Adeimantus

The Smart Thing and the Right Thing Are the Same Thing

2006-04-04T23:45:00.000-05:00

It will be sad indeed if, in angry pursuit of immigration policies that would be both vengeful and Quixotic, certain Republicans succeed in driving Latino voters into the laps of ANSWER Coalition, La Raza, and other such leftist ilk.

In coming weeks, Republicans in Congress must choose either a comprehensive immigration reform package including a guest-worker program or a narrowly focused border-security bill. The former would improve homeland security, help our economy and build greater Republican majorities. The latter, conversely, would ignore fundamental problems, hurt our economy and risk the party's majority status.

It is perhaps too much to expect that every one my fellow Republicans would resist less noble impulses toward our brown-skinned "guests." Yet is it too much to hope that some of the angry Republicans might cool down enough to perceive the glaring political reality?

Reality: George W. Bush led the GOP to substantial gains among Hispanic voters in both 2000 and 2004. Without those gains, he could not have won either election. But the current immigration debate puts those gains back into play. If the Latino vote starts to go the way of the black vote, the GOP will never again in our lifetimes be a majority party.

Immigration Policy Helpful Hint Number 1: Getting pissed off at reality doesn't help.

Immigration Policy Helpful Hint Number 2: Supporting pseudo-conservative politicians who pander to your pissed-offness is even worse, unless you take masochistic pleasure in the thought of liberals running the country for the next 50 years.

On immigration, as in most things, the right thing and the smart thing are the same thing. But many Republicans seem to want to persist in trying the same old stupid wrong things, the same stupid wrong things that have never worked and never will work.

But now someone in the GOP has a new stupid wrong idea: Build a big ol' brick wall 700 miles long.

Build that wall, . . . and we Republicans will spend the next fifty years bashing our heads against it.

The Privileged Few

2006-04-03T01:49:00.000-05:00

From: Bathus
To: David Frum
Sent: Monday, April 3, 2006
Subject: Immigration and Protectionism

Dear Mr. Frum,

You write:

When we debate free trade, it is the free-traders who speak for the public interest and the protectionists who champion narrow selfish constituencies: because protectionism imposes costs on almost everybody in society while concentrating its benefits on a privileged few.

But when we debate immigration, it is the restrictionists who speak for the public interest. The best economic research on the subject strongly indicates that high levels of unskilled immigration impose costs on most people - and concentrate their benefits on a privileged few. (New York mayor Michael Bloomberg spoke for that lucky group in a wonderful Marie Antoinette moment yesterday on WABC radio. Speaking to radio host John Gambling, Bloomberg said, "You and I are beneficiaries of these jobs. You and I both play golf; who takes care of the greens and the fairways in your golf course?" Lower wages for thee equals lower green fees for me!)

If we apply the logic you use to zing Bloomberg about his green fees, then we should also prohibit importation of golf balls because cheap access to those pock-marked pseudo-ovums benefits only the idle "privileged few" who golf (and who are generally from the upper layers of the economic strata).

If you want to know who are the "privileged few" benefiting from immigrant Latino labor (both legal and illegal), go to your local nursing home, assisted living facility, or hospital, and see who's working in the kitchen, wheeling the meal cart, emptying the trash, doing the laundry, and cleaning the commodes.

People rightly scream about the public cost of illegals who show up at hospital emergency rooms for routine health care, but they don't seem to notice all the immigrants who work (for low wages) emptying grandpa's bedpan and wiping granny's fanny in those very same hospitals. The low wages (and hard work!) of unskilled immigrant workers in the health care industry make it possible for granny to live out her days in a rather nicer old folks' home than many of us could otherwise afford to provide. As is so often the case, when it comes to the economics of illegal immigration, immigration opponents focus exclusively on the small bits of the picture that support their view, as to which your riff on Bloomberg is a typical example.

The "privileged few," as you call them, are anyone whose aging parent's health care is assisted by immigrant labor, anyone who works for a company with offices cleaned by immigrant labor, anyone who drives on a highway laid down by immigrant labor, and anyone who lives in a house sheetrocked and roofed by immigrant labor. Simply put, we are all the "privileged few," but most especially privileged are the thousands of recent new home buyers, and the economy whose growth has been driven and sustained by the recent housing boom that would not have been nearly so robust were it not for the lower construction costs made possible by the low cost of unskilled and semi-skilled labor of immigrant Latinos.

The truth is, because immigrant labor contributes to the provision not just of greener greens, but so many of the basic and essential goods and services we all consume, the benefits and the burdens of immigrant labor are spread pretty evenly throughout our economy, especially when one considers that states like mine (Texas) that bear greater burdens also enjoy greater benefits. (We can argue later whether the benefits outweigh the burdens. I think they do, although that is a largely academic argument, given the economic forces that impel the migration. As I've written elsewhere, we might as well make it illegal for hurricanes to enter the Gulf of Mexico.)

One last thing: In exchange for your Bloomberg zinger, let me zing you one in return. The immigration debate sure gets interesting when otherwise sensible conservatives like you start sounding Gorish anti-rich, populist themes about the "privileged few." Next you'll be warning us of "powerful forces."

Nonetheless, I remain . . .

Your loyal advocate,
Bathus

Jackson Now, Wilson Maybe Later

2006-03-25T01:10:00.000-06:00

Although I don't quite agree with his conclusions, I would rate Rich Lowry's recent NRO piece, The "To Hell with Them" Hawks (subscription required, but an edited version is available here), as the most insightful thing I've read on the current positions and movements of conservative attitudes about the Global War on Terror. (Or should I now say the Global War on Islamism?)

For all the reasons Lowry recounts, more and more conservatives now wish to abandon Bush's attempt to blend Jacksonian and Wilsonian foreign policies (policies manifested respectively in the theories of preemption and nation-building). As Lowry explains, THWT Hawks

are comfortable using force abroad but have little patience for a deep entanglement with the Muslim world, which they consider unredeemable or at least not worth the strenuous effort of trying to redeem. To put their departure from Mr. Bush in terms associated with foreign-policy analyst Walter Russell Mead, they want to detach Mr. Bush's Jacksonianism (the hardheaded, somewhat bloody-minded nationalism) from his Wilsonianism (the crusading democratic idealism).

But among conservatives I speak with, what it's come down to is not really a question of striking the right balance of idealism and hardheadedness.

What it's come down to is a threshold question of trust. Can we trust Muslim peoples not to turn our humanitarian inclinations against us?

Conservatives, and the American people collectively, are beginning to conclude that Muslim peoples cannot be trusted, that our every attempt to assist and accommodate them they will eventually interpret as either overweening malevolence or contemptible weakness, claiming revenge for the former or advantage from the latter. That, in a nutshell, is why the Dubai Port Deal could never go through. The American people don't trust Dubai or any Muslim nation. It's as simple as that.

Confirming that distrust, Afghanistan's official prosecution of Abdul Rahman for the crime of converting from Islam to Christianity is only the latest (to my mind the most dispiriting) incident draining the last dribbles of hope from the Wilsonian ambition. As I wrote in my last post, America will not long spend its treasure and spill the blood of its youth to build nations that would kill Christians for becoming Christian. But that is exactly what seems to have been happening so far: As repayment for the young lives lost and the treasure spent to lift Afghanistan out of a brutal religious tyranny, the Afghan government threatens to kill a Christian for nothing other than becoming Christian.

How can we ever trust such people?

So whether THWT Hawks are right or wrong, their numbers are growing. Those numbers easily will be supplemented by what Lowry might call THWT Doves, i.e., the majority of loyal Democrats who will hardly object (and under a Democrat president, will positively chirp) if frequent and substantial use of American force to check noxious regimes almost exclusively involves only bombing and cruise missiles.

Lowry seems to worry most that Bush Wilsonianism might not survive among conservatives to the end this administration. But even if the nation-building project does survive through Bush's term, unless things turn around fast--unless the American people suddenly begin to have a reason to believe Muslims can soon be trusted to govern themselves sanely--it is hard to imagine a new president of either party carrying on the Wilsonian theme.

What has long been easy to imagine is a tough-talking President Hillary Clinton implementing a wildly popular, coldly bloody-minded, and aggressively preemptive Jacksonian policy--a policy that would consume a heretofore inconceivable number of smart bombs and cruise missiles. But once the bombs and missiles have done their work, our first Madame President will dispatch no troops quixotically to rearrange the burning rubble. So beyond Lowry's concern, it's not so much a question of Bush's Jacksonianism being "detached" from his Wilsonianism. It's the reality of American popular opinion rejecting Wilsonianism in any post-Bush leader. At which point aggressive Jacksonianism emerges as the only viable alternative.

Lowry asserts THWT Hawks are as "naïve and unrealistic as Bush at his dreamiest." Yet, as to "the contention that Islam is a religion of peace," Lowry advises that "even if this seems a polite fiction, it is an important one."

But as that consoling fiction begins to appear more dangerous than polite, I find myself turning to a Jacksonian frame of mind. One recalls Machiavelli's advice that one must be able to change one's nature to fit the circumstances. One begins to think that what's needed at the moment--and for a good while to come--is a stronger application of Jackson, after which we could try another round of Wilsonian tutoring. It seems that before the Muslim peoples will desire to reform themselves, they must first experience the crisis of an experienced realization that Islamism does not bring Muslims victory, or even much in the way of a satisfying revenge, but brings Muslims only unbearable suffering.

If that is true, then our noblest efforts to ease the transition of Muslim peoples to democracy and liberalism will be counter-productive until an actual and much prolonged experience of the horrible destruction Islamism invites upon Muslims convinces Muslims peoples to purge themselves of stubbornly ingrained theofascist tendencies. Apparently Afghanistan's Taliban adventure, perhaps because it was self-inflicted, was not an adequate lesson.

Jackson now. Wilson maybe later.

If Afghanistan Executes Abdul Rahman

2006-03-23T22:00:00.000-06:00

One hopes some wise soul has mentioned to George Bush that if Afghanistan executes Abdul Rahman for the crime of converting from Islam to Christianity, it's all over.

If Afghanistan executes Rahman, you can start bringing the boys home.

If Afghanistan executes Rahman, "We the People of the United States," who are just about damn well fed up with Muslims already, will in November begin to instruct our leaders that we wish to wash our hands of Afghanistan and Iraq and the whole effing lot of them, and ultimately that we would prefer to deal with the followers of the religion of peace somewhat differently: at longer range with heavy bombers and cruise missiles and at shorter range by imprisoning and/or deporting any Arab or Muslim--citizen or not--whose devotion to America permits the slightest doubt.

It's not that one would want things to go that way, but if Afghanistan executes Rahman, that's how things will end up.

This is one of those moments that matters.

A few choice quotes from the story linked above. From cleric Abdul Raoulf who, so the AP tells us, is "considered a moderate":

Rejecting Islam is insulting God. We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die. Cut off his head! We will call on the people to pull him into pieces so there's nothing left.

And from Mirhossain Nasri, whom the AP story identifies as "the top cleric at Hossainia Mosque, one of the largest Shiite places of worship in Kabul":

If [Rahman] is allowed to [seek asylum] in the West, then others will claim to be Christian so they can too. We must set an example. He must be hanged. We are a small country and we welcome the help the outside world is giving us. But please don't interfere in this issue. We are Muslims and these are our beliefs. This is much more important to us than all the aid the world has given us.

On that we can agree. To us here in America too there's hardly anything that could prove more important than Afghanistan killing a Christian for converting from Islam.

If Afghanistan executes Abdul Rahman for the crime of converting from Islam to Christianity, America's collective sentiment will settle into something like this:

Okay, you 7th century Islamic zealots, we see we made a very big mistake. You've convinced us you can't learn how to govern yourselves in a sane way any time soon. There's nothing we can do to help you right now. So we're getting out. It's all yours to make as big a mess of as you want.

Bag your women and treat them like cattle. Raise your children in slavish ignorance. Degenerate your society back to Mohammad's Year Zero. Behead all your heretics and install bin Laden as your final messiah. That's your business, and we'll leave you to it.

Sell us your oil or drink it for tea. We don't give a damn, because we can manage without it if we have to (and if we can't somehow manage without it, we'll just take what we need).

But at the first threatening whisper we hear from your direction, what happened to Dresden in late winter and early spring of 1945 will seem like a pillow fight.

It's not just Abdul Rahman's innocent life at stake here, though that is enough.

America cannot spend its treasure and spill the blood of its youth for regimes that kill Christians for becoming Christian. I hope you understand that, George Bush. Because if you don't understand that, it's all over.

Unamerican! Or Maybe Not?

2006-02-11T01:03:00.000-06:00

In this era of official eavesdropping, I thought you might especially enjoy eavesdropping on a conversation about eavesdropping.

The conversation transpired among me and my dearest online pals in our private (or so we thought) Yahoo Group (which we have unpretentiously named "thesmartcafe"). As is usual, our online chatter in this thread ranged through more than one subject, but if you think about it, you'll see that the whole thing really does form a single piece about what it means for something or someone to be "American" or "Unamerican."

Our repartee was incited by smartcafe member Bill's post, bringing to our attention the following story:

Yahoo accused in jailing of 2nd China Internet user
Feb 9, 2:05 AM (ET)
By Lindsay Beck

BEIJING (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc. provided evidence to Chinese authorities that led to the imprisonment of an Internet writer, lawyers and activists said on Thursday, the second such case involving the U.S. Internet giant.

The latest storm over Western Internet companies in China comes just weeks after Web search giant Google Inc. came under fire for saying it would block politically sensitive terms on its new China site, bowing to conditions set by Beijing.

Writer and veteran activist Liu Xiaobo said Yahoo had co-operated with Chinese police in a case that led to the 2003 arrest of Li Zhi, who was charged with subverting state power and sentenced to eight years in prison after trying to join the dissident China Democracy Party.

Yahoo gave public security agents details of Li's registration as a Yahoo user, Liu said in an article posted on U.S.-based Chinese-language news portal Boxun, citing a defense statement from Li's lawyers.

A spokeswoman for Yahoo said the company was looking into the matter.

Bill's take on the story is short and to the point:

Unamerican!

Dan is reliably witty and topical:

I guess they will come up with a cartoon filter next.....

But did Bill happen to notice that Yahoo is the provider that hosts our internet group? In my response, as in my wont, no matter how I start out, I wind up aiming for something philosophical:

Should we consider moving this group to another provider? But who? Google is in bed with the Chicoms, and so is Microsoft. As is everyone else, so far as I can tell.

Proof that the almighty greenback trumps just about everything--which is usually a good thing in the long run, because capitalism is the most efficient way to generate wealth, so the desire for wealth eventually transforms tyrannies into commercial republics, or so the theory goes. We even have a handy euphemism for making money from doing business with murdering tyrants, which those of us on the right side of the political fence made good use of to describe economic dealings with South Africa back in the apartheid days: "constructive engagement." Clinton later rehabilitated the euphemism to justify dealing with China.

It's so hard to be pure in this modern world.

Southerndeb chimes in:

You know, I was thinking the same thing. It sure pisses me off.

Does anyone know of another [provider] that offers these services?

I've been working late every night, so on the way home I've listened to the financial show on NPR at six. They did a week-long series on the new Chinese economy. You know what was the most surprising thing I learned? There is no religion. None. So when people get more money than they need, become rich and richer, they have absolutely NO feeling of responsibility for those less fortunate, do not donate to charity, or even THINK about anything except themselves. The host of the show interviewed one very rich woman and she seemed absolutely stunned that he would ask her to take care of the poor.

In reply to Southerndeb's query about moving our group to a more ethical provider, tongue-in-cheek Tom suggests:

Al Jazeera.

Hey, at least they'd be honest about it.

That's a good one, Tom. Glad to see the chemo hasn't affected your wit. But I'm wondering, Southerndeb, what are you doing listening to NPR?!?! And what kind of conservative would ever suggest that the rich have any responsibilities for the poor? If you weren't the founder and moderator of this group, I'd have you exiled to the DailyKos! Seriously though, Southerndeb's insinuation that charitable feeling originates from religious instruction is priceless wisdom, wisdom that even the most religious liberal simply can't allow himself to contemplate, much less comprehend. That's exactly the sort of well-grounded, almost innate, wisdom that makes Southerndeb such a fine conservative--and sets her apart from bleeding heart liberals and selfish pseudo-conservative libertarians.

Then Jim weighs in with a geo-historical political economic analysis. He worries that Lenin was right, that we Western capitalists would sell the commies the rope to hang us with:

It doesn't matter, Deb. They own us. All of corporate America panders to them and their best lobbyists in this country are members of Congress. They've already defeated us in an economic war. Sun Tzu would be proud. So would Lenin. Historians will call Deng Xiaoping the most consequential statesman of the last quarter of the 20th Century. They'll be right.

