I'm not a fan of Ben Stein. He's mostly a conservative dick imho, but I stumbled onto this piece today. It's from the NY Times in 2006, shortly before the economic collapse.
* * *
In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning
By BEN STEIN
Published: November 26, 2006
NOT long ago, I had the pleasure of a lengthy meeting with one of the smartest men on the planet, Warren E. Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, in his unpretentious offices in Omaha. We talked of many things that, I hope, will inspire me for years to come. But one of the main subjects was taxes. Mr. Buffett, who probably does not feel sick when he sees his MasterCard bill in his mailbox the way I do, is at least as exercised about the tax system as I am.
Put simply, the rich pay a lot of taxes as a total percentage of taxes collected, but they don’t pay a lot of taxes as a percentage of what they can afford to pay, or as a percentage of what the government needs to close the deficit gap.
Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income. The people in his office were mostly secretaries and clerks, though not all.
It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”
Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.
“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
This conversation keeps coming back to mind because, in the last couple of weeks, I have been on one television panel after another, talking about how questionable it is that the country is enjoying what economists call full employment while we are still running a federal budget deficit of roughly $434 billion for fiscal 2006 (not counting off-budget items like Social Security) and economists forecast that it will grow to $567 billion in fiscal 2010.
When I mentioned on these panels that we should consider all options for closing this gap — including raising taxes, particularly for the wealthiest people — I was met with several arguments by people who call themselves conservatives and free marketers.
One argument was that the mere suggestion constituted class warfare. I think Mr. Buffett answered that one.
Another argument was that raising taxes actually lowers total revenue, and that only cutting taxes stimulates federal revenue. This is supposedly proved by the history of tax receipts since my friend George W. Bush became president.
In fact, the federal government collected roughly $1.004 trillion in income taxes from individuals in fiscal 2000, the last full year of President Bill Clinton’s merry rule. It fell to a low of $794 billion in 2003 after Mr. Bush’s tax cuts (but not, you understand, because of them, his supporters like to say). Only by the end of fiscal 2006 did income tax revenue surpass the $1 trillion level again.
By this time, we Republicans had added a mere $2.7 trillion to the national debt. So much for tax cuts adding to revenue. To be fair, corporate profits taxes have increased greatly, as corporate profits have increased stupendously. This may be because of the cut in corporate tax rates. Anything is possible.
The third argument that kind, well-meaning people made in response to the idea of rolling back the tax cuts was this: “Don’t raise taxes. Cut spending.”
The sad fact is that spending rises every year, no matter what people want or say they want. Every president and every member of Congress promises to cut “needless” spending. But spending has risen every year since 1940 except for a few years after World War II and a brief period after the Korean War.
The imperatives for spending are built into the system, and now, with entitlements expanding rapidly, increased spending is locked in. Medicare, Social Security, interest on the debt — all are growing like mad, and how they will ever be stopped or slowed is beyond imagining. Gross interest on Treasury debt is approaching $350 billion a year. And none of this counts major deferred maintenance for the military.
The fourth argument in response to my suggestion was that “deficits don’t matter.”
There is something to this. One would think that big deficits would be highly inflationary, according to Keynesian economics. But we have modest inflation (except in New York City, where a martini at a good bar is now $22). On the other hand, we have all that interest to pay, soon roughly $7 billion a week, a lot of it to overseas owners of our debt. This, to me, seems to matter.
Besides, if it doesn’t matter, why bother to even discuss balancing the budget? Why have taxes at all? Why not just print money the way Weimar Germany did? Why not abolish taxes and add trillions to the deficit each year? Why don’t we all just drop acid, turn on, tune in and drop out of responsibility in the fiscal area? If deficits don’t matter, why not spend as much as we want, on anything we want?
The final argument is the one I really love. People ask how I can be a conservative and still want higher taxes. It makes my head spin, and I guess it shows how old I am. But I thought that conservatives were supposed to like balanced budgets. I thought it was the conservative position to not leave heavy indebtedness to our grandchildren. I thought it was the conservative view that there should be some balance between income and outflow. When did this change?
Oh, now, now, now I recall. It changed when we figured that we could cut taxes and generate so much revenue that we would balance the budget. But isn’t that what doctors call magical thinking? Haven’t the facts proved that this theory, though charming and beguiling, was wrong?
THIS brings me back to Mr. Buffett. If, in fact, it’s all just a giveaway to the rich masquerading as a new way of stimulating the economy and balancing the budget, please, Mr. Bush, let’s rethink it. I don’t like paying $7 billion a week in interest on the debt. I don’t like the idea that Mr. Buffett pays a lot less in tax as a percentage of his income than my housekeeper does or than I do.
Can we really say that we’re showing fiscal prudence? Are we doing our best? If not, why not? I don’t want class warfare from any direction, through the tax system or any other way.
Ben Stein is a lawyer, writer, actor and economist. E-mail: ebiz@nytimes.com.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
American Royalty
Ah, Glenn Greenwald, you're my favorite!!!
* * *
It's time to embrace American royalty
(Updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV - Update V)
We're obviously hungry to live with royal and aristocratic families so we should really just go ahead and formally declare it:
Bush daughter Jenna Hager becomes 'Today' reporter
NBC's "Today" show has hired someone with White House experience as a new correspondent — former first daughter Jenna Hager, the daughter of former President George W. Bush. . . . She "just sort of popped to us as a natural presence, comfortable" on the air, [Executive Producer Jim] Bell said. Hager will work out of NBC's Washington bureau.
They should convene a panel for the next Meet the Press with Jenna Bush Hager, Luke Russert, Liz Cheney, Megan McCain and Jonah Goldberg, and they should have Chris Wallace moderate it. They can all bash affirmative action and talk about how vitally important it is that the U.S. remain a Great Meritocracy because it's really unfair for anything other than merit to determine position and employment. They can interview Lisa Murkowski, Evan Bayh, Jeb Bush, Bob Casey, Mark Pryor, Jay Rockefeller, Dan Lipinksi, and Harold Ford, Jr. about personal responsibility and the virtues of self-sufficiency. Bill Kristol, Tucker Carlson and John Podhoretz can provide moving commentary on how America is so special because all that matters is merit, not who you know or where you come from. There's a virtually endless list of politically well-placed guests equally qualified to talk on such matters.
About this latest hiring by NBC, Atrios observed: "if only the Villager values of nepotism and torture could be combined somehow." The American Prospect's Adam Serwer quicky noted that they already have been: "Liz Cheney." Liz Cheney is really the perfect face of Washington's political culture, a perfect manifestation of all the rotting diseases that define it and a pure expression of what our country has become and the reasons for its virtual ruin. She should really be on every political TV show all day every day. It's almost as though things can't really be expressed thoroughly without including her. Jenna Bush as a new NBC "reporter" on The Today Show -- at a time when every media outlet is firing and laying off real reporters -- is a very nice addition though.
UPDATE: Just to underscore a very important, related point: all of the above-listed people are examples of America's Great Meritocracy, having achieved what they have solely on the basis of their talent, skill and hard work -- The American Way. By contrast, Sonia Sotomayor -- who grew up in a Puerto Rican family in Bronx housing projects; whose father had a third-grade education, did not speak English and died when she was 9; whose mother worked as a telephone operator and a nurse; and who then became valedictorian of her high school, summa cum laude at Princeton, a graduate of Yale Law School, and ultimately a Supreme Court Justice -- is someone who had a whole litany of unfair advantages handed to her and is the poster child for un-American, merit-less advancement.
I just want to make sure that's clear.
UPDATE II: Speaking of Mike Wallace's boy, Andrew Sullivan says that, during his interview about torture with Dick Cheney today, he "sounded like a teenage girl interviewing the Jonas Brothers." Andrew compiles the "questions" Wallace asked of Cheney and it's hard to describe it any other way. He adds:
When future historians ask how the United States came not only to practice torture but to celebrate it and treat torturers as heroes, a special place in hell among the journalists who embraced and justified it should be reserved for Chris Wallace.
That's going to be a very crowded place (see here for more on Wallace's particularly well-deserved consignment to that locale).
UPDATE III: For those complaining that there are many other examples of political nepotism and dynastic succession other than those mentioned here: this was a two-paragraph post in which I stated explicitly that, beyond the identified examples, "there's a virtually endless list of politically well-placed guests equally qualified to talk on such matters." When saying that, I linked to this post of mine from last December, which, unlike today's post, was intended to be a very comprehensive discussion of American political aristocracies and royal families. Anyone who thinks I'm somehow being selective in this critique should read the first paragraph of that post. And yes: this also would absolutely be an example of the same syndrome.
That said, today's post is about a particular strain of royal succession: those who inherit their position and and whose achievement is attributable to their mommies and daddies and yet ludicrously purport to be Stern Advocates for (and Beacons of) Meritocracy and become righteous opponents of "unfair" affirmative action on the ground that only merit should determine advancement. Not everyone who inherits their influence is guilty of that.
UPDATE IV: Wonkette notes that I neglected to include this hideous event.
UPDATE V: Elect the father-dependent Ethan Hastert to his dad's former seat in Congress (h/t). I'd be willing to bet that this "self-described economic and social conservative" finds affirmative action to be a deep affront to merit-based achievement.
* * *
It's time to embrace American royalty
(Updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV - Update V)
We're obviously hungry to live with royal and aristocratic families so we should really just go ahead and formally declare it:
Bush daughter Jenna Hager becomes 'Today' reporter
NBC's "Today" show has hired someone with White House experience as a new correspondent — former first daughter Jenna Hager, the daughter of former President George W. Bush. . . . She "just sort of popped to us as a natural presence, comfortable" on the air, [Executive Producer Jim] Bell said. Hager will work out of NBC's Washington bureau.
They should convene a panel for the next Meet the Press with Jenna Bush Hager, Luke Russert, Liz Cheney, Megan McCain and Jonah Goldberg, and they should have Chris Wallace moderate it. They can all bash affirmative action and talk about how vitally important it is that the U.S. remain a Great Meritocracy because it's really unfair for anything other than merit to determine position and employment. They can interview Lisa Murkowski, Evan Bayh, Jeb Bush, Bob Casey, Mark Pryor, Jay Rockefeller, Dan Lipinksi, and Harold Ford, Jr. about personal responsibility and the virtues of self-sufficiency. Bill Kristol, Tucker Carlson and John Podhoretz can provide moving commentary on how America is so special because all that matters is merit, not who you know or where you come from. There's a virtually endless list of politically well-placed guests equally qualified to talk on such matters.
About this latest hiring by NBC, Atrios observed: "if only the Villager values of nepotism and torture could be combined somehow." The American Prospect's Adam Serwer quicky noted that they already have been: "Liz Cheney." Liz Cheney is really the perfect face of Washington's political culture, a perfect manifestation of all the rotting diseases that define it and a pure expression of what our country has become and the reasons for its virtual ruin. She should really be on every political TV show all day every day. It's almost as though things can't really be expressed thoroughly without including her. Jenna Bush as a new NBC "reporter" on The Today Show -- at a time when every media outlet is firing and laying off real reporters -- is a very nice addition though.
UPDATE: Just to underscore a very important, related point: all of the above-listed people are examples of America's Great Meritocracy, having achieved what they have solely on the basis of their talent, skill and hard work -- The American Way. By contrast, Sonia Sotomayor -- who grew up in a Puerto Rican family in Bronx housing projects; whose father had a third-grade education, did not speak English and died when she was 9; whose mother worked as a telephone operator and a nurse; and who then became valedictorian of her high school, summa cum laude at Princeton, a graduate of Yale Law School, and ultimately a Supreme Court Justice -- is someone who had a whole litany of unfair advantages handed to her and is the poster child for un-American, merit-less advancement.
I just want to make sure that's clear.
UPDATE II: Speaking of Mike Wallace's boy, Andrew Sullivan says that, during his interview about torture with Dick Cheney today, he "sounded like a teenage girl interviewing the Jonas Brothers." Andrew compiles the "questions" Wallace asked of Cheney and it's hard to describe it any other way. He adds:
When future historians ask how the United States came not only to practice torture but to celebrate it and treat torturers as heroes, a special place in hell among the journalists who embraced and justified it should be reserved for Chris Wallace.
That's going to be a very crowded place (see here for more on Wallace's particularly well-deserved consignment to that locale).
UPDATE III: For those complaining that there are many other examples of political nepotism and dynastic succession other than those mentioned here: this was a two-paragraph post in which I stated explicitly that, beyond the identified examples, "there's a virtually endless list of politically well-placed guests equally qualified to talk on such matters." When saying that, I linked to this post of mine from last December, which, unlike today's post, was intended to be a very comprehensive discussion of American political aristocracies and royal families. Anyone who thinks I'm somehow being selective in this critique should read the first paragraph of that post. And yes: this also would absolutely be an example of the same syndrome.
That said, today's post is about a particular strain of royal succession: those who inherit their position and and whose achievement is attributable to their mommies and daddies and yet ludicrously purport to be Stern Advocates for (and Beacons of) Meritocracy and become righteous opponents of "unfair" affirmative action on the ground that only merit should determine advancement. Not everyone who inherits their influence is guilty of that.
UPDATE IV: Wonkette notes that I neglected to include this hideous event.
UPDATE V: Elect the father-dependent Ethan Hastert to his dad's former seat in Congress (h/t). I'd be willing to bet that this "self-described economic and social conservative" finds affirmative action to be a deep affront to merit-based achievement.
Monday, August 24, 2009
30 Secrets Every Woman Keeps from Her Man
(There is something about this list that I like that makes me want to keep it. I think it's that the overall general advise being given here is "yes, it's okay--I really do want you to be a man.")
* * *
The woman you sleep with gazes into your eyes and tells you she loves you. And you believe her. You can tell by the way she looks at you, the way she holds you, the way she seems to always know what you want before you do. There are a couple of things in life you just know, and love and this naked woman are two of them.
But there are a lot of things you don't know.
A woman may give you her body and her heart, but there are parts that she'll never give up. Pieces woven into the very fiber of her being. Mysteries only hinted at in a passing sly smile, an inscrutable laugh. These are the secrets of lovers past, hidden fantasies, and unshared longings. A woman's deepest secrets that don't—and never will—include you.
You're about to sample this hidden knowledge. But like any man who seeks, you'd better be prepared for what you're about to find.
1. My best friend knows everything. She knows all of your vitals—from the size of your bank account to the size of your other, um, holdings—and she knows how both compare with those of every other man I've ever dated. I have done a hand-comparison measurement so I can divulge size and girth with a high level of accuracy. When my friend smirks at you knowingly, you are not imagining it. She knows. So just know that she knows, and deal with it. (It's not going to change.)
Ask her about me, or chat with her about our relationship, at your own risk. She will tell me. Even—in fact, especially—if she promises not to. This is not always a bad thing (e.g., if you happen to be telling her how much you love me). But, in general, remember that she is my confidante first, and yours never.
2. Just looking at your hands can turn me on.
3. When you go away, even for a day, I sleep in your favorite old T-shirt because it smells like you.
4. I'll never tell you exactly how many men I've slept with. No matter how sincere I appeared when I answered your question, chances are I wasn't. As an unscientific guideline, when a woman says she's slept with four men, the real number is actually closer to seven. Her fib is partly intentional (she doesn't want to appear a floozy), but mostly it's sexual amnesia. When a woman wants to pretend an encounter never occurred, she simply scraps the man from her official score sheet. Common excuses that lead to such an omission: The actual sex lasted only a few thrusts; or she was drunk or on the rebound.
5. I fantasized about being with you at least a dozen times before we actually first got naked.
6. I still think about my ex-boyfriends and compare them to you. Mostly you win. Sometimes not.
7. I have Googled your exes.
8. When I'm falling in love with you, I completely lose my appetite.
9. My body really isn't naturally this hairless and smooth all over. But I will never allow you to see any indication whatsoever of all the shaving, tweezing, waxing, exfoliating, and moisturizing that gets it this way.
10. I only appear to have it all together. My true organization (or lack thereof) is revealed in my closet, my makeup bag, my desk files.
11. I have discovered your porn stash and your frequently visited porn Web sites and think the things that turn you on are hilarious.
12. When I say, "I'm ready," I'll need exactly 7 more minutes to get ready. Don't try to cheat the system by showing up 7 minutes later; I will still need an extra 7 minutes.
13. When I say, "I'll meet you in 15 minutes," I mean I will leave in 15 minutes, and thus won't actually arrive for at least 30 (but probably more like 40).
14. You've made me cry more times than you'll ever know.
15. I obsess about when you're going to call me again. The period of time between our first date and your "Thanks for a great night; when can I see you again?" always seems stretched into slow motion. So don't worry about looking too eager. Call. Even if you only wait until noon the day after, it will feel like a lifetime to me. And don't send me an e-mail unless you want me to put you in the figurative trash can along with your message.
16. I want you to talk a little dirty.
17. At the beginning of our relationship, I save all of your voice mails and listen to them (and make my friends listen, too), repeatedly.
18. I might wear granny underwear and purposely not shave my legs because I like you. As crazy as it sounds, the more I like you, the less likely I am to sleep with you on an early date, because I don't want to sabotage having a "proper" relationship with you. So I just might purposely hunt out the ugliest underwear in my drawer and not shave my legs—all to prevent myself from getting naked with you too soon. Sometimes I might get a little tipsy or carried away, and this plan will backfire.
19. I split the cost of my fashion purchases over two or more credit cards, so you don't notice the gargantuan deficit.
20. I'm constantly testing you. I observe, analyze, and judge every action, word, gesture, e-mail, and facial expression. When I ask you if you want to have a threesome, I don't mean it. If you want me to speak to you again, let alone sleep with you after this conversation, the answer should always be, "Why would I want to sleep with another woman when I have you?"
21. I check out your butt every time you leave the room.
22. I need constant indications that you want me around. That's why it's better, for example, to say, "I want you to come away with me for the weekend. Could you come with me?" than to ask, "What are you up to this weekend?"
23. I love it when you get a little jealous. So if you ever see me flirting in front of you with the waiter, the bus driver, or another guy at a party, know I'm actually flirting with you—through him.
