture" didn't even arise until 1800 years after the Bible was written -- how's that for an unclear text?

Bush is right when he says Islam is a religion of peace. Osama bin Laden is right when he argues that Islam endorses slicing box-cutters across the throats of flight attendants and sending airplanes loaded with aviation fuel stabbing into occupied buildings at 300 miles an hour. That's Islam. So is opposition to it.

The problem is not that one Islam is winning or losing. The problem is not that America is embracing the "right" or "wrong" Christianity. The problem is with everyone who thinks they know which.

Torture Is Not US

2005-12-07T11:07:00.000-05:00

I don't know whether torture is effective. John McCain in his book says he gave up information he shouldn't have -- and he received only moderate torture, due to his father's status in the Navy. But torture's effectiveness is not the issue.

Victory is the issue.

And if we become the enemy to defeat the enemy, the enemy still wins. That's what President Bush means when he says Osama bin Laden hates our freedoms. To some extent, Bush is right. We do have freedoms bin Laden doesn't want. We do draw the line at doing things to people in the name of our cause that bin Laden will do in the name of us. The reason for this is that we are not Osama bin Laden. But even if we kill him, if we end up becoming him, he will still have won.

I just got word from Operation Truth of a new campaign to boost support for McCain's anti-torture legislation. It's called Torture Is Not US. As long as that's true, we're still winning.

In the Name of God

2005-12-06T16:58:00.000-05:00

This is what happens when a religion mutates into a faith that's all about loyalty and obedience, rather than the so-called moral/ethical principles it supposedly espouses.

Paul Mirecki, a University of Kansas professor who dared PROPOSE teaching so-called "intelligent design" as what it is, a creation myth, reports that two men followed him and beat him up, while making reference to his class.

This is what happens when religious leaders espouse faith over works. If you don't understand that, ask yourself, Who Would Jesus Beat?

Let's see whether the religious, dominionist men trying to hijack America and make it a theocracy speak out against this actual violence -- physical and intellectual violence -- as vocally as they do against fictional violence.

(Thanks to the reader who e-mailed me to alert me of this story and pass on the link. I'll post more info as it emerges.)

Dear Mizz Dowt...

2005-12-04T19:05:00.000-05:00

Sorry if I got yer name wrong. I wuznt sure if it was Morein Dowt, Maureen Dowd, Mizz Dowt, Mizzd Owt or Misses Dowt.

Anyway, ah ain't much fur books, so I ain't red yore book, "Are Men Necessary: When Sexes Collide." But I dun read yer exerpt, "What's A Modern Girl To Do?", in the New York Times.

And, well...ah luv you gurl. And now ah know you luv me, two.

We are sole mates.

Just lack ah bin wronged by wymen, you bin wronged by men. Men should fuckus on whut madders, knot on superfishal stuff.

Lack you say: Men want purty young things. Men want womyn de-voted to them, who don't intidimate them or be smarter than them.

It ain't raht and it ain't fare. Ah understaind eggsacly what you mean. Because whimin have discrinimated aginst me, too.

But ah no you won't due that, Mo.

Ah no yewll luv me fur who ah aim. You won't care ah ain't got no edgeoccasion. You won't care ah ain't good-lookin'. You won't care that ah cant reapreduce. You won't care ah ain't got know money. You won't care ah ain't got no kreer. Cuz you no bedder. You ain't a slave to eveillusion.

After all, ah ain't never even herd of the felllows you dated: Aaron Sorkin, John Tierney and Howwell Rains.

Sew pleas call me soon, Mo. Ah ain't got much time, cuz ahm 86 and dine of AIDS. (Of coarse, yuh dont have to, but ahd be honerred if you'd take my name).

Luv,
Adolf Dahmer

Once More Unto the Information Battlespace

2005-12-03T09:16:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post today reports on the U.S. military admission that it paid to have propaganda pieces appear in Iraqi media, without revealing their source. This is bad and dumb in more than just the obvious ways.

Here's how the Post summarized the issue:

In a statement, the command said the program included efforts, "customary in Iraq," to purchase advertising and place clearly labeled opinion pieces in Iraqi newspapers. But the statement suggested that the "information operations" program may have veered into a gray area where government contractors paid to have articles placed in Iraqi newspapers without explaining that the material came from the U.S. military and that Iraqi journalists were paid to write positive accounts.

"Serious allegations have been raised that suggest the process may be functioning in a manner different than is intended or appropriate," the statement said. Commanders are "reviewing these allegations and will investigate any improprieties," it said.

The Post's implication and interpretation (which I'm guessing is at least not contradicted by whatever background briefings they were given) is that the MNF-Iraq statement says that paying to place articles in Iraqi newspapers without explaining the source, and paying Iraqi journalists to write positive accounts are operational developments "in a manner different than is intended or appropriate" and that it is these two allegations that will be investigated as possible "improprieties."