Deb, infected by Jim's noble pessimism, quickly agrees:

You're right, of course. I was talking to a friend the other night discussing the kind of world in which our grandchildren will grow up. It dawned on me that it will be Chinese against the Muslims world-wide, and here at home it will be an Hispanic majority. USA as a world power will eventually be history.

Jim responds and elaborates with more detail:

The Chinese are using the Muslims against us.

It was lots of help from Beijing that made it possible for Pakistan to go nuclear. Within the borders of China there's a huge Muslim nation in the northwest, Xinjiang Province. The people are called Uighurs (wee-gurs), Sunni Muslims related to the Turks, the people who opened and ran the old Silk Road for centuries. The Chinese have been oppressing and ethnic cleansing the hell out of them for decades. Some of them have gone radical and have thrown in with Bin Laden. Our government decided shortly after 9/11/01 that meant all Uighur nationalists must be terrorists so we declared China our ally in the "War On Terror."

It was a battle of wits, and our side was unarmed.

Dan adds his piece:

That is why the poorer, rural areas of China are rioting. The hinterlands are a powder keg, but in a country with government controlled media, that story goes largely untold....

But I, the eternal optimist, am recalling that the last news we heard about Lenin, his perpetual lease in the Kremlin had been revoked. Yeah, we sold the Ruskies the rope, the wheat, and lots of technology, too. (Better to sell them our technology than to have them steal it for free!) But in the end, no matter how much rope we sold them, the Soviets ended up hanging only themselves.

Well, all that talk about the Chinese and the Muslims is highly interesting, but as soon as anyone alludes (with even the barest hint of derision) to my south-of-the-border blood cousins, that's a fight I'm going to jump right in the middle of. The way I see it, in a pinch our good hard-working Pope-loving Hispanic (soon-to-be) majority will be able to kick the asses of any number of godless Chinese oligarchs and suicide-bombing Muslims. So I post one of my pompous semi-philosophical diatribes:

Nah, we'll outlast them all [the Muslims and the Chinese], because we'll corrupt the hell out of them all.

Rot their guts with American soft drinks and addle their brains with our TV reruns. American popular culture is an almost deadly toxin to everyone who's not an American. That's exactly why the Muslims hate us: because they know their culture can't resist the seductions of ours, but lack the social constitution that would permit their cultures to absorb the worst products of American popular culture without being poisoned in the process. The only way they can survive our cultural imperialism is to become almost identical to us. The convulsions in the Muslim world are the last spasms of a dying culture.

The Chinese society, as presently constructed, cannot survive without massive change. There's no way to efficiently tyrannize a billion and a half people. Notwithstanding Yahoo's collaboration in official oppression, the expansion of technology on the whole makes tyranny harder, not easier, to sustain. If you want to find people who understand freedom, go to China. (Which reminds me of a quip attributed to the last pope: "The last communist will be an American nun in Boston.")

As for the emergence of an Hispanic majority, that doesn't bother me in the least, so long as they preserve the "good ol' American" values.

American is not a skin color or an ethnicity or a cuisine.

American is an idea.

All it takes to be a "real American" is to sign on to that idea.

So I don't care whether the inheritors and preservers of that idea are brown or yellow or white or black or red. I would go so far as to say that you'll find a greater percentage of "real Americans" (people who dedicate their lives to the American idea) among Hispanic immigrants than among 10th generation white skinned folks. The white ones think they deserve something just because their great-great-grandpa was lucky enough to be born here.

They think God created America as a birthright for white people. So all they do is piss and moan about how the tan ones are over-running "their" country.

Meanwhile, the tan ones understand the American dream, and they believe in it all the way. They understand that they have to work hard for what they get, and they do work hard for what they get. The white folks piss and moan about medicare and the size of their social security checks. Most white folks have forgotten what hard work really is. They only think they work hard. But they haven't the faintest idea what a hard life is. They have forgotten what it means not to have their cell phones, their cable TV, their dishwashers.

Nothing lasts forever, but America, the idea that is America, has got a long run to go. Whether that idea will be carried on by white, brown or tan, doesn't matter. But if I had to bet, I'd bet on the tan ones.

Now I have to confess that what I wrote above was in large part calculated to dig a rhetorical elbow into the metaphorical ribs of my dear online pal, Bill, a resident of Arizona who, to put it mildly, views immigration from Mexico and places further south rather differently than I do.

Sure enough, I do get a slight rise out of Bill. But he responds with grace, dignity, good humor, and a recitation of 10 generations of his family tree (which, until he corrupted it, looked about as WASPish as you can get):

1) Obadiah S____y b. about 1615, England d. August 25, 1657, Stanford CT. Arrived in America in 1630's. Is in records of being in Stamford 1635.

2)Obadiah S____y b. 1647 Stamford, CT d. Fairfield, CT July 25, 1680.

3) Obadiah S____y b. 1670 Stamford Ct d. Stamford CT September 04, 1745.

4) John S____y b. August 25, 1693 Stamford, CT d. Stamford, CT March 19, 1756.

5) Major Gideon S____y b. September 27, 1729, Stamford, CT d. December 18, 1804 in Croton river, Westchester County, New York .

6) Isaac S____y b. November 20, 1768 South Salem, New York d. October 26, 1850 Westchester County, New York. (Bought the farm and land where I was born 1938, my father in 1879, my grand-father in 1852, and my great grand-father in 1799.)

7) George S____y b March 15, 1799 d. May 01, 1870 Greenville, New York (now Scarsdale , NY).

8) Henry S____y March 20, 1852 d. June 10, 1920, Scarsdale.

9) William H. S____y b. May 30, 1879 d. November 1952, Scarsdale.

10) William H. S____y, Jr.. ME!!!! b. October 28, 1938 d. still living (and I just checked).

11) John Isaac S____y b. November 27, 1995 (still living) North Shore Hospital, Roslyn , New York

Except for my two oldest boys that are half Asian, you can call us all "Whitey".....(VBG)

Bill's post calls forth a flurry of posts about family trees.

Vic's:

I'm jealous. There was an earthquake in Crete--the church collapsed and the bible burned. The town in Cyprus was bulldozed and is on the Turkish frontier.

So I have no idea which goatherd or pirate was my ancestor.

Dan's:

My family tree isn't pretty either, but at least the limbs do fork.

Tom's:

America is generational stories, that's all. Whether the generations are white, black, yellow, brown, or tan, America is and always has been a bunch of strangers in a strange land trying to get along. Its collapse will come about when those strangers no longer want to get along, and that's where it's headed. Whites, blacks, yellows, browns and tans are as adept at exploiting and killing each other as they are "opposing" races.

My paternal grandparents came over - separately - in typical fashion. Nothing but the clothes on their backs and settled in South Philadelphia. Now, despite our surname, my dad's was more a matrilineal heritage. His family tree traces its origins back to the old country through his mother's side. My paternal grandfather came over here alone and was a laborer. Seems my paternal grandmother's oldest brother, Dominic had the balls to come over here and start a business that enabled him to bring over the rest of the siblings, three sisters, one of whom became my paternal grandmother. He was capo de capo of that family. All his sisters' children at one time or another worked in the soda business he had built up from nothing to having quite a reputation from Delaware to PA through NJ and lower NY. Because he was so successful, a small soda water bottler based in the south came up to him and asked if he would like to be the sole distributor of its product in the northeast. Uncle was simultaneously a savvy entrepreneur and stereotypically bullheaded immigrant that couldn't see a difference between a business 'partnership' and 'working for somebody'.

So he turned down a deal with Pepsi. Did it again with 7-Up.

Like a good Italian brother, Dominic saw to it that his sisters all married nice Italian men he approved of - meaning ornery old cusses like himself. He got two out of three. My paternal grandmother married Emedio M_________, a nice guy whom Uncle "Doom" couldn't stand. When they were both in their 40s, Uncle once told Emidio (who's American nickname, for some reason, was Jim), "Jim, I'ma gonna piss onna you grave." Grandpop said, "You probably will." Uncle took a stroke in an outhouse that year and died a few hours later. They went to my grandfather and told him, "Jim, Dom died." My grandfather sat there for a minute, then said, "Let me know when they're buryin' him. I'll drink a lot a wine beforehand."

Grandpop died on a Saturday afternoon in November, 1963, one week before JFK's assassination, at the age of 94. Took his afternoon nap and never woke up. We all ought to go that way.

And finally, mine:

Bill, yours is an impressive family tree, with a history stretching back almost 400 years in this land you white folks thought was a New World.

Here's mine, not as impressive as yours, but with a bit longer history on this particular continent:

1. Great-great-great grandfather (to 300th power): aboriginal person of unknown name with skull shape similar to that of modern ape. . . believed to have immigrated from Asia across Bering Strait through Alaska approx 8000 B. C.

2. Approximately 300 generations of other savage progenitors of whom the historical record is equally vague (including several from "the woodpile").

3. Grandfather: John Ander Jacobs, b. 1906, in swamps of SE North Carolina. (First in family line to adopt use of personal table utensils, specifically, knife and spoon. Ten years later introduces use of fork, which is still widely employed at table in the Jacobs family even up to present time.)

4. Father: Herman Jacobs, b. 1930, in swamps of SE North Carolina. (Too poor to afford a middle name. Survives Great Depression eating field peas, the only crop his father ever learned how to grow with any success. Unfortunately, Great Depression in NC marked by a glut of field peas, so there was no market for the family's produce. Joins US Navy 1947. Marries 1952 Ellen Walker, b. 1929, dirt poor orphan hillbilly from Kentucky. Continues family tradition of using table utensils at most meals; however, reverts to eating field peas with knife.)

5. Herman Edward Jacobs [aka Bathus], b. 1956, Portsmouth Naval Hospital. (Still too poor to afford a middle name. Mother gives him one anyway in hopes of future prospects. Usually eats field peas with fork. Uses knife only to round up strays.) Married Sandra Ann K____ (Cajun with moss growing between toes) b. 1955, New Orleans.

6. Children: daughter J____ M____, b. 197_. B.A. Yale, English Lit, 199_, Skull & Bones inductee; M.A. Columbia, Public Administration, 199_. Presently a major muckabout in State Public Health Department. (Thinks she's hot shit, but we know better. Married very nice white boy, Daniel M___ S____. No issue yet (but we remain hopeful). (Always eats field peas with fork.)

One presumes Yahoo has already neatly indexed, catalogued, and archived the above text, so that it will be available (for a small fee) to the government of Iran, the United States, The Peoples Republic of China, Turkey, Mexico, or any other regime implicated therein, should such government wish to investigate the activities of members of the infamous Yahoo Group known as thesmartcafe.

Okay, who rewrote Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution and didn't tell me?

2006-02-02T07:48:00.000-06:00

So those dead white guys responsible for the Constitution of these United States of America gave us an executive branch and a legislative branch that share power. The third branch, the judiciary, has no power, but that's not the point of this exercise. The framers figured the executive should keep the legislators apprised of what the hell he was doing with his executive powers that might involve the latter's legislative powers and what impact all of this was having or may have on the union.

The original language, I think, went something like this:

Article II, Section 3. He [i.e., the President] shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient ...

As an aside, conservatives can take heart that because the Constitution uses the pronoun "he" throughout Article II, Hillary Clinton is constitutionally forbidden from assuming the office. And as liberal democrats became such strict constructionists when it came to the impeachment of Mr. Hillary Clinton, consider the case ca-losed (as Archie Bunker used to say).

But that's not the point of this exercise.

Wait a minute, the Article II language above was exactly how that clause was written the last time I checked. Obviously, it's been rewritten. I'm presuming by the judiciary, which was already determined to possess no power under the Constitution, but has a neurotic urge to act like it does, but that's not the point of this exercise. It now reads:

Article II, Section 3. The person holding the office of President shall every January traipse down to the capitol building, creating a security nighmare for the Secret Service, particularly in a time of war, and speak before both houses of the Congress for at least 90 minutes, but no longer than 24 hours, on the state of the union. He shall recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient, but that he knows will never be passed because a) if his own party controls both houses of the Congress, they will shit their pants at the prospect of implementing any policies that may jeopardize their perpetual re-election, such policies including, but not limited to, anything that violates citizens' inalienable right, as invented by the third branch of government, the Judiciary, which has no authority in this regard, but this is not the subject of this Article, to have the government care for them from cradle to grave by taxing the "rich", as shall be defined from time to time by the Executive's opposition depending on their own election prospects; and b) the opposing party, if it controls the Congress, will simply laugh in his face. In any event, the Executive shall inform the Congress of the state of the union, what can otherwise easily be said in three lines, in 90-plus pages of text, and not fail to introduce various personages, particularly those serving in the military, whose deeds can be shamelessly exploited to compensate for the lack of substance in the Executive's speech. Such personage[s] shall sit no further than six inches from the elbows of the Executive's wife, who shall smile continuously for the duration of the Executive's speech or until she dies of old age, whichever may occur first.

I wish I could dissect Bush's State of the Union speech of the other night, but I can't. I didn't watch it. And from what I can gather from those who did watch it and dissect it, he didn't say his first order of business immediately after leaving the chamber that night was the annihilation of Iran, so I'm figuring I didn't really miss any - what they call in punditdom - bold initiative. And to really expose myself as one of those disgusted, terminal cynics, I didn't even read the post-event transcript published either on the net or in the print media. Look, if Bush didn't have a pair big enough to stand up and say, "I not only plan to continue the NSA surveillance program initiated after the attacks of September 11th, 2001, but will authorize federal law enforcement to plant bugs up the ass of every 7-Eleven and Dunkin' Donuts owner, and cab driver, in the US," I'm not really interested.

So, absent a sound basis for analyzing the State of the Union, this is a (relatively) short riff on the subject.

But on a personal note, just so you, dear reader, will appreciate how fed up I am with this total modern corruption of what our dead white male framers so ingeniously realized would bore everyone to tears if it went on at length, I'm scheduled to go into the hospital for treatment for Acute Myelogenous Leukemia (AML), which I was diagnosed with last year. I was in remission, but the little buggers came back, so I'm in for a new round of chemo followed by a bone marrow transplant - that will either cure me or kill me. Ah, if only the rest of life were so simple. Anyway, even before I got the recent biopsy results that showed recurrence, I said to my wife I don't know if it's because I'm just getting old and cranky (okay, older and crankier) or if everything really is so overhyped, overwritten and media saturated, that lying in a hospital for a few months doing crossword puzzles and reading novels and keeping up with the latest trends in modeling (structural, not Victoria's Secret) would be a welcome respite from this 24-hour news-cycle bullshit.

Let's be honest here: Not only the substance of the President's State of the Union speech, but verbatim quotes from the text, for God's sake, were released to and subsequently beaten to death by network reporters and pundits hours prior to the actual event. Why watch the damn thing? In contemporary politics, it's apparently not enough to have post-speech spin by the talking heads of liberal MSM or conservative FNC or talk radio. No, let's spin everything before it even happens. Of course, if some dumbass in the White House is going to release the speech beforehand, then I guess it has "happened", but why get metaphysical about it? All I know is, daily national and world events are far more important and substantive than this useless dog and pony ceremony every January.

Why can't we just go back to the Executive stating the state of the union as the practice was orginally prescribed in the Constitution by the (bless their dead white male hearts) framers? From time to time, the President reports to Congress. Lincoln did it by letter. In the middle of the frigging Civil War. After firing off a couple of lines with the old quill pen, he went about the more important business of preserving the Union and the Constitution. And for what, you may ask? For modern presidents to keep teleprompter repairmen in business? Of course, Lincoln's second inaugural address only lasted about 10 minutes. Compare that to the bloviating we have to sit through every four years. Come to think of it, inaugurations take place in January, too. Maybe there's something about that month that makes politicians stupid. Still, if a brief missive was good enough for an intellectual giant like Abraham Lincoln, it should be good enough for the morons that have held the office of the Presidency in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Okay, okay, okay ... I'll bow to progress. Twenty-first century presidents can e-mail the state of the union - from time to time. Personally, I think those communications would be a lot more interesting, not to mention entertaining.

To: Congress of the United States
From: POTUS
Subject: State of the Union

FYI,

SOU not bad. Dow's up. Unemploy down. SS could be adresed b4 it goes bankrupt. Tax cuts should be maid permanent. Give me line-item veto or I'll release pix of your wives at last WH Xmas party. Just funnin'. Iraq is cum se cum sa. Doing better than you defeatists are whining about. And how about those fucking Iranians? There starting to piss me off. How about u? NSA wiretapping continuing, so screw u and the limos u rode in on. If I missed anything important and u need more info, call me.

GWB

(P.S. Sorry. Didn't have time 2 spell check.)