24. Even though I may complain that I don't see you enough (or that you work too hard), I find nothing sexier than watching you put on a suit in the morning and rush off to work.
25. I start fights with you because I'm feeling ignored. I'm trying to force emotion out of you. Don't retreat into your cave; just give me what I want: some attention. And never tell me to "calm down," unless you want to guarantee that I absolutely won't.
26. Even if I insist on paying or splitting the bill on our first date, I'll think you're cheap if you let me.
27. I may find your best friend repulsive, but I've fantasized about sleeping with him. Not because I want him, but because I want a piece of a guy who is so close to you.
28. If I'm going to break up with you, all of my friends know way before you do. I've been talking about it for 2 weeks.
29. When we do break up, I put all photographs of you and mementos of our relationship in a shoe box and store it in my closet. Just in case I get nostalgic. Just in case you come back.
30. I want you to take control in bed. Yes, I have a successful career, I'm financially independent, I live on my own, and I don't need a man to make me happy (in theory). I still want you to pick me up, carry me to the bedroom, and take without asking.
* * *
The woman you sleep with gazes into your eyes and tells you she loves you. And you believe her. You can tell by the way she looks at you, the way she holds you, the way she seems to always know what you want before you do. There are a couple of things in life you just know, and love and this naked woman are two of them.
But there are a lot of things you don't know.
A woman may give you her body and her heart, but there are parts that she'll never give up. Pieces woven into the very fiber of her being. Mysteries only hinted at in a passing sly smile, an inscrutable laugh. These are the secrets of lovers past, hidden fantasies, and unshared longings. A woman's deepest secrets that don't—and never will—include you.
You're about to sample this hidden knowledge. But like any man who seeks, you'd better be prepared for what you're about to find.
1. My best friend knows everything. She knows all of your vitals—from the size of your bank account to the size of your other, um, holdings—and she knows how both compare with those of every other man I've ever dated. I have done a hand-comparison measurement so I can divulge size and girth with a high level of accuracy. When my friend smirks at you knowingly, you are not imagining it. She knows. So just know that she knows, and deal with it. (It's not going to change.)
Ask her about me, or chat with her about our relationship, at your own risk. She will tell me. Even—in fact, especially—if she promises not to. This is not always a bad thing (e.g., if you happen to be telling her how much you love me). But, in general, remember that she is my confidante first, and yours never.
2. Just looking at your hands can turn me on.
3. When you go away, even for a day, I sleep in your favorite old T-shirt because it smells like you.
4. I'll never tell you exactly how many men I've slept with. No matter how sincere I appeared when I answered your question, chances are I wasn't. As an unscientific guideline, when a woman says she's slept with four men, the real number is actually closer to seven. Her fib is partly intentional (she doesn't want to appear a floozy), but mostly it's sexual amnesia. When a woman wants to pretend an encounter never occurred, she simply scraps the man from her official score sheet. Common excuses that lead to such an omission: The actual sex lasted only a few thrusts; or she was drunk or on the rebound.
5. I fantasized about being with you at least a dozen times before we actually first got naked.
6. I still think about my ex-boyfriends and compare them to you. Mostly you win. Sometimes not.
7. I have Googled your exes.
8. When I'm falling in love with you, I completely lose my appetite.
9. My body really isn't naturally this hairless and smooth all over. But I will never allow you to see any indication whatsoever of all the shaving, tweezing, waxing, exfoliating, and moisturizing that gets it this way.
10. I only appear to have it all together. My true organization (or lack thereof) is revealed in my closet, my makeup bag, my desk files.
11. I have discovered your porn stash and your frequently visited porn Web sites and think the things that turn you on are hilarious.
12. When I say, "I'm ready," I'll need exactly 7 more minutes to get ready. Don't try to cheat the system by showing up 7 minutes later; I will still need an extra 7 minutes.
13. When I say, "I'll meet you in 15 minutes," I mean I will leave in 15 minutes, and thus won't actually arrive for at least 30 (but probably more like 40).
14. You've made me cry more times than you'll ever know.
15. I obsess about when you're going to call me again. The period of time between our first date and your "Thanks for a great night; when can I see you again?" always seems stretched into slow motion. So don't worry about looking too eager. Call. Even if you only wait until noon the day after, it will feel like a lifetime to me. And don't send me an e-mail unless you want me to put you in the figurative trash can along with your message.
16. I want you to talk a little dirty.
17. At the beginning of our relationship, I save all of your voice mails and listen to them (and make my friends listen, too), repeatedly.
18. I might wear granny underwear and purposely not shave my legs because I like you. As crazy as it sounds, the more I like you, the less likely I am to sleep with you on an early date, because I don't want to sabotage having a "proper" relationship with you. So I just might purposely hunt out the ugliest underwear in my drawer and not shave my legs—all to prevent myself from getting naked with you too soon. Sometimes I might get a little tipsy or carried away, and this plan will backfire.
19. I split the cost of my fashion purchases over two or more credit cards, so you don't notice the gargantuan deficit.
20. I'm constantly testing you. I observe, analyze, and judge every action, word, gesture, e-mail, and facial expression. When I ask you if you want to have a threesome, I don't mean it. If you want me to speak to you again, let alone sleep with you after this conversation, the answer should always be, "Why would I want to sleep with another woman when I have you?"
21. I check out your butt every time you leave the room.
22. I need constant indications that you want me around. That's why it's better, for example, to say, "I want you to come away with me for the weekend. Could you come with me?" than to ask, "What are you up to this weekend?"
23. I love it when you get a little jealous. So if you ever see me flirting in front of you with the waiter, the bus driver, or another guy at a party, know I'm actually flirting with you—through him.
24. Even though I may complain that I don't see you enough (or that you work too hard), I find nothing sexier than watching you put on a suit in the morning and rush off to work.
25. I start fights with you because I'm feeling ignored. I'm trying to force emotion out of you. Don't retreat into your cave; just give me what I want: some attention. And never tell me to "calm down," unless you want to guarantee that I absolutely won't.
26. Even if I insist on paying or splitting the bill on our first date, I'll think you're cheap if you let me.
27. I may find your best friend repulsive, but I've fantasized about sleeping with him. Not because I want him, but because I want a piece of a guy who is so close to you.
28. If I'm going to break up with you, all of my friends know way before you do. I've been talking about it for 2 weeks.
29. When we do break up, I put all photographs of you and mementos of our relationship in a shoe box and store it in my closet. Just in case I get nostalgic. Just in case you come back.
30. I want you to take control in bed. Yes, I have a successful career, I'm financially independent, I live on my own, and I don't need a man to make me happy (in theory). I still want you to pick me up, carry me to the bedroom, and take without asking.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Quitting quitters
Last Friday afternoon, Gov. Sarah Palin (R, AK) resigned abruptly. There has been MUCH media chatter about it, of course. My research indicates a hefty indictment coming perhaps with jail time. Here's a blurb off slate.com about how so many Republicans have been resigning lately.
* * *
In Sarah Palin's GOP, the leaders keep quitting and the troubles don't.
By Bruce Reed
Posted Saturday, July 4, 2009, at 1:12 AM ET
"It may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down [and] plod along," Sarah Palin said Friday, in an attempt to suggest that serving her full term as governor would add to the nation's apathy. "That's the worthless, easy path; that's a quitter's way out." Sarah Palin is no quitter. That's why she's quitting.
She's not the only one. For the past six months, about all that Republicans have been doing is resigning. On Friday, Sarah Palin said she was stepping down because "only dead fish 'go with the flow.' " But far from swimming upstream, she's the latest proof that for Republicans in government, the tide is out.
Look at the 2009 toll so far. One 2012 Republican wannabe, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, announced he would not seek re-election next year. One of the top woulda-beens, Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, quit his job to join the Obama administration and left the country and the hemisphere.
Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter quit the party. Last month, Nevada Sen. John Ensign had to resign his Republican leadership post to spend more time with his sex scandal. South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford resigned as head of the Republican Governors Association. After this week's disastrous AP interview, Sanford soon may have to step down as governor as well. As his Argentine mistress said, you can't "put the genius back in the bottle."
When did the GOP become such a bunch of quitters? What ever happened to the party of Larry Craig and his you'll-never-take-me-from-this-stall-alive spirit?
Some Republican strategists insist that resignation has its virtues. Mary Matalin told the New York Times that Palin's "brilliant" move will free her to camp out alongside Mitt Romney on the campaign trail. Certainly, we can all relish the next two years of watching the Romney and Palin broods go five-on-five across the heartland. But Romney himself is proof that quitting is no way to win. In 2006, he passed up a second term so he could campaign full-time in Iowa and New Hampshire. He lost them both.
The fallacy that successful presidential candidates are too busy to govern dates back to Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, who won the presidency as former governors. Yet neither Carter nor Reagan were quitters. Carter couldn't run for re-election in 1974 because in those days, Georgia governors were limited to one term. Reagan served two full terms as governor of California.
In the last 20 years, perseverers have prospered while quitters withered. Bill Clinton won a fifth term as governor of Arkansas before launching his 1992 campaign. George W. Bush won a second term in Texas two years before running for president in 2000.
Compare that with the dismal track record of strategic quitters. In 1986, Gary Hart chose not to run for a third Senate term and went on to meet Donna Rice. In 2004, John Edwards passed up a second Senate term and went on to meet Rielle Hunter.
Bill Bradley's decision not to seek a fourth term in 1996 helped cost him the Democratic nomination in 2000 to Al Gore, whose slogan was "stand and fight." Bob Dole's spectacular resignation from the Senate after he clinched the Republican nomination in June 1996 earned his campaign a few days of good press. But when his White House bid was over, Dole no longer had the Senate job he had loved.
Time after time, quitting has turned out to be the "worthless, easy path" that Sarah Palin insists it isn't. What makes her sudden resignation especially troubling, though, is not the flawed strategy so much as her jubilation and relief in putting the statehouse in her rear mirror. Palin's resignation is a symptom of what's crippling the Republican Party of late: Governing has become an unwelcome distraction.
Like Sanford's fatal press conference, Palin's bitter statement reads like a cry for help—an all-caps plea for someone to rescue her from the messy business of running Alaska. She passes up running for re-election because she doesn't need a title "to HELP people," then says she'll pack it in altogether rather than "milk" her lame-duck status by traveling to the Lower 48. Like Sanford, Palin snuck away to visit a distant land and fell in love with a siren she cannot bring home or leave behind. Her fatal attraction was the national spotlight.
Palin closed her statement with words she attributed to Gen. Douglas MacArthur: "We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction." Right war, wrong general: The man who said those words was Oliver Smith, who helped his men escape annihilation at the Battle of the "Frozen Chosin" Reservoir in Korea. She should be so lucky. For Sarah Palin, avoiding disaster continues to be a losing battle.
* * *
In Sarah Palin's GOP, the leaders keep quitting and the troubles don't.
By Bruce Reed
Posted Saturday, July 4, 2009, at 1:12 AM ET
"It may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down [and] plod along," Sarah Palin said Friday, in an attempt to suggest that serving her full term as governor would add to the nation's apathy. "That's the worthless, easy path; that's a quitter's way out." Sarah Palin is no quitter. That's why she's quitting.
She's not the only one. For the past six months, about all that Republicans have been doing is resigning. On Friday, Sarah Palin said she was stepping down because "only dead fish 'go with the flow.' " But far from swimming upstream, she's the latest proof that for Republicans in government, the tide is out.
Look at the 2009 toll so far. One 2012 Republican wannabe, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, announced he would not seek re-election next year. One of the top woulda-beens, Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, quit his job to join the Obama administration and left the country and the hemisphere.
Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter quit the party. Last month, Nevada Sen. John Ensign had to resign his Republican leadership post to spend more time with his sex scandal. South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford resigned as head of the Republican Governors Association. After this week's disastrous AP interview, Sanford soon may have to step down as governor as well. As his Argentine mistress said, you can't "put the genius back in the bottle."
When did the GOP become such a bunch of quitters? What ever happened to the party of Larry Craig and his you'll-never-take-me-from-this-stall-alive spirit?
Some Republican strategists insist that resignation has its virtues. Mary Matalin told the New York Times that Palin's "brilliant" move will free her to camp out alongside Mitt Romney on the campaign trail. Certainly, we can all relish the next two years of watching the Romney and Palin broods go five-on-five across the heartland. But Romney himself is proof that quitting is no way to win. In 2006, he passed up a second term so he could campaign full-time in Iowa and New Hampshire. He lost them both.
The fallacy that successful presidential candidates are too busy to govern dates back to Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, who won the presidency as former governors. Yet neither Carter nor Reagan were quitters. Carter couldn't run for re-election in 1974 because in those days, Georgia governors were limited to one term. Reagan served two full terms as governor of California.
In the last 20 years, perseverers have prospered while quitters withered. Bill Clinton won a fifth term as governor of Arkansas before launching his 1992 campaign. George W. Bush won a second term in Texas two years before running for president in 2000.
Compare that with the dismal track record of strategic quitters. In 1986, Gary Hart chose not to run for a third Senate term and went on to meet Donna Rice. In 2004, John Edwards passed up a second Senate term and went on to meet Rielle Hunter.
Bill Bradley's decision not to seek a fourth term in 1996 helped cost him the Democratic nomination in 2000 to Al Gore, whose slogan was "stand and fight." Bob Dole's spectacular resignation from the Senate after he clinched the Republican nomination in June 1996 earned his campaign a few days of good press. But when his White House bid was over, Dole no longer had the Senate job he had loved.
Time after time, quitting has turned out to be the "worthless, easy path" that Sarah Palin insists it isn't. What makes her sudden resignation especially troubling, though, is not the flawed strategy so much as her jubilation and relief in putting the statehouse in her rear mirror. Palin's resignation is a symptom of what's crippling the Republican Party of late: Governing has become an unwelcome distraction.
Like Sanford's fatal press conference, Palin's bitter statement reads like a cry for help—an all-caps plea for someone to rescue her from the messy business of running Alaska. She passes up running for re-election because she doesn't need a title "to HELP people," then says she'll pack it in altogether rather than "milk" her lame-duck status by traveling to the Lower 48. Like Sanford, Palin snuck away to visit a distant land and fell in love with a siren she cannot bring home or leave behind. Her fatal attraction was the national spotlight.
Palin closed her statement with words she attributed to Gen. Douglas MacArthur: "We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction." Right war, wrong general: The man who said those words was Oliver Smith, who helped his men escape annihilation at the Battle of the "Frozen Chosin" Reservoir in Korea. She should be so lucky. For Sarah Palin, avoiding disaster continues to be a losing battle.
Friday, July 3, 2009
California going down
The land that I love, my beloved home state where I have always lived, is going down. Not really a surprise, and the reasons why are many. Here's a good piece on it:
* * *
Californians are sinking themselves
An inflexible right wing is allowing the Golden State to drown in debt. But it's not alone
By Gary Kamiya
July 2, 2009 | The world's eighth-largest economy has just gone belly-up. When midnight tolled on Tuesday night with legislators and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger still deadlocked over how to resolve the state's staggering $24 billion budget shortfall, California became unable to pay its bills. The state will have to begin issuing IOUs to its creditors as early as Thursday. It is the worst budget crisis in the state's modern history.
There is an unreal, almost dreamlike quality about this moment. Dreadful things are about to happen: Hundreds of thousands of children will lose their healthcare. Five thousand state workers will be laid off. Massive cuts will decimate education at every level. Social services will be slashed. Two hundred and twenty-nine parks, out of a total of 280, will be shut down. Even some of the state's landmarks may go on the auction block to raise money.
Yet as their state prepares to go over the cliff, California's citizens seem weirdly oblivious, or resigned, or numb. Like inhabitants of a corrupt third-world country who have utterly lost faith in their government and in politics itself, or ostriches sticking their heads in the sand, Californians are behaving as if the whole thing is out of their control. Or even that it isn't happening at all.
Californians are not directly responsible for the state's budget debacle. They are not the legislators who are so ideologically polarized that on Tuesday they could not even agree on an emergency partial budget fix that would have saved the state $5 billion. But in a larger sense, Californians are indeed responsible for today's crisis. The cumulative weight of their decisions, over decades, and their inability to reach consensus on the fundamental issue of what government should do and who should pay for it, are squarely responsible for the historic mess this unruly nation-state finds itself in today.
It is a truism that California is a national bellwether. From John Muir's founding of the Sierra Club to Prop. 13, the 1978 tax revolt, from Mario Savio to Ronald Reagan, from Hollywood to Silicon Valley, California has time and again proven itself to be a national and global trendsetter. The least American of places, a piratical exception to East Coast gentility on the far end of the continent, it is also the most American of places, with its brilliant, selfish and wanton extremities mirroring the oldest and still-unresolved contradictions of the American spirit. As Kevin Starr, dean of California historians, writes in his superb 2003 book, "California: A History," California has "long since become one of the prisms through which the American people, for better or worse, could glimpse their future." And right now, what they see isn't pretty.
The immediate source of California's financial problems is a lethal combination of ideology and rules. It is deeply politically divided, and its governmental mechanisms are completely broken. Bay Area leftists stare at Orange County conservatives across an unbridgeable abyss; a large and potent group of anti-government libertarians faces off against an equally powerful group of pro-tax, proactive government liberals. If California, like most states, required only a simple majority to pass its budget, the disagreements between these camps could be worked out; after all, the Democrats control the Legislature. But California requires a two-thirds majority, which gives the GOP, now dominated by anti-government, anti-tax ideologues, veto power over the process. The result is deadlock.
Compounding this problem is California's notorious initiative process, which allows voters to bypass the Legislature and place initiatives directly on the ballot simply by gathering enough signatures. The initiative process was originally passed by voters in 1911 to circumvent the power of the oligarchic railroad trusts by restoring direct democracy. And it still offers citizens a chance to take control of important issues. But it has gone out of control, abused by powerful interests who hire people to collect signatures and ram through bills that no ordinary citizen can be expected to comprehend. By sidelining elected officials, it achieves the worst of both worlds: It gives ordinary citizens, who lack requisite expertise, institutional memory and accountability, too much power, and then forces legislators to clean up their mess -- except that because of ideological gridlock and the supermajority requirement, they can't.