But that's not what the actual MNF-Iraq news release says. Here's the relevant excerpt:

As part of our operations, we have offered articles for publication to Iraqi newspapers, and in some cases articles have been accepted and published as a function of buying advertising and opinion/editorial space, as is customary in Iraq. Third parties have been employed in an effort to mitigate the risk to publishers. The procedures for doing so undergo policy and legal review to ensure compliance with the law and regulations.

Serious allegations have been raised that suggest the process may be functioning in a manner different than is intended or appropriate.

In other words, the MNF-Iraq release defends precisely the policies the Post says MNF-Iraq will be investigating. "Buying...opinion/editorial space" is "customary." Paying a middleman in order to conceal the material's source (from at least its readers and possibly even from its publishers) is "an effort to mitigate the risk to publishers [through]...procedures...[that] undergo policy and legal review to ensure compliance with the law and regulations."

What's unclear is which allegations remain that the process might be "different than is intended or appropriate" -- given that the allegations were made about a process that MNF-Iraq is now claiming were "customary," and in "compliance with the law and regulations"!

The release defends the military's practice of subverting the free marketplace of ideas, and duping Iraqi readers, with the following explanations:

The information battlespace in Iraq is contested at all times and is filled with misinformation and propaganda by an enemy intent on discrediting the Iraqi government and the Coalition...

Information Operations is an essential tool for commanders to ensure the Iraqi population has current, truthful and reliable information...

Information operations are powerful and essential to military success...As with all combat operations, Coalition Forces have a number of programs designed for providing factual information to the local population.

Even assuming the reasoning is well-intentioned, it betrays a staggering lack of understanding about the basics of journalism, propaganda and nation-building. If the Pentagon were truly interested in nurturing the kind of journalism a successful representative democracy needs, it would protect threatened journalism not with deceit but with protection.

But the bigger point is that Iraqis have to learn not to trust their journalists, but how to assess their journalists. The issue is not as simple as getting the Pentagon's good news out there. The issue is that Iraqis have to learn how to practice and consume good, independent journalism, as is far from "customary" in Iraq.

By failing to provide Iraqis the truth about the source of information, the military tacitly endorsed the notion that people don't, or even shouldn't, assess journalism with a critical eye that weighs journalists against their rivals and their track records and possible personal or corporate biases. In other words, they've acted as if consuming journalism ought to be a passive endeavor. And they've given those disinclined to participate in that endeavor all the more reason to throw up their hands, give up the effort and proclaim, "it's all lies anyway." They've undermined not just American credibility, but far more importantly, the credibility of an emerging journalistic system in a newborn nation. And that, I fear, will contribute in Iraq to a trend in America that, with President Bush's support, has already had devastating consequences: The rejection of the notion of objective truth.

UPDATE: A former regular guest on my old show, Morning Sedition, was instrumental in breaking this story, and has his own take on some of the themes I've touched on, in an interview he gave to Anthony Lappe at GNN.tv.

NewsNight: The Other Casualty

2005-12-03T01:27:00.000-05:00

In all the (justified) lamentations for the loss of Aaron Brown from CNN, the end of NewsNight cost us another, far-more-underappreciated, journalist's work.

One of the many smart things Aaron Brown did was to give Correspondent Beth Nissen a de facto home at NewsNight. Following NewsNight's demise and Brown's departure, I'm pretty sure Nissen is still at CNN, but I don't know to what extent other CNN programs are taking advantage of her unique skills.

I should at this point confess that I worked with Nissen (as she preferred to be called) on several occasions when I was a producer on ABC's overnight program, World News Now, back in the late '90s. At the time, Nissen was one of ABC's pre-eminent storytellers, and would occasionally grace our graveyard shift with her presence (and omnipresent tea set) when we needed a substitute anchor. I was simultaneously intimidated, charmed, smitten and intimidated. As well as intimidated.

At the time, I was lucky enough to do subversive TV virtually every day -- working with terrific, game anchors such as Anderson Cooper and Juju Chang, but also Kevin Newman, Mark Mullen, Thalia Assuras and many, many others. Most of them were willing to indulge me -- and a thrilling handful were just as professionally suicidal as I was (if anyone has transcripts of the stuff Anderson and I used to get away with on the overnight, we'd both be ruined forever). Most of them were interested in making our viewers think differently about the subjects we were discussing (or at least in challenging the prevailing conventions about those subjects) and about our medium itself. Often, we were just bored and wanted to do things differently to keep ourselves entertained. (Okay, I should probably emphasize that I'm speaking for myself here). Anyway, Nissen definitely fell into the category of terrific, game anchors. But while most of us (or, I should reiterate, "I") usually operated in the realm of gallows humor, or sardonic remove, Nissen was different. Nissen didn't just care about the stories she was discussing, she was, I thought, utterly vulnerable to each and every one of them. In journalism, we speak sometimes of the concentric circles. You know -- anything that happens on your block is news; the further away it is, the bigger it has to be to qualify as news. Nissen had no circles. She felt it all. While most of us struggle to connect a day's headlines (i.e., tax cuts) to the people they affect down the road (i.e., people), Nissen couldn't separate the two. The latter was implicit in the former and she bore the weight of it as if it were about her. Scratch that: It clearly weighed heavier on her if someone else was affected.

