Queequeg the Harpooneer

The devil's advocate

2008-02-12T18:14:00.000-05:00

It is legal to torture a criminal suspect, Justice Antonin Scalia says, because by definition, torture can't be punishment if the victim has not been convicted.

"The Constitution refers to cruel and unusual punishment," Scalia said in an interview with the BBC. "It is referring to punishment for a crime. For example, incarcerating someone indefinitely would certainly be cruel and unusual punishment -- for a crime. But a court can do that when a witness refuses to answer -- can just commit them to jail until you will answer the question without any time limit on it, as a means of coercing the witness to answer, as the witness should.

"And I suppose it's the same thing about so-called torture," Scalia continued. "Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to find out where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited by the Constitution, because smacking someone in the face would violate the Eighth Amendment in a prison context? You can't go around smacking people about. Is it obvious that what can't be done for punishment can't be done to extract information that is crucial to the society? I think it's not at all an easy question, to tell you the truth."

In the interview, Scalia called himself an "originalist" -- someone who believes that the Constitution must be interpreted in light of how Scalia thinks the document's writers intended it to mean, rather than how you or I think the document's writers intended it to mean.

The Eighth Amendment reads: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."

Scalia says the meaning of this is as plain as the nose on Sam Madison's face: You can't inflict a cruel and unusual punishment on someone who has been convicted of a crime. That's what the Founders plainly meant, he says. If you disagree, you're a judicial activist and a despicable believer in a "Living Constitution."

By Scalia's reasoning, the first clause of the Eighth Amendment -- "excessive bail shall not be required" -- plainly refers to people who are accused of a crime and have not been convicted. And by Scalia's reasoning, it is absolutely obvious that the next two clauses refer only to people who have been convicted of crimes. No, wait -- the second clause -- "nor excessive fines imposed" -- also clearly and plainly refers to civil cases.

Obviously, then, according to Scalia's way of thinking, the first clause applies only to criminal suspects who have been charged but not convicted, the second clause applies to people who have lost certain civil cases or have been convicted of crimes, and the third clause applies only to people who have been convicted of crimes. It's right there, plain as day, in the words as written by the Founders, he says. That's not an interpretation, it's the truth, according to Scalia. Anyone who disagrees is engaging in interpretation, which should not be allowed.

Now, does that mean torture is permitted to extract information from anyone who is suspected to have knowledge of a crime, such as the spouses and friends and children of criminal suspects? It seems clear that this would be the case, under Scalia's logic.

But maybe not. Before he made the above comments, Scalia said this in the BBC interview:

"The United States Constitution gives rights to Americans wherever they are and to foreigners who are in America. It doesn't give rights to everybody in the world. That was the principal issue in Guantanamo. Whether indeed Guantanamo Bay was within the United States and our courts had no jurisdiction there."

I'm confused. If it's legal for Americans to torture non-Americans who are not on U.S. soil -- if constitutional protections don't apply in such cases -- why does Scalia argue about the Eighth Amendment at all? He says our military base on Guantanamo Bay, which we're renting from Cuba, is not U.S. territory, and that foreigners in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay have no constitutional rights, so why does he argue that the Eighth Amendment doesn't prohibit torture of these people?

He's arguing simultaneously that:

No constitutional protections apply to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, and
There is no Eighth Amendment prohibition of torture of the inmates at Guantanamo Bay because they have not been convicted.

That seems self-contradictory. Why make both arguments?

I can think of one reason: Scalia is willing to accept torture of Americans in American police stations and jails, as long as the people in custody have not been convicted.

I have a better idea: Accept that the Constitution bans anyone under American auspices from inflicting torture under any circumstances.

There is an easy way to deal with the ticking time bomb scenario: the executive pardon. If a cop breaks the law by torturing someone to get information that will stop bloodshed, he can explain his actions to a jury. And if the jury convicts him, he can seek a pardon. In the cliched hypothetical that Scalia describes, a governor or president would issue a pardon probably before the case even went to trial, Gerald Ford style.

Huckabee: Against counting votes before he was for it

2008-02-11T08:29:00.000-05:00

On Nov. 17, 2000, Mike Huckabee and other Republican governors said Al Gore was causing grave risk to democracy by requesting a complete vote count in Florida. They said Gore needed to "cease and desist" his legal efforts to get the votes counted. They called the Gore campaign's criticism of Katherine Harris "an outrage."

Now the Huckabee campaign calls it "an outrage" that the Washington state Republican Party isn't counting all the votes from Saturday's caucus.

Back in 2000, Huckabee and his fellow GOP governors said there was no evidence that Harris, Florida's top elections official and co-chair of the state Bush-Cheney campaign, was unbiased and fair-minded, and that any criticism of her could weaken the foundations of American democracy. Harris had halted vote recounts after she concluded that Bush had won Florida.

The New York Times' B. Drummond Ayres Jr. wrote:
The governors, convened here at a golf resort near Tampa for their annual association meeting, argued that while the race was undeniably close, there was no credible evidence of any wrongdoing by Republican election officials, particularly in Florida. In a news conference, they demanded that Vice President Al Gore concede that Gov. George W. Bush had won fair-and-square and retreat from the field.

Yesterday, Ed Rollins, chairman of Huckabee's presidential campaign, said: "It would be a disservice to every voter in Washington state to not pursue a full accounting of all votes cast." He added, "we are prepared to go to court."

Eight years ago, after the Bush campaign filed a lawsuit to prevent a Florida recount, Republicans said it was a sign of Gore's lack of character that he filed a countersuit.

Shuster is the bullet, not the target

2008-02-10T09:09:00.000-05:00

With her conflict against MSNBC, Hillary Clinton has revealed one of her central campaign strategies against John McCain, should she get the Democratic nomination. She is attacking McCain's biggest strength, which is his reputation as a truth-tellin' straight-shootin' honest politician.

She's not yet going after McCain's reputation for honesty directly. That will come later. She is starting out by weakening McCain's protective flank: She is undermining the credibility of the media that are forever swooning about McCain's supposedly unimpeachable honesty and forthrightness.

Assailing McCain's honesty is vital strategy. Doing it indirectly, by further weakening voters' trust in the media, is a clever tactic.

The Clinton campaign is deploying David Shuster as a long-range weapon, not as a target. Many in the media fail to understand this, as in this obtuse analysis by ABC's Jake Tapper, who guesses that Clinton "is capitalizing on an ugly moment to galvanize female voters." Sure, there might be an element of trying to stoke the ire of female voters (if you assume, as Tapper does, that only women, and not men, object when accomplished young women are smeared as whores), but the Clinton campaign is hunting for bigger game. They want to persuade voters to distrust the media that instruct them to trust John McCain.

Here's a comment accompanying the Tapper analysis, from a reader who says the media have writing about Clinton with "black colored goggles":

While not many, if any, of the Media's narrative "'points" resemble factual reality, the novelization of the political landscape continues apace. This novelization has burgeoned into an unsupportable, unreadable, and unviewable fictionalization of campaign and the candidates.

It is and has been for months outright well-poisoning. The media's fictionalizing is not just a disservice to the country but an outright betrayal of the public trust.

When I turn on the news I want the NEWS, the FACTS. I don't want a narrative, I don't want to hear what you think would be fun or interesting IF it were what was happening. I want narrative, I'll read a book or watch a movie.

This is conclusion that the Clinton campaign wants voters to make. This isn't about David Shuster or the locker-room atmosphere on MSNBC. This is about convincing voters, especially non-conservatives, that they can't trust the media. Expect the Clinton campaign to push further. They will get us to ask: When will Rush Limbaugh call 16-year-old Bridget McCain a dog? When will someone on MSNBC call Bridget McCain a whore who is being pimped by her parents? Because the media obviously have a double standard, can you trust reporters when they portray McCain as being unfailingly honest and forever frank?