A classic example is the 1994 "three strikes" initiative, which mandated harsh prison sentences for repeat offenders. The bill was cathartic for citizens who wanted to get tough on crime, but it had serious budgetary consequences. As a result of the initiative and other tough crime laws, California's prison population has increased 82 percent over the last 20 years. State institutions now house a mind-boggling 170,000 prisoners. Corrections costs California $13 billion a year -- a fivefold increase since 1994, and more than the state spends on higher education. Former Gov. Gray Davis gave the powerful prison guards union a 30 percent pay raise from 2003 to 2008.
But the most momentous initiative was Prop. 13, which slashed property taxes. By voting for Prop. 13, while not demanding a reduction in public services, Californians were in effect saying they wanted to have it all: low taxes and social services, subsidized public education, infrastructure and the other things provided by government.
This was, in effect, a mass outbreak of cognitive dissonance, an up-yours delivered to government with the public's left hand, while its right hand reached out for Sacramento's largesse. Now, 31 years later, the bill has finally come due. There is no free lunch. If you want good roads, parks, decent schools (California's schools, once the best in the nation, are now among the worst) and adequate social services, you have to pay for them.
For some reason, Californians have never come to grips with this fact. Some citizens who voted for Prop. 13 and other anti-tax measures are hard-line right-wingers who are ideologically opposed to government and don't care if state programs die. They are the soul mates of the current Republicans in the Legislature, who see the current crisis as a golden opportunity to get rid of government programs they have opposed for years. But they are the minority. Polls show that most Californians are more centrist. They are not absolutely opposed to taxes or government programs. They want compromises that work. The tragedy of California is that its political system no longer speaks for them. The center has not held. It no longer exists. It is a self-reinforcing problem: The more the public perceives politicians as ineffectual, the more it dismisses politics altogether.
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Sacramento Residents: Make $63/Hr Part-Time!$63/hr part-time jobs open. Requirements: Just a computer. Explore Now...As historian Starr points out in his new book, "Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963," this was not always the case. During what now looks like a Golden Age, moderate Republicans and Democrats worked together to get things done. Republican Govs. Goodwin Knight and Earl Warren and Democratic Gov. Pat Brown were masters of the art of the possible, reaching across the aisle to hammer out effective legislation. Even Reagan was more pragmatic than later GOP myth-makers claim. As governor, Reagan pushed through the largest tax increase in the state's history to pay for government services. It was during these years, Starr points out, that the infrastructure that allowed California to grow was built -- an infrastructure Californians are still living off today.
What happened? Why did the center fail? Why has California, a place famous for giving birth to cutting-edge ideas that changed the world, proved humiliatingly unable to manage its own affairs? Why can't California do politics as well as it does technology, biotech, movies, music and social justice movements?
Beyond the state's dysfunctional system, the short answer is the rise of the hard-right GOP. Pushed far to the right by ideologues like Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist and their ilk, California Republican lawmakers have staked out an absolutist line against taxes that makes governance nearly impossible. Lawmakers who believe and act on Reagan's famous line that "government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem," are walking oxymorons. Why expect anti-government Republican legislators to resolve a budget crisis when that crisis will result in their goal: the destruction of government? The floundering Governator may not be an extremist, but he remains in thrall to the members of his party who are.
But Californians themselves, of all political stripes -- or, more likely and significantly, none -- also are responsible. The fact remains that self-centered California has yet to come to terms with what it is. This is a state that was built with government programs, financed by massive federal military and aerospace spending and state funding of local projects, and yet still has not decided what it thinks about the New Deal, or government itself. Of course, those opposed to government tend to be on the right. But the fact that many leftists, chasing the chimera of perfection, disdain the world of practical politics is also damaging.
Will California be able to pull itself out of its current hole? Certainly it has done so in the past. Its history is nothing if not a tale of reversals and unexpected triumphs. It will no doubt muddle through. But in the long run, to overcome its structural problems, it must transform some of its most cherished values. Without abandoning its individualism, utopianism and radicalism, it must learn how to use them in the world -- with all the compromises that requires. Like an aging starlet, the Golden State is clinging desperately to its glorious youth. But it is past time for it to grow up.
* * *
Californians are sinking themselves
An inflexible right wing is allowing the Golden State to drown in debt. But it's not alone
By Gary Kamiya
July 2, 2009 | The world's eighth-largest economy has just gone belly-up. When midnight tolled on Tuesday night with legislators and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger still deadlocked over how to resolve the state's staggering $24 billion budget shortfall, California became unable to pay its bills. The state will have to begin issuing IOUs to its creditors as early as Thursday. It is the worst budget crisis in the state's modern history.
There is an unreal, almost dreamlike quality about this moment. Dreadful things are about to happen: Hundreds of thousands of children will lose their healthcare. Five thousand state workers will be laid off. Massive cuts will decimate education at every level. Social services will be slashed. Two hundred and twenty-nine parks, out of a total of 280, will be shut down. Even some of the state's landmarks may go on the auction block to raise money.
Yet as their state prepares to go over the cliff, California's citizens seem weirdly oblivious, or resigned, or numb. Like inhabitants of a corrupt third-world country who have utterly lost faith in their government and in politics itself, or ostriches sticking their heads in the sand, Californians are behaving as if the whole thing is out of their control. Or even that it isn't happening at all.
Californians are not directly responsible for the state's budget debacle. They are not the legislators who are so ideologically polarized that on Tuesday they could not even agree on an emergency partial budget fix that would have saved the state $5 billion. But in a larger sense, Californians are indeed responsible for today's crisis. The cumulative weight of their decisions, over decades, and their inability to reach consensus on the fundamental issue of what government should do and who should pay for it, are squarely responsible for the historic mess this unruly nation-state finds itself in today.
It is a truism that California is a national bellwether. From John Muir's founding of the Sierra Club to Prop. 13, the 1978 tax revolt, from Mario Savio to Ronald Reagan, from Hollywood to Silicon Valley, California has time and again proven itself to be a national and global trendsetter. The least American of places, a piratical exception to East Coast gentility on the far end of the continent, it is also the most American of places, with its brilliant, selfish and wanton extremities mirroring the oldest and still-unresolved contradictions of the American spirit. As Kevin Starr, dean of California historians, writes in his superb 2003 book, "California: A History," California has "long since become one of the prisms through which the American people, for better or worse, could glimpse their future." And right now, what they see isn't pretty.
The immediate source of California's financial problems is a lethal combination of ideology and rules. It is deeply politically divided, and its governmental mechanisms are completely broken. Bay Area leftists stare at Orange County conservatives across an unbridgeable abyss; a large and potent group of anti-government libertarians faces off against an equally powerful group of pro-tax, proactive government liberals. If California, like most states, required only a simple majority to pass its budget, the disagreements between these camps could be worked out; after all, the Democrats control the Legislature. But California requires a two-thirds majority, which gives the GOP, now dominated by anti-government, anti-tax ideologues, veto power over the process. The result is deadlock.
Compounding this problem is California's notorious initiative process, which allows voters to bypass the Legislature and place initiatives directly on the ballot simply by gathering enough signatures. The initiative process was originally passed by voters in 1911 to circumvent the power of the oligarchic railroad trusts by restoring direct democracy. And it still offers citizens a chance to take control of important issues. But it has gone out of control, abused by powerful interests who hire people to collect signatures and ram through bills that no ordinary citizen can be expected to comprehend. By sidelining elected officials, it achieves the worst of both worlds: It gives ordinary citizens, who lack requisite expertise, institutional memory and accountability, too much power, and then forces legislators to clean up their mess -- except that because of ideological gridlock and the supermajority requirement, they can't.
A classic example is the 1994 "three strikes" initiative, which mandated harsh prison sentences for repeat offenders. The bill was cathartic for citizens who wanted to get tough on crime, but it had serious budgetary consequences. As a result of the initiative and other tough crime laws, California's prison population has increased 82 percent over the last 20 years. State institutions now house a mind-boggling 170,000 prisoners. Corrections costs California $13 billion a year -- a fivefold increase since 1994, and more than the state spends on higher education. Former Gov. Gray Davis gave the powerful prison guards union a 30 percent pay raise from 2003 to 2008.
But the most momentous initiative was Prop. 13, which slashed property taxes. By voting for Prop. 13, while not demanding a reduction in public services, Californians were in effect saying they wanted to have it all: low taxes and social services, subsidized public education, infrastructure and the other things provided by government.
This was, in effect, a mass outbreak of cognitive dissonance, an up-yours delivered to government with the public's left hand, while its right hand reached out for Sacramento's largesse. Now, 31 years later, the bill has finally come due. There is no free lunch. If you want good roads, parks, decent schools (California's schools, once the best in the nation, are now among the worst) and adequate social services, you have to pay for them.
For some reason, Californians have never come to grips with this fact. Some citizens who voted for Prop. 13 and other anti-tax measures are hard-line right-wingers who are ideologically opposed to government and don't care if state programs die. They are the soul mates of the current Republicans in the Legislature, who see the current crisis as a golden opportunity to get rid of government programs they have opposed for years. But they are the minority. Polls show that most Californians are more centrist. They are not absolutely opposed to taxes or government programs. They want compromises that work. The tragedy of California is that its political system no longer speaks for them. The center has not held. It no longer exists. It is a self-reinforcing problem: The more the public perceives politicians as ineffectual, the more it dismisses politics altogether.
Sacramento Mom Lost 47 lbs Following 1 rule!I Cut Down 47 lbs of Stomach Fat In A Month By Obeying This 1 Old Rule Explore Now...
Sacramento Residents: Make $63/Hr Part-Time!$63/hr part-time jobs open. Requirements: Just a computer. Explore Now...As historian Starr points out in his new book, "Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963," this was not always the case. During what now looks like a Golden Age, moderate Republicans and Democrats worked together to get things done. Republican Govs. Goodwin Knight and Earl Warren and Democratic Gov. Pat Brown were masters of the art of the possible, reaching across the aisle to hammer out effective legislation. Even Reagan was more pragmatic than later GOP myth-makers claim. As governor, Reagan pushed through the largest tax increase in the state's history to pay for government services. It was during these years, Starr points out, that the infrastructure that allowed California to grow was built -- an infrastructure Californians are still living off today.
What happened? Why did the center fail? Why has California, a place famous for giving birth to cutting-edge ideas that changed the world, proved humiliatingly unable to manage its own affairs? Why can't California do politics as well as it does technology, biotech, movies, music and social justice movements?
Beyond the state's dysfunctional system, the short answer is the rise of the hard-right GOP. Pushed far to the right by ideologues like Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist and their ilk, California Republican lawmakers have staked out an absolutist line against taxes that makes governance nearly impossible. Lawmakers who believe and act on Reagan's famous line that "government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem," are walking oxymorons. Why expect anti-government Republican legislators to resolve a budget crisis when that crisis will result in their goal: the destruction of government? The floundering Governator may not be an extremist, but he remains in thrall to the members of his party who are.
But Californians themselves, of all political stripes -- or, more likely and significantly, none -- also are responsible. The fact remains that self-centered California has yet to come to terms with what it is. This is a state that was built with government programs, financed by massive federal military and aerospace spending and state funding of local projects, and yet still has not decided what it thinks about the New Deal, or government itself. Of course, those opposed to government tend to be on the right. But the fact that many leftists, chasing the chimera of perfection, disdain the world of practical politics is also damaging.
Will California be able to pull itself out of its current hole? Certainly it has done so in the past. Its history is nothing if not a tale of reversals and unexpected triumphs. It will no doubt muddle through. But in the long run, to overcome its structural problems, it must transform some of its most cherished values. Without abandoning its individualism, utopianism and radicalism, it must learn how to use them in the world -- with all the compromises that requires. Like an aging starlet, the Golden State is clinging desperately to its glorious youth. But it is past time for it to grow up.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Priviledged whiners
June's been a busy month at work, but here's a good Glenn Greenwald column about how the priviledged whine...
* * *
Friday June 12, 2009 09:13 EDT
Tribalistic self-absorption
(updated below - Update II)
The most predominant mentality in right-wing discourse finds expression in this form: "I am part of/was born into Group X, and Group X -- my group -- is better than all others yet treated so very unfairly." This claim persists -- indeed, is often intensified -- even when Group X is clearly the strongest, most privileged and most favored group. So intense is their need for self-victimization -- so inebriating is their self-absorption and so lacking are they in any capacity for empathy -- that, for all the noise and rhetoric, the arguments they make virtually always have this tribalistic self-absorption at its core.
Last week, Charles Krauthammer accused President Obama of treating every country in the world so well -- except for one, the one for which Krauthammer bears great love and affection and with which he was taught from childhood to identify:
President Obama repeatedly insists that American foreign policy be conducted with modesty and humility. Above all, there will be no more "dictating" to other countries. . . . An admirable sentiment. It applies to everyone -- Iran, Russia, Cuba, Syria, even Venezuela. Except Israel. Israel is ordered to freeze all settlement activity.
The U.S. transfers tens of billions of dollars to Israel -- more than any other country in the world. We demand that no country in the Middle East have nuclear weapons -- except Israel. We fuel Israel's wars with weapons transfers, ensure it is the most militarily powerful country in its region, and loyally protect it from U.N. sanctions using our veto power. It's virtually impossible to imagine one country that is more favorably treated by another than the various forms of largesse Israel receives from the U.S. But no matter. In Krauthammer's eyes, the opposite is true: the U.S. treats every country fairly except Israel. That's the country that, to him, is singled out for unfavorable treatment by the U.S. Israel is the victim of unfair treatment at the hands of Obama.
Identically, in his column today, Krauthammer attacks Obama for daring in his Cairo speech to suggest that the U.S. has done bad things in the past and has contributed to the hostilities between the U.S. and the Muslim world. As a result of Obama's statement of the obvious -- that the U.S. also bears responsibility for the enmity that exists -- Obama stands accused in Krauthammer's column of "a disturbing ambivalence about his own country." To Krauthammer, Obama's sins include "transcultural evenhandedness," "moral equivalencies and self-flagellating apologetics" and "creating false equivalencies."
Here again we find the same adolescent self-absorption: the group into which I was born and was instructed from childhood to believe is the best -- America -- is, objectively, superior. It is so much better than everyone and everything else that even to suggest that we have flaws comparable to others is to engage in "false moral equivalencies." To do anything other than emphatically proclaim my group's objective superiority is to treat my group unfairly [leave to the side the irony that the same people who want to suppress torture photos because they don't want to inflame anti-American sentiment apparently want the U.S. President to announce to the Muslim world that we are superior to them, have no serious flaws, have made no meaningful mistakes, and that everything is their fault -- that sort of pompous self-glorification won't inflame anti-American sentiment at all].
And then, finally, we have Jonah Goldberg actually anointing himself as the leading opponent of affirmative action on the ground that it unfairly penalizes and victimizes his group and allows achievement for reasons other than merit. This is someone who might be the single most compelling poster child for the ability of white males to advance in America for reasons having to do with everything except merit. His entire career is attributable to his mom. He was almost 30 years old and was working as the "Vice President" of her tiny company -- with no political or writing background -- when he leveraged his mom's sleazy involvement in the Lewinsky sex scandal and her contacts with the right-wing noise machine into a job with National Review, to which he has clung ever since. So much of the right-wing pundit class -- which also complains endlessly about the unfairness of affirmative action in undermining "merit-based" achievement -- similarly owe their entire careers to their moms and dads.
Yet this is the person -- Lucianne's nepotistic creation -- who is now prancing around as the Standard-Bearer of merit-based accomplishment and speaking out on behalf of fellow white males and Republicans who are treated so unfairly by our society and our media. Yet again, it amounts to nothing more than: my group -- the one I was born into and trained to love -- is being victimized and treated so badly. These claims of self-victimization persist even when their group historically occupied and continues to occupy positions of power and influence far disproportionate to their actual numbers. As Atrios put it on Twitter: so delusional and self-absorbed is the whole debate over Sonia Sotomayor's nomination and related affirmative action grievances that it amounts to nothing more than: "if only I had grown up a female Puerto Rican in a Bronx [public housing project], think of all the opportunities I would have had."
For all the mockery over empathy, look at what happens to right-wing figures in those rare cases when they become personally affected by the ideology they advocate. They quickly abandon it. Dick Cheney objects to the injustice of gay inequality because his daughter is burdened by it. Nancy Reagan deviates from social conservative dogma to become a leading advocate of stem-cell research because she suffered through her husband's Alzheimers. Jane Harman instantaneously transforms from Surveillance State authoritarian to raving civil libertarian upon learning that her own telephone conversations were intercepted by the government. They advocate their views up until the point that it begins adversely affecting not only others, but also themselves.
Otherwise, the only victims they ever see are themselves, the only unfairness they recognize is to their own group, the only perspective they are capable of understanding is the tribalistic ones drummed into their heads from birth. Anonymous Liberal put this very well when writing earlier this week about the disgusting indifference to the plight of Chinese Uighurs, who have been kept in cages for years despite even the Bush administration's recognition that they did nothing wrong:
That the plight of these men elicits precisely zero sympathy (indeed, it provokes laughter) from most supposedly freedom-loving conservatives in this country underscores the extent to which many conservatives have managed to dehumanize in their own minds the many foreigners whose lives are impacted by our policies. As Jonah Goldberg put it this morning in a post entitled "Enemy Combatants as Toxic Waste":
The more I think about it, the more the enemy combatant "problem" can be understood like a toxic waste issue (and, no, I'm not trying to dehumanize these fairly inhuman people — they do that just fine on their own).
Jonah's right that feckless politicians in this country are treating Guantanamo detainees like toxic waste, but he doesn't seem at all disturbed by this fact and has no problem casually describing all the detainees as "fairly inhuman people."
It's a defining attribute of early adolescence to be incapable of seeing the world through any lens other than total self-centeredness, self-absorption and empathy-free self-obsession. If you watch for it (principally though not only) in right-wing discourse, you will see that this is really the central theme animating most of what they write: My group is superior. My group (political, national, religious, ethic, gender) is victimized and treated unfairly. The misery and suffering my group inflicts on far less powerful groups is irrelevant and always justifiable. Even those societies we bomb, occupy, devastate and destroy -- even those we lock in cages without trials -- are the ones victimizing us. They never advanced beyond the adolescent stage of tribalistic self-absorption and it's amazing how completely that lies at the core of most of what they believe and argue.