You may never have heard of her. And you rarely saw her face. That's because she was never assigned to cover Beth Nissen. As far as she was concerned (again, this is my observation, not a claim to know her mind), there was no reason to show her face, when she could show an image that would advance the story, or make it more palpable to our viewers, or complement the covert poetry of her words.

If her writing sounded jarring to you it was due to the relative rarity of her style of writing: Good. She didn't write like a television correspondent. She wrote like a writer. She took time to tell her stories because stories take time to tell well. And because she didn't buy the mantra of bad producers and programmers who will swear up and down that viewers have no attention span and thus no story should exceed a minute-fifteen. (This claim being advanced about a generation that embraces hour-long reality shows in which nothing happens).

I don't know whether commercial, televised journalism has a place for Nissen these days. I'm not sure whether commercial, televised journalism has a place for journalism these days. Still, I hope CNN takes advantage of the fact that it has a skilled, empathetic, responsible, whip-smart, bona fide journalist in its midst. Almost more than that, I hope CNN decides to develop programming that provides an appropriate fit for a skilled, empathetic, responsible, whip-smart, bona fide journalist.

It's a cliche that we get the government we deserve. But I think we also get the journalism we deserve. I hope we still deserve Nissen.

How To Start a Presidential Speech

2005-12-02T21:37:00.000-05:00

Quick quiz, two questions.

1. You're the president of the United States. Two and a half years after your invasion of Iraq has led to the deaths of more than 2,000 members of the U.S. armed forces, and one year after your campaign disparaged the military service of a decorated veteran of the U.S. Navy, how do you start your speech at the U.S. Naval Academy outlining your strategy for victory in Iraq:

a) Thank you for that gracious welcome. Your discipline and comportment only confirm my long-standing regrets that I myself never enlisted as a young man.
b) Thank you very much. I know how hard each and every one of you worked to attend the Naval Academy and avail yourself of the unique opportunities offered here, so I won't keep you longer than I have to.
c) Thank you for that warm welcome. It's not much of a secret that I didn't exactly apply myself when I had access to some fine educators, and you have access to some unparalleled instructors here, so I hope you'll keep that in mind when you head back to class.
d) Thanks for the warm welcome. It's good to be back at the Naval Academy. I'm pleased to provide a convenient excuse for you to miss class.
Answer.

2. You're the president of the United States. On the occasion of World AIDS Day, how do you begin your remarks on a still-incurable disease that has killed millions of people:

a) Thank you very much. I want to thank my wife for introducing me. As she mentioned, the federal government next year will double its spending on AIDS research.
b) I want to thank my wife for that introduction, and for making the point that we can no longer allow personal religious beliefs to influence policy decisions on how we prevent the transmission of AIDS.
c) Thank you, Laura. Thank you all for being here. As you know, AIDS is no laughing matter.
d) Thank you all. How about my line of work, where you get introduced by your wife? (Laughter.)
Answer.

What the Fuck Is the Matter with Kansas?

2005-12-02T07:51:00.000-05:00

The one hopeful sign out of Kansas lately -- a college course that would have taught so-called "intelligent design" as what it is, a politically-charged creation myth -- has been canceled before it even hit the classroom.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting (article is available here for five days after this posting) that University of Kansas Religious Studies Chairman Paul Mirecki, who would have taught the class, decided this week to pull it from next semester's schedule. Why?

Mirecki, it turns out, is partially responsible. He did something dumb by telling an e-mail group that his course, "Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism, and Other Religious Mythologies," was "a nice slap in their big fat face." It was, reportedly, in reference to the Christian right.

Mirecki tells the Chronicle he got 1,200 e-mails in response. Most of them were positive, but enough were hostile or threatening, that he felt "the learning environment was going to be ruined." Rather than salvage it, he totalled it.

The class came under such fire for committing the gravest of sins against Christian fundamentalism: It denied its claims for exceptionalism by lumping it in with other mythologies and refusing to pretend that it has any greater claim to truth than they do.

It remains unclear exactly what the focus of the course would have been. But it's truly a shame that Kansas, the state that apparently needs it most, missed an opportunity to consider just how "intelligent design" fits into the overall pattern of religious creationism.