MSNBC's (and Chris Matthews's) crotch and Mountie fixation

2008-02-08T19:44:00.000-05:00

Over at Hullabaloo, Digby makes the important observation that the Donner Party over at MSNBC is circling the wagons. They think the, uh, hullabaloo about David Shuster's "pimped out" comment is politically motivated -- just a way for the Clinton campaign to get positive, feel-good, noncontroversial mileage out of a stupid comment, I guess.

The towel-snapping boys in the MSNBC locker room, so eager to deny and deflect attention from their homoeroticism, have convinced themselves that they are the victims of That Harridan Hillary. How do we change their behavior? Simple. The Clinton campaign can throw the MSNBC crew's words right back at them.

The obvious place to start is to ask Chris Matthews why he was staring at the president's crotch as Bush minced across the deck of an aircraft carrier. But I'd like the Clinton campaign to ask Matthews, and press him repeatedly with follow-up questions, about this quote from Matthews: "He has the perfect chin, the perfect hair, he looks right. He looks like a Mountie. He looks like from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. ... Can that guy capture the hearts of the American people?"

What's with Matthews's fixation on men's crotches and perfect chins and guys dressed like Mounties?

Do tell, Chris.

There's this comment in the comments section: "I think the inference is why is she making those calls? It does seem perverse when you consider she is not a politician or a political operative. There seems to me to be a feeling that if they put her up to the calls, the superdelegates will be put on the spot in a way that they wouldn't when speaking to a political operative."

I don't recall the press making an issue out of another instance of a presidential offspring delving deeply into the political process. During the presidential term of the first George Bush, his son George W. took up an office in the White House and became, in essence, his father's enforcer. I never knew about this little bit of history until 2000. What W. was doing in his father's White House was more substantial than anything Chelsea Clinton has done. But he got a pass from the press and she isn't getting one. Why the double standard?

Many voters believe Obama is a Muslim

2008-02-08T08:03:00.000-05:00

Barack Obama has a problem. There are people out there who still think he is a Muslim, and they will refuse to vote for him because of it.

How many? I don't know of any polling data. But I know at least two people who insist that Obama is a Muslim -- and they'll never vote for a Muslim for president. They would vote for Obama if they believed he was a Christian, but they are positive that he is a Muslim.

Like you, I thought this Obama-is-a-Muslim story had been debunked more or less thoroughly. It hasn't. My first inkling of this came last week, when my conservative father-in-law mentioned Obama's prodigious fund-raising ability. Most of that $32 million raised in January, he said, "came from the Middle East."

Why did he think that? "Because he's a Muslim!" my father-in-law declared emphatically, in the same condescending tone that George Bush uses when he talks to his audience like they're all kindergartners.

"No, he's not," I said. "Obama belongs to the Church of Christ. He's a Christian."

"What are you talking about?" my father-in-law replied. "When he took office, he swore on the Koran, not the Bible. He's a Muslim, and if he's elected, he's going to let people in the Middle East call all the shots."

In the stunned silence that followed, my wife interjected. "My boss says he would vote for Clinton over McCain, but he would never vote for Obama because he's a Muslim."

Do you think these are the only two voters who have this mistaken belief? Me either.

The news about Obama's faith is not getting through to the Fox News audience -- even those Fox watchers who would be willing to vote for a Democrat instead of McCain. It's going to be difficult to push the truth past the gatekeepers of the right-wing media. The difficulty is compounded by the subtlety of the message: Obama isn't a Muslim -- not that there's anything wrong with that.

A long campaign will benefit Democrats

2008-02-06T09:12:00.000-05:00

"It's hard to see where this doesn't go all the way to the convention," quoth Josh Marshall, writing of the competition between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. He's right. And it's the best thing that could happen to the Democratic Party.

The Democratic nominee will come out of the convention with an elated, motivated core of volunteers who have recent experience in canvassing door-to-door, making phone calls, stamping envelopes, and all of that drudgery that goes with working on a campaign. Having succeeded in putting their nominee over the top, there will be an army of volunteers, eager to topple the Republicans.

On the other side, a dormant McCain campaign will have to rouse itself from a six-month slumber when the general election campaign hits the stretch run from Labor Day to Election Day. In the general election, McCain volunteers will be inexperienced and rare in states that had late primaries. And the right-wing evangelicals will cross their arms and sit this one out.

Who's this "we" you speak of, kemosabe?

2007-07-05T19:49:00.000-05:00

"In the great country of the United States, we believe that you should be able to worship any way you see fit; that you're equally American, regardless of your religious beliefs," quoth our only president, during a July Fourth speech in West Virginia.

As for the Bad Guys, Bush adds: "They believe that if you don't worship the way they see it, then they're going to bring you harm. We believe in an Almighty, we believe in the freedom for people to worship that Almighty. "

Rewind the tape. "We believe in an Almighty." Rewind again. "We believe in an Almighty." Swwrp goes the tape as it rewinds yet again. "We believe in an Almighty."

We do? Gee, I was under the impression that some of us don't believe in an Almighty, and that we deserve equal treatment.

Bush says "you're equally American, regardless of your religious beliefs." Two sentences later, he says, "We believe in an Almighty."

I guess some religious beliefs are more equal than others. Someone should ask Bush if atheists, agnostics, Wiccans, Mormons and liberal Episcopalians have religious beliefs. If they do, can we all agree to treat them equally with fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals?

Bush and other Republicans are fond of boasting that we're all equal, because that's the American way -- and in the next breath, hissing about Massachusetts liberals or San Francisco values. They believe a dead Marine from the Bay Area isn't as valuable, and his death isn't as lamentable, as a dead Marine from Alabama.

(Thanks to the Rude One.)

What a fucking phony

2007-06-07T16:44:00.000-05:00

There's an old joke that goes like this: A freshman from Fort Worth is wandering the Harvard campus, obviously lost, at the beginning of the fall term. "Can you tell me where the library's at?" he asks a passerby. His interlocutor says, "My man, here at Harvard we are not so base as to end a sentence with a preposition. Will you please restate your question?" And the kid from Texas says, "Can you tell me where the library's at -- asshole?"

It is virtually impossible for someone to attend Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School for a total of 10 years without losing one's provincial accent. That is, it's impossible unless a person has a core of limitless rage at the elite people he went to school with. That kid in the joke, looking for the Harvard library? That's George W. Bush. He's always right and always has a chip on his shoulder and he's always daring you to knock it off.

Josh Marshall asks, "what sort of cultural imprint makes some of us hear it with (a shocking phoney like) Mitt Romney and others with Bill Clinton?" Who, Josh asks, makes you hear the dog whistle of phoniness? Josh hears all sorts of phoniness when Mitt Romney speaks. For me, it's George W. Bush.

As a native Texan, I'm finely attuned to phonies who try to out-Texan everyone else, and George W. Bush is one of those phonies. I always saw right through him. His pseudo-Texanness didn't bother me as much as the fact that he kept that exaggerated Texas identity, especially the accent, after attending elite northeastern schools for a decade. As I said, this is a sign of a deeply pissed-off person, and Bush campaigned in 2000 as a guy who never got angry, never held a grudge. We certainly know how that turned out -- he manifested his sick, twisted anger by invading Iraq, throwing people into Guantanamo, authorizing torture and illegal renditions, and getting rid of habeus corpus. He could fake not being pissed off, for a while. But it finally came out in the form of fascist behavior.

Romney strikes me as a phony. So does McCain with this obviously fake laid-back affect, like he's on pharmaceuticals that flatten the emotions. But no one strikes me as being as phony as George Bush, and to spot the extent of his phoniness, perhaps one needs to be a native Texan who rejects the rampant Texas chauvinism that one sees and hears all over the Lone Star State.