We Will Not Yield to Islamist Pressure!

2006-01-30T17:22:00.000-06:00

A few weeks ago, an independent Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, published some rather mild cartoons that were critical of Islam and its founder, Mohammed. Since then, whackos from throughout the Muslim world have been threatening all sorts of dire consequences, including, one must assume, a boycott of Danish hams.

The Danish Prime Minister has basically told the objecting Muslims to go to paradise (unlike his Norwegian neighbors, who somehow felt compelled to apologize for the Danes' anti-Muslim "atrocities").

It turns out mocking Mohammed is something of a Danish national pasttime, that is if the reaction of my friend Wiggin (who lives in Denmark) gives us anything to go by. He has graciously given me permission to reproduce his brilliant homage to the Prophet (pbuh)(peanut butter upon him) above. On the off chance that there are any Islamists reading--I guess you just won't be enjoying any more delicious Danish ham.

Hopefully the "we must address the reasons why they hate us" crowd is paying attention. They hate us because theirs is an ideology of hate. If it's not our foreign policy, it'll be the cartoons in our newspapers. If they drive us out of Baghdad, they'll want Seville.

UPDATE:

Jyllands-Posten has published a non-apology apology. It's addressed to "Honourable Citizens of the Muslim World" (though one wonders if honorable Muslims are the ones making a hullabaloo) and essentially says "We're sorry you're offended." Not bad, I suppose, though I think "We're sorry you feel compelled by your religion to act as though you live in the 13th century," or "We're sorry you let your imams think for you" might have been even better. Don't look for a big Saudi rush on Danish ham.

UPDATE 2:

Bucking the national tradition of appeasement, the French newspaper France Soir has reprinted the Danish cartoons (the originals, not Wiggin's masterpiece above). In recognition of this dramatic and unexpected feat of non-cowardice, I think tonight I'll enjoy a bottle of French wine--my first in over two years.

UPDATE 3:

I knew it was too good to be true. The French compulsion to surrender is just too strong. The owner of France Soir has fired its editor for his un-Gallic display of courage and issued an appropriately grovelling apology. It's too late for me to un-drink that bottle of French wine, but as it leaves my body I dedicate it to the owner of France-Soir. Get used to it, mon ami, there's a long line of radical Muslims preparing even now to piss on you, too.

UPDATE 4 (on 02/02/2006 by Bathus):

PBS Watch has been doing a fine job blogging the Cartoon Wars. For the latest developments, insightful commentary, relevant links, and reproductions of the cartoons themselves, see the following PBS Watch posts (listed here in reverse chrono order):

Who Won the Election?

Once In A While

Maturity

More Help For Tarek

We Have Always Been At War With Oceania

Trumping The Blogburst

Europe Grows A Backbone

Rodney King

The Final Solution

Helping Tarek

Advancing the Discussion

Farenheit 451 Alert (The Danish cartoons are reproduced here.)

Study Reveals Joe Biden Is Judiciary Committee's Biggest Gasbag

2006-01-10T23:00:00.000-06:00

[01/11/2006 NOTE by Bathus: There's an update of this item here at the end of this post.]

Let's have some fun with statistics, shall we?

In the senate judiciary committee hearings this morning, Ted Kennedy clumsily attempted to make use of a Cass Sunstein "study" to support a charge that "Judge Alito rules against individuals 84 percent of the time." Writing for National Review Online two days ago, Byron York pointed out in advance that, with all its caveats, qualifications, and disclaimers, Sunstein's report is useful "to prove virtually nothing." Well, it does prove that if a bloated liberal senator gives Cass Sunstein enough money, in a very short time that scholar of unimpeachable credentials will produce a study of sufficient rigor to convince the bloated senator that what the bloated senator wants to be believe is actually true.

Kennedy didn't mention Sunstein's ample disclaimers because the ample senator doesn't care whether Sunstein's ginned up stats reveal everything, something, or nothing about what kind of justice Alito would be. Kennedy's not alone in that regard. If any of the senators on the judiciary committee actually cared about using these hearings to learn something about Alito, they would spend more time listening to what the nominee might have to say, and less time self-indulgently bloviating.

Kennedy's use of Sunstein's dubious statistics inspired me to do a little number-crunching myself, to answer the pressing question: Which senator, when measured by an objective standard, can be identified as the biggest gasbag on the judiciary committee?

My methodology is completely objective:

Using this transcript of the morning session of today's hearings, for each senator's thirty minute question period I took the number of words spoken by the senator and divided it by the number of words spoken by the nominee and the senator together. Actually, because some senators use bigger words and some use smaller words, I decided that, instead of using words as the unit of measure, it would be better to use individual letters (without counting spaces between words), so that the phrase "Alito sucked eggs" and the phrase "Alito dissembled" count exactly the same: 15 characters. (Before calculating percentages, I excluded words spent on administrative matters and other similar interruptions. However, the senators'--often extensive--introductory remarks were counted.) So the numbers in the second and third columns of the chart below reflect the number of letters (not words) appearing in the transcript of questions and answers asked by and answered to each senator. The resulting percentages, shown in the last column (labelled "Senator %,") indicate what portion of each senator's dialogue with Alito was comprised of the senator's "questions."

The great thing about careful statistical analysis is that it reveals truths that just can't be discerned by casual observation and common sense alone.

For example, I bet you never would have guessed that the biggest gasbag during the first session of questioning was Joe Biden, who monopolized almost 80% of his dialogue with Alito. Roughly speaking, the nominee got in edgewise one word for every four that meandered out of Biden's yap.

Coming in a distant second in verbosity this morning was the ever-generous Ted Kennedy, who gave more than twice as much as he received. But it's not really fair to expect the bloated one to be up to snuff so early in the day.

As a group, during the morning session the senators used up three-fifths (60.32%) of the total dialogue and left the nominee to make do with two-fifths. I guess that's only fair since there are so many of them and only one of him.

Kyl was the only senator who failed to out-talk the nominee. But as the last questioner of the morning session, Kyl was interrupted when the committee adjourned for lunch ten minutes into his allotted thirty minutes. With a light lunch and a heavy nap, perhaps Kyl can catch back up with pack when the hearings resume in the afternoon.

Joe Biden also claimed the morning's prize for the longest soliloquy, wherein he wasted more than a third of his entire dialogue with Alito on this single "question":

BIDEN: Well, it was a pretty outrageous group. I mean, I believe you that you were unaware of it. But here I was, University of Delaware graduate, a sitting United States senator, I was aware of it because I was up there on the campus. I mean, it was a big deal. It was a big deal, at least in our area of the Delaware Valley, if Princeton, Penn, the schools around there had this kind -- because the big thing was going on at Brown at the time as well.

And by the way, for the record, I know you know when you stated in your application that you are a member -- you said in '85, "I am a member" -- they had restored ROTC. ROTC was back on the campus.

But again, this is just by way of why some of us are puzzled. Because if I was aware of it, and I didn't even like Princeton...

I mean, I really didn't like Princeton. I was an Irish Catholic kid who thought it had not changed like you concluded it had.

I admit, one of my real dilemmas is I have two kids who went to Ivy League schools. I'm not sure my Grandfather Finnegan will ever forgive me for allowing that to happen.

But all kidding aside, I wasn't a big Princeton fan. And so maybe that is why I focused on it and no one else did. But I remember it at the time.

The other thing is, Judge, the other thing you should be aware of -- and do not take this personally, what's going on here -- every nominee that comes before us is viewed by all the senators -- left, right, center, Democrat, Republican -- at least on two levels, at least in my experience here.

The first one is individual qualifications and what their constitutional methodology, their views are, their philosophy.

But the other is -- and it always occurs -- whose spot they're taking and what impact that would have on the court.

Everybody wrote with Roberts after the fact that a lot of people voted for Roberts that were doubtful. I was doubtful, I voted no. But he was replacing Rehnquist. So Roberts for Rehnquist, you know, what's the worst that can happen, quote/unquote, or the best that can happen?

No, I'm not being facetious. What's the best or worst?

If you're conservative, the best that can happen is he's as good as Rehnquist. From the standpoint of a -- someone who's a liberal, the worst that can happen, he's as good as Rehnquist.

So, I mean -- but you're replacing -- I mean, we can't lose this and so people understand this. You are replacing someone who has been the fulcrum on an otherwise evenly divided court. And a woman who's -- most scholars who write about her, and in a retrospective about her, say this is a woman who viewed things from -- the phrase you've used -- a real-world perspective. This was a former legislator, this was a former practitioner, this was someone who came to the bench and applied -- to her critics, she applied too much common sense. Critics would say that she was too sensitive to the impact on individuals, you know, that -- what would happen to an individual.

So her focus on the impact on individuals was sometimes criticized and praised.

It's just important you understand, at least for my questioning, that this goes beyond you. It goes to whether or not your taking her seat will alter the constitutional framework of this country by shifting the balance 5-4, 4-5, one way or another.

And that's the context in which, at least, I want to ask you my questions after trying to get some clarification, or getting some clarification from you on concern Princeton. Because, again, a lot of this just is puzzling; not not able to be answered, just puzzling.

Judge, you and I both know -- and clearly one of the hallmarks, at least in my view, of Justice O'Connor's position was, she fully understood the real world of discrimination. I mean, she felt it.

Graduated number two in her class from Stanford, couldn't get a job, was offered a job by law firms -- granted, she was older than you are, but couldn't get a job because she was a woman; they'd offer her a job as a secretary.

And so she understood what I think everybody here from both ends of the spectrum understand: that discrimination has become very sophisticated. It's become very, very sophisticated, very much more subtle than it was when I got here 34 years ago or 50 years ago.

And employees don't say any more, you know, "We don't like blacks in this company," or, "We don't want women here."

They say things like, "Well, they wouldn't fit in," or, "You know, they tend to be too emotional" or "a little high-strung."

I mean, there's all different ways in which now it's become so much more subtle. And that's why we all, Democrat and Republican, wrote Title VII. We wrote these laws to try to get at what we observed in the real world.

What we observed in the real world is it's real subtle. And yet it's harder to make a case of discrimination even though there's no doubt that it still exists.

And so I'd like to talk to you about a couple of anti- discrimination cases. One is the Bray case. In that case, a black woman said she was denied a promotion for a job that she was clearly qualified for. There was no doubt she was qualified. And she said, "I was denied that job because I'm a black woman."

And it was, as I said, indisputable she was qualified. It was indisputable that the corporation failed to follow their usual internal hiring procedures. And the corporation gave conflicting explanations as to why they reached the decision to hire another woman who they asserted was more qualified than Ms. Bray.

Now the district court judge said, you know, Ms. Bray hadn't even made a prima facie case here, or she made -- but she hadn't made a sufficient showing to get to a jury; I'm finding for the corporation here.

And Ms. Bray's attorney appealed and it went up to the 3rd Circuit. And you and your colleagues disagreed. Two of your colleagues said, you know, Ms. Bray should have a jury trial here. And you said "No, I don't think she should," and you set out a standard, as best I can understand it. I want to talk to you about it.

And your colleagues said that if they applied your standard in Title VII cases, discrimination cases, that it would effectively -- their words -- eviscerate Title VII because, they went on to say, it ignores the realities of racial animus.

They went on to say that racial animus runs so deep in some people that they're incapable of acknowledging that a black woman is qualified for a job.

But, Judge, you dismissed that assertion. You said that the conflicting statements that the employer made were just loose language, and you expressed your concern about allowing disgruntled employees to impose cost of a trial on employers. And so your colleagues thought you set the bar, I think it's fair to say, pretty high in order to make the case that it should go to a jury.

Can you tell me what the difference is between a business judgment as to who's most qualified -- you said, "This comes down to subjective business judgment" -- and discrimination? You said, "Subjective business judgment should prevail unless the qualifications of the candidate are extremely disproportionate."

What's the difference between that in today's world and discrimination? I know you want to eliminate discrimination. Explain to me how that test is distinguishable from just plain old discrimination.

So the big revelation from this morning's hearing is that, based on objective statistical analysis and confirmed by anecdotal evidence, Joe Biden is the biggest gasbag on the judiciary committee.

Even though he is an indeflatible gasbag, from what I've heard Joe Biden is actually a pretty decent guy on a personal level, which is more than one can say--on any level--about certain other members of the committee: If I can figure out an objective way to measure who's the biggest asshole on the judiciary committee, my next post will feature Ted Kennedy.

UPDATE 01/11/2006: The table above displayed data only for the first seven senators who questioned Alito during yesterday's morning session. By this afternoon the judiciary committee had completed its first full round of questioning, so I've run the numbers to show results for all eighteen senators:

With one full round of questions completed, Joe Biden retained his top spot in the gasbag stakes, but saw his lead threatened by Republican John Cornyn who now trails him by less than one percent. By the end of the first round, Ted Kennedy had slipped all the way to fifth place, when Senators Schumer and DeWine both recorded truly inspired displays of fatuous bloviation. Undeterred, the bloated senator from Massachusetts remains within what for him is easy stinking distance of the lead, and has promised an especially gaseous outing in the second round of questions, which was set to begin right after lunch today. Thrown off stride when his first round questions were interrupted by an adjourment after only ten minutes, Senator Kyl had been the only inquisitor to fail to out-talk the nominee in yesterday's morning session. But after the adjournment Kyl came back strong in his final twenty minutes to offer a respectably gas-filled performance that propelled him back toward the middle of the pack. Bringing up the rear were Senators Feinstein and Kohl. Those two senators, who permitted the nominee to out-gas them badly, have fallen so far behind that some have suggested they should drop out of the competition altogether.

(Thanks to James Taranto at Best of the Web for linking this post.)

Ostracon

2006-01-08T13:48:00.000-06:00

Sad but true, "throw 'em to the wolves" is sometimes for the best.

The Dems set their sights on bringing down Tom Delay a long time ago, and now they've succeeded.

I had expected all along that they would succeed, and to be perfectly frank I've looked forward to their success because Delay (aka "The Exterminator," aka "The Hammer") has never presented the most appealing image of the Republican Party. He's not the devil the Dems want to make him out to be, but there is something about his persona that lends itself to a caricature drawn with the most hideous stereotypes one can associate with Republicans and conservatives. I doubt Delay will be convicted (but then again I thought Martha Stewart would be acquitted), but that's irrelevant to what's in the best interests of conservatives, the GOP, and the public generally.

What's happening to Delay is akin to the ancient Athenian democracy's practice of ostracism, a practice in which the actual guilt or innocence of the political leader is completely irrelevant. The person's status comes to depend entirely upon whether he is admired or reviled (or feared). Ostracism is a formalization of a fundamental instinct of all democratic peoples: The need, now and then, to bring low some person of high status.To be ostracized by the Athenians meant being exiled from the land for a period of ten years. But one was not imprisoned, and one's property was not confiscated. In our democracy, ostracism can be both harsher and more frivolous than it was among the Athenians: Our practice is harsher because our modern ostracisms sometimes entail criminal prosecutions, with loss of freedom and/or property. Martha Stewart's criminal trial was a modern ostracism. She was convicted because she was reviled and envied. Our process is also sometimes more frivolous than it was among the Athenians, because they reserved ostracism for great political leaders. The Athenian people would have thought they had demeaned themselves if they ostracized a mere celebrity like Martha Stewart.

To have been ostracized by the Athenian democracy was a mark of greatness and power. To be ostracized by the American democracy it is enough merely to be popularly disliked or envied.

Distasteful (and morally abhorrent) as all this is, aside from the nice question of whether what is happening to Delay is fair or just to him personally, the reality is that in a democracy a leader cannot serve the public good if he is too widely reviled or envied. In that question of the public good, the justice of the individual case cannot stand against the public necessity.

The Dems and Ronnie Earle are doing the GOP a favor by giving them the excuse to do, and claiming the ignoble credit for doing, what many Republicans have wanted to do-- what must be done for the good of all, all except Tom Delay.

Further Thoughts on the Little White Lie about a Little Read Book

2006-01-04T01:59:00.000-06:00

[01/05/2006 NOTE by Bathus: There's an important update of this item at the end of this post.]

On further reflection I have realized that my last post on this subject was too hard on the UMass Dartmouth student and too easy on the newspaper that published his lie.

I still believe that the student's name should be disclosed for the public good and for the good of journalism, and that the student himself will be better off in the long run if he steps forward to take personal responsibility for his lie.

So if and when I discover his name, I still intend to publish it in this space.

However, after looking more closely at the way the New Bedford Standard-Times handled this story, especially how that newspaper's editors and its reporter have slyly sought to deflect the major responsibility for their journalistic sin from themselves onto the student, I have come to the conclusion that the Standard-Times, not the student, is the real villain of this piece.