Setting the Record Straight on "Off the Record"

2005-11-30T20:38:00.000-05:00

It's been more than a few years since I was a wire-service reporter and, before that, a newspaper reporter, but I still remember enough to know that Katharine Seelye got it frighteningly wrong in the New York Times this week.

And it's frightening because, especially after years of one journalistic embarrassment after another, you'd think the Times would have mastered the basics.

Seelye led her story by declaring: "The journalistic phrase "off the record" seemed to lose all meaning last week at an event featuring Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court."

Why did the phrase lose "all meaning?" Because two newspapers -- the New York Daily News and the New York Post -- had the balls and brains to report on the event. The News did so in cutesy fashion, but in greater detail than did the Post.

They were right to do so, and Seelye is wrong to suggest otherwise. Why? Because "off the record" is not a magic phrase -- it's not something you can demand of journalists. It's a phrase sources and journalists use, by mutual consent, to determine how particular quotations or facts will be sourced and attributed.

In other words, if I ask President Bush, "how's it going?" and he says, "off the record, I could use a vacation," there's no rule that says I have to honor his declaration that he was going off the record. Why? Because it's not his record. The same principle applies if someone says, "don't photograph me." Well, if they're in public, you're allowed to photograph them. It's, like, the law and stuff. That whole "freedom" deal.

The one thing that would have put the News and Post in the wrong would have been if attendance at the event was contingent upon acceptance of ground rules such as declaration of all remarks as off the record. According to Seelye, and Lloyd Grove of the News, that wasn't the case. In fact, Grove makes a good point to Seelye, that the event was declared off the record ex post facto. A journalist with integrity should probably interrupt and object when a source starts off with a unilateral declaration of off-the-recordness, but there's definitely no power to an after-the-fact unilateral declaration.

Even in these post-adversarial-journalism days, you'd think they'd know that. At the paper of record.

Morning Sedition

2005-11-30T20:22:00.000-05:00

So, Danny Goldberg is killing Morning Sedition.

Sedition, if you haven't heard of it, is Air America Radio's morning-drive program, hosted by comedian Marc Maron and co-host Mark Riley. As its first producer, I helped create and launch the show in April 2004 and produced it for its first year. If you've seen the HBO documentary, Left of the Dial, you know that this was an extremely trying process.

When Goldberg started as Air America Radio CEO this year, he made it clear almost immediately that he didn't like (or get, depending on your view) Sedition and that he wanted, at the very least, to make substantive changes. Landing in Goldberg's crosshairs strained the previously volatile, but also rewarding, relationship between myself and Maron and, especially after the network asked me to help Rachel Maddow create and launch her new 5 a.m. show, I ended up reducing my involvement in Sedition, handing over most of the responsibility to the hyper-capable Brendan McDonald and focusing my efforts more on the long-term planning required for the summer's slate of live remote broadcasts.

Eventually, it became clear to me that this set-up wasn't infinitely tenable. I told the network I wanted to stay on in some other capacity. My superiors there felt the same way and sought other ways to utilize me. Goldberg, however, had no interest in keeping me, so I was laid off in September.

All of which is not the point of my story, but a good-faith effort to disclose that, yes, I have a number of axes that could use grinding if I were so inclined.

I don't feel so inclined (okay, I do, but not so much any more and, in any case, I'm trying not to indulge). Maron is pretty damn close to a national treasure. His level of emotional intelligence is off the charts and he applies it to issues of politics and society in ways that make his work the comedic equivalent of "Freakonomics" or "Tipping Point," his synthesis of insights (his own and others) into how people work individually and societally is just about that revolutionary.

And it's piss-your-pants funny. The New Haven Advocate came pretty close, I think, to nailing what made Sedition good and valuable to AAR, and in general. When Goldberg arrived at Air America, everyone -- including him -- acknowledged that Morning Sedition had been neglected by the network.

Al Franken and, to a lesser extent, Randi Rhodes, had received most of the promotional push (including the scant paid advertising AAR purchased as well as the free media). Sedition had a couple strikes against it -- it started off with a mismatched team and only really took off once one of the three initial hosts left the program. Also, Maron had never done radio before and Riley had only done local radio. Maron was the lead host and needed a few months to find his groove -- which he did in preternaturally quick time.