Yes, plenty of people saw Bill Clinton as a phony, and they didn't see that George W. Bush was one. I think that those people are incapable of seeing politicians as real people, with ordinary human failings. Instead, they view politicians as symbols, as holograms that are the manifestations of their hopes and fears.

Many people, when they saw Bill Clinton dressed in a business suit, saw a hallucination. They genuinely thought they saw a guy wearing cut-offs and a tie-dyed T-shirt, smoking a joint. Seriously. If you said to one of these people, "What was Bill Clinton wearing at his first inauguration," they would say, "A tattered down jacket over a tie-dyed T-shirt, raggedy jeans, and one of those Austrian ski caps with earflaps and cords that you tie under your chin." And they would not be joking. That's genuinely what they saw.

Conversely, when these people see George Bush, they see a straight-talkin' he-man. That's what they want in a president, so that's what they believe they have.

I'll bet you are attuned to Romney's phoniness because you have had experience with salesmen. Maybe you have an uncle who's a slick, and not entirely ethical, salesman. Maybe it's someone else, and it's probably more than one person. But Romney comes across as the slickest of used-car salesmen, and he probably comes across that way most strongly to people who have been intimately exposed to slick salestypes.

Steve Gilliard, 1964-2007

2007-06-04T22:03:00.000-05:00

The first blogger I ever read was Jorn Barger's Robot Wisdom Weblog. When he drove me away with his anti-semitism, I was happy to become a hanger-on at the Metafilter community. Then came the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and I soon discovered other blogs: Stephen den Beste, TomPaine.com, Arthur Silber. Around the same time, Kos and Eschaton and Josh Marshall. And then I discovered Steve Gilliard and his News Blog.

Steve quickly became my favorite blogger. He was my favorite until the day he died. The News Blog community was my hangout. I could discern a Hubris Sonic comment from a Gracchus observation from a "Doc" Jesse Wendel diagnosis from a LowerManhattanite gem, before seeing the names at the ends of their comments. For a long time I commented under a variation of my real name, and then as Queequeg.

I was missing Steve terribly just a week or two after his hospitalization. I read today that he fell ill in February, and it was shocking to realize how long he had been out of commission.

I miss his perceptiveness and his combativeness. I miss his stentorian predictions: Bush would resign before the end of his second term; the Democrats would win both houses of Congress in 2006. Steve was right about the latter and let's hope he was correct about the former.

The Internet has a big hole to fill. Let's hope Hubris Sonic, Julia, Gracchus and yes, LowerManattanite can put together a permanent group blog to follow Steve's tradition.

I will always miss him.

Fucking a Popsicle, you just shrivel up

2007-03-26T08:40:00.000-05:00

Some buddies and I have been arguing about Franklin Foer's 2005 article in TNR, Swimming With the Sharks, about how Republicans develop their ratfucking and election-stealing tricks when running for national office for the College Republicans. It's a fascinating story, and frightening, if you believe that democracy and the rule of law are the ways to run a nation. The College Republicans don't have much use for democracy and rule of law.

We've had quite a debate about this article via email, with one Republican virtually covering his ears and saying, "Shutupshutupshutup!" to our superior liberal firepower. I hope he strives to understand what's so dangerous about the Republican ruling junta. Here's what I would tell him if he would remove his hands from his eyes and ears and listen for a few minutes:

There's a difference between taking bribes and subverting democracy.

Most college students spend their spring breaks getting laid (Democrats), trying to get laid (Republicans) or working full-time instead of the usual part-time (working-class kids like me). The point of Foer's article is that members of the College Republican National Committee fashion their spring breaks as laboratories to develop their skills for ratfucking, dirty tricks, slander and vote-stealing. Later, in elections out in the real world, you end up with Republican candidates who benefit from ratfucking, dirty tricks, slander and vote-stealing. The corruption of the College Republicans' electoral process is a feature, not a bug. It's practice for local, state and national elections.

The College Democrats just don't operate that way. That's why there hasn't been a Democratic counterpart to the likes of Donald Segretti, Lee Atwater and Karl Rove.

Atwater died (thank god) of a painful brain cancer, but not before he repented for the evil he had done. Karl Rove is destined to expire of a coronary while having his rectum reamed by a pre-op tranny with a Marine flat-top, so any last confession will be mumbled into a saliva-drenched pillow and lost to posterity.

The national convention of the College Republican National Committee is a virtually all-male affair where the big prize goes to the guy who does the best job of dreaming up creative ways to fuck the other guys. Politically, I mean. Just as with the 9/11 hijackers who spent their last night in one another's cozy company in a hotel room with a cloth draped over a painting of a scantily clad woman, the Republicans' guiding motivation stems from repressed homoeroticism and general sexual frustration. Hence the marriages to Popsicles such as Pat, Nancy and Laura, or to hormonally imbalanced, bug-eyed bitches like Barbara. Dick, Ronnie, George and George should have got out more when they were younger, married someone who moves her hips a little when she fucks.

If there's good and bad in both parties, why have Democrats been the targets of more than 80 percent of the federal prosecutions for political corruption under the Bush administration, when under previous administrations, it was about 50 percent? Why was Carol Lam dusted the week after she targeted Dusty Foggo? Why was David Iglesias pushed out when he declined to indict Democrats before the 2006 election because he lacked evidence? Why was Rove acolyte Bud Cummins appointed in Little Rock? Why was there so much foot-dragging in the New Hampshire phone-jamming case, and was the prosecution's bungling an accident?

If you don't know what I'm talking about, find another channel besides Fox News.

Look, there's nothing wrong with being conservative, just as there's nothing wrong with having any other mental handicap. But if you're a conservative and you're truly a patriot, you'll do something to take your party back from scoundrels such as Rove. At the next election, knock on doors. Hand out flyers. Make phone calls. Hold signs at rallies. And demand that your fellow volunteers -- and everyone in the candidate's organization, all the way to the top political advisers -- conduct themselves in exemplary fashion, as benefits a democracy.

Attack of the resume padders

2007-03-17T21:01:00.000-05:00

Hullaballoo's Poputonian excerpts a Vermont wingnut's defense of the Bush administration. The wingnut, a lawyer, opines in an op-ed piece:

I spent more than 15 hours researching the specific allegations outlined to support the impeachment resolutions in order to determine their accuracy, because I concluded that if Democrats and Progressives are seeking such a profound change without an election, the facts which are the basis for the proposals must be serious and well documented.

I can picture her, grimly "concluding" that … er … what exactly did she "conclude?" It's hilarious to picture this lawyer marshaling facts to "conclude" whether or not, as the Declaration of Independence says, "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

Way to go, counselor! Good research there! And it gets better as she jumps to more and more "conclusions":

The conclusion of my research: Every single one of the "facts" upon which the resolutions are based is false and misleading.
First, the impeachment documents claim that the president or vice president "lied" in six specific instances about the magnitude of the threat from Iraq. Each one of those six claims is false.

That's the extent of the documentation of her "research" into Bush's and Cheney's lies about the supposed threat of Iraq.

But what I really want to talk about is what she does later in the op-ed. She does something dishonest in a way that many Americans don't even recognize anymore as dishonesty. I call it resume padding. Perhaps there's a better term for this phenomenon, because resume padding almost never involves resumes. "Bullshitting" doesn't quite cover the concept, although bullshitting is an important part of resume padding.