UPDATE: In comments, Gator90 ponders: "How different might the world be if Dick Cheney had a Muslim daughter?"
We can only speculate about that, but there is a similar, real-world example from which we can infer some answers: Long-time, hard-core movement conservative Grover Norquist has a Kuwaiti-Muslim wife; was a vocal opponent of many of the Bush/Cheney "War on Terror" policies; and has been viciously accused by entities such as Front Page Magazine of pursuing a "wicked project to dress Islamists up as patriotic Republicans so they can infiltrate the government"; by New Republic Editor Frank Foer of having a "strange alliance with Radical Islam"; and by movement conservatives who once revered him as "being in bed with Islamists" and "acting as an 'agent of influence' for groups hostile to American interests." How revealing that right-wing polemicists abandon their own side when the ideology personally affects them.
UPDATE II: Here is what Liz Cheney -- who, like Jonah Goldberg, undoubtedly opposes affirmative action because it unfairly allows people to advance for reasons other than merit (such as family connections) -- thinks that Obama should be saying to the world (h/t A.L. via email):
We've now seen several different occasions when [Obama]'s been on the international trips, where he's not willing to say, flat out, 'I believe in American exceptionalism. I believe unequivocally, unapologetically, America is the best nation that ever existed in history, and clearly that exists today.' Instead we've seen him do what we saw him do in the speech in Cairo, which is sort of, 'on one hand this, on the other hand that,' and then attempt to put himself sort of above it all. I think that troubles people.
Just ponder how psychologically disturbed -- how deeply self-absorbed -- is the need to announce to the world, let alone to believe: We are not only better than all of you - we're better than everyone who has ever existed for all of human history!!" Imagine if you heard someone saying that about themselves; wouldn't you conclude that there was something deeply wrong with that person? And speaking of inflaming anti-American sentiment, do you think constantly announcing that to the world might do so a bit more than releasing some detainee photos? But -- as is so often true -- Liz Cheney's statement is a perfect distillation of the core right-wing view of the world: our group is better than every other -- not just that exists now but that ever existed -- and it's terribly unfair to us when our superiority is not recognized and affirmed. That's just pathological.
* * *
Friday June 12, 2009 09:13 EDT
Tribalistic self-absorption
(updated below - Update II)
The most predominant mentality in right-wing discourse finds expression in this form: "I am part of/was born into Group X, and Group X -- my group -- is better than all others yet treated so very unfairly." This claim persists -- indeed, is often intensified -- even when Group X is clearly the strongest, most privileged and most favored group. So intense is their need for self-victimization -- so inebriating is their self-absorption and so lacking are they in any capacity for empathy -- that, for all the noise and rhetoric, the arguments they make virtually always have this tribalistic self-absorption at its core.
Last week, Charles Krauthammer accused President Obama of treating every country in the world so well -- except for one, the one for which Krauthammer bears great love and affection and with which he was taught from childhood to identify:
President Obama repeatedly insists that American foreign policy be conducted with modesty and humility. Above all, there will be no more "dictating" to other countries. . . . An admirable sentiment. It applies to everyone -- Iran, Russia, Cuba, Syria, even Venezuela. Except Israel. Israel is ordered to freeze all settlement activity.
The U.S. transfers tens of billions of dollars to Israel -- more than any other country in the world. We demand that no country in the Middle East have nuclear weapons -- except Israel. We fuel Israel's wars with weapons transfers, ensure it is the most militarily powerful country in its region, and loyally protect it from U.N. sanctions using our veto power. It's virtually impossible to imagine one country that is more favorably treated by another than the various forms of largesse Israel receives from the U.S. But no matter. In Krauthammer's eyes, the opposite is true: the U.S. treats every country fairly except Israel. That's the country that, to him, is singled out for unfavorable treatment by the U.S. Israel is the victim of unfair treatment at the hands of Obama.
Identically, in his column today, Krauthammer attacks Obama for daring in his Cairo speech to suggest that the U.S. has done bad things in the past and has contributed to the hostilities between the U.S. and the Muslim world. As a result of Obama's statement of the obvious -- that the U.S. also bears responsibility for the enmity that exists -- Obama stands accused in Krauthammer's column of "a disturbing ambivalence about his own country." To Krauthammer, Obama's sins include "transcultural evenhandedness," "moral equivalencies and self-flagellating apologetics" and "creating false equivalencies."
Here again we find the same adolescent self-absorption: the group into which I was born and was instructed from childhood to believe is the best -- America -- is, objectively, superior. It is so much better than everyone and everything else that even to suggest that we have flaws comparable to others is to engage in "false moral equivalencies." To do anything other than emphatically proclaim my group's objective superiority is to treat my group unfairly [leave to the side the irony that the same people who want to suppress torture photos because they don't want to inflame anti-American sentiment apparently want the U.S. President to announce to the Muslim world that we are superior to them, have no serious flaws, have made no meaningful mistakes, and that everything is their fault -- that sort of pompous self-glorification won't inflame anti-American sentiment at all].
And then, finally, we have Jonah Goldberg actually anointing himself as the leading opponent of affirmative action on the ground that it unfairly penalizes and victimizes his group and allows achievement for reasons other than merit. This is someone who might be the single most compelling poster child for the ability of white males to advance in America for reasons having to do with everything except merit. His entire career is attributable to his mom. He was almost 30 years old and was working as the "Vice President" of her tiny company -- with no political or writing background -- when he leveraged his mom's sleazy involvement in the Lewinsky sex scandal and her contacts with the right-wing noise machine into a job with National Review, to which he has clung ever since. So much of the right-wing pundit class -- which also complains endlessly about the unfairness of affirmative action in undermining "merit-based" achievement -- similarly owe their entire careers to their moms and dads.
Yet this is the person -- Lucianne's nepotistic creation -- who is now prancing around as the Standard-Bearer of merit-based accomplishment and speaking out on behalf of fellow white males and Republicans who are treated so unfairly by our society and our media. Yet again, it amounts to nothing more than: my group -- the one I was born into and trained to love -- is being victimized and treated so badly. These claims of self-victimization persist even when their group historically occupied and continues to occupy positions of power and influence far disproportionate to their actual numbers. As Atrios put it on Twitter: so delusional and self-absorbed is the whole debate over Sonia Sotomayor's nomination and related affirmative action grievances that it amounts to nothing more than: "if only I had grown up a female Puerto Rican in a Bronx [public housing project], think of all the opportunities I would have had."
For all the mockery over empathy, look at what happens to right-wing figures in those rare cases when they become personally affected by the ideology they advocate. They quickly abandon it. Dick Cheney objects to the injustice of gay inequality because his daughter is burdened by it. Nancy Reagan deviates from social conservative dogma to become a leading advocate of stem-cell research because she suffered through her husband's Alzheimers. Jane Harman instantaneously transforms from Surveillance State authoritarian to raving civil libertarian upon learning that her own telephone conversations were intercepted by the government. They advocate their views up until the point that it begins adversely affecting not only others, but also themselves.
Otherwise, the only victims they ever see are themselves, the only unfairness they recognize is to their own group, the only perspective they are capable of understanding is the tribalistic ones drummed into their heads from birth. Anonymous Liberal put this very well when writing earlier this week about the disgusting indifference to the plight of Chinese Uighurs, who have been kept in cages for years despite even the Bush administration's recognition that they did nothing wrong:
That the plight of these men elicits precisely zero sympathy (indeed, it provokes laughter) from most supposedly freedom-loving conservatives in this country underscores the extent to which many conservatives have managed to dehumanize in their own minds the many foreigners whose lives are impacted by our policies. As Jonah Goldberg put it this morning in a post entitled "Enemy Combatants as Toxic Waste":
The more I think about it, the more the enemy combatant "problem" can be understood like a toxic waste issue (and, no, I'm not trying to dehumanize these fairly inhuman people — they do that just fine on their own).
Jonah's right that feckless politicians in this country are treating Guantanamo detainees like toxic waste, but he doesn't seem at all disturbed by this fact and has no problem casually describing all the detainees as "fairly inhuman people."
It's a defining attribute of early adolescence to be incapable of seeing the world through any lens other than total self-centeredness, self-absorption and empathy-free self-obsession. If you watch for it (principally though not only) in right-wing discourse, you will see that this is really the central theme animating most of what they write: My group is superior. My group (political, national, religious, ethic, gender) is victimized and treated unfairly. The misery and suffering my group inflicts on far less powerful groups is irrelevant and always justifiable. Even those societies we bomb, occupy, devastate and destroy -- even those we lock in cages without trials -- are the ones victimizing us. They never advanced beyond the adolescent stage of tribalistic self-absorption and it's amazing how completely that lies at the core of most of what they believe and argue.
UPDATE: In comments, Gator90 ponders: "How different might the world be if Dick Cheney had a Muslim daughter?"
We can only speculate about that, but there is a similar, real-world example from which we can infer some answers: Long-time, hard-core movement conservative Grover Norquist has a Kuwaiti-Muslim wife; was a vocal opponent of many of the Bush/Cheney "War on Terror" policies; and has been viciously accused by entities such as Front Page Magazine of pursuing a "wicked project to dress Islamists up as patriotic Republicans so they can infiltrate the government"; by New Republic Editor Frank Foer of having a "strange alliance with Radical Islam"; and by movement conservatives who once revered him as "being in bed with Islamists" and "acting as an 'agent of influence' for groups hostile to American interests." How revealing that right-wing polemicists abandon their own side when the ideology personally affects them.
UPDATE II: Here is what Liz Cheney -- who, like Jonah Goldberg, undoubtedly opposes affirmative action because it unfairly allows people to advance for reasons other than merit (such as family connections) -- thinks that Obama should be saying to the world (h/t A.L. via email):
We've now seen several different occasions when [Obama]'s been on the international trips, where he's not willing to say, flat out, 'I believe in American exceptionalism. I believe unequivocally, unapologetically, America is the best nation that ever existed in history, and clearly that exists today.' Instead we've seen him do what we saw him do in the speech in Cairo, which is sort of, 'on one hand this, on the other hand that,' and then attempt to put himself sort of above it all. I think that troubles people.
Just ponder how psychologically disturbed -- how deeply self-absorbed -- is the need to announce to the world, let alone to believe: We are not only better than all of you - we're better than everyone who has ever existed for all of human history!!" Imagine if you heard someone saying that about themselves; wouldn't you conclude that there was something deeply wrong with that person? And speaking of inflaming anti-American sentiment, do you think constantly announcing that to the world might do so a bit more than releasing some detainee photos? But -- as is so often true -- Liz Cheney's statement is a perfect distillation of the core right-wing view of the world: our group is better than every other -- not just that exists now but that ever existed -- and it's terribly unfair to us when our superiority is not recognized and affirmed. That's just pathological.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Persistent misogyny
I was talking with a friend last night about feminist issues. Sorta ironic that this op-ed should crop up today. The author starts with a bit about how Miss California's Christianity moved her to condemn gays, and yet didn't prevent her from posing naked. Then he moves on to a general discussion on the big picture and gay marriage. Really good stuff from the Huffington Post...
* * *
"Would Jesus Oppose Gays and be Silent on Porn?"
by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
Here's a glimpse of religion in America. All gays all the time. It seems that there is nothing else that can capture the spiritual imagination of this nation. Jesus came to the world to stop the damned gays. He had precious little else to say.
Forget the fact that we Americans are desperate to be liberated from our materialism and narcissism. Or that our youth are clamoring for anything other than American Idol to inspire them. We clerics will get around to it just as soon as we stop them gays.
The latest installment in the American obsession with gay marriage comes from Miss California, Carrie Prejean, who said in the Miss Universe competition that she opposes gay marriage and was immediately championed as a Christian heroin throughout America. But it seems that her Christianity could not find expression in preventing her from posing topless for men or having the Miss Universe pageant pay for her breast implants. Now I ask you honestly, what is a bigger threat to heterosexual marriage today? Gay marriage or porn? When a wife waits alone in bed for her husband who is downloading pictures of naked women on his laptop, do you really believe she consoles herself by thinking, "Well at least those gays can't marry"?
For all my Christian brothers and sisters who scapegoat gays for undermining the institution of marriage, I would remind them that we straight people have done a mighty fine job of destroying it ourselves, thank you very much. The gay population in the United States is at most ten percent while the heterosexual divorce rate is more than fifty percent and has been so well before gay rights ever became a national issue.
The foremost danger to marriage in our time is the wholesale degradation of women in popular culture. In magazines, on TV, and especially on Internet porn, women are portrayed as the libidinous man's plaything, not an equal to be respected but a subordinate to be used. On college campuses male womanizing is an expected right of passage. Why devote yourself to one woman when idiotic shows like The Bachelor reinforce the idea that the rich and good-looking guys get to have a harem. Even well-meaning women like Miss California who participate in porn become complicit in their own degradation and further the male view that a woman's principle purpose is to satiate male erotic needs.
Beauty pageants don't help much either and it's surprising that my Christian clerical brothers haven't spoken out against them as they have gay marriage. Can you believe that sixty years after feminism rightly pointed out that a woman's mind is even more important than her legs we still have televised contests of women parading around in their underwear for Donald Trump to rate their bodies? And what would Jesus say about Miss California's implants? Would he endorse the message that women ought to stuff their chests with silicon to appear as perfect male eye-candy, or would he emphatically declare that beauty is not merely skin deep?
How any of this congruent with Christian values is beyond me, but it seems that we've entered some weird Twilight Zone where opposition to gay marriage alone makes one into a Christian in good standing.
Look. I'm not here to condemn Carrie Prejean and I can of course be just as religiously inconsistent. But my point is that America has real problems and can really use an authentic spiritual voice to lead us out of the shallowness, greed, divorce, and teen sex that are plaguing our country. And so long as we make gay marriage the only issue of importance we abscond our moral responsibility to provide spiritual leadership to a starving generation. Most of all we shift our focus away from combating the misogyny that has become such a central staple of American culture.
Patti Stanger, Bravo's Millionaire Matchmaker, and I recently debated in Los Angeles in front of 1100 young people about Patti's belief that women ought to marry rich husbands. I argued that this just fuels the stereotype of women as greedy gold-diggers prepared to sell themselves as a commodity to a guy with cash. When men come to believe these stereotypes it affects their respect for women. Soon they believe that can they can neglect their wives as long as they give them credit cards. But three quarters of all divorces today are initiated by wives who are making their own money and would rather be alone than remain with a distant husband in an empty marriage. The most influential TV show over the past decade was Sex in the City where four female friends have nearly given up on men and turn to each other for intimate companionship instead. As for married women in America, approximately thirty percent are on an anti-depressant and Maureen Dowd of the New York Times scored big by publishing a book suggesting that perhaps women are better off without men.
As for the guys, well, the only ones who still want to get married are gay. While the gay men are out petitioning the Supreme Court for the right to get hitched, the straight guys are inventing brilliant excuses not to wed their girlfriends with whom they have lived for years and even have children. It's curious that Brad Pitt proclaims that he and Angeline Jolie, who admirably have six kids together, will only get married when all people, gays included, can wed. But that has not stopped him from adopting children even though in most states gays can still not adopt. Which just goes to show you that when a man wants to find reasons to stay single he becomes as bright as Einstein.
We can save marriage in America and get men to become gentlemen who treat women like ladies. But that must be accompanied by women not only demanding male respect, but respecting themselves as well.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach this week publishes his new book, "The Blessing of Enough: Becoming Materially Content and Spiritually Hungry." He is the founder of ThisWorld: The Values Network. www.shmuley.com
* * *
"Would Jesus Oppose Gays and be Silent on Porn?"
by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
Here's a glimpse of religion in America. All gays all the time. It seems that there is nothing else that can capture the spiritual imagination of this nation. Jesus came to the world to stop the damned gays. He had precious little else to say.
Forget the fact that we Americans are desperate to be liberated from our materialism and narcissism. Or that our youth are clamoring for anything other than American Idol to inspire them. We clerics will get around to it just as soon as we stop them gays.
The latest installment in the American obsession with gay marriage comes from Miss California, Carrie Prejean, who said in the Miss Universe competition that she opposes gay marriage and was immediately championed as a Christian heroin throughout America. But it seems that her Christianity could not find expression in preventing her from posing topless for men or having the Miss Universe pageant pay for her breast implants. Now I ask you honestly, what is a bigger threat to heterosexual marriage today? Gay marriage or porn? When a wife waits alone in bed for her husband who is downloading pictures of naked women on his laptop, do you really believe she consoles herself by thinking, "Well at least those gays can't marry"?
For all my Christian brothers and sisters who scapegoat gays for undermining the institution of marriage, I would remind them that we straight people have done a mighty fine job of destroying it ourselves, thank you very much. The gay population in the United States is at most ten percent while the heterosexual divorce rate is more than fifty percent and has been so well before gay rights ever became a national issue.
The foremost danger to marriage in our time is the wholesale degradation of women in popular culture. In magazines, on TV, and especially on Internet porn, women are portrayed as the libidinous man's plaything, not an equal to be respected but a subordinate to be used. On college campuses male womanizing is an expected right of passage. Why devote yourself to one woman when idiotic shows like The Bachelor reinforce the idea that the rich and good-looking guys get to have a harem. Even well-meaning women like Miss California who participate in porn become complicit in their own degradation and further the male view that a woman's principle purpose is to satiate male erotic needs.
Beauty pageants don't help much either and it's surprising that my Christian clerical brothers haven't spoken out against them as they have gay marriage. Can you believe that sixty years after feminism rightly pointed out that a woman's mind is even more important than her legs we still have televised contests of women parading around in their underwear for Donald Trump to rate their bodies? And what would Jesus say about Miss California's implants? Would he endorse the message that women ought to stuff their chests with silicon to appear as perfect male eye-candy, or would he emphatically declare that beauty is not merely skin deep?
How any of this congruent with Christian values is beyond me, but it seems that we've entered some weird Twilight Zone where opposition to gay marriage alone makes one into a Christian in good standing.