The biggest strike against us, though, was that we were operating in the most competitive daypart -- morning drive. And no one knew we existed. Despite that, however, and despite Goldberg's public rationales, Sedition usually did relatively okay in the ratings. When it stumbled, there was usually some clear reason for it or it was part of a larger pattern (affecting AAR or talk-radio overall). So, we needed to let people know our show existed. And this wasn't another case of a show feeling neglected and making excuses; all the executives agreed, and said, in essence, that it wasn't possible to put a show on in the nation's number-one market, in the most competitive daypart and expect it to succeed without spending a single dollar to let people know it existed. To his credit, Goldberg brought in people to remedy that. Unfortunately, for reasons beyond my ken, the additional staff didn't yield any additional attention for or promotion of the show. We were, in fact, told to wait. First a new logo had to be developed. Then an overall network-marketing plan would have to be developed. Only then, finally, would the network be able to market Morning Sedition properly. If that was true, why cancel the show before allowing the still-unseen marketing to debut? If it wasn't true, why should we believe what we're being told now?

Goldberg's claim that he's dividing the morning-drive slot into two shows of radically different sensibilities rather than retain a sharp, critically acclaimed comedian at a time when fans of Howard Stern (some of whom had already discovered us and joined the ranks of our listeners) would be looking at alternatives, in order to boost ratings, is both laughable and transparently false. The reality is he dislikes Air America's comedic elements. Rather than more of Sedition's comedy, Goldberg wanted the show to interview former NYC mayoral candidate Mark Green.

After I was gone, Green started showing up on Sedition with such frequency that it led the consistently-favorable magazine TimeOut NY to make its first negative comments about the show, with a dig about Green's frequency as a guest.

I'm glad that my friend Rachel is going to get more exposure. She's enough of a star that it's probably only a matter of time until Air America somehow fumbles and lets her slip away. But it's a huge disappointment that Goldberg is rejecting the advice of virtually everyone who's weighed in on this issue in order to kill a show that's been provocative, unique, smart, brave, personal, vulnerable, honest and as funny as gallows humor can be.

I hope Goldberg isn't full of shit when he says they're trying to find a way to keep Maron on the air at Air America. I'd be interested to see how Maron evolved as a solo act on the air. And Maron's is a perspective (that should be plural, actually) you just don't get from any of the other lefty-ish, progressive hosts. No slur against them, they all say important things and expose important truths, but Maron does more than that, he does so with a singular voice.

And silencing that voice just because he doesn't hear it would make Goldberg just as bad as the people he claims to oppose.

Translation: No Flamers

2005-11-30T07:18:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post reports that the local shaman thinks the Vatican has left some, um, wiggle room in the "No Gays" sign they posted on the door of their top-secret, boys-only clubhouse.

Me, I find it interesting that in their quest for celibate priests, they bar men who know they're gay, while admitting men who aren't, but still have practiced gay sex. Wouldn't CHOOSING to commit an act the Bible calls an abomination be worse than simply having a biologically programmed inclination to be gay?

But then, I guess that's about as meaningful as debating D&D's rules on hit points or something.

Fuck Morale

2005-11-29T21:42:00.000-05:00

The news that a new poll suggests most Americans agree with Bush and Cheney that criticizing the war and its prosecution damages troop morale got a lot of play, much of it along the lines found in this Washington Post writeup. Unfortunately, most of the coverage I saw misses, as the poll itself seems to have, the bigger point. (At this writing, the poll had not been posted online yet).

According to the coverage, 70% of Americans believe that criticism of the war by Democratic senators hurts troop morale. Why the pollsters chose to ask anyone other than the owners of said morale, I'm not quite sure. Nevertheless, let's assess what lies behind the poll: Namely, the implication that if something hurts troop morale, good Americans ought not do it.

Let's even stipulate the truth of what the poll found most Americans believe: That war criticism hurts troop morale. Our next question ought to be: So the fuck what?

I don't mean that as synonymous with, "Who gives a shit?" I mean, seriously, what are we supposed to do with the stipulated reality that dissent hurts morale? Let's break it down. There are two possibilities about the dissent:

It's accurate.
It's not accurate.

In other words, the complaining about the war is either merited or not merited. If it's merited, we shouldn't waste time worrying about whether VALID complaints about the war are hurting morale. It's like worrying that an accurate cancer diagnosis may lead to depression. Kinda misses the big picture.

So that leaves us with the scenario of inaccurate (or, at least, not wholly accurate) war criticism. Dissenters are either disingenuous, in which case I think we can agree they're not defensible, or they're sincere in their criticism. The reason -- well, one reason -- it's still not just appropriate, but imperative, for war critics to speak out, even at the risk of hurting morale, is that dissent is not merely about present conflicts, it's also about future conflicts.

Dissent is something war planners should know to anticipate. They should know that it can hurt morale. Both of these facts are supposed to compel responsible political, civilian leaders not to stifle dissent, but to render it moot by obtaining civic consensus before going to war.