My thinking about all this is set forth in full in the following email I dashed off to the Standard-Times editor, Robert Unger. (I've edited the text of my email a bit to spruce up sloppy grammar and to clarify especially awkward phrasing.)

From: Bathus
To: Robert Unger
Date: Wednsday, January 04, 2006 12:40 AM
Subject: Further Thoughts on the Little Red Hoax

I am an attorney and blogger who operates under the nom de blog "Bathus" at Adeimantus Blog, where I have recently written on the subject of the now infamous UMass Dartmouth Little Red Book hoax.

In its apologia for publishing this false story, the New Bedford Standard-Times has put forward three rationales for withholding the hoaxer's identity:
[W]e didn't name the student, at the request of the university. We also worried about the student's mental state and about the careers of professors Williams and Pontbriand.
(In his follow-up story, your reporter Aaron Nicodemus had similarly stated, "At the request of the two professors and the university, The Standard-Times has agreed to withhold his name.")

Your paper's stated rationales for refusing to disclose the identity of the UMass Dartmouth hoaxer are not plausible. Let's look at them one by one:

I. "We didn't name the student at the request of the university."

This rationale standing by itself is worthless. No responsible newspaper would ever withhold newsworthy facts from the public merely because some entity, even a beloved local institution of higher education, so requested. If the information is newsworthy (and in the course of reading this email it should become clear to you why the student's identity is indeed newsworthy), then the newspaper should publish it notwithstanding the university's understandable desire to protect its students--unless the university offered some very weighty reasons not to publish. Such reasons have not been forthcoming.

II. "We also worried about the student's mental state."

This rationale, while somewhat compelling emotionally, is not otherwise persuasive. Editors and reporters are not qualified to make a psychologist's judgment that publishing the student's name would do him significant emotional harm beyond that which he has already suffered. One wonders whether--except for the inapplicable rationales for withholding the names of minors and victims of sex offenses--the Standard-Times has ever before worried whether publishing the name of a person at the very center of a story would affect that person's mental state. In a similar context, would the Standard-Times hesitate to publish the name of a 22 year-old factory worker whose false statements were at the center of a nationally significant story reported in its pages? Notwithstanding the sympathies one might feel toward students as a class, does a student deserve milder treatment than a factory worker?

One must evaluate the credibility of the Standard-Times' purported concern for the student's frail emotional state in light of an editorial column titled "Sizing up [the] week of news" in which the Standard-Times published the following post hoc analysis:
Student should be ashamed

Thumbs down for the UMass student who lied to professors and The Standard-Times about being visited by federal agents after he ordered a copy of Mao Tse Tung's Little Red Book through the inter-library loan system. This bogus story went around the nation and gave the public a false impression of our government at a time when our government is under intense pressure to defend the homeland from terrorism and does not need the public to turn against it. (emphasis added)
The above statement elicits the following observations:

Firstly, with the above statement, the Standard-Times appears to be attempting unfairly to place the bulk of the blame on this student in order to deflect responsibility away from itself, when (as I explain more fully below) it was the Standard-Times' extremely shoddy reporting that transformed what otherwise would have remained a thoroughly unremarkable "private lie" between a student and his professors into a source of massive public embarrassment for all the involved parties.

Secondly, the Standard-Times' assertion that the student deserves shame is not consistent with its statement that the Standard-Times is worried about the student's mental health. If the Standard-Times were truly concerned about the student's purportedly fragile mental health, it would not have published the above statement asserting that the student deserves to have shame heaped upon him. (On the other hand, you can call me old-fashioned, but I personally believe that this student would emerge from this episode with greater integrity, both emotional integrity and ethical integrity, if he were required publicly to take personal responsibility for his role in this fiasco.) The Standard-Times inflicts more public shame on the student (whose identity is already known among a large segment of the UMass Dartmouth community) while at the same time using the student's supposed mental frailty as an excuse for withholding his name.

Thirdly, the Standard-Times' statement correctly points out that this story "gave a false impression of our government at a time when our government is under intense pressure to defend the homeland from terrorism and does not need the public to turn against it." Because that is true, the Standard-Times editor has a journalistic duty to the public, to his own paper, and to his profession to reveal the name of the hoaxer so as to discourage others from using the media to disseminate information they know to be false. This duty to protect the integrity of your profession, and to serve the public's right to the full truth on a story that has corrupted the public debate in a matter of national interest, outweighs any speculative concerns the Standard-Times might have about private harm that might redound to the person who originated the lie.

III. We also worried about . . . the careers of professors Williams and Pontbriand.

All of the considerations that apply to discredit your concern for protecting the mental health of the student apply equally to your concern for protecting the careers of the professors. Since when did tenured university professors become a specially protected class under the First Amendment?

More particularly, I am unable to see how disclosing the name of this student could do further harm to the careers of these two professors--unless that disclosure might lead to discovery of additional facts indicating the professors had reason to know, before the story was first published, that this student and his story did not merit the defense that they attempted to provide. In either case, the story remains unfinished, and the Standard-Times has a journalistic duty to complete the story that it started.

The implicit suggestion that disclosure of the student's name would cause harm to the professors' careers leaves one with precisely the impression that the professors do have something to hide. If you really do care about the professors' careers, assuming their careers deserve journalistic protection, you would serve them better by publishing the student's name. But your duty is not to protect reputations and careers. Your duty is to get all the facts out so your readers, including those who happen to be in a position to make judgments about the two professors' careers, can determine for themselves what judgments are fitting.

In that regard, one notes Professor Williams' positively glowing statement--that this student, whom he claimed to "know well" was "the real thing . . . mature, honest, reliable, hard-working and genuinely interested in getting to the truth"--an evaluation that simply does not match up with the picture of this student that emerges from the Standard-Times later reporting, wherein the student comes across as self-centered:
When I came back, like wow, there's this circus coming on. I saw my cell phone, and I see like, wow, I have something like 75 messages and like something like 87 missed calls. Wow, I was popular.
and not quite the budding scholar the professor described, if the above sample of his thinking and the following sample of his writing are fairly illustrative:
The fact is that my being panicked about this hole (sic) event led me to unfortunately prop up my story (i.e., fabricate it), for that I have to apologize to you and to my professors. I have spoken to my family about the whole issue and the fact is that they were understandibly (sic) angry. My name has been dishonored within my family and so I will spend the rest of the winter trying to restore even a little bit of it back, at least.
One finds it difficult to believe that Professor Williams could be so utterly deceived about the character of a student he claimed to know so well. Thus, one is left to wonder whether the incongruity between the character of the student Professor Williams described and the character of the student who made the above statements should be otherwise, or at least further, explained. Several persons, including myself, have speculated whether the unidentified student might have originated as a creation of professor's imagination. Many others have speculated that the student's story was seeded by the government to embarrass Bush's critics, and that the two professors were in on it the whole time. The plausibility of such speculations confirms that the story remains incomplete and cannot be wrapped up until this student's identity is known.

Having gone through the reasons that the Standard-Times' rationales for withholding this student's name are implausible, let me offer my opinion as to the real reason, for your reticence, a reason which I hinted at above and which can be summed up in single word:

Guilt

(Pardon me here if I indulge in the same sort of psychological analysis for which I have faulted the Standard-Times. We lawyers grant ourselves wide latitude.)

The Standard-Times, or should I say its editors and reporter, feel downright guilty, as well they should, that their sloppy journalism had the effect of tempting and aiding an otherwise fairly decent young man to persist in what was an otherwise mildly blameworthy private lie until that private lie was transformed into what now seems to threaten to become a public humiliation.

Let me explain how I reached that judgment about your motives for withholding this student's name, motives of which you yourselves might not yet be fully conscious. Based on the Standard-Times' own reporting and editorializing, it seems clear that events unfolded thusly:

In the course of a conversation Nicodemus initiated to obtain a comment from Professor Williams, the professor let drop, "almost as an aside," that he'd heard tell from a fellow professor that a student had been interrogated by government agents for attempting to get his hands on a copy of the Little Red Book. Had Professor Williams known that Nicodemus would want to make a full-blown story out of that yarn, he probably would never have mentioned that seemingly harmless little anecdote in the first place,even if he did believe at the time it was true. But Nicodemus seized on the juicy tidbit, and--based on a second piece of second-hand hearsay "corroboration" (which was just as worthless as the first piece of second-hand hearsay "corroboration")--put the story into print without first making direct contact with the student himself.

Let me here point out with special emphasis the important fact that, although the student had lied privately to his professor, he did not lie to the Standard-Times reporter until after the Standard-Times had already put the story into print. The Standard-Times got the story wrong without ever talking to the student. Therefore, it is quite false, unethical, and grossly unfair to the student (about whom the Standard-Times now claims to worry so much), for the Standard-Times to have left its readers with the impression that the paper got the story wrong because the student purposefully misled the Standard-Times reporter. That is exactly the impression you tried to create when you wrote, "We must be as sure as we can that a source is telling us the truth," which leaves the impression that you got the story wrong only because the student lied to you. Yes, the student misled his professors. But the Standard-Times misled itself. And then the Standard-Times slyly tried to nudge the bulk of the blame for its own mistake onto the student. For that journalistic sin, you deserve every bit of the guilt you now feel.

That failure to speak with the student before printing the story was the fatal error. And that failure to speak with the student remains the source of the Standard-Times' abiding feelings of guilt. That sense of guilt prevents the Standard-Times editors from perceiving their journalistic duty.

If, oh if, the reporter Nicodemus had just made contact with the student, and if, oh if, Nicodemus had then pressed him as he should have, it is entirely probable either that the student would have backed off his fish story or that Nicodemus would have smelled something fishy that would have warned him off the story.

But once the story was in print, once the student's favorite professors had publicly placed their own reputations on the line in defense of the student's tale, the stakes became just to high for the student to pull back. By unilaterally upping the ante (with some help from the gullible professors), the Standard-Times made the game too rich for the student to fold. That's the kind of thing that can happen when newspapers gamble with the truth. Lots of people lose.

So the Standard-Times feels especially guilty toward the student for taking what should have remained an entirely private matter (a student's private lie to his professors) and transforming it into a major public humiliation for the student. The Standard-Times then magnified its guilt by suggesting that the student had misled its reporter into filing a false story, when the Standard-Times, by its own admission, never spoke to the student before printing the false story.

So guilt, that good old fashioned emotion, is the real reason the Standard-Times won't finish reporting this story. And it seems that, by apparently promising the professors and the university not disclose the student's name, the Standard-Times has made things worse by painting itself into a journalistic corner. One journalistic sin just keeps leading to another, until it seems the Standard-Times only option is to clam up entirely.

Let me suggest a way out for the Standard-Times to escape from its dark and silent corner.

First, come clean. All the way clean. Admit explicitly that you screwed up completely. Not a little. Completely. Off the charts. Off the scale screw up. Don't offer explanations that sound like excuses. Don't give us these half-apologies about how Nicodemus "corroborated" the story with a second source. (Pontbriand's "corroboration" was confirmation of what the student said; it was not confirmation of the truth of what the student said. Don't you see the difference? If Pontbriand had said that a student had said the moon is made of green cheese, would you claim to have a second reliable corroboration that the moon is made of green cheese?)

Second, apologize publicly and profusely to the student, whom you have unfairly cast as the main villain. Explain explicitly that although the student's private lie was certainly blameworthy, it was worthy only of private blame, to be negotiated between him and his professors. Explain that, although the student was clearly wrong to lie to his professor, that private act did not the merit the public humiliation that the Standard-Times' sloppy reporting lead to. Explain that once the Standard-Times published the story without giving the student a chance to confirm or to retract his private lie, and without proper corroboration, the damage was already done. Explain that by the time your reporter got around to speaking with the student, the die had already been cast by the Standard-Times, and nothing the student could have said once the story was already in print could undo much of the damage the Standard-Times had done. Explain that it is certainly understandable that after the Standard-Times rashly raised the stakes by making this private lie public, it would have been extremely difficult for any young student to come clean right away when his apparently harmless private peccadillo suddenly threatened to compromise the public reputations of his favorite professors. Explain and admit to your readers over and over that, although it was a private wrong for the student to lie to his professors, it was a much worse public wrong for the Standard-Times to rely on a second-hand story that made that private lie into public humiliation. Retract and apologize profusely for your editorial heaping blame on the student, when the vast bulk of the blame belongs to the Standard-Times for blowing this private lie completely out of proportion. Remind yourselves and your readers over and over again that although the student had lied privately to his professors, he didn't lie to the Standard-Times until after the Standard-Times had already published this false story. Remind your readers that the Standard-Times never published a single word that was based on a lie the student told directly to the Standard-Times, and that it was therefore terribly wrong for the Standard-Times for try to blame lies, to which it was not a party, for its own sloppy reporting.

Third, publish the student's name. But before you do so, explain to him that, although his private lie deserves private blame, the Standard-Times will acknowledge that its own sloppy reporting--by exploding a private lie into a public matter--placed him into what for almost any young person would be an untenable position. Explain to him that you must now publish his name because one journalistic sin cannot serve as the justification for a second journalistic sin. And give the student another chance to make a fuller public statement, in a separate piece to be published prominently on your editorial page, concurrent with the publication of his name. (And this time, have your editors clean up his grammar, spelling, and diction so he won't look like an idiot.) If you approach this student honestly, if you explain to him that you will now deal with him fairly, I believe that he will agree to have his name disclosed.

There's an honorable and honest path open to you if you have the guts to take it.

Or alternatively you can dig yourselves deeper into your dark and silent corner and hope to weather the storm. But (God bless the internet!) some blogger (maybe me) will soon come up with this student's name and will disclose it. Several of us are working on it already, and it is just a matter of time. No, my site traffic is not on the scale of Instapundit or Kos, but I suspect that if I come up with this student's name before you disclose it, Instapundit and Kos and dozens of other bloggers large and small (and perhaps a few MSM outlets) will link to my post. When that day arrives, you can rest assured that I will be fairer to this student than you have been thus far. Indeed, on further contemplation, I have come to realize that my recent blog post was far too hard on the student and much too soft on the Standard-Times editors and reporter, who to my mind were and remain the real culprits here. So now I can assure you that if the Standard-Times doesn't come clean, if and when I get this student's name, I will use that occasion to give the Standard-Times the public blistering it will by then most richly deserve.

Respectfully,

Bathus

If you have information that might lead to the identity of theUMass Dartmouth Little Red Book hoaxer, email me at bathus@houston.rr.com.

01/05/2006 UPDATE

Standard-Times editor Robert Unger replied to the above email. I wrote him back, and he replied a second time:

From: Robert Unger
To: Bathus
Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2006
Subject: Re: Further Thoughts on the Little Red Hoax

Dear Mr. Jacobs,

Whether or not you decide to publish the name of the student is your business. We made our decision based on what we believed to be right and fair. You disagree, as is your right. You also are free to criticize us in any way you choose.

With best regards,

Bob Unger
Editor, The Standard-Times
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From: Bathus
To: Robert Unger
Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2006
Subject: Re: Further Thoughts on the Little Red Hoax

Dear Mr. Unger,

Thank you for reminding me that I am free to criticize the Standard-Times in any way I choose. We agree about that much.

But with respect to those matters where agreement is less easy to come by, I had hoped that your reply might substantively address at least a few of the points raised in my email.

I believe the Standard-Times has an obligation, not to me, but to its readers, to provide a fuller explanation of its decision to withhold this student's name. Can't you expand further on the reasonings that led you to believe it was "right and fair" to withhold the student's name? One assumes there was a thought process involving a weighing of interests, a consideration of consequences, etc. Or was it just a gut feeling that prompted you to make a promise to the university and the two professors without really thinking things through? If you aren't going to publish the student's name, you should at least explain the reasoning that brought you to that decision. The account you've given so far is simply not persuasive or even plausible, for all the reasons I've pointed out [in my last email].

I am still hoping for a fuller reply.

Respectfully,

Bathus
¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤
From: Robert Unger
To: Bathus
Date: Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Subject: Re: Further Thoughts on the Little Red Hoax

Hello, Mr. Jacobs,

I didn't mean to blow you off in any way, and I hope you'll forgive me if that's how it sounded. It's just that I have heard from a lot of non-readers (mostly bloggers, talk radio hosts and people with strong pro- and anti-Bush perspectives all wanting to talk about this case) and I do have a fulltime job here that keeps me plenty busy. My two reasons for not ID'ing the student truly was as I said.

The two professors we quoted [Pontbriand and Williams] both were facing possible disciplinary action because they divulged to our reporter private information about a particular student. In that it was our reporter [Aaron Nicodemus] seeking comment from them on the Times story about the eavesdropping on U.S. citizens, which we do from time to time in seeking reaction to significant national or international events, we believed that they would pay an unfairly heavy price for talking to us.