The Vermont lawyer is guilty of two counts of resume padding in the following assertions:

A second claim that senior military officials condoned the abuses at Abu Ghraib has no factual support whatsoever. Indeed, the abuses were discovered and prosecuted by the military, and strongly condemned by the president.
The claim that the president engaged in illegal wiretapping in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court's requirements is unsupported by any factual evidence. … Moreover, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act law provides for both criminal and civil remedies for illegal wiretapping. There has not been one civil case filed on behalf of any specific victim of alleged illegal wiretapping, and there have been no criminal prosecutions of violations by the Bush administration of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act law.
First, she says that you can't blame the torture at Abu Ghraib on senior officers (or, she neglects to say, on the president and senior civilian Pentagon officials such as Donald Rumsfeld) because low-level enlisted people were prosecuted, and the torture was "strongly condemned by the president."

Call the first one the Inspector Renault defense: The president, secretary of defense and top generals were shocked, shocked by the torture at Abu Ghraib. Then she says that the president couldn't have engaged in illegal wiretapping because no one has sued the government or prosecuted anyone within the government.

Pay close attention, because this is what resume padders do. It's how they justify the evil that they do.

They elevate words far above actions when defending themselves. But when attacking you, actions suddenly are more important than words, as they should always be.

She says the president didn't condone torture because after it was discovered, he condemned it. The victims of illegal wiretapping haven't sued, so it's not illegal and no one minded.

You've been on the receiving end of resume padding. It happened when you were a recipient of poor service at a store. When you objected, the manager told you, "No one has ever complained about this before."

The word -- lack of complaints in the past -- takes precedence over action -- the poor customer service in the present.

The Rude Pundit correctly recognizes resume padding as evil. He writes about a pseudonymous friend, Jasper, who, back in the Big Eighties, worked at a nursing home.

Jasper pointed out a few of the nurses and attendants on visits there. One or two of them sometimes slapped patients, Jasper said, although nothing was done when they were reported because there was no evidence and the old lady with dementia wasn't going to talk. The rest, they were fuck-ups, who wouldn't do their jobs right, leaving patients unwiped, unturned, unmedicated, only kicking into high gear when supervisors were there or when an inspection was imminent. Jasper could excuse them, saying they were untrained, they weren't trying to hurt anyone, they just wanted to keep their jobs.

There was no evidence. The old lady with dementia wouldn't talk. Without the words, the actions just disappeared. This is an insidious way of looking at the world, and it is spreading.

The Rude Pundit didn't buy it. Sure, maybe if they were working the fryer at Buger King. But not here. See, he told Jasper, if you can't do the work that you're supposed to do where lives are at stake and you keep fucking it up, then at some point you cross a line from being a functioning idiot to simply being cruel. Whether you like it or not. And if you're the one doing it, you don't get to fucking judge it. In other words, Nurse X might say she didn't mean to let someone's bedsores get infected with bacteria from shit, but if her neglect, both passive and active, allows it to happen again and again, then she isn't just stupid, but mean, working only to maintain whatever power and money the job gives her.

The Rude Pundit is getting at something vitally important. To Nurse X, the most important thing was her intention -- her words. Her actions were secondary. A person like Nurse X will defend herself vehemently and self-righteously, telling you to judge her by her words, her intentions, not by her actions or the harm she causes.

Fred Clark's blog, Slacktivist, dwells a lot on the resume-padding phenomenon, although he has never used that phrase as far as I know. Witness his recent post about people who believe that disagreements are all about attitude (words), and not about facts (actions). Or his post before that, in which he points out that, for evangelical Christians, the crucial thing is to identify oneself as Christian, and it's not important to do anything Christian, such as helping the oppressed. Or the post before that, one of his deconstructions of the anti-Christian Left Behind books, in which he points out that conservative evangelicals preach "justification by faith, rather than by works."

Too many of us stress faith over works. We would rather tell people that we are good, rather than do good.

Time line of the U.S. attorneys firing scandal

2007-03-13T05:54:00.000-05:00

The Bush administration's firing of eight U.S. attorneys isn't easy to understand. The elevator-pitch version goes like this: Using the Global War on Terror™ as an excuse, the administration pushed through a change in the law that allows the president to appoint U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation. The White House recited an endless litany of baseless complaints of Democratic vote fraud during the 2004 and 2006 election cycles. Under cover of these complaints, Bush's closest lieutenants pushed out eight U.S. attorneys -- most of them for not indicting Democrats on trumped-up vote fraud charges, or for at least not leaking information about investigations of Democrats in time to tamper with elections. One of Bush's lieutenants was Harriet Miers, who he briefly nominated to be a justice on the Supreme Court.

Shorter elevator pitch: George Bush politicized the Justice Department to persecute Democrats.

This time line will be a continuing project. It is incomplete and needs items such as the date of Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.

February 2005: Harriet Miers, the White House counsel, suggests to D. Kyle Sampson, Alberto Gonzales's chief of staff, that all 93 U.S. attorneys be dismissed and replaced.

February 2005: Alberto Gonzales approves the idea of firing "a smaller group of U.S. attorneys."

March 2005: D. Kyle Sampson, chief of staff for Alberto Gonzales, emails Harriet Miers, the White House chief counsel, that ranks all 93 U.S. attorneys. According to the Washington Post: "Strong performers 'exhibited loyalty' to the administration; low performers were 'weak U.S. attorneys who have been ineffectual managers and prosecutors, chafed against Administration initiatives, etc.' A third group merited no opinion. At least a dozen prosecutors were on a 'target list' to be fired at one time or another, the e-mails show."

Oct. 3, 2005: Bush nominates Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court vacated by Sandra Day O'Connor.

Oct. 27, 2005: Bush withdraws the Miers nomination, based mostly on opposition from conservatives and Senate requests for documents relating to Miers's work for the White House. Bush later nominates Samuel Alito to replace O'Connor.

January 2006: D. Kyle Sampson writes to Harriet Miers: "I recommend that the Department of Justice and the Office of the Counsel to the President work together to seek the replacement of a limited number of U.S. Attorneys. … [a] limited number of U.S. attorneys could be targeted for removal and replacement, mitigating the shock to the system that would result from an across the board firing."

January 2006: D. Kyle Sampson, chief of staff for Alberto Gonzales, sends the White House a list of seven candidates for dismissal. Four of them are gone by year's end: Margaret Chiara of Grand Rapids, Mich.; Bud Cummins of Little Rock; Carol Lam of San Diego, and Kevin Ryan in San Francisco.

March 2006: The USA Patriot Act is renewed. It allows the attorney general to name interim replacements for U.S. attorneys, without Senate confirmation.

Sept. 17, 2006: D. Kyle Sampson, chief of staff to Alberto Gonzales, sends the White House a list of nine U.S. attorneys to be fired. He says one, Bud Cummins in Little Rock, is "in the process of being pushed out." Cummins and four others on the list are fired by year's end. He adds that the administration should eschew Senate confirmation of the replacements because "we can give far less deference to home state senators and thereby get 1.) our preferred person appointed and 2.) do it far faster and more efficiently at less political costs to the White House."

October 2006: D. Kyle Sampson, chief of staff to Alberto Gonzales, adds David Iglesias, the U.S. attorney in Albuquerque, to the list of U.S. attorneys to be fired, based on complaints from Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) that Iglesias wasn't prosecuting enough vote fraud cases.

October 2006: In a conversation with Alberto Gonzales, Bush mentions complaints about vote fraud investigations.

Dec. 7, 2006: Seven U.S. attorneys are fired. William Kelley, deputy to White House counsel Harriet Miers, writes that Domenici's chief of staff "is happy as a clam" about the firing of Iglesias.

Dec. 14, 2006: Sampson writes in an email that "Domenici is going to send over names tomorrow (not even waiting for Iglesias's body to cool)."

January 2007: Harriet Miers resigns as White House counsel.

March 12, 2007: Alberto Gonzales's chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, resigns "after acknowledging that he did not tell key Justice officials about the extent of his communications with the White House, leading them to provide incomplete information to Congress."