The problem is not that dissent causes low morale. The problem is that poor leadership and/or planning causes dissent AND low morale. If the dissenters are, in effect, saying, "fuck morale," then so are the leaders who engendered the dissent. If the fact that dissent can have negative consequences causes us to stifle dissent, then we've removed a crucial motive future political leaders have to ensure that they only go to war with broad-based civilian support. President Bush failed to win broad-based support; much of the support he did get came through defrauding the populace. That's why dissent is so important now -- not so much to bring about change in this obstinate, unresponsive administration, but to serve as a warning to future politicians that they damn well better win Americans' WITTING support before they wage war in our name again. If we fail to voice our dissent now, we're writing a blank check for tomorrow's politicians to wage war without fear of reprisal, let alone criticism. And that will really hurt troop morale.

AP Prays for Guidance. And Gets It.

2005-11-29T07:25:00.000-05:00

The Associated Press has a writeup out there -- linked, most notably, by Huffington Post -- on the latest in a gazillion allegedly "unexplained" crying-statue "miracles."

The AP does its usual minimum of dropping in the obligatory "some say"s before most of the supernatural claims. But, I thought I'd give them a hand on this one and show them how their story might appear if the traditional wire-service standards (I used to work for UPI) were applied to claims of magic that happen to emanate from populous religions. My edits are in italics.

By JULIET WILLIAMS
The Associated Press

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Carrying rosary beads and cameras, the faithful have been coming in a steady stream to a church on the outskirts of Sacramento for a glimpse of what some observers, who have neither evidence nor relevant expertise, are calling a miracle: A statue of the Virgin Mary they say has begun crying a substance that looks like blood in that it is red.

It was first noticed more than a week ago, when a priest at the Vietnamese Catholic Martyrs Church says he spotted a stain on the statue's face and wiped it away. Before Mass on Nov. 20, people again noticed a reddish substance near the eyes of the white concrete statue outside the small church, said Ky Truong, 56, a parishioner.

Since then, Truong said he has been at the church day and night, so emotional he can't even work, although he remains capable of discussions with reporters. He believes the tears are a sign but is unable to produce supporting evidence.

"There's a big event in the future earthquake, flood, a disease," Truong said. "We're very sad." The Associated Press has learned that earthquakes, floods and diseases have all occurred in the past and that their recurrence has already been predicted by several established scientific institutions.

On Saturday, tables in front of the fenced-in statue were jammed with potted plants, bouquets of roses and candles, in part because local organizers were sufficiently canny not to arrange for tables so large that the displays would appear small in comparison. Some people prayed silently, while others sang hymns and hugged their children. An elderly woman in a wheelchair wept near the front of the crowd. It was not immediately clear whether the hugging and weeping were routine phenomena.

A red trail could be seen from the side of the statue's left eye to about halfway down the robe of concrete.

"I think that it's incredible. It's a miracle. Why is she doing it? Is it something bothering her?" asked Maria Vasquez, 35, who drove with her parents and three children from Stockton, about 50 miles south of Sacramento. The Associated Press has since learned that the statute is, in fact, a block of concrete and, as such, possesses neither a gender nor the capacity to be bothered.

Thousands of such incidents are reported around the world each year, though many turn out to be hoaxes or natural phenomena. The other incidents, therefore, must be magic, in which case, this reporter ought to have led this story with the sentence: "The Associated Press has confirmed the existence of magic." The Associated Press regrets the error.

The Diocese of Sacramento has so far not commented on the statue, and the two priests affiliated with the church did not return a telephone message Saturday. The Associated Press had planned to grill the local shamans with such hard-hitting questions as: "How about that statue deal? Pretty freaky, right?"

The Rev. James Murphy, deacon of the diocese's mother church, the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, said church leaders are always skeptical at first, a claim the Associated Press was unable to verify after a review of historical records indicating that church leaders have, in fact, eschewed skepticism in favor of accepting on faith the notion that there's a magic man in the sky.

"For people individually seeing things through the eyes of faith, something like this can be meaningful. As for whether it is supernatural or a miracle, normally these incidences are not. Miracles are possible, of course," Murphy said without being able to cite a single confirmed incident in the history of humanity. "The bishop is just waiting and seeing what happens. They will be moving very slowly."

But seeing the statue in person left no doubt for Martin Operario, 60 and therefore susceptible to believing anything that might ease his encroaching dread of mortality, who drove about 100 miles from Hayward. He took photos to show to family and friends, who were unavailable for comment.

"I don't know how to express what I'm feeling," Operario said. "Since religion is the mother of believing, then I believe." Operario added that since necessity is the mother of invention, then he invents.

Nuns Anna Bui and Rosa Hoang, members of the Salesian Sisters of San Francisco, also made the trek Saturday. Whether the weeping statue is declared a miracle or not, they said, it is already doing good by awakening people to the faith and reminding them to pray. The Associated Press has confirmed that it is also doing bad by seducing people to the faith and discouraging them from doing things other than pray that might prove more fruitful due to their closer ties to causality.