Look. I'm not here to condemn Carrie Prejean and I can of course be just as religiously inconsistent. But my point is that America has real problems and can really use an authentic spiritual voice to lead us out of the shallowness, greed, divorce, and teen sex that are plaguing our country. And so long as we make gay marriage the only issue of importance we abscond our moral responsibility to provide spiritual leadership to a starving generation. Most of all we shift our focus away from combating the misogyny that has become such a central staple of American culture.
Patti Stanger, Bravo's Millionaire Matchmaker, and I recently debated in Los Angeles in front of 1100 young people about Patti's belief that women ought to marry rich husbands. I argued that this just fuels the stereotype of women as greedy gold-diggers prepared to sell themselves as a commodity to a guy with cash. When men come to believe these stereotypes it affects their respect for women. Soon they believe that can they can neglect their wives as long as they give them credit cards. But three quarters of all divorces today are initiated by wives who are making their own money and would rather be alone than remain with a distant husband in an empty marriage. The most influential TV show over the past decade was Sex in the City where four female friends have nearly given up on men and turn to each other for intimate companionship instead. As for married women in America, approximately thirty percent are on an anti-depressant and Maureen Dowd of the New York Times scored big by publishing a book suggesting that perhaps women are better off without men.
As for the guys, well, the only ones who still want to get married are gay. While the gay men are out petitioning the Supreme Court for the right to get hitched, the straight guys are inventing brilliant excuses not to wed their girlfriends with whom they have lived for years and even have children. It's curious that Brad Pitt proclaims that he and Angeline Jolie, who admirably have six kids together, will only get married when all people, gays included, can wed. But that has not stopped him from adopting children even though in most states gays can still not adopt. Which just goes to show you that when a man wants to find reasons to stay single he becomes as bright as Einstein.
We can save marriage in America and get men to become gentlemen who treat women like ladies. But that must be accompanied by women not only demanding male respect, but respecting themselves as well.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach this week publishes his new book, "The Blessing of Enough: Becoming Materially Content and Spiritually Hungry." He is the founder of ThisWorld: The Values Network. www.shmuley.com
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Turn the page on the Bush years
Excellent. This op-ed really gets it down. Obama has (so far) consistently failed to turn the page on the Fear mindset of the Bush years. From Salon.com
* * *
In the shadow of Cheney
Obama could spring America from the dank culture of fear spread by Cheney and Bush. So what's holding him back?
By Gary Kamiya
May 28, 2009 | Last week, Dick Cheney and Barack Obama carried on a bizarre, disembodied and deeply dissatisfying debate about national security. In a major speech on May 21, Obama denounced torture, defended his plan to close Guantánamo and blasted the Bush administration's approach to fighting terrorism, saying it "failed to rely on our legal traditions and time-tested institutions [and] failed to use our values as a compass." One minute later, Cheney -- who had been blasting Obama's national security for weeks -- took to the airwaves to warn that Obama's rejection of torture and his plan to shut down the military prison at Guantánamo were "unwise in the extreme." Accusing Obama of "recklessness wrapped in righteousness," the former vice-president said Obama had made the country less safe.
For the large majority of Obama's supporters who utterly reject the Bush administration's approach to fighting terrorism, the president's speech was disillusioning. Despite his soaring rhetoric about "upholding our most cherished values," Obama proposed eviscerating those values by continuing the Bush policies of military tribunals and indefinite detention. Coming on the heels of the Senate's humiliating 90-6 vote to keep Guantánamo open and forbid transferring any of its inmates to U.S. prisons, Obama's speech was a dispiriting confirmation that the country's leadership is still locked into the same fearful "war on terror" mind-set.
The sad thing is that Obama could have chosen a different path. Yet he clung to establishment positions that his supporters have long rejected. His decisive victory in November proved that America is ready to turn the page on the entire Bush era, from its economic policies to its "war on terror." For an exhausted and disillusioned country, Obama represents hope, and embracing hope means sloughing off fear. Like Cheney, who spent much of his time hiding in an underground bunker, Americans spent the Bush years cowering in a metaphorical cave, terrified that the terrorists were coming to get them. Bush's hyper-aggressive foreign policy, his trashing of civil and legal rights and U.N. conventions, were simply the other face of a craven and debilitating fear.
The terrorist attacks on 9/11 were a dreadful trauma. But that trauma took place almost eight years ago, and a natural and salutary forgetfulness has occurred. One of the virtues of this still-green republic has always been its capacity to quickly recover from setbacks, to refuse to dwell on the past, to constantly remake itself. Of all the American virtues, elasticity is perhaps the most important. In a process as natural as the blossoming of flowers in the spring, Americans are ready to reclaim their courage. And they expect and want their young president to lead them forward.
Obama has tried to lead America out of the shadows of the Bush years. He has projected a calm optimism, a reasoned determination, that is a breath of fresh air after the puerile, bullying bravado of George W. Bush and the dark, croaking counsel of his evil courtier Cheney. And he has said inspiring things about the importance of defending our laws, rights and traditions, even in the face of terrorist threats. But because Obama has failed to directly reject the irrational boogeymen his predecessors whipped up, and because he has continued many of their policies, he has not been able to spring us from their dank culture of fear.
The Guantánamo debacle, in which Senate Democrats voted overwhelmingly to reject funds to close it, is just one painful result of Obama's unwillingness to challenge the culture of fear. The Senate was spooked by polls showing that Americans, their paranoia aroused by talk radio demagogues and Fox News hacks, were afraid that terrorists would end up in their backyards. Obama was rightfully criticized for failing to come up with a coherent plan for what to do with the Guantánamo detainees.
But that was not Obama's real problem. His real problem was his failure to forthrightly say that while terrorism remains a threat, its danger has been greatly overblown. Obama needed to tell Americans the truth, which is that no open society can ever be absolutely free from terrorist attacks, and that a society that allows its irrational fear of such attacks to cause it to jettison its laws, freedoms and most cherished traditions has already lost to the terrorists. He needed to say that while we will never forget 9/11, always honor the memory of its victims, and never let our guard down, we cannot allow one attack, no matter how horrific and spectacular, to determine the nature and future of our country. He needed to draw a line in the sand, and tell Americans that while he will do everything in his power to protect them, only fools dream of eternal, perfect safety. In short, he needed to seize the terrorism shibboleth root and branch and pull it out of the ground.
This would not have been easy. Politicians do not generally choose to ask their constituents to accept risks of any kind. Denying death may be mentally unhealthy, but it is de rigueur in politics. And even though the Republican Party is going through a meltdown so grotesque that it makes Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" look like an inspiring tale of personal growth, Democrats continue to be terrified that the right will paint them as "soft on national security."
Above all, there is the very nature of terrorism, which is, well, terrifying. Because it is random, indiscriminate, driven by hatred, and seemingly pointless, terrorism taps into primordial human fears in a way that no other form of violence does. It is a monster that inhabits our collective id. Since 9/11, the word "terrorism" has been a totem, a quasi-religious myth, a nightmarish archetype that occupies the same place in our national imagination that "hell" did for the people of the Middle Ages. "Terrorism" blurs the boundaries of political and personal fear: It represents at once a thoroughly human evil to be hated and fought against, and the impersonal, fatalistic face of death itself. Terrorism is fate with a hideous face, like the White Whale that Ahab hates and tries to kill in Melville's "Moby-Dick." (Indeed, the Bush administration's unwinnable, endless, self-defeating "war on terror" is more than a little reminiscent of Ahab's obsessive quest -- which ends, it is well to remember, with the destruction of his ship and all of its crew save the narrator Ishmael.)
Because terrorism in our national imagination is simultaneously villain and nemesis, human and inhuman, the "war" against terrorism slips into becoming a war not just against fanatical jihadis but against our own death, against the very idea of death. As we accept this, repression of reality and the infantile fantasy of perfect safety -- in other words, cowardice -- become the driving forces of our lives.
This craven position dishonors a country whose troops fought at Valley Forge and Shiloh and Belleau Wood and Guadalcanal and Hue and Fallujah. It is not worthy of the mighty nation whose diverse people came together 60 years ago to help defeat the most dangerous tyrant in the history of humankind. But it is not an easy one for a politician to oppose. Indeed, the cadaverous Cheney, who has now fully embraced his role as the horrifying shadow of our national soul, is essentially accusing Obama of leading America toward death.
Once the argument is framed in these terms, Obama cannot win. By tacitly accepting Cheney's terms -- by shamefully proposing that we detain suspected terrorists indefinitely without real trials, or by refusing to release photographs of Americans torturing people in their control -- Obama has enabled and encouraged our diffuse national cowardice. The American people will continue to cling to irrational positions, like refusing to put convicted terrorists in supermax penitentiaries from which no one has ever escaped, until Obama puts the threat of terrorism in its correct perspective, removes it from the realm of metaphysics and nightmares and returns it to earth, as the ugly but manageable tactic that it is. The only way for Obama to break out of Cheney's trap is to reject the suppositions it is based on.
Cheney's death-obsessed vision found its ultimate expression in his notorious "1 percent doctrine." As revealed in Ron Suskind's eponymous book, the doctrine held that the U.S. should treat an even 1 percent chance of a terrorist attack as if it were a certainty. This doctrine was directly responsible for America's calamitous behavior in the last eight years. It led to policies and actions -- torture, targeted assassinations, indiscriminate aerial bombing, detention without trial, denial of habeas rights -- that only enrage previously neutral people, increase the number of potential terrorists and threaten our national security.
Which is exactly what al-Qaida and their ilk want. A few fanatical jihadis hiding in caves cannot fatally damage the United States: Only the United States can fatally damage the United States. Under the fearful reign of Bush and Cheney, America went a long way toward becoming a country its own citizens would not recognize. As his May 21 speech showed, Obama clearly realizes that many of the policies pursued by his predecessors are irrational, inhumane, unjust and self-defeating. But he has not repudiated their fundamental error, their misapprehension of the actual threat posed by Islamist terrorists.
Which is why Obama's left hand has consistently undone what his right hand has done. He is by nature a difference-splitter, a position that has its virtues. But some differences cannot be split. Either we are locked in an endless, self-defeating war on terror or we are not. Either our laws, traditions and freedoms are more important than an infantile dream of perfect, eternal safety, or they are not. Either we are clear-sighted enough to realize that different kinds of enemies require different responses and that treating a handful of jihadis as if they were the second coming of Nazi Germany is foolish, or we are not. Either we live in the land of the free or we do not.
In 1933, when the nation was in the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his first inaugural address. That towering president said, "This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
FDR's words gave heart to Americans facing a crisis and a threat far worse than any posed by terrorists today. The country has a new president, and it wants a new direction. It is waiting for him to sound his trumpet.
* * *
In the shadow of Cheney
Obama could spring America from the dank culture of fear spread by Cheney and Bush. So what's holding him back?
By Gary Kamiya
May 28, 2009 | Last week, Dick Cheney and Barack Obama carried on a bizarre, disembodied and deeply dissatisfying debate about national security. In a major speech on May 21, Obama denounced torture, defended his plan to close Guantánamo and blasted the Bush administration's approach to fighting terrorism, saying it "failed to rely on our legal traditions and time-tested institutions [and] failed to use our values as a compass." One minute later, Cheney -- who had been blasting Obama's national security for weeks -- took to the airwaves to warn that Obama's rejection of torture and his plan to shut down the military prison at Guantánamo were "unwise in the extreme." Accusing Obama of "recklessness wrapped in righteousness," the former vice-president said Obama had made the country less safe.
For the large majority of Obama's supporters who utterly reject the Bush administration's approach to fighting terrorism, the president's speech was disillusioning. Despite his soaring rhetoric about "upholding our most cherished values," Obama proposed eviscerating those values by continuing the Bush policies of military tribunals and indefinite detention. Coming on the heels of the Senate's humiliating 90-6 vote to keep Guantánamo open and forbid transferring any of its inmates to U.S. prisons, Obama's speech was a dispiriting confirmation that the country's leadership is still locked into the same fearful "war on terror" mind-set.
The sad thing is that Obama could have chosen a different path. Yet he clung to establishment positions that his supporters have long rejected. His decisive victory in November proved that America is ready to turn the page on the entire Bush era, from its economic policies to its "war on terror." For an exhausted and disillusioned country, Obama represents hope, and embracing hope means sloughing off fear. Like Cheney, who spent much of his time hiding in an underground bunker, Americans spent the Bush years cowering in a metaphorical cave, terrified that the terrorists were coming to get them. Bush's hyper-aggressive foreign policy, his trashing of civil and legal rights and U.N. conventions, were simply the other face of a craven and debilitating fear.
The terrorist attacks on 9/11 were a dreadful trauma. But that trauma took place almost eight years ago, and a natural and salutary forgetfulness has occurred. One of the virtues of this still-green republic has always been its capacity to quickly recover from setbacks, to refuse to dwell on the past, to constantly remake itself. Of all the American virtues, elasticity is perhaps the most important. In a process as natural as the blossoming of flowers in the spring, Americans are ready to reclaim their courage. And they expect and want their young president to lead them forward.
Obama has tried to lead America out of the shadows of the Bush years. He has projected a calm optimism, a reasoned determination, that is a breath of fresh air after the puerile, bullying bravado of George W. Bush and the dark, croaking counsel of his evil courtier Cheney. And he has said inspiring things about the importance of defending our laws, rights and traditions, even in the face of terrorist threats. But because Obama has failed to directly reject the irrational boogeymen his predecessors whipped up, and because he has continued many of their policies, he has not been able to spring us from their dank culture of fear.
The Guantánamo debacle, in which Senate Democrats voted overwhelmingly to reject funds to close it, is just one painful result of Obama's unwillingness to challenge the culture of fear. The Senate was spooked by polls showing that Americans, their paranoia aroused by talk radio demagogues and Fox News hacks, were afraid that terrorists would end up in their backyards. Obama was rightfully criticized for failing to come up with a coherent plan for what to do with the Guantánamo detainees.
But that was not Obama's real problem. His real problem was his failure to forthrightly say that while terrorism remains a threat, its danger has been greatly overblown. Obama needed to tell Americans the truth, which is that no open society can ever be absolutely free from terrorist attacks, and that a society that allows its irrational fear of such attacks to cause it to jettison its laws, freedoms and most cherished traditions has already lost to the terrorists. He needed to say that while we will never forget 9/11, always honor the memory of its victims, and never let our guard down, we cannot allow one attack, no matter how horrific and spectacular, to determine the nature and future of our country. He needed to draw a line in the sand, and tell Americans that while he will do everything in his power to protect them, only fools dream of eternal, perfect safety. In short, he needed to seize the terrorism shibboleth root and branch and pull it out of the ground.
This would not have been easy. Politicians do not generally choose to ask their constituents to accept risks of any kind. Denying death may be mentally unhealthy, but it is de rigueur in politics. And even though the Republican Party is going through a meltdown so grotesque that it makes Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" look like an inspiring tale of personal growth, Democrats continue to be terrified that the right will paint them as "soft on national security."
Above all, there is the very nature of terrorism, which is, well, terrifying. Because it is random, indiscriminate, driven by hatred, and seemingly pointless, terrorism taps into primordial human fears in a way that no other form of violence does. It is a monster that inhabits our collective id. Since 9/11, the word "terrorism" has been a totem, a quasi-religious myth, a nightmarish archetype that occupies the same place in our national imagination that "hell" did for the people of the Middle Ages. "Terrorism" blurs the boundaries of political and personal fear: It represents at once a thoroughly human evil to be hated and fought against, and the impersonal, fatalistic face of death itself. Terrorism is fate with a hideous face, like the White Whale that Ahab hates and tries to kill in Melville's "Moby-Dick." (Indeed, the Bush administration's unwinnable, endless, self-defeating "war on terror" is more than a little reminiscent of Ahab's obsessive quest -- which ends, it is well to remember, with the destruction of his ship and all of its crew save the narrator Ishmael.)
Because terrorism in our national imagination is simultaneously villain and nemesis, human and inhuman, the "war" against terrorism slips into becoming a war not just against fanatical jihadis but against our own death, against the very idea of death. As we accept this, repression of reality and the infantile fantasy of perfect safety -- in other words, cowardice -- become the driving forces of our lives.
This craven position dishonors a country whose troops fought at Valley Forge and Shiloh and Belleau Wood and Guadalcanal and Hue and Fallujah. It is not worthy of the mighty nation whose diverse people came together 60 years ago to help defeat the most dangerous tyrant in the history of humankind. But it is not an easy one for a politician to oppose. Indeed, the cadaverous Cheney, who has now fully embraced his role as the horrifying shadow of our national soul, is essentially accusing Obama of leading America toward death.
Once the argument is framed in these terms, Obama cannot win. By tacitly accepting Cheney's terms -- by shamefully proposing that we detain suspected terrorists indefinitely without real trials, or by refusing to release photographs of Americans torturing people in their control -- Obama has enabled and encouraged our diffuse national cowardice. The American people will continue to cling to irrational positions, like refusing to put convicted terrorists in supermax penitentiaries from which no one has ever escaped, until Obama puts the threat of terrorism in its correct perspective, removes it from the realm of metaphysics and nightmares and returns it to earth, as the ugly but manageable tactic that it is. The only way for Obama to break out of Cheney's trap is to reject the suppositions it is based on.
Cheney's death-obsessed vision found its ultimate expression in his notorious "1 percent doctrine." As revealed in Ron Suskind's eponymous book, the doctrine held that the U.S. should treat an even 1 percent chance of a terrorist attack as if it were a certainty. This doctrine was directly responsible for America's calamitous behavior in the last eight years. It led to policies and actions -- torture, targeted assassinations, indiscriminate aerial bombing, detention without trial, denial of habeas rights -- that only enrage previously neutral people, increase the number of potential terrorists and threaten our national security.
Which is exactly what al-Qaida and their ilk want. A few fanatical jihadis hiding in caves cannot fatally damage the United States: Only the United States can fatally damage the United States. Under the fearful reign of Bush and Cheney, America went a long way toward becoming a country its own citizens would not recognize. As his May 21 speech showed, Obama clearly realizes that many of the policies pursued by his predecessors are irrational, inhumane, unjust and self-defeating. But he has not repudiated their fundamental error, their misapprehension of the actual threat posed by Islamist terrorists.