Onward, Christian liar

2007-03-11T20:49:00.000-05:00

I once met a guy who was an astronomer at a science museum. One of his main duties was speaking to groups of schoolchildren. Occasionally, groups of Christian homeschoolers visited. The parents would pull my acquaintance aside, and whisper: "Can you please leave out the stuff about the universe being billions of years old? We're believers in the Bible, and the Bible teaches us that the universe is 6,000 years old. That's what we're teaching our children."

Reminds me of a comedy routine -- maybe it was Steve Martin -- where the comedian brainstormed a diabolical idea: teach your kid that brown is called "red," and that red is called "green," and so on. Then have fun when the kid goes to kindergarten and makes a fool of himself.

All parents lie to their children, whether it's about the tooth fairy or why Spot disappeared. Many of these lies are harmless. But right-wing Christianists specialize in telling the most hurtful lies -- and not only to their children. They also enjoy taking advantage of vulnerable, pregnant girls and women. Our tax dollars go to pay for the distribution of these harmful lies.

Emily Minor reports in the Palm Beach Post that "faith-based pregnancy centers," where "counselors" are paid to lie to pregnant women so they won't get abortions, outnumber legitimate counseling centers and abortion clinics:

Abortion opponents are running thousands of centers, called crisis pregnancy centers — dispensing everything from baby clothes to free ultrasound pictures to prayer. There are as many as 4,000 crisis pregnancy centers in the U.S. and about 130 in Florida.
By comparison, about 1,800 centers in the U.S. provide abortions.

Florida contributes $2 million a year to pay for billboards, radio ads and training for these Christianist "counselors," and the state pays some crisis pregnancy centers $50 for each hour of face time that a "counselor" spends with a pregnant client. The state gives these Christianist pregnancy centers $4 for each phone call they receive.

The thing is, these "counselors" lie. They're so crooked they need corkscrews to put their clothes on in the morning. Minor writes:

The responsibilities of single parenting might be oversimplified. Counselors often connect abortion and breast cancer, even though today's leading medical researchers do not. Some activists tell women there's a good chance they'll miscarry after an abortion, and perhaps never have a baby at all.

And they push the rhythm method of birth control.

An abortion clinic in West Palm Beach asked clients if they had been to a crisis pregnancy center, and if so, what they were told. Only four women have filled out reports so far. One wrote: "(They) told me I could die from an abortion, that I would never have kids, preached religion, told me I should have the baby and put it up for adoption, told me I had a formed baby and how it was a sin."

Most of these places tell women that they'll get breast cancer if they get abortions, contrary to establish medical belief.

Right-wing Christians have a curious aversion to the truth. They know they lie, but they believe lying is the Christian thing to do. What would Jesus do? He would lie his head off, all day, every day, according to Christianists. Age of the universe? 6,000 years, according to the Christianists.. Global warming a problem? A bunch of nonsense, according to the Christianists.. Evolutionary biology is the most believable and useful theory of the development of life? All bullshit, according to the Christianists.

Right-wing Christians are not merely filling their children's heads with nonsense, setting up the poor youngsters for ridicule and dissillusionment when they get older. Christianists are filling up our discourse with lies. They do all of us harm. And taxpayers are paying them to do it.

Stop snitching

2007-03-11T01:53:00.000-05:00

Police in minority neighborhoods are confronting "the spread of the gangland code of silence, or omerta, from organized crime to the population at large," according to Jeremy Khan in the April issue of The Atlantic.

This code of silence is summed up by the motto "stop snitching," seen on caps and T-shirts and heard in songs. "The metastasis of this culture of silence in minority communities has been facilitated by a gradual breakdown of trust in the police and the government," Khan writes. He traces it to the use of informants against groups such as the Black Panthers, as well as against low-level drug dealers in the War on Drugs.

Khan adds: "The growing culture of silence helps to legitimize witness intimidation."

He also mentions timing: Arrest and conviction rates for violent crimes have fallen since the late 1990s. "At the same time, crime has spiked," he writes. "Murder rates have risen more or less steadily since 2000."

To sum up, three things have happened since 2000: The culture of "stop snitching" has spread, witness intimidation has become the norm, and violent crime has skyrocketed.

Now, why could that be?

Let's go back to Nov. 2, 2000 -- five days before the presidential election. WPXT, a Fox station in Portland, Maine, reported that George W. Bush had been arrested for drunken driving in Kennebunkport in 1976. CNN reported: "Bush said the timing of the initial news report, just days before Americans elect a new president, was 'interesting.' When asked where the story may have originated, he said, 'I've got my suspicions.'"

His suspicions. You have "suspicions" about wrongdoing. No one says they have "suspicions" that someone did something laudatory.

Message from the president-to-be: Stop snitching.

Seventeen days later, a few dozen angry Republican operatives flew from D.C. to Miami and engaged in the infamous Brooks Brothers Riot. They chanted "Stop the fraud!" and "Let us in!" when vote counters at Miami-Dade County election headquarters tried to move from one room to another. The vote counters were so scared that they stopped the hand count, with 10,750 ballots to go.

The riot "dealt a devastating blow to Al Gore's presidential campaign," John Lantigua wrote a few days later in Salon.com, while the election result was still in doubt. "The vice president's attorneys are arguing that intimidation influenced the canvassing board's decision to stop the hand recount and that it should be resumed."

Intimidation.

Shortly into Bush's term, a Houston Chronicle reporter named Bennett Roth asked Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, about the Bush twins' substance abuse after they were caught sneaking into a bar while underage. Fleischer called Roth to tell him that his question had been "noted in the building."

More intimidation.

Whenever word gets out about the latest illegality or wrongdoing, the Bush administration dons its "Stop snitching" cap.

Joe Wilson writes a New York Times op-ed explaining how Bush lied in his State of the Union speech when he said Iraq had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Africa. Cheney or Bush orders Wilson's wife outed as a covert CIA employee.

Message: Stop snitching. Another message: You'd better watch out if you're a witness to the Bush Administration's crimes.

"Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials," begins the New York Times's blockbuster story about illegal surveillance, published in December 2005. The Bush administration reacts by speculating whether to prosecute the reporters.

Intimidation. "Stop snitching."

Climate-change scientists working for the federal government are told to keep their mouths shut about global warming.

Stop snitching.

Dick Cheney shoots a man in the face. His aides tell him to get the story out. He refuses. Finally, 21 hours after the incident, the owner of the ranch where the shooting took place calls a reporter for the local paper.

Stop snitching.

You probably can think of other examples. This White House is rife with the "stop snitching" culture. It isn't just a ghetto thing.

So when Khan writes in The Atlantic that the culture of "stop snitching" afflicts mainly minority communities, he's missing the big picture. When he blames hip-hop singers and a professional basketball player (!) for showing "that threatening snitches has become mainstream," he's acting like he hasn't noticed any news coming out of the White House in the past six years.

The president and vice president are role models of the worst kind, spreading word that it's OK to retaliate against "snitches" and to intimidate witnesses. If the White House culture of "stop snitching" takes hold elsewhere, and people get hurt and killed because of it, well, they're merely collateral damage.

Citi gets religion

2007-03-04T11:58:00.000-05:00

If you're late on your car payment or student loan payment or mortgage payment, your credit card company can jack up your interest rate, even if you've never been late with a credit card payment. It's a credit policy called "universal default."

Unfair? You bet. But since when do credit card companies factor fairness into their bottom lines?

Democratic control of both houses of Congress has made an impression on credit card companies. They're reluctant to do what's right, but they surely want to do what's smart. And it's smart not to rile Congress with outrageous credit policies.