In addition, it was our belief (along with our other sources) that the student who told this tale -- which as I said we should not have reported without evaluating his story directly ourselves -- was emotionally unstable and we feared for him. We believed that revealing his name, therefore, was likely to do more harm than good. At no point did we promise anyone -- either the student or the university -- that we would not name him; we made that determination ourselves after long discussion. I believe it was the right thing to do. I hope that answers your questions, and I respectfully acknowledge that you disagree with that decision.

With best regards,
Bob Unger

I do appreciate Unger's willingness to respond to a highly critical email from an obscure blogger. His second email--by abandoning the dismissive tone of his first email--represents at least a stylistic improvement. However, inasmuch as neither of Unger's replies succeeds in meeting the points I had raised in my long and detailed email, there's nothing to be gained by my rehashing arguments to which he has failed to respond. Without doing much to address my points, Unger's reply does create new questions and new contradictions:

1. To support the rationale that the Standard-Times withheld the student's name to protect the professors' careers, Unger writes:

The two professors we quoted both were facing possible disciplinary action because they divulged to our reporter private information about a particular student. In that it was our reporter seeking comment from them on the Times story . . . , we believed that they would pay an unfairly heavy price for talking to us.[emphasis added]

So far as I know, there had not been--until now--any public allegation that the professors had improperly divulged private information about the as-yet anonymous student. While I have no idea under what circumstances a professor's disclosure of such information would violate UMass Dartmouth policies, and while I have no knowledge about precisely what private information the professors disclosed, it seems to me that, with his startling admission that the professors had "divulged to our reporter private information about a particular student," Unger has provided evidence that now substantially increases the risk that the professors could be subjected to discipline by their university.

So much for the Standard-Times' concern about protecting the professors' careers!

And there's a larger point here. For reasons that I discussed in my long email above, the Standard-Times' concern about the professors' careers is misplaced. Instead of sending me an email disclosing potentially damaging facts about acts these professors might have committed in furtherance of the hoax, the fact that these professors, possibly wrongfully, disclosed private information about their student should have been published several days ago in the pages of the Standard-Times. That fact, along with the identity of the student hoaxer, is necessary for the public to evaluate exactly how and why it came to be that, at a crucial moment in a vitally important public debate, the Standard-Times published a false story that corrupted the debate.

2. If indeed the professors are candidates for university discipline, either for divulging a student's private information to a reporter or for some other act, it is not clear to me that by withholding the name of the student, the Standard-Times thereby reduces the professors' risk of being disciplined. If the UMass Dartmouth disciplinary system is administered fairly, the professors liability for academic discipline will depend solely upon the acts the professors themselves committed, not upon acts committed by a third party. If the professors violated university policy by divulging a student's private information to a reporter, the act deserving discipline was complete the moment the information was passed to the reporter. Whether or not the reporter then further disseminates the information is irrelevant to the question of the wrongfulness of the professors' disclosure. If the professors were wrong to disclose a student's private information to a reporter, that act does not become less wrong because the reporter chose not to publish the information.

3. In my original email to Runger I had speculated that perhaps the Standard-Times had bound itself to silence by rashly promising either the student, the professors, or the university not to disclose the hoaxer's name. In his second email to me Unger contends that, "At no point did we promise anyone--either the student or the university-- that we would not name him; we made that determination ourselves after long discussion." However, in his follow-up article reporting that the student's tale was a hoax, Standard-Times reporter Nicodemus wrote, "At the request of the two professors and the university, The Standard-Times has agreed to withhold his name." Does The Standard-Times' agreement, made at the request of the university and the professors, constitute a promise? Other lawyers can split hairs over that one, but from a common sense perspective--and probably from the perspective of an expert in journalism ethics--it sure looks an awful lot like a promise to me. If so, it was a promise rashly given, a promise prompted, as I have already suggested, not by an evaluation of journalistic duty, but by a sense of guilt.

And so one journalistic sin leads to another and another and another.

It's time for the Standard-Times to come clean.

Help Me Identify This Sniveling Lying Coward

2005-12-30T01:59:00.000-06:00

[01/04/2006 Note by Bathus: After I had already written and posted the following item, and after thinking things over for a couple of more days, I came to the conclusion that I was a little too tough on the anonymous UMass Dartmouth student, and way too easy on the the New Bedford Standard-Times. In a more recent post, I explain why the kid deserves less blame and the newspaper deserves more blame.]

Can You Identify This Man?

1. He's a senior at UMass Dartmouth, majoring in history.

2. He's 21 or 22 years old.

3. His family resides in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

4. He has a twin brother who is a student at UMass Amherst.

5. He has an uncle who lives in Puerto Rico.

6. In Autumn 2005 at UMass Dartmouth, he was enrolled in Prof. Robert Pontbriand's course on fascism and communism.

The young man who fits the above profile is a liar and coward, and he deserves to be identified by name.

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

So what's this all about?

Surely by now you've heard the bewitching tale, originally reported by Aaron Nicodemus of the New Bedford Standard-Times, about the poor UMass Dartmouth student who claimed he had been interrogated by Department of Homeland Security agents. The student's tale, which Nicodemus swallowed hook, line, and sinker, included the inflammatory claim that those government agents warned him he had been placed on a "watch list" because he had submitted an Inter-Library Loan request to check out Mao's Little Red Book.

One can evaluate the direction of Nicodemus' bias in this comment he wrote when his reportage quickly came under withering scrutiny:

[M]y story, published in The Standard-Times on Saturday, Dec. 17, is real and is factual to the extent I reported. I am trying to convince the student to come forward, and for the university library loan system to come clean about its involvement, and of course, for the Department of Homeland Security to admit it visited the student.

So you might wonder exactly how far into Nicodemus' original story one can read before encountering reporting that is not real and factual? The answer is, one line, the very first line in which Nicodemus really and factually reported falsely that, "A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's tome on Communism called The Little Red Book." Manfully ignoring the many paths to enlightenment that honest bloggers were pointing out to him, Nicodemus still saw nothing dubious about the student's tale. His journalistic duty, as he understood it, was not to scrutinize more carefully an uncorroborated second-hand anonymous source. No, Nicodemus' highest journalistic duty, as he saw it, was "to convince . . . the Department of Homeland Security to admit it visited the student," a factoid Nicodemus accepted as an established truth, in the glaring light of which his job was merely to obtain a full confession from the relevant authorities.

Once the bogus story had hit the internet, every variety of radical leftist America-hater (from Ivins to Kos to Carville, with Ted Kennedy being the most notable example) immediately threw gas on the fire and set about fanning the flames. This was, they gleefully announced, precisely the sort of abuse we would all regularly suffer if Bush got his way with the Patriot Act, which was at that moment a subject of heated debate. (Just google "patriot act" umass mao to get a sense of how the often the left repeated this flimsy story to gin up opposition to the Partriot Act. This was not a harmless hoax.)

But at the same time, bloggers (mostly on the right, but including a few on the left) began drowning the radical leftists' fantasy in well targeted jets of ice cold water. Within a week the reporter who "broke" the strange story admitted the kid's claim was entirely false.

As noted above, one of the more obvious of the many problems with the story was that Nicodemus first put the tale into print based entirely on information received second hand from a single uncorroborated anonymous source with whom the reporter had not yet had any direct contact:

Although The Standard-Times knows the name of the student, he is not coming forward because he fears repercussions should his name become public. He has not spoken to The Standard-Times.

Okay, even if Nicodemus didn't bother speaking directly with his single anonymous source, there was a tiny shred of corroboration: the opinions of two of the student's professors who--though they themselves had no personal knowledge of any of the actual events comprising the substance of the student's tale--were nonetheless eager to stake their own reputations on the student's truthfulness. (For that misjudgment, they might yet be called upon to pay a more concrete penalty beyond the damage done to their reputations.)[UDATE: The Standard-Times has now issued a statement conceding that the newspaper never should have published the story without first making direct contact with the uncorroborated second-hand source: "We -- reporter and editors -- failed here because we put our faith in what two college professors told us. We should have held off publishing the story until we had a chance to judge the student's credibility for ourselves."]

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

In a post titled The Homeland Security agent ate my paper!, blogger Academic Elephant at Elephants in Academia explores the comic possibility that the student-hoaxer was motivated by that familiar necessity of coming up with a story juicy enough to convince a prof to give you more time to finish that paper you've been putting off starting all semester:

[I]t was a surefire way to get out of writing Professor Pontbriand's odious paper, which, I assume was due in a few days, or might have already been overdue, because the Homeland Security agents took the book with them. The student knew his audience from the content of the class, and was confident that his professors would lap up this story and let him out of his responsibilities--and almost certainly give him an A as a badge of honor. If this is the case I must applaud the student's deviant verve, because "The Homeland Security Department took my book" is an excuse I have not yet heard--and I've heard a lot. Give him an E for effort but an F for the course, put him on academic probation and be done with it.

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

I have a different hypothesis about how this lie was born, grew, and evolved.

But first a legal disclaimer:

My speculation, I admit, is exactly that--speculation and nothing more. (But hey, what's sauce for the goose!). My speculation is not grounded in fact and should not be understood as fact. My speculation does not even rise to level of an opinion. It's less than an opinion. My speculation is meant to be a sort intellectual exercise, an almost worthless mental gymnastic with which we must maintain ourselves until either the good professor Williams, UMass Dartmouth, the MSM, some industrious blogger, or perhaps even the cowardly lying student himself favors us with the actual confirmable facts about how this lie originated, including the identity of the person who first dreamed it up.

So, with that disclaimer out of the way, I offer my idle speculation, which is:

The anonymous student originated purely as a figment of the imagination of the good professor Brian Glyn Williams.

And here's how I speculate that things might have snowballed out of control for the good professor Williams:

A reporter from the local press phones an undeservedly obscure, courageously ambitious, mildly charismatic academician, one Associate Professor Brian Glyn Williams at UMass Dartmouth, to obtain an utterly predictable comment to fill out a piece of fluff the reporter is putting together on the evile evils of the evile Bush junta spying on wholesome God-fearing ordinary citizenry. Intoxicated by the prospect of a little press attention, the prof embellishes his comment with some harmless BS anecdote. The prof claims he heard tell of a student who recently had been investigated by DHS agents for trying to get a copy of Mao's Little Read Book. (Pun intended!) Much to the prof's surprise, the lefty reporter gobbles up that mini-bolus of harmless BS and promptly poops out a story glorifying the poor student's plight.

The story immediately burns up the internet.

All this attention comes as quite a shock to the prof, who had no idea that his harmless little mini-bolus of an anecdote would generate such a shit storm. At first he's basking in his cheaply-won celebrity, as he smugly taps out emails like this one to his well-wishers in the academic left:

I am delighted to hear that librarians are aware of this outrage. I was wondering if you could possibly give me a link to the site that displayed the story. All is well here in Boston, the story has caused a surge of interest in academic freedoms and I have been inundated with emails from people urging me to teach my class [the class the poor victimized professor had been quoted as saying he was now afraid to teach].

But then things start to get way out of hand. Reporters start calling the good prof from all over the country, and now they want some kind of corroboration. Yikes! To save his reputation, the good prof has to come up with a real live flesh and blood student to present to the press.

Not to worry. That might have been a serious problem if the prof and the university and the entire MSN hadn't made protecting the sacred anonymity of this hoaxer their highest value. But with a promise of anonymity (and maybe some extra credit points), the prof can easily find a student willing to play out the role conjured in prof's imagination. So the cooperative student spends a few minutes rehearsing his story with the good professor, and then spends a few more minutes on the phone chatting with intrepid reporters, and then a few more minutes in the dean's office elaborating his tale. Of course, eventually the story had to fall apart, but in the process the good prof manages to anoint himself a self-sacrificing hero for single-handedly conducting the investigation that unearths "the real truth": "My investigation eventually took me to his house, where I began to investigate family matters. I eventually found out the whole thing had been invented, and I'm happy to report that it's safe to borrow books." Great work, professor. We all share deeply in your relief.

After the tale was fully debunked, the prof laments sadly, "I feel as if I was lied to."

Uh, excuse me prof, whadaya mean you "feel as if" you were lied to? If this student really exists, there can be no "feeling" about it. You were lied to, plain and simple. But if the student was a figment of your imagination, then I suppose conjuring up a "feeling" is about the best you could be expected to do. In the good prof's inability to state flatly that he was lied to, I detect the sort of mental slippage that arises from the subconscious pang experienced by all but the most accomplished fabricators.

And in another email to a colleague that was posted to an ALA list serve shortly after the story broke-- when the story was coming under fire, but before it was fully debunked--the good prof Williams wrote:

I know this student well. He is the real thing, he is mature, honest, reliable, hard-working and genuinely interested in getting to the truth on issues, i.e. he is everything we train our students to be. The fact that Dr. Bob Pontbriand who is by the way a passionate educator who seeks to instill just this sort of above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty research in his students also vouches for him lends two voices to his defense. I sincerely hope that your questions are meant to be the sort of critical inquiry we expect from our students and not some reflexive attempt to de-legitimize our reporting of what it is frankly a rather disturbing act of surveillance . . .

Let's look more closely at the above email that the good professor Williams wrote to defend his student's claim against his fellow academicians' skeptical inquiries.

This student, so the good prof Williams claimed at the time, was "the real thing . . . mature, honest, reliable, hard-working . . . everything we train our students to be." That over-the-top praise instantly sets off the BS detector. Without intending disrespect toward undergrads (whom I sincerely consider the most delightful, but hardly the most honest, creatures God ever invented) and based on my experience loitering around college campuses for the better part of the last twenty-five years, I would estimate that the prof's assessment of the hoaxer's character can be applied accurately to approximately zero out of every forty zillion undergrads. And the prof's perfect student was certainly no exception. When all was said and done, the putatively perfect student summed up his experience with these lucid lines:

When I came back, like wow, there's this circus coming on. I saw my cell phone, and I see like, wow, I have something like 75 messages and like something like 87 missed calls. Wow, I was popular.

Like wow, like something like wow. Thus spake Professor Williams' ideal student?

So pardon me for my confusion, Professor Williams, but how can you expect anyone to believe that you yourself honestly believed that Mr. Like Wow Anonymous could be the same student you had previously claimed was "everything we train our students to be"? Something just doesn't add up. Not even a college professor could so thoroughly misjudge the character, not to mention the scholarly inclinations, of a student he claimed to know well. When Mr. Honest Mature Reliable of your fantasy turned out to be Mr. Like Wow I'm Popular Anonymous, it left me with a suspicion that the perfect student you had described (whom no decent prof could disbelieve) really was too good to be true--too perfect to be anything more than a character playing a part in a good professor's fantasy university, where perfect students of undeservedly obscure professors are hounded by black-suited government agents.

And that was all fine until the fantasy got mixed up with reality.

Interestingly, just as Professor Williams over-hyped the character of his fantasy student, he also seems to have vastly oversold the endorsement he claimed his colleague, Robert Pontriband, had offered on that student's behalf. Williams claimed that Pontbriand "also vouches" for the student. But Pontriband himself now contends that he "merely confirmed that the student in his seminar on totalitarianism had asserted that he had been visited by federal agents." (Whether the student made that claim to Pontbriand before or after Williams had already reported it to Nicodemus remains unclear.)

Note also the way the good prof's email slyly assaulted the integrity of an academic colleague who had the balls to question the story: "I sincerely hope" wrote the good professor Williams, "that your questions are . . . not some reflexive attempt to de-legitimize our reporting of what it is frankly a rather disturbing act of surveillance." That aggressive-defensive posture, of the sort one often hears from liars who try to shame their critics into silence, coming from a man who is supposedly dedicated to the relentless pursuit of truth, strongly suggests to me that the good prof himself might have something to hide. Again I repeat, this is all idle speculation, which I wish the professor would lay to rest by telling us the name of the student who got him sucked into this lie.

In any case, and this is my main point, this student, if he exists, needs to be outed forthwith.

If this student were anything more than a lying crybaby of a coward without a scrap of integrity (he reportedly "broke down and cried" when he could no longer sustain his lie), he would have come forward voluntarily to admit and openly apologize for what he has done.

His hoax corrupted the public debate on extension of the Patriot Act at the critical moment when the rational resolution of that debate was a matter of the utmost national concern.

There are lessons to be learned here. And for the lessons to work the way they should, a name and a face needs to be put to this lie. This story is not wrapped up until this liar is outed for all the world to see.

The MSM won't do it, and you know why, just as you know how they'd light up a student who invented a story championing some right-wing dogma. Imagine how bright the floodlights bathing the liar's front lawn had his fantasy story been one that supported a conservative viewpoint! Can the reporters at the Boston Globe, the Standard Times, and other MSM outlets honestly contend that they have an ethical journalistic duty to protect the identity of a source who tried to use them to promulgate what he knew was a bald-faced lie? To the contrary if anonymous sources knew they'd be exposed if they used the media to publish what they knew were blatant falsehoods, those sources would be rather more reliable than they currently are.