Which is why Obama's left hand has consistently undone what his right hand has done. He is by nature a difference-splitter, a position that has its virtues. But some differences cannot be split. Either we are locked in an endless, self-defeating war on terror or we are not. Either our laws, traditions and freedoms are more important than an infantile dream of perfect, eternal safety, or they are not. Either we are clear-sighted enough to realize that different kinds of enemies require different responses and that treating a handful of jihadis as if they were the second coming of Nazi Germany is foolish, or we are not. Either we live in the land of the free or we do not.
In 1933, when the nation was in the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his first inaugural address. That towering president said, "This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
FDR's words gave heart to Americans facing a crisis and a threat far worse than any posed by terrorists today. The country has a new president, and it wants a new direction. It is waiting for him to sound his trumpet.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Sotomayor for SCOTUS
Obama has made his first nomination to the Supreme Court, an hispanic woman named Sonia Sotomayor. There's been LOTS of chatter about it, of course. This piece by Joan Walsh on Salon.com is my fav so far.
* * *
Buchanan on Sotomayor: "Not that intelligent"
Let's take a moment to acknowledge the history made when President Obama chose 2nd Circuit Judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court. The Latina standout from the Bronx, beloved daughter of a widow who worked two jobs to put her children through the best schools, is a woman who also happened to graduate Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Princeton; who ran the Yale Law Journal; who worked as a prosecutor and a civil litigator before being appointed to the federal bench. She has more judicial experience than any of her other eight would-be colleagues did when they joined the court.
In short: She's got an American dream story, she makes women and Latinos proud, and she's also supremely qualified. It doesn't get any better than that for Democrats.
And it can only get worse for Republicans if they're going to hit Sotomayor the way MSNBC political analyst Pat Buchanan did debating me on "Hardball" today. (Actually, Mike Huckabee may have sunk lower than Buchanan. Earth to Mike: Calling Sotomayor "Maria" is not going to win you Latino votes in 2012.)
On "Hardball" (video below) Buchanan tossed me some weak softballs about Sotomayor. It was the same handful of charges that make up the key, easily refuted GOP talking points: that she claimed in a speech that appellate judges make policy (she did not); that she voted to discriminate against white men in the New Haven firefighter case (she merely upheld a lower court's ruling); that she said her gender and race would influence her court rulings, improperly, according to Buchanan (I'll deal with that one later). Amazingly, Buchanan's final shot was the widely derided and debunked Jeffrey Rosen piece in the New Republic that let anonymous sources trash Sotomayor, mostly to call her "domineering and dumb," in the words of Rebecca Traister. "She is not that intelligent," Buchanan insisted, a ridiculous assertion given her educational and professional accomplishments.
Unbelievably, Buchanan compared Sotomayor to Harriet Miers, President Bush's personal attorney who was, in fact, not at all qualified to be a Supreme Court justice. Ever notice it's the Republicans whose "affirmative action" picks aren't qualified (as in Miers and Clarence Thomas)? Watch it all here:
Where do I begin? First of all, if Republicans are going to be tin-eared enough to attack Sotomayor on her intelligence and qualifications, they are going to wind up an even tinier minority party than they are now. Acting as though Obama had to lower his standards to appoint the first Hispanic justice is offensive to more than just Hispanics; it exposes a profound prejudice and lack of knowledge about the vast talent pool in our country. Certainly Sotomayor will face tough questions on her judicial philosophy from liberals and conservatives, and she should, but to insinuate she's merely an affirmative action pick is wrong and repellent.
The irony is that Sotomayor is more centrist than some of Obama's other possible appointees. She disappointed abortion rights advocates by failing to strike down the Bush administration's global gag rule, which prohibited organizations that received U.S. family planning funds from counseling abortion. She's been criticized for upholding a school's decision to discipline a student for differing with school officials on her private Live Journal account. The American Bar Association termed her a "moderate," not a liberal. Glenn Greenwald, while praising the choice of Sotomayor, has already noted that Diane Wood might have been a more reassuring pick to those concerned about Obama's assertion of executive powers; Sotomayor hasn't left a record in such cases.
I happen to think that at her confirmation hearings, she might want to explain and elaborate on one much-criticized sound bite. Taking issue with the famous notion frequently attributed to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg -- that a wise old man and a wise old woman would reach the same conclusion when deciding cases -- she said instead: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." Even I might quibble with the use of the term "better conclusion"; certainly Justice Harry Blackmun's work on abortion rights is as important to women as the many decisions of Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. We'll see what Sotomayor has to say about that quote, and her philosophy about diversity, during her confirmation hearings, I'm sure. But it would be silly to deny the possibility that a court made up of individuals with diverse backgrounds may well draw different conclusions than one made up of nine white men.
I find the reliance on old racial and gender stereotypes, when it comes to debating the Sotomayor pick, extremely depressing. Buchanan also said she's known as a "bully" on the bench, and I never got to ask him and Chris Matthews: Why is it that strong women are so often called bullies and ballbreakers, while strong, opinionated men are often called, simply, Justice Scalia. But this time, I don't think it will work. If Pat Buchanan and other right-wing pundits want to savage the pride of the Bronx's Cardinal Spellman High School, I'm sure Democrats will say "bring it on."
-- Joan Walsh
* * *
Buchanan on Sotomayor: "Not that intelligent"
Let's take a moment to acknowledge the history made when President Obama chose 2nd Circuit Judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court. The Latina standout from the Bronx, beloved daughter of a widow who worked two jobs to put her children through the best schools, is a woman who also happened to graduate Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Princeton; who ran the Yale Law Journal; who worked as a prosecutor and a civil litigator before being appointed to the federal bench. She has more judicial experience than any of her other eight would-be colleagues did when they joined the court.
In short: She's got an American dream story, she makes women and Latinos proud, and she's also supremely qualified. It doesn't get any better than that for Democrats.
And it can only get worse for Republicans if they're going to hit Sotomayor the way MSNBC political analyst Pat Buchanan did debating me on "Hardball" today. (Actually, Mike Huckabee may have sunk lower than Buchanan. Earth to Mike: Calling Sotomayor "Maria" is not going to win you Latino votes in 2012.)
On "Hardball" (video below) Buchanan tossed me some weak softballs about Sotomayor. It was the same handful of charges that make up the key, easily refuted GOP talking points: that she claimed in a speech that appellate judges make policy (she did not); that she voted to discriminate against white men in the New Haven firefighter case (she merely upheld a lower court's ruling); that she said her gender and race would influence her court rulings, improperly, according to Buchanan (I'll deal with that one later). Amazingly, Buchanan's final shot was the widely derided and debunked Jeffrey Rosen piece in the New Republic that let anonymous sources trash Sotomayor, mostly to call her "domineering and dumb," in the words of Rebecca Traister. "She is not that intelligent," Buchanan insisted, a ridiculous assertion given her educational and professional accomplishments.
Unbelievably, Buchanan compared Sotomayor to Harriet Miers, President Bush's personal attorney who was, in fact, not at all qualified to be a Supreme Court justice. Ever notice it's the Republicans whose "affirmative action" picks aren't qualified (as in Miers and Clarence Thomas)? Watch it all here:
Where do I begin? First of all, if Republicans are going to be tin-eared enough to attack Sotomayor on her intelligence and qualifications, they are going to wind up an even tinier minority party than they are now. Acting as though Obama had to lower his standards to appoint the first Hispanic justice is offensive to more than just Hispanics; it exposes a profound prejudice and lack of knowledge about the vast talent pool in our country. Certainly Sotomayor will face tough questions on her judicial philosophy from liberals and conservatives, and she should, but to insinuate she's merely an affirmative action pick is wrong and repellent.
The irony is that Sotomayor is more centrist than some of Obama's other possible appointees. She disappointed abortion rights advocates by failing to strike down the Bush administration's global gag rule, which prohibited organizations that received U.S. family planning funds from counseling abortion. She's been criticized for upholding a school's decision to discipline a student for differing with school officials on her private Live Journal account. The American Bar Association termed her a "moderate," not a liberal. Glenn Greenwald, while praising the choice of Sotomayor, has already noted that Diane Wood might have been a more reassuring pick to those concerned about Obama's assertion of executive powers; Sotomayor hasn't left a record in such cases.
I happen to think that at her confirmation hearings, she might want to explain and elaborate on one much-criticized sound bite. Taking issue with the famous notion frequently attributed to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg -- that a wise old man and a wise old woman would reach the same conclusion when deciding cases -- she said instead: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." Even I might quibble with the use of the term "better conclusion"; certainly Justice Harry Blackmun's work on abortion rights is as important to women as the many decisions of Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. We'll see what Sotomayor has to say about that quote, and her philosophy about diversity, during her confirmation hearings, I'm sure. But it would be silly to deny the possibility that a court made up of individuals with diverse backgrounds may well draw different conclusions than one made up of nine white men.
I find the reliance on old racial and gender stereotypes, when it comes to debating the Sotomayor pick, extremely depressing. Buchanan also said she's known as a "bully" on the bench, and I never got to ask him and Chris Matthews: Why is it that strong women are so often called bullies and ballbreakers, while strong, opinionated men are often called, simply, Justice Scalia. But this time, I don't think it will work. If Pat Buchanan and other right-wing pundits want to savage the pride of the Bronx's Cardinal Spellman High School, I'm sure Democrats will say "bring it on."
-- Joan Walsh
Friday, May 22, 2009
The Repubs love Pelosi (not)
Lots of noise has been going on lately ever since Speaker Pelosi (D, San Francisco) made the charge that the CIA lied to her and to Congress about the fact that they were torturing. This firestorm is a typicall 'look over here' plot by the Republicans to dsitract from the fact that it was they who ordered and approved the torture. It pisses me off to watch them try to change the debate, but in a the letters of response to a Salon.com article, I found this hilarious and oh-so-true summation:
"A quick summary
Reports: CIA flagrantly broke the Geneva convention, tortured 100+ detainees to death.
Republicans: Look over there! A Democrat said something bad about the CIA!
Media: Ooh, shiny!"
This is something I've been pissed about since, well, forever, and have posted many blogs on. It's frustrating to see this furvor over what Pelosi knew and when she knew it and yet absolutely no indignation in the MSM over the fact that WE TORTURED PEOPLE--to death!!! And why? So that the Bush administration could make a case for war in Iraq.
Pelosi's responses to questions these days seem to be 'let's investigate' but so far no investigations are happening. It's all still theatre.
"A quick summary
Reports: CIA flagrantly broke the Geneva convention, tortured 100+ detainees to death.
Republicans: Look over there! A Democrat said something bad about the CIA!
Media: Ooh, shiny!"
This is something I've been pissed about since, well, forever, and have posted many blogs on. It's frustrating to see this furvor over what Pelosi knew and when she knew it and yet absolutely no indignation in the MSM over the fact that WE TORTURED PEOPLE--to death!!! And why? So that the Bush administration could make a case for war in Iraq.
Pelosi's responses to questions these days seem to be 'let's investigate' but so far no investigations are happening. It's all still theatre.
More Cheney refutations
Found this on Yahoo's news...
* * *
Cheney's speech contained omissions, misstatements
By Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel, McClatchy Newspapers Jonathan S. Landay And Warren P. Strobel, Mcclatchy Newspapers – Thu May 21, 7:10 pm ET
WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Dick Cheney's defense Thursday of the Bush administration's policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements.
In his address to the American Enterprise Institute , a conservative policy organization in Washington , Cheney said that the techniques the Bush administration approved, including waterboarding — simulated drowning that's considered a form of torture — forced nakedness and sleep deprivation, were "legal" and produced information that "prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people."
He quoted the Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair , as saying that the information gave U.S. officials a "deeper understanding of the al Qaida organization that was attacking this country."
In a statement April 21 , however, Blair said the information "was valuable in some instances" but that "there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is that these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security."
A top-secret 2004 CIA inspector general's investigation found no conclusive proof that information gained from aggressive interrogations helped thwart any "specific imminent attacks," according to one of four top-secret Bush-era memos that the Justice Department released last month.
FBI Director Mueller Robert Muller told Vanity Fair magazine in December that he didn't think that the techniques disrupted any attacks.
— Cheney said that President Barack Obama's decision to release the four top-secret Bush administration memos on the interrogation techniques was "flatly contrary" to U.S. national security, and would help al Qaida train terrorists in how to resist U.S. interrogations.
However, Blair, who oversees all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, said in his statement that he recommended the release of the memos, "strongly supported" Obama's decision to prohibit using the controversial methods and that "we do not need these techniques to keep America safe."
— Cheney said that the Bush administration "moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks."
The former vice president didn't point out that Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenant, Ayman al Zawahri , remain at large nearly eight years after 9-11 and that the Bush administration began diverting U.S. forces, intelligence assets, time and money to planning an invasion of Iraq before it finished the war in Afghanistan against al Qaida and the Taliban .
There are now 49,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan fighting to contain the bloodiest surge in Taliban violence since the 2001 U.S.-led intervention, and Islamic extremists also have launched their most concerted attack yet on neighboring, nuclear-armed Pakistan .
— Cheney denied that there was any connection between the Bush administration's interrogation policies and the abuse of detainee at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, which he blamed on "a few sadistic guards . . . in violation of American law, military regulations and simple decency."
However, a bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report in December traced the abuses at Abu Ghraib to the approval of the techniques by senior Bush administration officials, including former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld .
"The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own," said the report issued by Sens. Carl Levin , D- Mich. , and John McCain , R- Ariz. "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality and authorized their use against detainees."
— Cheney said that "only detainees of the highest intelligence value" were subjected to the harsh interrogation techniques, and he cited Khalid Sheikh Mohammad , the alleged mastermind of the 9-11 attacks.
He didn't mention Abu Zubaydah, the first senior al Qaida operative to be captured after 9-11. Former FBI special agent Ali Soufan told a Senate subcommittee last week that his interrogation of Zubaydah using traditional methods elicited crucial information, including Mohammed's alleged role in 9-11.
The decision to use the harsh interrogation methods "was one of the worst and most harmful decisions made in our efforts against al Qaida ," Soufan said. Former State Department official Philip Zelikow , who in 2005 was then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's point man in an internal fight to overhaul the Bush administration's detention policies, joined Soufan in his criticism.
— Cheney said that "the key to any strategy is accurate intelligence," but the Bush administration ignored warnings from experts in the CIA , the Defense Intelligence Agency , the State Department , the Department of Energy and other agencies, and used false or exaggerated intelligence supplied by Iraqi exile groups and others to help make its case for the 2003 invasion.
Cheney made no mention of al Qaida operative Ali Mohamed al Fakheri , who's known as Ibn Sheikh al Libi , whom the Bush administration secretly turned over to Egypt for interrogation in January 2002 . While allegedly being tortured by Egyptian authorities, Libi provided false information about Iraq's links with al Qaida , which the Bush administration used despite doubts expressed by the DIA.
A state-run Libyan newspaper said Libi committed suicide recently in a Libyan jail.
— Cheney accused Obama of "the selective release" of documents on Bush administration detainee policies, charging that Obama withheld records that Cheney claimed prove that information gained from the harsh interrogation methods prevented terrorist attacks.
"I've formally asked that (the information) be declassified so the American people can see the intelligence we obtained," Cheney said. "Last week, that request was formally rejected."
However, the decision to withhold the documents was announced by the CIA , which said that it was obliged to do so by a 2003 executive order issued by former President George W. Bush prohibiting the release of materials that are the subject of lawsuits.
— Cheney said that only "ruthless enemies of this country" were detained by U.S. operatives overseas and taken to secret U.S. prisons.
A 2008 McClatchy investigation, however, found that the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees captured in 2001 and 2002 in Afghanistan and Pakistan were innocent citizens or low-level fighters of little intelligence value who were turned over to American officials for money or because of personal or political rivalries.
In addition, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Oct. 5, 2005 , that the Bush administration had admitted to her that it had mistakenly abducted a German citizen, Khaled Masri , from Macedonia in January 2004 .
Masri reportedly was flown to a secret prison in Afghanistan , where he allegedly was abused while being interrogated. He was released in May 2004 and dumped on a remote road in Albania .
In January 2007 , the German government issued arrest warrants for 13 alleged CIA operatives on charges of kidnapping Masri.
— Cheney slammed Obama's decision to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and criticized his effort to persuade other countries to accept some of the detainees.
The effort to shut down the facility, however, began during Bush's second term, promoted by Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates .
"One of the things that would help a lot is, in the discussions that we have with the states of which they (detainees) are nationals, if we could get some of those countries to take them back," Rice said in a Dec. 12, 2007 , interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. "So we need help in closing Guantanamo ."
— Cheney said that, in assessing the security environment after 9-11, the Bush team had to take into account "dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists."
Cheney didn't explicitly repeat the contention he made repeatedly in office: that Saddam cooperated with al Qaida , a linkage that U.S. intelligence officials and numerous official inquiries have rebutted repeatedly.
The late Iraqi dictator's association with terrorists vacillated and was mostly aimed at quashing opponents and critics at home and abroad.
The last State Department report on international terrorism to be released before 9-11 said that Saddam's regime "has not attempted an anti-Western terrorist attack since its failed plot to assassinate former President ( George H.W.) Bush in 1993 in Kuwait ."
A Pentagon study released last year, based on a review of 600,000 Iraqi documents captured after the U.S.-led invasion, concluded that while Saddam supported militant Palestinian groups — the late terrorist Abu Nidal found refuge in Baghdad , at least until Saddam had him killed — the Iraqi security services had no "direct operational link" with al Qaida .
* * *
Cheney's speech contained omissions, misstatements
By Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel, McClatchy Newspapers Jonathan S. Landay And Warren P. Strobel, Mcclatchy Newspapers – Thu May 21, 7:10 pm ET
WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Dick Cheney's defense Thursday of the Bush administration's policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements.
In his address to the American Enterprise Institute , a conservative policy organization in Washington , Cheney said that the techniques the Bush administration approved, including waterboarding — simulated drowning that's considered a form of torture — forced nakedness and sleep deprivation, were "legal" and produced information that "prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people."