Citigroup is eliminating universal default from all Citi-branded credit cards.

"Credit card issuers are announcing unilateral changes in their practices that have been criticized because they are now fearful that Congress will legislate in this area and they don't want that to happen," says Travis Plunkett, legislative director of the Consumer Federation of America.

Harvard prof Elizabeth Warren notes that Citigroup's alteration of its credit card policy comes a week after Sen. Chris Dodd held hearings on credit card practices.

"The Citigroup shift is an important reminder of the power of the Congressional hearing," Warren writes. "So long as the folks in charge of Congress didn't want to upset the credit card companies, the companies kept on adding new tricks and traps. But now direction has changed."

She's correct, and lenders aren't the only entities that are getting the message. In early January, the Senate held hearings on mortgage lending. This week, federal regulators suggested tighter guidelines for underwriting subprime mortgages. Coincidence? No. Word on the street in D.C. is that the feds fast-tracked these proposed guidelines in just a few weeks -- the weeks following the Senate hearings. The regulators now say that companies shouldn't lend money to people who will have a lot of trouble repaying the loans.

Gee, I sure do miss Michael Bérubé

2007-03-04T11:25:00.000-05:00

So funny. So incisive.

Broken gaydar

2007-03-03T08:17:00.000-05:00

Ann Coulter needs to go into rehab.

She says so herself. Friday, in a speech at the right wing's big annual bash, the conference for the American Conservative Union's PAC, she called John Edwards a faggot.

"I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, " Coulter said, "but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so …" she paused as the audience's collective gasp turned into laughter and applause, then she continued: "so I'm kind of at an impasse."

Ann has anger issues as well as sexual identity issues.

I won't psychoanalyze her weird fixation on sexuality. Her fellow conservatives, many of whom are obsessed with the sexuality of others, might be a better choice for explaining Coulter's homophobia and her malfunctioning gaydar. (John Edwards? I mean, I can see someone calling out Lindsey Graham. But Edwards?)

As far as Ann's anger, we liberal bloggers bear some responsibility for it. Who among us has not called her Mann Coulter? Which of us has not noted that she has a horse face? Raise your hand if you have not commented, online or in person, upon Coulter's own dubious sexuality? Called her Coultergeist? Remarked upon her prominent Adam's apple?

We've been mean to her, folks, and so she struck at the best-looking presidential candidate she could find. Maybe she has a man-crush on Edwards. Hard to tell what's going on in Ann's mind. She makes her patented outrageous statements with so little conviction that it makes you wonder who the joke is on -- her supposed targets, or her conservative audience.

By the way, she endorsed Mitt Romney.

I find it odd that this hasn't gotten much coverage by the mainstream press. Atrios notes that "there's nothing a conservative can say which would cause the 'liberal media' to decide that she wasn't an appropriate person to promote." Over at Tapped, Ben Adler notes: "Charming. When the right lets out its hate-mongering id, it's a really pretty sight."

I met Ann Coulter last summer in a greenroom, when I was waiting to do a brief interview on Fox News out of a dingy studio in West Palm Beach. She walked in, doffed her chiffon cape and threw it on a couch, and made a beeline for the makeup chair. She told the makeup artist, Christine, that she had awakened with a red eye. Christine had Visine. I was relieved that Ann apparently didn't notice me, because I felt like the manly, Queequegish thing to do would be to say something nasty to her. But since I didn't exist in her world, I didn't have to discharge my responsibility.

I thought, what the heck, I'm not going to be an asshole unless she's an asshole to me.

After my interview, I walked out of the studio and into the greenroom. Ann was sitting on the couch, waiting for her time before the camera. She was wearing blue jeans (it was 90 degrees outside and humid) with a big hole ripped in the right knee. I smiled wimpily and mumbled hello as I lifted her chiffon cape to see if I had left anything on the couch.

Her car was parked next to mine. Empty. Engine running, air conditioning turned on full blast.

I asked myself if I had done the moral thing by not saying something belittling to her. My friends, I admit that I was afraid of confrontation. I sense that she's muy smart and she could have eviscerated me with a nasty comeback.

But perhaps the best she could have done would have been to call me a faggot.

Tonkin Toys

2007-02-27T02:47:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago I noticed something odd about Bush's latest news conference: his sudden rhetorical fixation on protecting the troops. He used a permutation of the phrase "protect the troops" seven times in a half-hour of Q&A. Initially, it merely sounded like he had glommed onto a talking point and didn't want to let go.

Digby has a more sinister interpretation. "So, when president Bush used the phrase 'protect our troops' followed by everyone from Gates to Rice, my antennae were way up; it was obvious that it was a potential cassus belli for an attack on Iran," Digby writes.

Like you, I haven't yet read Seymour Hersh's latest on the administration's Middle East shenanigans. I'll wait till my copy arrives in the mail Thursday. But you don't need to read the details of the administration's latest strategic flip-flops to arrive at a conclusion about the administration's tactics. Bush is looking for his Gulf of Tonkin excuse to attack Iran.

This is where the moral monstrousness of Bush stands out in bold and italic. He sends hundreds of thousands of our military people in harm's way, with insufficient armor and paltry numbers of boots on the ground. Then he uses their vulnerability as bait to draw Iran into military conflict.

To Bush, our military people are mere Tonkin Toys, to be expended as a way of getting his desired war with Iran. He will get his confrontation, whether manufactured or not.

Splendid quitter

2007-02-24T09:31:00.000-05:00

I picked up Harvey Pekar's confessional, The Quitter, in the public library's "new books" section. The fact that the book was published in 2005 tells you what you need to know about the Palm Beach County library system.

Pekar is best known as the protagonist of the 2003 biographical movie American Splendor, in which he appears as himself and as portrayed by Paul Giamatti. If that sounds confusing, Roger Ebert describes it well here.

Pekar is a graphic novelist who recounts the quotidian details of his life. He bared his life in a series of comics called American Splendor, and in a book called Our Cancer Year, about his treatment for lymphoma. As portrayed in the movie, Pekar has zero drawing ability. He writes, and a hired cartoonist draws. The first issues of American Splendor were drawn by the legendary R.Crumb. The Quitter is illustrated ably by Dean Haspiel.

I was about a quarter of the way through the book when I came across the movie while channel-surfing last night. I had seen it before, twice, but now that I've read Pekar's book, I'm astonished at the way Giamatti poured himself into that role. The back of The Quitter has pictures of Pekar in the 50s and 60s, and Giamatti's resemblance is uncanny.

The Quitter is an unusual type of biography. It's not a memoir -- names and dates and places -- nor is it a full-fledged autobiography, telling the full story of his life. It's narrower than that. Pekar has identified one of the things that he doesn't like about himself -- that he would rather quit than rise to a challenge -- and goes back to his childhood and young adulthood to discover the roots of his character defect. This tight focus allows the story to be told with economy. He tells of how hard he worked to prepare for his bar mitzvah, and how his father was proud of how well Harvey did in the ceremony. "And then, boom, we went our separate ways, with practically no communication between us."

Pekar recounts his disastrous month in the Navy, when he washed out of basic training because he couldn't do laundry.

As Pekar tells it, a pivotal event of his life happened when he got a C-plus on a geography test in college. He was so frustrated at himself that he went home and kicked a chair to splinters, which led to a brawl in the kitchen with his father and cousin. Harvey quit school and moved out. That's when the rest of his life began -- when he quit school and quit his family.

Ratfucking in the 21st century

2007-02-21T06:52:00.000-05:00

I got an email from the John Edwards campaign. Join One Corps (an organization that, as of yet, is not well-defined; I'm not sure what relationship it has to the campaign) and do something to push for universal health care. I typed in my ZIP code and got a list of five One Corps chapters in my area.