So if you'd like to help me help track down this sniveling cowardly liar, so he can bear the shame he deserves and serve as an example to others of his kind, reread the profile at the top of this post. There can't be many students who fit that profile. If, on the other hand, it turns out that there is no UMass Dartmouth student who fits that bill, then one is left to conclude that some good prof made up the entire story from the start. If this student actually does exist (and contrary to what I've speculated above, I do believe the student does exist), and if you know who he might be, send me an email telling me what you know. (I promise you anonymity--unless you lie to me.)

Science and the Meaning of Things

2005-12-04T23:51:00.000-06:00

Material existence carries the meaning of things the way the meaning of a book is carried by the words written on its pages. It's not as if words don't matter in themselves, but one would not mistake the arbitrary shapes of ink pressed on paper for the meaning. Neither should one mistake the words, isolated from each other, for the full meaning. All the words of a book affect each other's meaning. They have to be understood together, as a whole. And the meaning of a book exists in some sense apart from the words which carry that meaning, just as the meaning of things exists in some sense apart from material existence.

The modern scientist's concern with what makes up material existence, his quest to master and to remake it, is akin to a concern with the compounds and processes that go into producing the ink and paper of a book. The modern scientist, with our encouragement, begins his quest to remake the book without bothering to read more than a few words, much less trying to understand the whole story. He never grasps that the ink, the paper, and the isolated words are not the meaning. He believes what is almost the opposite, that one finds the truth about the book of meaning by ripping pages from binding to see what they are made of and how they are held together, and then tearing pages into sentences, and then dissecting sentences into words, and then cutting words into letters, and finally boiling the letters down to ink and pulp. Then he tries to reconstruct some of those pieces in a way that seems more useful or convenient for the purpose of the moment. He does not fail to concoct a more permanent ink and a sturdier paper. Emboldened by that success, he will set about repairing or replacing the imperfections he sees in isolated words and sentences that he believes to be most important, which are the words and sentences he imagines he understands.

When something cannot be explained by his method, the modern scientist tries nonetheless to assign a meaning that accords with his method: "Love," says a scientist, "is at bottom nothing more than a series of electro-chemical reactions." (Most of us still refuse to believe what the scientist says about love. Yet even though we disbelieve him about love--the most important thing in our lives--we stand ready to believe whatever he says about almost everything else.) Whatever cannot be assigned a such a meaning, the scientist dismisses as having no real meaning. Thus, a mediocre scientist will proclaim, "the only truth is scientific truth." A better scientist, knowing the very idea of "scientific truth" to be a contradiction of the basic principle of science, instead proclaims, "There is no truth. There is no meaning. There is no love. There is only the expanse of space, particles of matter, bits of energy, and perhaps some sorts of in-between stuff we've not quite discovered yet, but which amount to much the same thing."

If the modern scientist continues in his own way and with our encouragement, he will eventually manufacture something that looks like the real book, the one with real meaning, which he will have ripped apart to produce what he believes will be a more perfect version, or at least a version that promises to be more amenable to our usual preferences. But the story he writes will be a chaos--a loveless, friendless, soulless chaos--within which no one would wish to live.

Something to Be Ashamed of

2005-11-16T00:25:00.000-06:00

To: The Editorial Board of the Houston Chronicle
From: Bathus
Date: November 15, 2005
Re: Texas Constitutional Amendment Banning Gay Marriage

The Chronicle's editorial board would have us believe that the recently-approved state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage was unnecessary, "mean-spirited," and an "embarrassment":

However satisfying this amendment is to its many supporters, its passage is no victory for Texas. Its presence on the ballot was as unnecessary as it was mean-spirited. Texas law already defines marriage as between a man and a woman, and Texas does not recognize same-sex unions recognized in other states.

* * * *

Not only was there no legal or practical need to elevate current state prohibitions to constitutional writ, but doing so came across as a direct attack on gays and on their struggle for a measure of legal equality. Besides being an embarrassment, the amendment sends the wrong signal to businesses that thrive on intellectual capital and creativity.

Inner city black voters in Harris County, many of whom have long experience with the denial of civil rights, favored the marriage amendment by an even higher majority than the general Harris County voting population. Black discomfort with homosexual marriage is rooted less in conscious discrimination than in religious belief, but support for the amendment brought blacks into incongruous accord with members of the Ku Klux Klan, whose members rallied in Austin in support of Proposition 2.

As to the necessity of the amendment, even though an existing Texas statute already prohibited gay marriage, that state statute could have been superseded by a pronouncement of the state supreme court, exactly as happened last year in Massachusetts. If Massachusetts voters had enacted a similar amendment to that state's constitution, the Massachusetts Supreme Court would not have been able to impose gay marriage by judicial fiat. Therefore, to remove the question of gay marriage permanently from the hands of the Texas judiciary, a state constitutional amendment was indeed necessary.

As to the implication that the three-quarters of Texas voters who approved the amendment are mean-spirited and an embarrassment, does the Chronicle's editorial board believe that gratuitous insults will shame its readers into adopting a more enlightened view?

Does the editorial board believe that black readers will not notice the presumptuous condescension with which the Chronicle's editorial writer (who must have worked hours to find what he thought were just the right words) implies that black voters' disapproval of gay marriage must be (ever-so-gently) excused as a product of "religious belief" rather than "conscious discrimination"? With its insinuation that religious belief is, among blacks, a peculiar cause of unconscious discrimination, the Chronicle's editorial manages to impugn blacks both for possessing inordinately unsophisticated religious beliefs and for lacking ordinary intellectual acuity.

Aghast that such an overwhelming majority of blacks voters has escaped from the white liberal plantation, the editorial finally tries to "Uncle Tom" them back into submission with a rhetorically unimaginative observation that the Ku Klux Klan had also demonstrated in favor of the amendment. The only way the Chronicle's editorial writer could have made that last observation more patently disgusting would be to append to it the equally irrelevant remark that the majority of KKK'ers also enjoys fried chicken and watermelon.

The Chronicle editorial board's insulting and condescending attitude toward Texas voters, particularly black Texas voters, on this and a host of other issues is one of the reasons the paper's daily paid circulation declined last year at a rate twice the national average.

Now there's a real embarrassment.

"I don't give a damn what you think. If it can happen to Janet Jackson, it can happen to anybody."

2005-11-14T07:10:00.000-06:00

Okay, it's in poor taste to poke fun at terrorist bombings, but ... Well, personally, I don't give a flying leap that it's in poor taste. This is funny. I forget who said there's a fine line between comedy and tragedy (I think it was Charles Manson), but the latest nominee for the Darwin Award has got to be 35-year-old Sajida Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi, the Iraqi broad who claims she tried to blow herself up at the Jordan-Raddisson wedding reception last week, but suffered a wardrobe malfunction when the TNT strapped to her Islamic ass "failed to detonate". Her hubby's, however, worked perfectly, and he's now with Mohammed.

May he rest in pieces.

Now, if this were Mr. and Mrs. Mayflower of Levittown, USA who went out on a weekday jaunt planning to off themselves in a joint suicide pact and Mr. Mayflower went through with it, but Mrs. Mayflower walked away, rest assured the authorities would be looking into whether or not Mrs. Mayflower had recently taken out a fat new insurance policy on Mr. Mayflower. They would at least react a little skeptically to Mrs. Mayflower's claim that when she put the .357 Magnum into her mouth and pulled the trigger, it failed to fire.

Al-Rishawi said she and her husband, Ali Hussein Ali al-Shamari (I dunno, maybe it was a common law marriage) strapped on their bomb belts and crashed the Raddisson wedding reception. According to the bereaved widow, "My husband wore a belt and put one on me. He taught me how to use it, how to pull the (primer cord) and operate it ... My husband detonated (his bomb). I tried to explode (my belt) but it wouldn't. I left, people fled running and I left running with them."

(We can imagine the ushers greeting guests at the Mosque entrance at future Islamic weddings: "Allah be praised, groom's family or bride's family? Explosive-laden or non-explosive-laden?")

Anyway, these are Muslim headcases, so the politically correct, terrorist-loving liberal American press covering the story is naturally disinclined to examine whether Mrs. Raghead Terrorist is either ...

1) The Islamic version of Paris Hilton and too stupid to pull a cord correctly, which explains why her husband was so eager to martyr himself for the cause, because maybe those 57 (give or take) virgins in Paradise are a little smarter;

2) Not so dumb after all and saw a perfect opportunity to "divorce" Mr. Raghead Terrorist; or

3) Simply chickened out.

Whichever choice is correct, husband and wife suicidal terrorist tag teams provide yet another reason (as if we needed another one) why the majority of the "Arab Street" are awe-struck by indoor plumbing and stuff, and why it took western Christian know-how to extract the oil that now pays for their Emirs' and Princes' and Grand Wazoos' Mercedes' and BMWs, etc.

Of course, the American press will not examine the idiocy of 1/5th of the world's population reflected in Mr. and Mrs. Ali-Doofus. And, yes, I include the Jordanians in that sweeping generalization about the Religion of Peace. Their "outrage" over last week's attacks doesn't extend beyond their own borders. It's just peachy when Americans, Brits and Spaniards are incinerated, but ruin one of their weddings and that's where they draw the line.

No, the American press will ignore all of this beyond examining just what terrible things the United States did that turned Muslims into morons. We will, however, see and hear numerous condescending stories in the liberal press about red state "fundamentalist" Christian families and their quaint beliefs.

I find that even funnier than Al-Rishawi.

Since It Looks Like We'll Have to Have a Cold War with Iran and North Korea, Let's at Least Give Ourselves a Chance to Win It

2005-11-11T21:05:00.000-06:00

A sadly predictable course of events continues to unfold unabated in the West's attempts to restrain the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea.

In case of the former, the regime's ongoing use of al Qaeda terrorists as active instruments of an aggressive Islamofascist foreign policy is well-documented. When Iran constructs a nuclear device, whether that occurs in two or three years, or ten years (or easily much sooner if Iran is able to smuggle in the fissile material it as yet appears unable to produce on its own), the threat of a hostile regime placing a nuclear weapon in the hands of a fanatical terrorist will have acquired an immediacy against which U.S. policy on nuclear deterrence should be designed to respond well in advance.

Therefore, it must now become the settled policy of the United States that:

In the event of nuclear attack against this nation, its vital interests, or its vital allies,

if each of the progenitors, executors, accomplices, accessories, and abettors of the attack cannot immediately be reasonably ascertained,

the United States shall retaliate without delay, in kind, and with disproportionate and overwhelming force,

against the territories and regimes of North Korea, Iran, and every other hostile government that has possessed, does possess, or has evidenced a volition to possess, nuclear weapons.

If articulated now, such a policy--in addition to fulfilling the absolute necessity to address in advance the apparent eventuality that a state-sponsor of terrorism will soon enough possess nuclear weapons--might also give that regime reason to pause to reconsider the utility of its present course.

Come and Get Me, I Dare Ya

2005-11-02T21:07:00.000-06:00

When it comes to restricting free expression of political views on the internet, the United States House of Representatives and the tyrants of communist China now officially see eye to eye.

In the Peoples Republic of China:

authorities have introduced scores of regulations, closed Internet cafes, blocked e-mails, search engines, foreign news and politically-sensitive websites, and have recently introduced a filtering system for web searches on a list of prohibited key words and terms.

Those violating the laws and regulations which aim to restrict free expression of opinion and circulation of information through the Internet may face imprisonment and according to recent regulations some could even be sentenced to death.

For the US version of similarly obscene restrictions on your fundamental right of free political expression, you can thank the so-called reforms of McCain-Feingold, which limited what kind of opinions can be expressed about federal election candidates, and who can express them, within 30 days of a primary and 60 days of a general election.

And as of today you can thank the United States House of Representatives for eliminating any doubt about the power of the Federal Election Commission under McCain-Feingold to shut down your blog, fine you, and seek to have to jailed.

But you think McCain-Feingold restrictions on free speech can't possibly apply to your modest little blog?

Think again.

Before McCain-Feingold was passed, the ACLU (which for once is on the right side of an issue) warned that:

individual citizens who want to join together to engage in [issue] advocacy would be subjected to new and burdensome registration and reporting requirements under McCain-Feingold. And for citizen groups whose message is particularly controversial, such disclosure requirements are tantamount to placing a gag around their mouths and silencing them.

In other words, you and your pals on your little team blog that focuses on saving the wetlands or preserving Second Amendment rights are now exposed to FEC regulation, hefty FEC fines, and jail time if you and your fellow bloggers have the balls to join together online to express opinions about a particular federal candidate's position on your pet issue within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of general election. Even if you are so cowardly as to submit to McCain-Feingold's pre-election blackout on free speech, Hercules scissors won't be powerful enough to cut through the red of tape of reporting forms you'll be legally required to file if you are so bold as to use a paypal button to raise a little cash to support your blogging. And heaven help you if take it one more step and use your blog the way God intended to join with like-minded bloggers to support or oppose a particular issue or candidate: You will have then engaged in "coordinated activity," which is conduct subject to severe restrictions under McCain-Feingold, according to U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly who apparently is thoroughly unimpressed by your First Amendment rights to free association and free speech.

That's right. Just as the ACLU warned, McCain-Feingold gave the FEC the power to regulate what you say about politicians and political issues on your blog, what you link to (especially around election time), and ultimately the power to shut down your blog altogether and have you tossed in jail if you resist.

Today the United States House of Representatives, by failing to exempt internet communications from the reach of McCain-Feingold, effectively confirmed that the FEC does indeed possess all that power and now has a green light to wield it against bloggers, big and small:

House Defeats Bill on Political Blogs
Thursday November 3, 2005 1:31 AM
By JIM ABRAMS
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Online political expression should not be exempt from campaign finance law, the House decided Wednesday as lawmakers warned that the Internet has opened up a new loophole for uncontrolled spending on elections.

The House voted 225-182 for a bill that would have excluded blogs, e-mails and other Internet communications from regulation by the Federal Election Commission. That was 47 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed under a procedure that limited debate time and allowed no amendments.

The vote in effect clears the way for the FEC to move ahead with court-mandated rule-making to govern political speech and campaign spending on the Internet.

Opposition [to the bill to exempt the internet from campaign finance restrictions] was led by Rep. Marty Meehan, D-Mass., who with Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., championed the 2002 campaign finance law that banned unlimited "soft money" contributions that corporations, unions and individuals were making to political parties.

"This is a major unraveling of the law," Meehan said. At a time when Washington is again being tainted by scandal, including the CIA leak case, "[exempting the internet from campaign finance restrictions] opens up new avenues for corruption to enter the political process."

The bill's sponsor, Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, said the federal government should encourage, rather than fetter, a phenomenon that was bringing more Americans into the political process.

"The newest battlefield in the fight to protect the First Amendment is the Internet,'' he said. "The Internet is the new town square, and campaign finance regulations are not appropriate there."

Without his legislation, Hensarling said, "I fear that bloggers one day could be fined for improperly linking to a campaign Web site, or merely forwarding a candidate's press release to an e-mail list."

Bloggers from liberal and conservative perspectives made similar predictions at a hearing on the subject in September. "Rather than deal with the red tape of regulation and the risk of legal problems, they will fall silent on all issues of politics," said Michael J. Krempasky, director of the Web site RedState.org.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., writing Wednesday on a blog he recently started, said the bill "is about all the folks out in the blogosphere. It's going to protect what you say. It keeps the hand of the federal government out of Internet speech."

But Meehan said no one wants to regulate bloggers. He said he and Shays have an alternative that would protect the free speech rights of bloggers while closing the cyberspace loophole where a lawmaker could vote for a prescription drug bill and then ask pharmaceutical interests to write six-figure checks for campaign ads for them to run on the Internet.

FEC commissioner Scott E. Thomas said at the September hearing that some $14 million was spent on Internet ads in the 2004 campaign.

A federal court last year, amid the escalation of political activity on the Internet, instructed the FEC to draw up regulations that would extend federal campaign finance and spending limits to the Web.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada has introduced a companion bill to the Hensarling measure, but the Senate has yet to take it up.

In accord with a long American tradition, and in accord with a somewhat more recent but no less impressive blogging tradition, I have just one thing to say to the United States House of Representatives, to the FEC, and most especially to George W. Bush for signing McCain-Feingold into law, after he admitted it was unconstitutional and promised to veto it:
SCREW
THE
LOT
OF
YOU!