He quoted the Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair , as saying that the information gave U.S. officials a "deeper understanding of the al Qaida organization that was attacking this country."
In a statement April 21 , however, Blair said the information "was valuable in some instances" but that "there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is that these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security."
A top-secret 2004 CIA inspector general's investigation found no conclusive proof that information gained from aggressive interrogations helped thwart any "specific imminent attacks," according to one of four top-secret Bush-era memos that the Justice Department released last month.
FBI Director Mueller Robert Muller told Vanity Fair magazine in December that he didn't think that the techniques disrupted any attacks.
— Cheney said that President Barack Obama's decision to release the four top-secret Bush administration memos on the interrogation techniques was "flatly contrary" to U.S. national security, and would help al Qaida train terrorists in how to resist U.S. interrogations.
However, Blair, who oversees all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, said in his statement that he recommended the release of the memos, "strongly supported" Obama's decision to prohibit using the controversial methods and that "we do not need these techniques to keep America safe."
— Cheney said that the Bush administration "moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks."
The former vice president didn't point out that Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenant, Ayman al Zawahri , remain at large nearly eight years after 9-11 and that the Bush administration began diverting U.S. forces, intelligence assets, time and money to planning an invasion of Iraq before it finished the war in Afghanistan against al Qaida and the Taliban .
There are now 49,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan fighting to contain the bloodiest surge in Taliban violence since the 2001 U.S.-led intervention, and Islamic extremists also have launched their most concerted attack yet on neighboring, nuclear-armed Pakistan .
— Cheney denied that there was any connection between the Bush administration's interrogation policies and the abuse of detainee at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, which he blamed on "a few sadistic guards . . . in violation of American law, military regulations and simple decency."
However, a bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report in December traced the abuses at Abu Ghraib to the approval of the techniques by senior Bush administration officials, including former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld .
"The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own," said the report issued by Sens. Carl Levin , D- Mich. , and John McCain , R- Ariz. "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality and authorized their use against detainees."
— Cheney said that "only detainees of the highest intelligence value" were subjected to the harsh interrogation techniques, and he cited Khalid Sheikh Mohammad , the alleged mastermind of the 9-11 attacks.
He didn't mention Abu Zubaydah, the first senior al Qaida operative to be captured after 9-11. Former FBI special agent Ali Soufan told a Senate subcommittee last week that his interrogation of Zubaydah using traditional methods elicited crucial information, including Mohammed's alleged role in 9-11.
The decision to use the harsh interrogation methods "was one of the worst and most harmful decisions made in our efforts against al Qaida ," Soufan said. Former State Department official Philip Zelikow , who in 2005 was then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's point man in an internal fight to overhaul the Bush administration's detention policies, joined Soufan in his criticism.
— Cheney said that "the key to any strategy is accurate intelligence," but the Bush administration ignored warnings from experts in the CIA , the Defense Intelligence Agency , the State Department , the Department of Energy and other agencies, and used false or exaggerated intelligence supplied by Iraqi exile groups and others to help make its case for the 2003 invasion.
Cheney made no mention of al Qaida operative Ali Mohamed al Fakheri , who's known as Ibn Sheikh al Libi , whom the Bush administration secretly turned over to Egypt for interrogation in January 2002 . While allegedly being tortured by Egyptian authorities, Libi provided false information about Iraq's links with al Qaida , which the Bush administration used despite doubts expressed by the DIA.
A state-run Libyan newspaper said Libi committed suicide recently in a Libyan jail.
— Cheney accused Obama of "the selective release" of documents on Bush administration detainee policies, charging that Obama withheld records that Cheney claimed prove that information gained from the harsh interrogation methods prevented terrorist attacks.
"I've formally asked that (the information) be declassified so the American people can see the intelligence we obtained," Cheney said. "Last week, that request was formally rejected."
However, the decision to withhold the documents was announced by the CIA , which said that it was obliged to do so by a 2003 executive order issued by former President George W. Bush prohibiting the release of materials that are the subject of lawsuits.
— Cheney said that only "ruthless enemies of this country" were detained by U.S. operatives overseas and taken to secret U.S. prisons.
A 2008 McClatchy investigation, however, found that the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees captured in 2001 and 2002 in Afghanistan and Pakistan were innocent citizens or low-level fighters of little intelligence value who were turned over to American officials for money or because of personal or political rivalries.
In addition, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Oct. 5, 2005 , that the Bush administration had admitted to her that it had mistakenly abducted a German citizen, Khaled Masri , from Macedonia in January 2004 .
Masri reportedly was flown to a secret prison in Afghanistan , where he allegedly was abused while being interrogated. He was released in May 2004 and dumped on a remote road in Albania .
In January 2007 , the German government issued arrest warrants for 13 alleged CIA operatives on charges of kidnapping Masri.
— Cheney slammed Obama's decision to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and criticized his effort to persuade other countries to accept some of the detainees.
The effort to shut down the facility, however, began during Bush's second term, promoted by Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates .
"One of the things that would help a lot is, in the discussions that we have with the states of which they (detainees) are nationals, if we could get some of those countries to take them back," Rice said in a Dec. 12, 2007 , interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. "So we need help in closing Guantanamo ."
— Cheney said that, in assessing the security environment after 9-11, the Bush team had to take into account "dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists."
Cheney didn't explicitly repeat the contention he made repeatedly in office: that Saddam cooperated with al Qaida , a linkage that U.S. intelligence officials and numerous official inquiries have rebutted repeatedly.
The late Iraqi dictator's association with terrorists vacillated and was mostly aimed at quashing opponents and critics at home and abroad.
The last State Department report on international terrorism to be released before 9-11 said that Saddam's regime "has not attempted an anti-Western terrorist attack since its failed plot to assassinate former President ( George H.W.) Bush in 1993 in Kuwait ."
A Pentagon study released last year, based on a review of 600,000 Iraqi documents captured after the U.S.-led invasion, concluded that while Saddam supported militant Palestinian groups — the late terrorist Abu Nidal found refuge in Baghdad , at least until Saddam had him killed — the Iraqi security services had no "direct operational link" with al Qaida .
A 'Countdown' moment for the blog
Normally I'm not big on Keith Olberman, he's a bit too RARR!!! for my tastes. But he does hold a special place in my heart for being one of the few MSM folks to call for Bush's head on a platter.
Obama gave a big speech this week about the same old BS -- keeping America safe, war on terror, etc., etc. former VP Cheney hit back with a speech of his own. Here is Olberman's commentary. Pretty good stuff...
* * *
Countdown: Special Comment on Dick Cheney's Speech--In the Name of God, Go!
By Keith Olbermann
Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment about Mr. Cheney's speech.
Neurotic...
Paranoid...
False to fact and false to reason...
Forever self-rationalizing...
His inner rage at his own impotence and failure dripping from every word...
And as irrational, as separated from the real world, as dishonest, as insane, as any terrorist...
The former Vice President has today humiliated himself beyond redemption.
The delusional claims he has made this day could be proved by documentation and first-hand testimony to be the literal truth, and still he himself would be wrong, because the America he sought to impose upon the world and upon its own citizens, the dark hateful place of Dick Cheney's own soul, the place he to this hour defends and to this day prefers, is a repudiation of all that our ancestors, all that for which our brave troops of 200 years ago and two minutes ago, have sacrificed and fought.
I do have to congratulate you, Sir. No man living or dead could have passed the buck more often than you did in 35 minutes this morning.
It's not your fault we water-boarded people, you said.
It isn't torture, you said, even though it is based on 111 years of American military prosecutions.
It was in the Constitution that you could do it, even if our laws told you, you could not.It was in the language of the 2001 military authorization you force-fed the Congress that you could do it, even if our international treaties told you, you could not.
It produced invaluable information, you said, even though the first-hand witnesses, the interrogators of these beasts, said the information preceded the torture and ended when it began.
It was authorized, you said, by careful legal opinion, even though the legal opinions were dictated by you and your cronies, and, oh by the way, the torture began before the legal opinions were even written.
It was authorized, you said, and you imply even if it really wasn't, it was done to "only detainees of the highest intelligence value."
It was more necessary, you said, because of the revelation of another program by the real villains, the New York Times, even though that revelation was possible because the program was detailed on the front page of the website of a defense department sub-contractor.
It was all the fault of your predecessors, you said, who tried to treat terror as a "law enforcement problem," before you came to office and rode to the rescue... after you totally ignored terrorism for the first 20 percent of your first term and the worst attack on this nation in its history unfolded on **your** watch."
9/11 caused everyone to take a **serious second look at threats that had been gathering for awhile," you said today, "and enemies whose plans were getting bolder and more sophisticated."
Gee, thanks for being motivated, by the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans, to go so far as to "take a serious second look." And thank you, Sir, for admitting, obviously inadvertently, that you did not take a serious **first** look in the seven months and 23 days between your inauguration and 9/11.
For that attack, Sir, you are culpable, morally, ethically. At best you were guilty of malfeasance and eternally-lasting stupidity. At worst, Sir, in the deaths of 9/11, you are negligent.
The circular logic, and the self-righteous sophistry, falls from a copy of Mr. Cheney's speech like bugs from a book on a moldy shelf. He still believes in "dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists." He still assumes everyone we captured is guilty without charge or trial, but that to prosecute law-breaking by government officials is "to have an incoming administration criminalize the policy decisions of its predecessors."
And most sleazy of all, while calling the CIA torturers "honorable," he insists the grunts at Abu Ghraib were "a few sadistic prison guards (who) abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulations, and simple decency" even though -- and maybe he doesn't know we know this -- even though there is documentary proof that those guards were acting on orders originating in the office of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.
It is, in short, madness. Madness, Sir. Mr. Cheney, your speech was almost entirely about you...There are only five or six other people even mentioned, and only two quoted at any length.And why would you have quoted, as you did, the man who said this" I know that this program saved lives. I know we've disrupted plots. I know this program alone is worth more than the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us."
As you know, Sir, you are quoting former CIA Director George Tenet.That would be the George Tenet who told Congress, on February 11th, 2003, quote:"Iraq is harboring senior members of a terrorist network led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a close associate of al Qaeda."
Mr. Tenet then went into elaborate detail about the Iraq/Al-Qaeda connection.None of it was true.This is your source.As he was your boss's source."
George, how confident are you?" President Bush asked Tenet about Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction, just before the Iraq war, according to Bob Woodward's book "Plan Of Attack."
"Don't worry," Tenet answered. "It's a slam-dunk."That is your independent authority on how well torture worked.Next time you see him, Mr. Cheney, you might as well ask Mr. Tenet if he thinks he is Napoleon.
I don't want to know who you think you are:"...those are the basic facts on enhanced interrogations," you concluded. "And to call this a program of torture is to libel the dedicated professionals who saved American lives, and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims."
You saved no one, Sir.
If the classified documents you seek released really did detail plots other than those manufactured by drowning men in order to get it to stop, or if they truly did note plans beyond the laughable ones you and President Bush already revealed -- hijackers without passports targeting a building whose name Mr. Bush couldn't remember, clowns who thought they could destroy airports by dropping matches in fuel pipelines 30 miles away, men who planned to attack a military base dressed as Pizza delivery boys forgetting that every man there was armed, and today: the four would-be Synagogue bombers, one of whom turns out to keep bottles of urine in his apartment, and to be on schizophrenia medicine--
If those documents contained anything of value... you would have leaked them already! As you leaked those revenge fantasies of the Library Tower and the J-F-K Bomber, and the Fort Dix Six. "When they (terrorists) see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, or whether foreign terrorists have constitutional rights, they don't stand back in awe of our legal system and wonder whether they had misjudged us all along."
Instead the terrorists see just what they were hoping for - our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity."
The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness of blind rage replacing essential cold logic.
The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness of judgment suspended, in favor of self-fulfilling prophecy.The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness of moral force supplanted by violence and revenge fantasies.The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness... of Dick Cheney.
And yet, still, ceaselessly, indefatigably, you moralize and lie to us. "I might add," someone said today, "that people who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about 'values.'"
Very apt.The quote is from your speech...Your speech, which was at essence, about your fantasy that you and Mr. Bush were not negligent...
About your pig-headed certainty first that these attacks were impossible, then that they were a good excuse for a war you had already planned in Iraq, and finally that they were to be imminently repeated and only you knew whence the next threat would next come.
You saved no one, Mr. Cheney.
All you did... was help kill Americans.
You were negligent before 9/11.
Your response to your complicity by omission on 9/11, was panic, and shame, and insanity, and lying this country into a war that did nothing but kill 4,299 more of us.We will take no further instruction from you, Sir.
Let me again quote Oliver Cromwell to you, Mr. Cheney:
You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!
Obama gave a big speech this week about the same old BS -- keeping America safe, war on terror, etc., etc. former VP Cheney hit back with a speech of his own. Here is Olberman's commentary. Pretty good stuff...
* * *
Countdown: Special Comment on Dick Cheney's Speech--In the Name of God, Go!
By Keith Olbermann
Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment about Mr. Cheney's speech.
Neurotic...
Paranoid...
False to fact and false to reason...
Forever self-rationalizing...
His inner rage at his own impotence and failure dripping from every word...
And as irrational, as separated from the real world, as dishonest, as insane, as any terrorist...
The former Vice President has today humiliated himself beyond redemption.
The delusional claims he has made this day could be proved by documentation and first-hand testimony to be the literal truth, and still he himself would be wrong, because the America he sought to impose upon the world and upon its own citizens, the dark hateful place of Dick Cheney's own soul, the place he to this hour defends and to this day prefers, is a repudiation of all that our ancestors, all that for which our brave troops of 200 years ago and two minutes ago, have sacrificed and fought.
I do have to congratulate you, Sir. No man living or dead could have passed the buck more often than you did in 35 minutes this morning.
It's not your fault we water-boarded people, you said.
It isn't torture, you said, even though it is based on 111 years of American military prosecutions.
It was in the Constitution that you could do it, even if our laws told you, you could not.It was in the language of the 2001 military authorization you force-fed the Congress that you could do it, even if our international treaties told you, you could not.
It produced invaluable information, you said, even though the first-hand witnesses, the interrogators of these beasts, said the information preceded the torture and ended when it began.
It was authorized, you said, by careful legal opinion, even though the legal opinions were dictated by you and your cronies, and, oh by the way, the torture began before the legal opinions were even written.
It was authorized, you said, and you imply even if it really wasn't, it was done to "only detainees of the highest intelligence value."
It was more necessary, you said, because of the revelation of another program by the real villains, the New York Times, even though that revelation was possible because the program was detailed on the front page of the website of a defense department sub-contractor.
It was all the fault of your predecessors, you said, who tried to treat terror as a "law enforcement problem," before you came to office and rode to the rescue... after you totally ignored terrorism for the first 20 percent of your first term and the worst attack on this nation in its history unfolded on **your** watch."
9/11 caused everyone to take a **serious second look at threats that had been gathering for awhile," you said today, "and enemies whose plans were getting bolder and more sophisticated."
Gee, thanks for being motivated, by the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans, to go so far as to "take a serious second look." And thank you, Sir, for admitting, obviously inadvertently, that you did not take a serious **first** look in the seven months and 23 days between your inauguration and 9/11.
For that attack, Sir, you are culpable, morally, ethically. At best you were guilty of malfeasance and eternally-lasting stupidity. At worst, Sir, in the deaths of 9/11, you are negligent.
The circular logic, and the self-righteous sophistry, falls from a copy of Mr. Cheney's speech like bugs from a book on a moldy shelf. He still believes in "dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists." He still assumes everyone we captured is guilty without charge or trial, but that to prosecute law-breaking by government officials is "to have an incoming administration criminalize the policy decisions of its predecessors."
And most sleazy of all, while calling the CIA torturers "honorable," he insists the grunts at Abu Ghraib were "a few sadistic prison guards (who) abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulations, and simple decency" even though -- and maybe he doesn't know we know this -- even though there is documentary proof that those guards were acting on orders originating in the office of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.
It is, in short, madness. Madness, Sir. Mr. Cheney, your speech was almost entirely about you...There are only five or six other people even mentioned, and only two quoted at any length.And why would you have quoted, as you did, the man who said this" I know that this program saved lives. I know we've disrupted plots. I know this program alone is worth more than the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us."
As you know, Sir, you are quoting former CIA Director George Tenet.That would be the George Tenet who told Congress, on February 11th, 2003, quote:"Iraq is harboring senior members of a terrorist network led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a close associate of al Qaeda."
Mr. Tenet then went into elaborate detail about the Iraq/Al-Qaeda connection.None of it was true.This is your source.As he was your boss's source."
George, how confident are you?" President Bush asked Tenet about Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction, just before the Iraq war, according to Bob Woodward's book "Plan Of Attack."
"Don't worry," Tenet answered. "It's a slam-dunk."That is your independent authority on how well torture worked.Next time you see him, Mr. Cheney, you might as well ask Mr. Tenet if he thinks he is Napoleon.
I don't want to know who you think you are:"...those are the basic facts on enhanced interrogations," you concluded. "And to call this a program of torture is to libel the dedicated professionals who saved American lives, and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims."
You saved no one, Sir.
If the classified documents you seek released really did detail plots other than those manufactured by drowning men in order to get it to stop, or if they truly did note plans beyond the laughable ones you and President Bush already revealed -- hijackers without passports targeting a building whose name Mr. Bush couldn't remember, clowns who thought they could destroy airports by dropping matches in fuel pipelines 30 miles away, men who planned to attack a military base dressed as Pizza delivery boys forgetting that every man there was armed, and today: the four would-be Synagogue bombers, one of whom turns out to keep bottles of urine in his apartment, and to be on schizophrenia medicine--
If those documents contained anything of value... you would have leaked them already! As you leaked those revenge fantasies of the Library Tower and the J-F-K Bomber, and the Fort Dix Six. "When they (terrorists) see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, or whether foreign terrorists have constitutional rights, they don't stand back in awe of our legal system and wonder whether they had misjudged us all along."