"It's a call for us to change ourselves, to love one another," Hoang said. Hoang was unable to provide evidence for his claims and the Associated Press has learned that Hoang's plans to change himself will be short-lived and that, in fact, he does not love you.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed unless Jesus says it's okay.

Journalists and Jehovah

2005-11-27T22:23:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow's issue of The New Yorker will win a new round of headlines for Seymour Hersh, but if American journalism runs true to form, it'll focus on two things -- military strategy in Iraq, and Bush's detachment from execution of policy -- and stay well clear of a third.

Hersh's piece -- as summarized in the magazine's PR e-mail notice -- includes quotes from several Pentagon sources, and concludes that Bush is, in fact, looking at pulling out ground troops from Iraq. There is, however, a disturbing trend that Hersh outlines regarding the air war. The details will, I'm sure, be all over the place Monday.

But I suspect we won't see much of the corporate media focus on another aspect of Hersh's piece -- that Bush's obstinance on Iraq has its roots in his religious certitude. Here's a taste of it from that PR e-mail:

Hersh speaks with several senior officials who confirm that President Bush “remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq.” One senior official, who served in President Bush’s first term, tells Hersh that, after September 11th, he was told that the President felt that “God put me here” to deal with the war on terror, and a former defense official says that the President has grown detached, leaving more to Karl Rove and Vice-President Dick Cheney. “They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,” he says.

That gray world is safe for Bush for several reasons. The one that concerns me most right now, however, is that the media have declared it a DMZ. The media are simply too ill-informed, too cowardly and too simplistic to address basic issues of how politicians' religious beliefs shape their political beliefs and guide their actions.

It's insane that any politician vying for federal office, or even statewide office, doesn't as a matter of course, end up addressing questions about what supernatural forces they believe in, what system they believe guides those supernatural forces, how those supernatural forces affect their own actions, etc., etc.

Part of the problem, I think, is condescension. Much of the northeastern-based, well-educated media can't imagine that most Americans (and most American politicians) actually believe in a "personal" god that has sentience and intentionality. So they feel dumb or patronizing or just plain weird asking about it.

Which is too bad. Because people are dying as a result.

When Should I Become Anti-Catholic?

2005-11-23T19:14:00.000-05:00

Americans have a choice. We can be tolerant of everything (which must include intolerance). Or we can be intolerant of some things (which might, but need not, be limited to intolerance).

I happen to be a big fan of intolerance. I think America, and specifically the left, could benefit from a healthy helping of it. And let's be open about it. If some group out there proudly identifies itself as anti-somethingwevalue, why shouldn't we respond with a declaration of proud anti-whateverisantisomethingwevalue-ism?

Which brings me to the Catholic church. The Vatican, Pope Benedict's secret hideout, is about to issue a new hiring policy, the details of which have been leaked: No fags allowed. In fact, the Catholic church is now not only a proud discriminator against fags, queers, dykes, sword swallowers and presumably other carny folk, Papa Benedict is going so far as to prohibit from its seminaries and its, um, "sacred orders" (By The Power of Greyskull!) "those who...support so-called gay culture."

That's right, while the corporate media goes bat-shit on the no-shit anti-gay angle, it turns out the Vatican is also implementing job discrimination against, well, male fag hags, I guess. Metrosexuals, perhaps. Straight men who enjoy Broadway musicals. Writers. Me, maybe. I've supported the so-called gay culture, which I take to include, well, all culture. So, no priesthood for me: The Vatican is anti-me. Shouldn't it be okay, then, for me to be anti-them?

I don't mean to suggest that I think all Catholics are bad people, or that we should discriminate against them. But when an institution advertises and defends hateful policies of employment discrimination, doesn't that put a burden on those who identify themselves as members of that institution either to disavow it, disavow its policies, or accept the logic that, otherwise, we must assume they embrace the policies of the organization with which they willingly, publicly identify?

At what point does an organization, an ideology, a religion, slip from being one that enjoys the assumption of beneficence to become one that is seen, and treated, as an advocate and propagator of hate?

Back in college, for the April Fools issue of The Tufts Daily, our lead story was that Kurt Waldheim (then the UN Secretary General), was going to give Tufts' commencement speech. The point was to lampoon Tufts' decision to hold commencement on a Jewish holiday. But one of the lines we included in the story was a defense of the fictional Waldheim booking, in which Waldheim (or a surrogate) protested: "You never hear about the nice Nazis, the ones who care."

Today, I have to wonder, what will it mean to be a good Catholic, if Catholicism itself goes bad?

Rape Responsibility

2005-11-22T22:28:00.000-05:00

A new survey commissioned by the UK branch of Amnesty International has drawn a lot of attention to societal attitudes about rape, but not necessarily in a good way.