Good enough so far. I click on the chapter closest to me: One Corps for Palm Beach County Students. In the description of the chapter, it begins: "My name is Jeff and I'm a sophomore at a local high school."

And there's one more member listed besides the founder, Jeff. The other one is a guy who calls himself tedfun21. There's a photo of him, grinning, standing in a room, his arms crossed. Big arms. The guy works out. He's proud of those big ol' guns.

Let's look at the next-closest chapter, presumably a chapter started by a voting-age person in Palm Beach County. Thirteen members. And the second member listed is tedfun21. The next-closest chapter, just north of here. Two members, one of them tedfun21. The nine-member chapter in West Palm Beach includes tedfun21. And the seven-member chapter 22 miles south ranks tedfun21 as a member.

Let's check tedfun21 out by looking at his One Corps profile. Turns out he lives on South Beach, more than 100 miles south of the kid who started One Corps for Palm Beach County Students. He belongs to One Corps chapters from Florida's Panhandle to Miami Beach. Presumably, as part-owner of PR business, he's not going to have time to drive to all the meetings.

I mention the case of tedfun21 because he illustrates a hazard of online organizing. There's a real risk of getting ratfucked. (To put it another way, if a Republican candidate starts up something like One Corps, there's an opportunity to ratfuck his campaign.)

My first objection is the choice of the peurile handle "tedfun21." That sounds like the handle of someone who's cruising for anonymous sex partners, not like someone who is a serious, dependable political volunteer. Tedfun21's profile says he was Edwards's state volunteer coordinator in 2004. Well, OK. It still looks kind of weird when a grown man calling himself "tedfun21" gloms onto a high school sophomore online.

My second objection is the apparently unfettered ability for anyone to sign up for any One Corps chapter.

Neither one of these objections sounds like a big deal unless you consider the ratfucking possibilities. For the sake of argument, let's assume that John McCain starts something like One Corps, a vaguely defined online organizing thingie. Call it MegaCorpses, for his support for more killing in Iraq. Someone could adopt the handle GookKillr and join every chapter in the nation.

Someone calling herself Pu55yLiquor could join every chapter of Mitt Romney's online organization. If the object were to tweak the Mormon, the name Pu55yLiquor would provide a two-fer: lesbianism and alcohol.

Giuliani's online organization could be plagued by a guy calling himself Diallosnitestik.

Or maybe a guy calling himself Tedfun22 could join all the Republican online campaign organizations, post a nude picture of himself in his profile, and troll constantly for sex partners. That would take valuable time away from the people running the sites.

Naturally, we shouldn't expect the Republicans to come up with the same idea.

Update: Kos knows a potential ratfucking when he sees one.

History's greatest midwife to change

2007-02-20T18:56:00.000-05:00

"We are losing our wars in the Muslim world because our vision of history is at odds with reality, " Michael Vlahos writes in, of all places The American Conservative.

Vlahos adds: "In fact, what empires have most in common is how their sacred narratives come to rule their strategic behavior—and rule it badly. In America's case, our war narrative works against us to promote our deepest fear: the end of modernity."

As I interpret it, Vlahos's argument goes like this: Our success as an empire leads us to believe that we embody the endpoint of history: American-style liberal democratic capitalism where religion is personal and not societal. When a group comes along to challenge that way of organizing the world, we regard it not as a political and philosophical disagreement, but as a mortal threat to The American Way of Life.

"The attacks were not simply a violation of the national person --as in 1941-- but an affront to all that was right and true. Yet its emotional symbolism had a darker side too -- the suggestion, felt but unvoiced by Americans, that the attacks were the first black sign of The Fall of the City, the beginning of the end of the American sacred narrative," Vlahos writes.

As we overreact, our opponents gain adherents. As they gain adherents, we tighten our embrace with authoritarian, corrupt regimes like those that run Saudi Arabia and Egypt. As our hypocrisy becomes clearer and clearer,our opponents gain more adherents. And as we attack them and they survive, they draw even more admirers. Eventually, their ideas will win many adherents. Maybe their ideas will prevail over ours.

Vlahos seems to say simultaneously that it didn't have to be this way because we could have reacted differently, and that it was inevitable that we would react this way because of our status as the world's dominant empire.

We lose our moral authority, Vlahos says, because we shut out the world's poor and dispossessed from our shiny vision of modernity. In addition, we strengthen our opponents when we demonize them. And we pick the wrong military fights, so when we lose, observers note that we are an emperor with no clothes.

We can't defeat our opponents by killing them, because most of our opponents are ordinary, unarmed civilians who disagree with our way of life, and disagree with our support for totalitarian regimes. We demonize groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Muqtada al-Sadr's followers. So when they win political legitimacy among their own societies, we have no one to talk to.

"America's destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan mobilized the Muslim world against us, but more than that it put the global other on notice. For much of the West and most of Islam, the lie of modernity as American altruism is dying in Iraq. Americans care about the death of their soldiers but barely a whit for the destruction of a society wrought in the name of 'democracy,'" Vlahos writes.

Eventually, maybe after we're dead, he says, we will "birth a changed world" and "cast off [our] claim to the universal." And maybe that won't be so bad. "No longer the object of all attack, we might productively rethink our national purpose."

Economic security is the cornerstone of economic opportunity

2007-02-18T22:00:00.000-05:00

In his book The Great Risk Shift, Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker describes how individuals have individuals and families have lost much of their security over the last three decades. Incomes are more volatile, jobs can go poof in an instant, two-earner families are in greater peril of suffering severe declines in income. Most importantly (at least, these would be the most important notions I would push if I were a politician), we are much less secure than we were 30 years ago in our retirement income and in the financing of our health care. In the old days, before I went to college, most employees worked for medium and large corporations that paid 100 percent of the premium for family health coverage. Now fewer than a quarter of those employers do that. And where companies once provided defined-benefit pensions, now they offer defined-contribution 401(k)s.

What strikes a chord most deeply, though, is Hacker's invocation of the Personal Responsibility Crusade. This crusade has emedded itself so firmly in our culture that we rarely notice it. When we do, we have trouble describing what's so wrong-headed about it.

When President Bush blamed torture at Abu Ghraib as the actions of a few bad apples, he was parrotting the party line of the Personal Responsibility Crusade. Whenever anyone wonders out loud why the hijackers of Sept. 11, 2001, hated the United States so much, all debate is shut off as Personal Responsibility Crusaders angrily reply that those 19 hijackers were responsible for what they did, and U.S. foreign policy had nothing to do with it.

This kind of buck-passing is infuriatingly hard to argue against, because the buck-passer is disclaiming all responsibility for his actions by explicitly pinning the responsibility on others. Buck-passers don't dodge the issue; they sidestep it expertly by invoking the Personal Responsibility Crusade.

The Personal Respsonsibility Crusade is, among other things, anti-insurance. On the issue of medical insurance, the Personal Responsibility Crusade says we should abandon broad health-insurance pools, and instead we should embrace Medical Savings Accounts, to force us to live healthier and to, I don't know, I guess we're supposed to comparison-shop for medical care -- find the cheapest lab to process biopsies for cancer, that sort of thing.

Hacker says there is "a simple but forgotten truth: economic security is the cornerstone of economic opportunity."

No one has forgotten this. But if you mention it, you're branded as a class warrior. And "class warriors," like "conspiracy theorists," are not allowed to participate in our mass-media discourse.

A couple of years ago, I was visiting a good friend, a guy who is married to a woman with an MBA degree from Wharton. (Did she grow up on my side of the tracks? Hell, no -- she's the stepdaughter of a former president of a huge cosmetics company.) We had dinner with my friend and his wife, and some friends of theirs -- a Wharton classmate and her husband, who owns a company that employs in-home nurses.