Some other lawyers can worry themselves with sophistical niceties of the constitutional limits on FEC's regulatory powers over political speech. For me, the rule I follow in expressing my views about political matters on this blog is simple, just like the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law . . . . abridging the freedom of speech . . . or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.

And that applies to speech on the internet and to "peaceably assembling" with my fellow bloggers on the internet.

So here's my rule and my pledge: On this blog, when it comes to political matters, I say whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want, about whoever I want, to whoever I want. I will do all my free speaking and free assembling peaceably, so long as the government leaves me alone. But I will never, ever, so long as I draw breath, register this blog with the FEC or any other government entity. I will never, ever, so long as I draw breath, submit this blog to any legislation or government regulation that purports to place any limit whatsoever on my right peaceably to express my political views. It's that simple.

And if you folks at the FEC don't like it, you can come and get me.

Just try. I dare ya.

There's a Reason Why I'm Not Talking About It

2005-10-18T23:04:00.000-05:00

With regard to my silence about . . .

(1) Harriet Miers

(2) recent developments in Iraq,

take your pick:

A. Somebody else has already said whatever needs to be said better, or at least sooner, than I ever could.

B. You'll have to figure it out on your own, because I'm just too dern busy with non-blog life to help you out on this one--besides which, things ought to be clear enough to anyone who's paying the slightest attention.

C. I'm ambivalent about it.

D. I'm holding my fire until I see the whites of their eyes.

E. Things are going well enough without me adding my two cents.

F. I'm waiting for additional evidence, which will be forthcoming shortly and should dispel any lingering confusion.

G. I've run out of mixed metaphors and worn out clichés, and I just can't write without them.

H. I haven't thought about it enough to offer a decent opinion.

I. It's too depressing to talk about it.

J. It's too depressing even to think about it.

If Katherine Harris did screw with the ballots, she deserves the Medal of Freedom

2005-10-07T07:09:00.000-05:00

It would take a book-length screed to address every idiocy, contradiction, and out and out lie uttered in Al Gore's recent speech at Bellevue Hospital, or wherever it is people who think Gore has something meaningful to say congregate nowadays. Gore knows this, which is why his brain farts go on and on. If you agree with the following assumptions from his latest debacle regarding what little time we dumb Americans have to stay informed...

... eight hours of work a day, six to eight hours of sleep and a couple of hours to bathe, dress, eat and commute, that is almost three-quarters of all the discretionary time that the average American has...
...then you must also agree no one has the time to read, let alone tear apart, what Al Gore [ahem] thinks. There are so many more relevant things consuming our discretionary time.

Ignore the redundancy of listening to an Al Gore speech and sleeping, and ask yourself just what in the hell exactly is this "discretionary time" in the context of that sentence? Is good old Al drawing on the concept of "discretionary income" - i.e., we what we have left over to spend on On Demand porno movies and other entertainment after Al's nanny state steals 40% of our income in taxes and we take care of the rest of our living expenses - and applying it to time we have left over after satisfying the other demands of life? That can't be. As a matter of fact, according to this whack job, three quarters of our "discretionary time" is taken up by the necessities, so it can't be what's "left over", as is meant by "discretionary income".

And three quarters of what you ask? Twenty-four hours? Or our entire lives on this earth, which can't really be measured, because unless we're seriously contemplating suicide (and we could be after reading his speech), when our lives will end is pretty much an unknown?

We have to assume that, according to Al, we have twenty-four hours of discretionary time each day, three quarters of which we devote to the crap he rattles off. And since this time is "discretionary", that means we have a choice how to use it. So, according to good old Al, we choose to devote three-quarters of our discretionary time per day to such optional pursuits as work, sleep, eating, etc.

Just think, we could be like three fourths of Democrats and not work, just sleep and eat on the public dole, maybe bathe, but then the chicks at the anti-Bush rallies won't sleep with us, and spend the rest of the time keeping informed of which Democrats we're supposed to vote for in any given election.

Al also notices a strange coincidence: The percentage of Americans' discretionary time taken up by working, sleeping, breaking wind, etc. just happens to correlate with the percentage of Americans who are "misinformed" by today's media. (Okay, he doesn't explicitly state the coincidence, because I don't think he sees the coincidence, because he's an idiot, but it's there.)

I thought maybe it was an aberration when three-quarters of Americans said they believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11, 2001. [Emphasis added.]
Anyone who feels like it can, just for shits and giggles, search for the specific poll or whatever that supports the statistic he recites in that paragraph. Of course, why wouldn't he believe that "three quarters of Americans" believe Hussein was responsible for 9-11 because that's what "right-wing" media told them? He believes that more than half of living, legally eligible and registered voters elected him in 2000 because that's what liberal media told him. He'll believe anything.

Be that as it may, somewhere along the line, stupid Americans became better informed - probably when Air America started broadcasting, because

... more than four years later, between a third and a half still believe Saddam was personally responsible for planning and supporting the attack.

Well, if you don't source your original statistic, it's a lot easier to demonstrate a variation by pulling another statistic out of your ass. Having an audience of drooling morons you know won't question your nonsense helps.

If you've got a few discretionary minutes to piss away, read the reprint below of the text of his remarks at the day care center, or if you don't trust that I copied this thing verbatim, follow the link. Gore takes an inordinate amount of precious time and more precious oxygen stating the simple-minded belief we already know he and his fellow travelers in the Democratic party hold dear: Our mass media, particularly the internet that Al Gore invented, were born pure of heart, but bred the incubi of Fox News, conservative talk radio, conservative web logs, that in turn developed into demons out to devour democracy. Oh, and if you need a date when American media became corrupt, it was somewhere around, oh, say ... January of 2001.

Anyway, in the Gospel according to Gore, citizens having 500 cable channels, a world wide web, and thousands upon thousands of information/news sources to choose from borders on fascism, but when the New York Times, Washington Post, and only three networks controlled the flow of information, the idyllic public discourse envisioned by our founding fathers was better served.

As you read, never lose sight of the fact that Gore's well-deserved defeat in 2000, aside from serving as conclusive proof not only of God's existence, but of his mercy and compassion, is the whining subtext of every non-thought he's subsequently uttered.

I guarantee that by the end of his rambling diatribe, in which effusive praise for the moral authority of an ex-Klansman and the media analysis of the "brilliant" Jon Stewart is only surpassed by a gallant attempt to convince us he's read, let alone understood, the "philosophy" of Jurgen Habermas, you will realize that if conclusive proof of a vast right wing Republican conspiracy to disenfranchise voters in Florida in 2000 were revealed tomorrow, you wouldn't give one turd. As a matter of fact, you'd up your annual contribution to the GOP in gratitude for saving us from this kook.

And, okay, I know the myth of disenfranchised semi- or totally senile Florida retirees and semi- or totally illiterate other Florida Democrats has been debunked numerous times by greater minds than this humble blogger's. Just bear with me while I express one last brief message of comfort to all those Floridian Democrats who still believe the ash-canning of their mismarked ballots infringed their right to vote:

Your right to vote was upheld. YOUR NON-VOTE WAS IGNORED, DOOFUSES. Flushing your unreadable ballot no more infringes your right to vote than ignoring a person speaking gibberish - Al Gore, for instance - infringes his right to free speech.

Got that? Good.

Now for the fun part, yet another attempt by Algore to duck an unpleasant reality: The majority of Americans, devastated by the attacks of September 11, 2001, breathed a collective sigh of relief on September 12, 2001, and thanked God Florida Democrats can't read.

I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse . I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America's fabled "marketplace of ideas" now functions.

How many of you, I wonder, have heard a friend or a family member in the last few years remark that it's almost as if America has entered "an alternate universe"?

I thought maybe it was an aberration when three-quarters of Americans said they believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11, 2001. But more than four years later, between a third and a half still believe Saddam was personally responsible for planning and supporting the attack.

At first I thought the exhaustive, non-stop coverage of the O.J. trial was just an unfortunate excess that marked an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. But now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time.

Are we still routinely torturing helpless prisoners, and if so, does it feel right that we as American citizens are not outraged by the practice? And does it feel right to have no ongoing discussion of whether or not this abhorrent, medieval behavior is being carried out in the name of the American people? If the gap between rich and poor is widening steadily and economic stress is mounting for low-income families, why do we seem increasingly apathetic and lethargic in our role as citizens?

On the eve of the nation's decision to invade Iraq, our longest serving senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor asked: "Why is this chamber empty? Why are these halls silent?"

The decision that was then being considered by the Senate with virtually no meaningful debate turned out to be a fateful one. A few days ago, the former head of the National Security Agency, Retired Lt. General William Odom, said, "The invasion of Iraq, I believe, will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history."

But whether you agree with his assessment or not, Senator Byrd's question is like the others that I have just posed here: he was saying, in effect, this is strange, isn't it? Aren't we supposed to have full and vigorous debates about questions as important as the choice between war and peace?

Those of us who have served in the Senate and watched it change over time, could volunteer an answer to Senator Byrd's two questions: the Senate was silent on the eve of war because Senators don't feel that what they say on the floor of the Senate really matters that much any more. And the chamber was empty because the Senators were somewhere else: they were in fundraisers collecting money from special interests in order to buy 30-second TVcommercials for their next re-election campaign.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there was - at least for a short time - a quality of vividness and clarity of focus in our public discourse that reminded some Americans - including some journalists - that vividness and clarity used to be more common in the way we talk with one another about the problems and choices that we face. But then, like a passing summer storm, the moment faded.

In fact there was a time when America's public discourse was consistently much more vivid, focused and clear. Our Founders, probably the most literate generation in all of history, used words with astonishing precision and believed in the Rule of Reason.

Their faith in the viability of Representative Democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry. But they placed particular emphasis on insuring that the public could be well- informed. And they took great care to protect the openness of the marketplace of ideas in order to ensure the free-flow of knowledge.

The values that Americans had brought from Europe to the New World had grown out of the sudden explosion of literacy and knowledge after Gutenberg's disruptive invention broke up the stagnant medieval information monopoly and triggered the Reformation, Humanism, and the Enlightenment and enshrined a new sovereign: the "Rule of Reason."

Indeed, the self-governing republic they had the audacity to establish was later named by the historian Henry Steele Commager as "the Empire of Reason."

Our founders knew all about the Roman Forum and the Agora in ancient Athens. They also understood quite well that in America, our public forum would be an ongoing conversation about democracy in which individual citizens would participate not only by speaking directly in the presence of others -- but more commonly by communicating with their fellow citizens over great distances by means of the printed word. Thus they not only protected Freedom of Assembly as a basic right, they made a special point - in the First Amendment - of protecting the freedom of the printing press.

Their world was dominated by the printed word. Just as the proverbial fish doesn't know it lives in water, the United States in its first half century knew nothing but the world of print: the Bible, Thomas Paine's fiery call to revolution, the Declaration of Independence, our Constitution , our laws, the Congressional Record, newspapers and books.

Though they feared that a government might try to censor the printing press - as King George had done - they could not imagine that America's public discourse would ever consist mainly of something other than words in print.

And yet, as we meet here this morning, more than 40 years have passed since the majority of Americans received their news and information from the printed word. Newspapers are hemorrhaging readers and, for the most part, resisting the temptation to inflate their circulation numbers. Reading itself is in sharp decline, not only in our country but in most of the world. The Republic of Letters has been invaded and occupied by television.

Radio, the internet, movies, telephones, and other media all now vie for our attention - but it is television that still completely dominates the flow of information in modern America. In fact, according to an authoritative global study, Americans now watch television an average of four hours and 28 minutes every day -- 90 minutes more than the world average.

When you assume eight hours of work a day, six to eight hours of sleep and a couple of hours to bathe, dress, eat and commute, that is almost three-quarters of all the discretionary time that the average American has. And for younger Americans, the average is even higher.

The internet is a formidable new medium of communication, but it is important to note that it still doesn't hold a candle to television. Indeed, studies show that the majority of Internet users are actually simultaneously watching television while they are online. There is an important reason why television maintains such a hold on its viewers in a way that the internet does not, but I'll get to that in a few minutes.

Television first overtook newsprint to become the dominant source of information in America in 1963. But for the next two decades, the television networks mimicked the nation's leading newspapers by faithfully following the standards of the journalism profession. Indeed, men like Edward R. Murrow led the profession in raising the bar.

But all the while, television's share of the total audience for news and information continued to grow -- and its lead over newsprint continued to expand. And then one day, a smart young political consultant turned to an older elected official and succinctly described a new reality in America's public discourse: "If it's not on television, it doesn't exist."

But some extremely important elements of American Democracy have been pushed to the sidelines . And the most prominent casualty has been the "marketplace of ideas" that was so beloved and so carefully protected by our Founders. It effectively no longer exists.

It is not that we no longer share ideas with one another about public matters; of course we do. But the "Public Forum" in which our Founders searched for general agreement and applied the Rule of Reason has been grossly distorted and "restructured" beyond all recognition.

And here is my point: it is the destruction of that marketplace of ideas that accounts for the "strangeness" that now continually haunts our efforts to reason together about the choices we must make as a nation.

Whether it is called a Public Forum, or a "Public Sphere" , or a marketplace of ideas, the reality of open and free public discussion and debate was considered central to the operation of our democracy in America's earliest decades.

In fact, our first self-expression as a nation - "We the People" - made it clear where the ultimate source of authority lay. It was universally understood that the ultimate check and balance for American government was its accountability to the people. And the public forum was the place where the people held the government accountable. That is why it was so important that the marketplace of ideas operated independent from and beyond the authority of government.

The three most important characteristics of this marketplace of ideas were:

1) It was open to every individual, with no barriers to entry, save the necessity of literacy. This access, it is crucial to add, applied not only to the receipt of information but also to the ability to contribute information directly into the flow of ideas that was available to all; 2) The fate of ideas contributed by individuals depended, for the most part, on an emergent Meritocracy of Ideas. Those judged by the market to be good rose to the top, regardless of the wealth or class of the individual responsible for them; 3) The accepted rules of discourse presumed that the participants were all governed by an unspoken duty to search for general agreement. That is what a "Conversation of Democracy" is all about.

What resulted from this shared democratic enterprise was a startling new development in human history: for the first time, knowledge regularly mediated between wealth and power.

The liberating force of this new American reality was thrilling to all humankind. Thomas Jefferson declared, "I have sworn upon the alter of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." It ennobled the individual and unleashed the creativity of the human spirit. It inspired people everywhere to dream of what they could yet become. And it emboldened Americans to bravely explore the farther frontiers of freedom - for African Americans, for women, and eventually, we still dream, for all.

And just as knowledge now mediated between wealth and power, self- government was understood to be the instrument with which the people embodied their reasoned judgments into law. The Rule of Reason under- girded and strengthened the rule of law.

But to an extent seldom appreciated, all of this - including especially the ability of the American people to exercise the reasoned collective judgments presumed in our Founders' design -- depended on the particular characteristics of the marketplace of ideas as it operated during the Age of Print.

Consider the rules by which our present "public forum" now operates, and how different they are from the forum our Founders knew. Instead of the easy and free access individuals had to participate in the national conversation by means of the printed word, the world of television makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation today.

Inexpensive metal printing presses were almost everywhere in America. They were easily accessible and operated by printers eager to typeset essays, pamphlets, books or flyers.

Television stations and networks, by contrast, are almost completely inaccessible to individual citizens and almost always uninterested in ideas contributed by individual citizens.

Ironically, television programming is actually more accessible to more people than any source of information has ever been in all of history. But here is the crucial distinction: it is accessible in only one direction; there is no true interactivity, and certainly no conversation.

The number of cables connecting to homes is limited in each community and usually forms a natural monopoly. The broadcast and satellite spectrum is likewise a scarce and limited resource controlled by a few. The production of programming has been centralized and has usually required a massive capital investment. So for these and other reasons, an ever-smaller number of large corporations control virtually all of the television programming in America.

Soon after television established its dominance over print, young people who realized they were being shut out of the dialogue of democracy came up with a new form of expression in an effort to join the national conversation: the "demonstration." This new form of expression, which began in the 1960s, was essentially a poor quality theatrical production designed to capture the attention of the television cameras long enough to hold up a sign with a few printed words to convey, however plaintively, a message to the American people. Even this outlet is now rarely an avenue for expression on national television.

So, unlike the marketplace of ideas that emerged in the wake of the printing press, there is virtually no exchange of ideas at all in television's domain. My partner Joel Hyatt and I are trying to change that - at least where Current TV is concerned. Perhaps not coincidentally, we are the only independently owned news and information network in all of American television.

It is important to note that the absence of a two-way conversation in American television also means that there is no "meritocracy of ideas" on television. To the extent that there is a "marketplace" of any kind for ideas on television, it is a rigged market, an oligopoly, with imposing barriers to entry that exclude the average citizen.