Instead the terrorists see just what they were hoping for - our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity."
The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness of blind rage replacing essential cold logic.
The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness of judgment suspended, in favor of self-fulfilling prophecy.The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness of moral force supplanted by violence and revenge fantasies.The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness... of Dick Cheney.
And yet, still, ceaselessly, indefatigably, you moralize and lie to us. "I might add," someone said today, "that people who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about 'values.'"
Very apt.The quote is from your speech...Your speech, which was at essence, about your fantasy that you and Mr. Bush were not negligent...
About your pig-headed certainty first that these attacks were impossible, then that they were a good excuse for a war you had already planned in Iraq, and finally that they were to be imminently repeated and only you knew whence the next threat would next come.
You saved no one, Mr. Cheney.
All you did... was help kill Americans.
You were negligent before 9/11.
Your response to your complicity by omission on 9/11, was panic, and shame, and insanity, and lying this country into a war that did nothing but kill 4,299 more of us.We will take no further instruction from you, Sir.
Let me again quote Oliver Cromwell to you, Mr. Cheney:
You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Republican Insider deconstructions the party
I was very impressed with this article. Dude really nails it. (Emphasis is mine) From the Huffington Post...
* * *
Republican Disaster -- The Evangelical/Zionist Anatomy of Meltdown
by Frank Schaeffer
I was a Republican insider. For instance, the late Jack Kemp was a friend who I often advised on "connecting" with the Religious Right, until I left the Republican Party and the evangelical subculture and slammed the door behind me. During my last call with Jack he hung up on me. (I was backing McCain in 2000 and he was for W.) I want you to understand this context of my "insider's" comments here because they are going to strike you as shocking. So please let me recap some personal history.
My parents and I were the guests of the Reagans, Fords and Bush's in the White House and/or in other private meetings. Jack Kemp was so good a friend that he once interrupted a speech at a fund-raising banquet in Washington that I'd walked into late and walked from the podium to the back of the hall shook my hand introduced me to the assembled Republican leaders, then walked back to the podium and continued his speech. He did this because -- in those days -- I was an important link to the (then) powerful evangelical movement.
I was often in Jack's house with Jack and his wife Joanne who, at that time, was conducting a weekly Bible study group with other congressional wives called the "Schaeffer group," based on my father's books. In those days -- the 1970s and early 80s -- as both a staunch Republican and pro-life leader and the son of the famous evangelist, I was right in the middle of the Republican machine.
Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom -- in the 1970s my family was an integral part of bringing the Republican Party under the sway of the emerging Religious Right, particularly because of our support of the antiabortion movement. It was my father who talked Jerry Falwell into "taking a stand" on the "moral issues" of the day, which then morphed into the Moral Majority. Back in the 70s and early 80s Dad and I both appeared on the 700 Club many times, I preached from Jerry Falwell's pulpit and was the keynote speaker at the Religious Broadcasters and Christian Booksellers Association annual events several years running.
There came a day in 1985 (my dad had died in 1984) that I began to take another look at my commitment to the both the far right of Republican Party and the Religious Right. I came to realize that I was in bed with a group of people who were profoundly anti-American. They were professional haters. They wrapped themselves in the flag and "loved America," but it was an America in their imaginations only and cast in their image: white, middle-class, straight, born-again, homophobic and tinged with racism, not to mention misogyny.
The America most Americans lived in; diverse, open, tolerant and multi-ethnic was the America that the right would hardly even acknowledge. They "loved" an America that didn't exist, and hated the real country we live in. (I go into this in detail in two books; Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All -- or Almost All -- of It Back and also in my forthcoming Patience With God: Faith For People Who Don't Like Religion -- Or Atheism where I lay out an alternative to some very bad choices between the extremes.)
So what went wrong with the Republican Party? Believe me, it's all about religion!
Two religions (in the broadest sense of the term) have destroyed the Republican Party: evangelical Christianity and Christian/Jewish Zionism. Evangelical Christianity created the Religious Right which forever linked the Republican Party to the antiabortion, anti-sex education, anti-evolution and anti-gay crusades. And both Christian and Jewish Zionism linked the Republican Party to what became the neoconservative movement with its roots in such publications as Commentary magazine and their shrill Israel-can-do-no-wrong anti-Arab agenda. (I knew the late editor of Commentary Norman Podhoretz quite well, and we met several times to build alliances between evangelicals and the far American Zionist far right. When it came to Arabs, I believe he was a real racist.)
I would not call Zionism per se a religion, but I'm talking about secular goals pursued with religious fervor. I would call Zionism, American-style a politicized version of a religion. I also argue that the neo-con side got traction when religious Jews became Zionists and when religious Christians (evangelicals) hopped aboard to hasten the "Rapture." And I'd like to point out that American Zionists ally themselves with the Israeli hardliners, but that opinion in Israel is much more diverse and often tolerant than that, as is opinion among Jewish Americans, who do not by and large accept the AIPAC point of view uncritically.
The result of the Republican Party being taken over by these religious groups was that we got George W. Bush. His idea of governance was a hands-off, all-government-is-bad-government neglect, combined with an unnecessary war in Iraq inspired by a form of Zionism that sees all Arabs as a threat, Islam as evil, America as an exceptional place duty-bound "by God" to keep the world safe for evangelical Christian "values," on the one hand, and militant Christian and Jewish Zionism on the other. It is a poisonous blend. (It's not just Zionism, or a form of Zionism, that makes Americans hate Arabs. Anti-Arab, anti-Muslim images in America go way back and some right wing evangelicals and Jews merely tap into that racism.)
Evangelical/Christian Zionism has been bad for the State of Israel too. It has helped put that country into a permanent defensive crouch in which there is now perhaps no way out from destruction that comes to all people who see everyone else (from the EU to the UN to the Arabs and Iran) as a threat. The building of the illegal West Bank settlements and turning the Gaza Strip into what amounts to a concentration camp, combined with demographic reality will doom the State of Israel if a two state peace agreement is not reached and reached fast. But Christian Zionists have done all they can to undermine peace in the name of fulfilling "biblical prophecy" as have the far right of the Jewish Zionists, people like my old friend Norman Podhoretz.
With "friends" like the Christian Zionists -- exemplified by the Reverend John Hagee and many others who "support" Israel while eagerly waiting for the "return of Christ" and the destruction of all "unbelieving Jews" -- Israel needs no enemies. Given that the hard-line American Christian Zionists encouraged the Republican Party to become the party of permanent war to keep the State of Israel "safe" they have actually helped set the stage for its destruction. And therefore the Republicans also opened the door to our national economic ruin as well. The two are linked; eternal war and ruin, because our permanent wars (thinly veiled excuses to "keep Israel safe") are never paid for by increased taxes or a draft. (Disclosure: my son served in the Marines and was deployed.)
But attitudes are changing: The results of a new Zogby poll are interesting. They suggest that Obama would have strong support for a US diplomatic effort to forge an Israel-Palestine deal, even if it means tough pressure on Israel. According to the poll, when asked if the United States should "get tough" with Israel in order to back up its call for an end to settlement construction in the occupied West Bank, fully 50 percent of Americans said yes, with just 19 percent saying "do nothing," and 32 percent not sure.
Asked whether the interests of Israel and the US are identical, only 28 percent of Obama voters agreed, while 59 percent disagreed. Among McCain voters, it was the reverse: 78 percent of McCain voters said US and Israel interests were identical (!) and 15 percent said they are not.
So what did the Republicans become? They are the party of unnecessary wars both actual and cultural and the party of the rich -- those who never serve in the military, just put up flags to "support the troops." The actual war in Iraq was (as everyone knew with a wink and a nod, but few dared say) really about our commitment to Christian and Jewish Zionism as it was "understood" by the born-again fool Bush. The culture war is also an unnecessary and unmitigated war that pitted the "real America" (in other words white mostly uneducated, lower-middle-class evangelical/Catholic working Americans) against everyone else.
If you're not a gay-hating, "pro-life," born-again evangelical and/or an ardent Israel-can-do-no-wrong-all-Arabs-are-evil-Jesus-is-coming-back-soon evangelical on the one hand or a neoconservative I-never-met-a-war-I-didn't-like "intellectual" on the other hand, these days you're probably not a Republican. Throw in a college degree or the habit of getting information from any source other than right wing blogs, radio "personalities" like Rush Limbaugh or "authors" like Ann Coulter and you won't be voting Republican again in this lifetime.
What's caused the Republican Party's real meltdown? It's that it has ceased to exist as a political party and is instead a dwindling weirdly eclectic collection of uneducated rubes led by a few fearful angry far right thinkers who talk in media sound bites geared to the types of people who watch Fox News. Jack Kemp was not part of this horrible little "party." He was a smart compassionate man. There used to be more Republicans like Kemp. Today the Republican core constituency is the national village idiot.
With the election of President Obama America has turned the page on the village idiots. We now have a president who is a religious believer himself, who supports Israel (as I do, by the way), but who well understands -- and articulates beautifully as he just did at Notre Dame talking about abortion -- the fact that authentic faith should be a unifying force instead of a divisive one. That's bad news for religious nuts, be they Christians or Jews. That's good news for America and the world, and maybe for our overstretched military too.
The choice for America has always been between inclusive pluralism and exclusion. The kind of religion and Evangelical/Zionist/neoconservative cabal used to take over the interests of the Republican Party is just too small for this big diverse, tolerant and open country of ours. So the Republicans have a choice: become an American political party again serving American interests or continue to serve the narrowly defined religious interests of two angry and fearful Jewish/Evangelical minorities who are themselves bastardized offshoots of their Christian and Jewish traditions.
Frank Schaeffer is a writer. He is author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back and also author of the forthcoming Patience With God: Faith For People Who Don't Like Religion (Or Atheism).
* * *
Republican Disaster -- The Evangelical/Zionist Anatomy of Meltdown
by Frank Schaeffer
I was a Republican insider. For instance, the late Jack Kemp was a friend who I often advised on "connecting" with the Religious Right, until I left the Republican Party and the evangelical subculture and slammed the door behind me. During my last call with Jack he hung up on me. (I was backing McCain in 2000 and he was for W.) I want you to understand this context of my "insider's" comments here because they are going to strike you as shocking. So please let me recap some personal history.
My parents and I were the guests of the Reagans, Fords and Bush's in the White House and/or in other private meetings. Jack Kemp was so good a friend that he once interrupted a speech at a fund-raising banquet in Washington that I'd walked into late and walked from the podium to the back of the hall shook my hand introduced me to the assembled Republican leaders, then walked back to the podium and continued his speech. He did this because -- in those days -- I was an important link to the (then) powerful evangelical movement.
I was often in Jack's house with Jack and his wife Joanne who, at that time, was conducting a weekly Bible study group with other congressional wives called the "Schaeffer group," based on my father's books. In those days -- the 1970s and early 80s -- as both a staunch Republican and pro-life leader and the son of the famous evangelist, I was right in the middle of the Republican machine.
Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom -- in the 1970s my family was an integral part of bringing the Republican Party under the sway of the emerging Religious Right, particularly because of our support of the antiabortion movement. It was my father who talked Jerry Falwell into "taking a stand" on the "moral issues" of the day, which then morphed into the Moral Majority. Back in the 70s and early 80s Dad and I both appeared on the 700 Club many times, I preached from Jerry Falwell's pulpit and was the keynote speaker at the Religious Broadcasters and Christian Booksellers Association annual events several years running.
There came a day in 1985 (my dad had died in 1984) that I began to take another look at my commitment to the both the far right of Republican Party and the Religious Right. I came to realize that I was in bed with a group of people who were profoundly anti-American. They were professional haters. They wrapped themselves in the flag and "loved America," but it was an America in their imaginations only and cast in their image: white, middle-class, straight, born-again, homophobic and tinged with racism, not to mention misogyny.
The America most Americans lived in; diverse, open, tolerant and multi-ethnic was the America that the right would hardly even acknowledge. They "loved" an America that didn't exist, and hated the real country we live in. (I go into this in detail in two books; Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All -- or Almost All -- of It Back and also in my forthcoming Patience With God: Faith For People Who Don't Like Religion -- Or Atheism where I lay out an alternative to some very bad choices between the extremes.)
So what went wrong with the Republican Party? Believe me, it's all about religion!
Two religions (in the broadest sense of the term) have destroyed the Republican Party: evangelical Christianity and Christian/Jewish Zionism. Evangelical Christianity created the Religious Right which forever linked the Republican Party to the antiabortion, anti-sex education, anti-evolution and anti-gay crusades. And both Christian and Jewish Zionism linked the Republican Party to what became the neoconservative movement with its roots in such publications as Commentary magazine and their shrill Israel-can-do-no-wrong anti-Arab agenda. (I knew the late editor of Commentary Norman Podhoretz quite well, and we met several times to build alliances between evangelicals and the far American Zionist far right. When it came to Arabs, I believe he was a real racist.)
I would not call Zionism per se a religion, but I'm talking about secular goals pursued with religious fervor. I would call Zionism, American-style a politicized version of a religion. I also argue that the neo-con side got traction when religious Jews became Zionists and when religious Christians (evangelicals) hopped aboard to hasten the "Rapture." And I'd like to point out that American Zionists ally themselves with the Israeli hardliners, but that opinion in Israel is much more diverse and often tolerant than that, as is opinion among Jewish Americans, who do not by and large accept the AIPAC point of view uncritically.
The result of the Republican Party being taken over by these religious groups was that we got George W. Bush. His idea of governance was a hands-off, all-government-is-bad-government neglect, combined with an unnecessary war in Iraq inspired by a form of Zionism that sees all Arabs as a threat, Islam as evil, America as an exceptional place duty-bound "by God" to keep the world safe for evangelical Christian "values," on the one hand, and militant Christian and Jewish Zionism on the other. It is a poisonous blend. (It's not just Zionism, or a form of Zionism, that makes Americans hate Arabs. Anti-Arab, anti-Muslim images in America go way back and some right wing evangelicals and Jews merely tap into that racism.)
Evangelical/Christian Zionism has been bad for the State of Israel too. It has helped put that country into a permanent defensive crouch in which there is now perhaps no way out from destruction that comes to all people who see everyone else (from the EU to the UN to the Arabs and Iran) as a threat. The building of the illegal West Bank settlements and turning the Gaza Strip into what amounts to a concentration camp, combined with demographic reality will doom the State of Israel if a two state peace agreement is not reached and reached fast. But Christian Zionists have done all they can to undermine peace in the name of fulfilling "biblical prophecy" as have the far right of the Jewish Zionists, people like my old friend Norman Podhoretz.
With "friends" like the Christian Zionists -- exemplified by the Reverend John Hagee and many others who "support" Israel while eagerly waiting for the "return of Christ" and the destruction of all "unbelieving Jews" -- Israel needs no enemies. Given that the hard-line American Christian Zionists encouraged the Republican Party to become the party of permanent war to keep the State of Israel "safe" they have actually helped set the stage for its destruction. And therefore the Republicans also opened the door to our national economic ruin as well. The two are linked; eternal war and ruin, because our permanent wars (thinly veiled excuses to "keep Israel safe") are never paid for by increased taxes or a draft. (Disclosure: my son served in the Marines and was deployed.)
But attitudes are changing: The results of a new Zogby poll are interesting. They suggest that Obama would have strong support for a US diplomatic effort to forge an Israel-Palestine deal, even if it means tough pressure on Israel. According to the poll, when asked if the United States should "get tough" with Israel in order to back up its call for an end to settlement construction in the occupied West Bank, fully 50 percent of Americans said yes, with just 19 percent saying "do nothing," and 32 percent not sure.
Asked whether the interests of Israel and the US are identical, only 28 percent of Obama voters agreed, while 59 percent disagreed. Among McCain voters, it was the reverse: 78 percent of McCain voters said US and Israel interests were identical (!) and 15 percent said they are not.
So what did the Republicans become? They are the party of unnecessary wars both actual and cultural and the party of the rich -- those who never serve in the military, just put up flags to "support the troops." The actual war in Iraq was (as everyone knew with a wink and a nod, but few dared say) really about our commitment to Christian and Jewish Zionism as it was "understood" by the born-again fool Bush. The culture war is also an unnecessary and unmitigated war that pitted the "real America" (in other words white mostly uneducated, lower-middle-class evangelical/Catholic working Americans) against everyone else.
If you're not a gay-hating, "pro-life," born-again evangelical and/or an ardent Israel-can-do-no-wrong-all-Arabs-are-evil-Jesus-is-coming-back-soon evangelical on the one hand or a neoconservative I-never-met-a-war-I-didn't-like "intellectual" on the other hand, these days you're probably not a Republican. Throw in a college degree or the habit of getting information from any source other than right wing blogs, radio "personalities" like Rush Limbaugh or "authors" like Ann Coulter and you won't be voting Republican again in this lifetime.
What's caused the Republican Party's real meltdown? It's that it has ceased to exist as a political party and is instead a dwindling weirdly eclectic collection of uneducated rubes led by a few fearful angry far right thinkers who talk in media sound bites geared to the types of people who watch Fox News. Jack Kemp was not part of this horrible little "party." He was a smart compassionate man. There used to be more Republicans like Kemp. Today the Republican core constituency is the national village idiot.
With the election of President Obama America has turned the page on the village idiots. We now have a president who is a religious believer himself, who supports Israel (as I do, by the way), but who well understands -- and articulates beautifully as he just did at Notre Dame talking about abortion -- the fact that authentic faith should be a unifying force instead of a divisive one. That's bad news for religious nuts, be they Christians or Jews. That's good news for America and the world, and maybe for our overstretched military too.
The choice for America has always been between inclusive pluralism and exclusion. The kind of religion and Evangelical/Zionist/neoconservative cabal used to take over the interests of the Republican Party is just too small for this big diverse, tolerant and open country of ours. So the Republicans have a choice: become an American political party again serving American interests or continue to serve the narrowly defined religious interests of two angry and fearful Jewish/Evangelical minorities who are themselves bastardized offshoots of their Christian and Jewish traditions.
Frank Schaeffer is a writer. He is author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back and also author of the forthcoming Patience With God: Faith For People Who Don't Like Religion (Or Atheism).
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