The guy was worn out and seemed a bit unhappy, although not to depressed to usher us out to his new car, a Bluetooth-enabled Acura. His cross to bear: He was being sued by his employees for alleged violations of wage-and-hour laws. I made a gently smart-ass remark about how maybe he should have followed the wage-and-hour laws, for which I spent half an hour in the social deep-freeze. Clearly, I was to side with my friend's wife's friend's husband, not with his employees who complained about working unpaid overtime.

What bugged me even more was that the guy's home-nursing business had been kick-started with an investment by his wealthy father. His dad staked him the money to start his business. Nothing wrong with that, but the guy had no idea of what it must be like to have a job where your boss forces you to work overtime and you risk losing your job -- and possibly your home -- if you complain.

"Economic security is the cornerstone of economic opportunity." Yeah, and those who grew up with a surfeit of economic security often don't realize that they're in the minority. That most people can't be entrepreneurs with Dad's money. That most of us can't work unpaid internships to get the experience needed to get a good start to our careers.

"Economic security is the cornerstone of economic opportunity." We're going to talk a lot about that in the coming election season.

Watch your language

2007-02-17T07:11:00.000-05:00

Let's stop calling our occupation our war in Iraq.

There's a war going on, yes, between Sunnis and Shiites and among various militias. But we're no longer at war. That mission was accomplished years ago.

The verb for what we're doing is "to occupy."

The noun for what we're doing is "occupation."

The noun that most accurately describes our nation is "occupiers."

Despite its horrors, war often sounds noble and grand. As Lincoln so eloquently described it, the "exceeding brightness of military glory -- that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood, that serpent's eye that charms to destroy." People get angry when you question the mission of our men and women at war. They don't listen.

An occupation doesn't sound so noble, and people are more willing to listen. Yes, there have been moral and effective occupations. Our occupations of Japan and Germany come to mind. But there are ignoble occupations that corrupt the occupiers: the Soviet occupation of Germany, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. From the Iraqis' point of view, we're more like the Soviets in East Germany than the Americans in West Germany.

When the occupied country emphatically doesn't want the occupiers there, an occupation corrupts the occupying country. What we did in Japan was noble. What we're doing in Iraq is corrupting us, both there in Iraq and here at home.

It's harder to fit on a sign or on a lapel button, but "End the occupation" is a more powerful slogan than "End the war." Dirty hippies are anti-war. Decent people who take showers want to end an occupation and bring their men and women home.

Repeat after me: America's occupation of Iraq… Our occupation of Iraq… Occupation forces in Iraq… The nearly four-year-old occupation… Our occupiers are caught in the crossfire of an Iraqi civil war…

End the occupation. The war ended long ago.

Pay for a dishonest war? Here's what Lincoln said

2007-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00

On Jan. 12, 1848, U.S. Rep. Abraham Lincoln, a Whig from Illinois, gave a speech on the House floor in which he denounced President Polk for lying to justify an unprovoked war against Mexico. Not only that. Lincoln complained that Polk had characterized "every silent vote given for supplies, into an endorsement of the justice and wisdom of his conduct."

Lincoln continued:

…in his late message in which [Polk] tells us that Congress, with great unanimity, only two in the Senate and fourteen in the House dissenting, had declared that, "by the act of the Republic of Mexico, a state of war exists between that Government and the United States" when the same journals that informed him of this, also informed him that when that declaration stood disconnected from the question of supplies, sixty-seven in the House, and not fourteen merely, voted against it…

Lincoln accused Polk of an "open attempt to prove, by telling the truth, what he could not prove by telling the whole truth." He added that "all the President states as facts, he falls far short of proving his justification; and that the President would have gone farther with his proof if it had not been for the small matter that the truth would not permit him."

Lincoln brought up three issues, all of which are found in the debate over the occupation of Iraq: funding of the occupation, deception about the reason for war, and predictions about the ease and brevity of the fighting. On all three issues, today's Democrats echo Lincoln's arguments.

First, Lincoln thought Congress had a right and a responsibility to end the war in Mexico by tightening the purse strings.

Second, the bulk of Lincoln's speech concerned Polk's assertion that the war was justified because American blood had been spilled on American territory. Lincoln believed that Polk's assertion was a lie, just as today, most Americans believe Bush's warnings about weapons of mass destruction were lies.

Third, Lincoln bitterly recalled that Polk had "driven into disfavor" a general who had predicted that the war wouldn't be a cakewalk, and that it would take at least three or four months. The war was 20 months old when Lincoln made his speech.

Lincoln said that Polk had tried to escape scrutiny

by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory -- that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood, that serpent's eye that charms to destroy -- he plunged into it, and has swept, on and on, till, disappointed in his calculation of the ease with which Mexico might be subdued, he now finds himself where he knows not where. How like the half insane mumbling of a fever-dream is the whole war part of his late message!

Then Lincoln diagnosed the current problem in a passage that could be spoken on the floor of today's House with few alterations:

As to the mode of terminating the war, and securing peace, the President is equally wandering and indefinite. First, it is to be done by a more vigorous prosecution of the war in the vital parts of the enemy's country; and, after apparently talking himself tired on this point, the President drops down into a half despairing tone, and tells us that "with a people distracted and divided by contending factions, and a government subject to constant changes, by successive revolutions, the continued success of our arms may fail to secure a satisfactory peace." Then he suggests the propriety of wheedling the Mexican people to desert the counsels of their own leaders, and trusting in our protection to set up a government from which we can secure a satisfactory peace; telling us that "this may become the only mode of obtaining such a peace." But soon he falls into doubt of this too; and then drops back on to the already half abandoned ground of "more vigorous prosecution." All this shows that the President is, in no wise, satisfied with his own positions. … His mind, tasked beyond its power, is running hither and thither, like some tortured creature on a burning surface, finding no position on which it can settle down and be at ease.

Again, it is a singular omission in this message that it nowhere intimates when the President expects the the war to terminate. … As I have before said, he knows not where he is. He is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man. God grant he may be able to show there is not something about his conscience more painful than all his mental perplexity!

I, unlike Frank Gaffney, have not fabricated quotes from Lincoln. The text of the speech can be found on the site of the Library of Congress. If this link doesn't work, go here and search the phrase "Lincoln Mexican War."

More importantly, the speech shows that today's Democrats -- and 17 lonely House Republicans -- are the patriotic heirs of Abraham Lincoln.

GOP hands the reins to Osama bin Laden

2007-02-15T18:41:00.000-05:00

Sun Tzu said, "the clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy's will to be imposed on him."

Fight for your objective. If you and your enemy are fighting for different reasons -- if your enemy wants to start a religious war, and you merely want to be left alone -- it's foolish to adopt your enemy's objective. To do so is a form of surrender.

Osama bin Laden wanted to provoke a religious war. The United States didn't, and doesn't. Only a fool would make this a war about religion. Among Americans, only a naif would agree with Osama bin Laden that this war is about religion.

Zac Wamp, R-Tenn.:

First, the war on terror is the worst-named war in the history of our country. We are at war with Islamic jihadists, fundamentalists, radicals. We need to be more clear as to who we are fighting. Frankly, my view is that this is a religious conflict.

Rep. Virgil Goode, R-Va.:

When the commentary begins in the Middle East, in no way do I want to comfort and encourage the radical Muslims who want to destroy our country and who want to wipe the so-called infidels like myself and many of you from the face of the earth. In no way do I want to aid and assist the Islamic jahadists who want the green flag of the crescent and star to wave over the Capitol of the United States and over the White House of this country. I feel that radical Muslims who want to control the Middle East and ultimately the world would love to see "In God we trust" striken from our money and replaced with "In Muhammad we trust."

You have joined the wrong team, guys.