The survey (and you should read it for yourself, it ain't exactly heavy lifting) found that British men and women, generally, hold similar views and misconceptions about rape. And it suggested -- or, at least, it seemed to suggest -- that a startlingly high percentage of Britons hold rape victims at least partially responsible for the crime. I'll explain why the survey was fatally flawed in its conception, but first, a breakdown of the most notorious findings:

...please indicate whether you believe a woman is totally responsible, partially responsible or not at all responsible for being raped if…

The woman is drunk (4% totally responsible; 26% partially)
The woman has behaved in a flirtatious manner (6% totally responsible; 28% partially)
The woman has failed to say ‘no’ clearly to the man (8% totally responsible; 29% partially)
A woman is wearing sexy or revealing clothes (6% totally responsible; 20% partially)
It is known that the woman has many sexual partners (8% totally responsible; 14% partially)
The woman is alone and walking in a dangerous or deserted area (5% totally responsible; 18% partially)

Disappointingly, but not surprisingly, some of the most feeble journalistic writeups used provocative and unsubstantiated headline phrases such as "deserve it" and "ask for it." But the poor coverage of the poll isn't what I want to address. The poll itself is poorly constructed, but the outrage in response to it is misguided.

The poll is poorly constructed because the term "responsible" is vague and open to misinterpretation. It's quite possible, as the bad coverage demonstrates, to interpret "responsible" in this case to mean "morally at fault." If everyone polled interpreted it that way, this would be a tremendously troubling poll.

However, "responsible" could also be interpreted as meaning "causal." This conflation between moral and causal responsibiltiy has, I think, made it impossible for otherwise smart and rational people to have frank and open discussions about rape. Too often, discussions about causality are misperceived as discussions about morality; an unfortunate result, I think, of our truly warped notions about sex and the mistaken thinking that sex inherently has moral dimensions.

Every rape victim does something to make their rape possible. They leave the house. They go on dates. They get jobs. These decisions and actions put them in situations that increase their odds of being raped. That is, I think, a fairly innocuous observation.

It's only when people start to consider not whether a woman's behavior, but a woman's sexual behavior, increases the odds of her being raped, that we start to encounter problems. The reason so many people have trouble even considering whether rapists are motivated by a woman's sexual behavior is, I think, the fear that this knowledge will then be used to limit women's freedom to act as they choose or, conversely, to validate or excuse rape itself. These fears are valid. But shouldn't we also be afraid of missing an opportunity to learn something about why rape happens? Wouldn't the ideal solution be to learn more about why rape happens and simultaneously take steps to ensure that rapists are still held fully accountable for their crimes?

What if a woman's sexual behavior can affect the odds she'll be targeted by a rapist? Shouldn't we know that? Shouldn't SHE know that? When I'm told that pickpockets will be more tempted to try for my wallet when I carry it in my back pocket, I don't resent that information as an assault on my autonomy, or as an attempt to condemn my choice of wallet storage. Nor do I somehow become more willing to find back-pocket pickpockets less guilty than front-pocket pickpockets. I'm appreciative of information that I can use to increase the odds I'll keep my money. And, in fact, I do carry my wallet in my front pocket. I could, if I so chose, withdraw all my money from the bank in cash, and then tape hundred dollar bills (okay, maybe twenties) all over my body and go for a stroll through Times Square. I'd be within my moral rights to do so. But no one would be surprised if I came back a few bills light. And some people might go so far as to say I had been an idiot not to know the risks I took on.

And if anyone had told me my behavior wouldn't make me more of a target, wouldn't we condemn that person for misleading me?

Drunk, promiscuous, flirtatious, scantily clad women who are raped in darkened alleyways at midnight deserve our sympathies and support just as much as do sober, chaste, dour, parka-wearing women who are raped in Disneyland at noon. And both rapists deserve equally long stretches in prison. But are we really helping women when we tell them that the ODDS of each rape are identical?

It's not politically correct to suggest that anything but power dynamics motivates rape. In one of his books (Blank Slate, or How the Mind Works), Steven Pinker makes (or passes on) the argument that men use every tactic known to men in order to get sex, and that they've also been known to use violence to attain virtually every goal known to men, so why should it surprise us, then, to learn that at least some men are at least partially motivated by sex when they use violence to get sex?

We do know that rapists target women more than they target men. If woman-ness is a factor, shouldn't we also consider whether behavior that accentuates woman-ness might also be a factor? Because if it is, we might learn something that can help us both reduce how often rapists strike, and inform women about how better to guard against rapists. And if anyone is stupid enough to suggest that understanding more about why rapists rape whom they rape somehow absolves them even partially of culpability, maybe that will force us into a long-overdue dialogue about our underlying hypocrisies and double standards about sex and sexual behavior, and the mistaken notion that questions about sex are questions about morality.