The German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, describes what has happened as "the refeudalization of the public sphere." That may sound like gobbledygook, but it's a phrase that packs a lot of meaning. The feudal system which thrived before the printing press democratized knowledge and made the idea of America thinkable, was a system in which wealth and power were intimately intertwined, and where knowledge played no mediating role whatsoever. The great mass of the people were ignorant. And their powerlessness was born of their ignorance.

It did not come as a surprise that the concentration of control over this powerful one-way medium carries with it the potential for damaging the operations of our democracy. As early as the 1920s, when the predecessor of television, radio, first debuted in the United States, there was immediate apprehension about its potential impact on democracy. One early American student of the medium wrote that if control of radio were concentrated in the hands of a few, "no nation can be free."

As a result of these fears, safeguards were enacted in the U.S. -- including the Public Interest Standard, the Equal Time Provision, and the Fairness Doctrine - though a half century later, in 1987, they were effectively repealed. And then immediately afterwards, Rush Limbaugh and other hate-mongers began to fill the airwaves.

And radio is not the only place where big changes have taken place. Television news has undergone a series of dramatic changes. The movie "Network," which won the Best Picture Oscar in 1976, was presented as a farce but was actually a prophecy. The journalism profession morphed into the news business, which became the media industry and is now completely owned by conglomerates.

The news divisions - which used to be seen as serving a public interest and were subsidized by the rest of the network - are now seen as profit centers designed to generate revenue and, more importantly, to advance the larger agenda of the corporation of which they are a small part. They have fewer reporters, fewer stories, smaller budgets, less travel, fewer bureaus, less independent judgment, more vulnerability to influence by management, and more dependence on government sources and canned public relations hand-outs. This tragedy is compounded by the ironic fact that this generation of journalists is the best trained and most highly skilled in the history of their profession. But they are usually not allowed to do the job they have been trained to do.

The present executive branch has made it a practice to try and control and intimidate news organizations: from PBS to CBS to Newsweek. They placed a former male escort in the White House press pool to pose as a reporter - and then called upon him to give the president a hand at crucial moments. They paid actors to make make phony video press releases and paid cash to some reporters who were willing to take it in return for positive stories. And every day they unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President.

For these and other reasons, The US Press was recently found in a comprehensive international study to be only the 27th freest press in the world. And that too seems strange to me.

Among the other factors damaging our public discourse in the media, the imposition by management of entertainment values on the journalism profession has resulted in scandals, fabricated sources, fictional events and the tabloidization of mainstream news. As recently stated by Dan Rather - who was, of course, forced out of his anchor job after angering the White House - television news has been "dumbed down and tarted up."

The coverage of political campaigns focuses on the "horse race" and little else. And the well-known axiom that guides most local television news is "if it bleeds, it leads." (To which some disheartened journalists add, "If it thinks, it stinks.")

In fact, one of the few things that Red state and Blue state America agree on is that they don't trust the news media anymore.

Clearly, the purpose of television news is no longer to inform the American people or serve the public interest. It is to "glue eyeballs to the screen" in order to build ratings and sell advertising. If you have any doubt, just look at what's on: The Robert Blake trial. The Laci Peterson tragedy. The Michael Jackson trial. The Runaway Bride. The search in Aruba. The latest twist in various celebrity couplings, and on and on and on.

And more importantly, notice what is not on: the global climate crisis, the nation's fiscal catastrophe, the hollowing out of America's industrial base, and a long list of other serious public questions that need to be addressed by the American people.

One morning not long ago, I flipped on one of the news programs in hopes of seeing information about an important world event that had happened earlier that day. But the lead story was about a young man who had been hiccupping for three years. And I must say, it was interesting; he had trouble getting dates. But what I didn't see was news.

This was the point made by Jon Stewart, the brilliant host of "The Daily Show," when he visited CNN's "Crossfire": there should be a distinction between news and entertainment.

And it really matters because the subjugation of news by entertainment seriously harms our democracy: it leads to dysfunctional journalism that fails to inform the people. And when the people are not informed, they cannot hold government accountable when it is incompetent, corrupt, or both.

One of the only avenues left for the expression of public or political ideas on television is through the purchase of advertising, usually in 30-second chunks. These short commercials are now the principal form of communication between candidates and voters. As a result, our elected officials now spend all of their time raising money to purchase these ads.

That is why the House and Senate campaign committees now search for candidates who are multi-millionaires and can buy the ads with their own personal resources. As one consequence, the halls of Congress are now filling up with the wealthy.

Campaign finance reform, however well it is drafted, often misses the main point: so long as the only means of engaging in political dialogue is through purchasing expensive television advertising, money will continue by one means or another to dominate American politic s. And ideas will no longer mediate between wealth and power.

And what if an individual citizen, or a group of citizens wants to enter the public debate by expressing their views on television? Since they cannot simply join the conversation, some of them have resorted to raising money in order to buy 30 seconds in which to express their opinion. But they are not even allowed to do that.

Moveon.org tried to buy ads last year to express opposition to Bush's Medicare proposal which was then being debated by Congress. They were told "issue advocacy" was not permissible. Then, one of the networks that had refused the Moveon ad began running advertisements by the White House in favor of the President's Medicare proposal. So Moveon complained and the White House ad was temporarily removed. By temporary, I mean it was removed until the White House complained and the network immediately put the ad back on, yet still refused to present the Moveon ad.

The advertising of products, of course, is the real purpose of television. And it is difficult to overstate the extent to which modern pervasive electronic advertising has reshaped our society. In the 1950s, John Kenneth Galbraith first described the way in which advertising has altered the classical relationship by which supply and demand are balanced over time by the invisible hand of the marketplace. According to Galbraith, modern advertising campaigns were beginning to create high levels of demand for products that consumers never knew they wanted, much less needed.

The same phenomenon Galbraith noticed in the commercial marketplace is now the dominant fact of life in what used to be America's marketplace for ideas. The inherent value or validity of political propositions put forward by candidates for office is now largely irrelevant compared to the advertising campaigns that shape the perceptions of voters.

Our democracy has been hallowed out. The opinions of the voters are, in effect, purchased, just as demand for new products is artificially created. Decades ago Walter Lippman wrote, "the manufacture of consent...was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy...but it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique...under the impact of propaganda, it is no longer plausible to believe in the original dogma of democracy."

Like you, I recoil at Lippman's cynical dismissal of America's gift to human history. But in order to reclaim our birthright, we Americans must resolve to repair the systemic decay of the public forum and create new ways to engage in a genuine and not manipulative conversation about our future. Americans in both parties should insist on the re-establishment of respect for the Rule of Reason. We must, for example, stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public's ability to discern the truth.

I don't know all the answers, but along with my partner, Joel Hyatt, I am trying to work within the medium of television to recreate a multi- way conversation that includes individuals and operates according to a meritocracy of ideas. If you would like to know more, we are having a press conference on Friday morning at the Regency Hotel.

We are learning some fascinating lessons about the way decisions are made in the television industry, and it may well be that the public would be well served by some changes in law and policy to stimulate more diversity of viewpoints and a higher regard for the public interest. But we are succeeding within the marketplace by reaching out to individuals and asking them to co-create our network.

The greatest source of hope for reestablishing a vigorous and accessible marketplace for ideas is the Internet. Indeed, Current TV relies on video streaming over the Internet as the means by which individuals send us what we call viewer-created content or VC squared. We also rely on the Internet for the two-way conversation that we have every day with our viewers enabling them to participate in the decisions on programming our network.

I know that many of you attending this conference are also working on creative ways to use the Internet as a means for bringing more voices into America's ongoing conversation. I salute you as kindred spirits and wish you every success.

I want to close with the two things I've learned about the Internet that are most directly relevant to the conference that you are having here today.

First, as exciting as the Internet is, it still lacks the single most powerful characteristic of the television medium; because of its packet-switching architecture, and its continued reliance on a wide variety of bandwidth connections (including the so-called "last mile" to the home), it does not support the real-time mass distribution of full-motion video.

Make no mistake, full-motion video is what makes television such a powerful medium. Our brains - like the brains of all vertebrates - are hard-wired to immediately notice sudden movement in our field of vision. We not only notice, we are compelled to look. When our evolutionary predecessors gathered on the African savanna a million years ago and the leaves next to them moved, the ones who didn't look are not our ancestors. The ones who did look passed on to us the genetic trait that neuroscientists call "the establishing reflex." And that is the brain syndrome activated by television continuously - sometimes as frequently as once per second. That is the reason why the industry phrase, "glue eyeballs to the screen," is actually more than a glib and idle boast. It is also a major part of the reason why Americans watch the TV screen an average of four and a half hours a day.

It is true that video streaming is becoming more common over the Internet, and true as well that cheap storage of streamed video is making it possible for many young television viewers to engage in what the industry calls "time shifting" and personalize their television watching habits. Moreover, as higher bandwidth connections continue to replace smaller information pipelines, the Internet's capacity for carrying television will continue to dramatically improve. But in spite of these developments, it is television delivered over cable and satellite that will continue for the remainder of this decade and probably the next to be the dominant medium of communication in America's democracy. And so long as that is the case, I truly believe that America's democracy is at grave risk.

The final point I want to make is this: We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Worldwide Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it because some of the same forces of corporate consolidation and control that have distorted the television marketplace have an interest in controlling the Internet marketplace as well. Far too much is at stake to ever allow that to happen.

We must ensure by all means possible that this medium of democracy's future develops in the mold of the open and free marketplace of ideas that our Founders knew was essential to the health and survival of freedom.

Missing Rita

2005-09-21T22:43:00.000-05:00

I live in Houston.

At this very moment, as Hurricane Rita takes aim at my home city, I'm high and dry, well out of harm's way. In fact, I'm almost ashamed to admit where I am: Aspen, Colorado.

To celebrate my wife's fiftieth birthday, we've been vacationing here for the last week. In the mountain sky, close and clear, it's easy for me to count my lucky stars.

We were originally scheduled to return to Houston tomorrow morning. We thought about staying here in Aspen for a few more days, but the money is running out, and--though it would be insane to go back to Houston when half the city is evacuating--I still want to be a little closer to home. So instead of going home to Houston, tomorrow we'll be flying into Dallas where my dad will pick us up and take us to his place out in the country near Hillsboro. We'll stay there until Rita has done her damage, and then on Sunday or Monday we'll drive down to Houston to see what's left of our house.

UPDATE 09/25/05: Much to be thankful for! Houston was largely spared Rita's wrath. And because we were already out of town on vacation when Rita began her approach to the Gulf Coast, we were doubly lucky to avoid the chaos of the Houston evacuation, which turned out to be worse than the storm itself. Friday night we flew from Aspen to Dallas, and we've spent the last few days relaxing at my dad's place in the country.

Our next door neighbor, who did not evacuate, reports that our house came through unscathed, but the electricity has been out in our area since 5:00 a.m. Saturday. So, rather than hurrying home to a house without A/C (unbearable in Houston's 100 degree heat and 99 percent humidity!), we'll sit tight right here until the returning traffic eases up and the electricity is restored. I'm guessing we'll make it back home Monday or Tuesday.

UPDATE 09/26/05: We're home!

Traffic on the main routes from Dallas to Houston was still a little clogged, so we took the back roads. Took a little longer than usual, but we're home, the electricity is back on (the food in the freezer stayed frozen!), and all's well.

A Gift That Will Keep on Giving: The Small Business Disaster Relief Fund

2005-09-12T15:30:00.000-05:00

A little over a week ago, when the putrid wind of post-Katrina political opportunism had yet to gather hurricane strength, I counseled Adeimantus readers that we all should try to resist the only-too-human proclivity to dissipate our frustration by descending into mutual recriminations at the height of a crisis, that we should all try to find ways to contribute positively to dealing with the challenges at hand, rather than wasting time and energy undermining our leaderships' efforts to do so.

With appropriate modesty, I am happy to report that my advice achieved its intended result--if not on a national scale, at least among faithful Adeimantus readers. Among those who read my recent post on this topic (a readership whose number easily surpasses low double digits), the level of carping dropped substantially as they turned their thoughts and efforts toward doing something positive to help people affected by the disaster.

One especially noteworthy example of a person who has eschewed public carping in favor of doing positive good work is my longtime online friend, Dan Juneau, president of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI). As a native son of the bayou and as a politically astute proponent of Louisiana business interests, Dan has a particularly good insight into the conditions, both recent and long-standing, that contributed to the successes and failures in the preparation for and the response to Hurricane Katrina. If he were inclined to do so, Dan could have used this disaster as a golden opportunity to make political life miserable for quite a number of prominent local, state, and national leaders on either side of the ideological divide. But instead of descending into political opportunism, Dan chose to highlight and to address a need the importance of which cannot be over-emphasized. Under Dan's capable leadership, LABI, in conjunction with the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, quickly established the Small Business Disaster Relief Fund to assist qualified small business owners in getting their operations back up and running.

We all know that meeting the immediate basic human needs of individuals displaced by this disaster has been the matter of most pressing concern. Yet, over the long haul, re-animating the economy that will make it possible for those individuals to lead productive lives independent of government assistance is perhaps even more important. In that process, the re-establishment of small businesses is the vital precondition to the long-term recovery of New Orleans and the region.

This revitalization of small business must be accomplished as rapidly as possible because small businesses provide the majority of jobs, and, as Dan Juneau wisely points out, if there are no jobs to return to, people simply will not return:

The rapid recovery of small businesses is the biggest factor in the preservation of the workforce on the Gulf Coast. If there are no jobs, there is no future-and workers will go where they can work.

It is incumbent upon those handling the public and private relief and reconstruction efforts (which follow closely behind the rescue effort) to do everything in their power to assist small businesses in their efforts to reopen and re-employ their workers.

To assist in that regard, the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry-with the assistance of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation-has created a Small Business Disaster Relief Fund. The fund will provide start-up grants to Gulf Coast businesses severely impacted by Hurricane Katrina. Contributions to the fund-dollar for dollar-will be used to help get as many small businesses back into business as possible. The grants will serve as "gap funding" for things not covered by insurance. Beginning September 15, the grant application form and details can be accessed via the LABI Web site. Any business in one of the federally designated disaster parishes or counties with fewer than 100 employees on August 29, 2005 that suffered significant damage or disruption due to the hurricane is eligible to apply. Volunteers recruited from the CPA Society, the local Bar Association, and the Independent Insurance Agents will screen the applications in an anonymous system to ensure fairness.

Many of you have already dug deep into your wallets, your closets, and your cupboards to help meet the immediate essential needs of Hurricane Katrina's victims. But now I'm asking you to please dig a little deeper and to click here to give a gift that will keep on giving, a contribution to the Small Business Disaster Relief Fund.

Maps of New Orleans Flooding

2005-09-02T19:36:00.000-05:00

The map below shows areas that were under water in Jefferson and Orleans parishes in New Orleans as of 8/31/2005. The image below has been stiched together from maps that are available here on a FEMA website.

On FEMA's site you can find separate and more detailed maps (pdf files) showing all areas of New Orleans that were under water in Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard, Plaquemines, and St. Charles parishes.

UPDATE 09/07/2005: C&C Technologies, Inc. has put together a clickable map (integrated with Google maps) that gives an estimate of floodwater crest depth at any point in New Orleans. Here's a sample screen cap:

Instructions for using the map are on this page, with a link at the bottom of that page that'll take you to the clickable map.

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[Note: Because small businesses collectively provide the majority of jobs, the re-opening of small businesses will be absolutely crucial to the long-term recovery of regions affected by Hurricane Katrina. If you'd like to help small businesses put their people back to work as quickly as possible, please consider contributing to the Small Business Disaster Relief Fund. Further information is available here.]

I Demand to Know Why This Disaster Isn't Being Run More Smoothly

2005-09-01T20:52:00.000-05:00

Katrina has brought a disaster of an intensity never before experienced in this country.

Certainly in terms of physical and economic damage, perhaps in terms of loss of life and perhaps even in terms of the psychic blow to the body politic, 9/11 was by comparison a gentle autumn rain.

A great part of the man-made portion of this disaster (and in every disaster there is a man-made portion) stems from the fact that so many people did not heed the mandatory evacuation order. Although I am sure there are exceptions, I am not buying the excuse that most lacked the wherewithal to leave. Most of those who stayed behind did so, not because they had no choice, but because they made an astoundingly bad choice--one that put their own lives, and the lives of their rescuers, at grave risk. But their bad decisions are water over the dam now. One hopes that all this will count as one of the lessons learned so that if there is, heaven forbid, a "next time," the authorities will enforce and implement their evacuation orders more vigorously. But enough of that--there'll be plenty of time for recriminations later.

At this stage I don't think it's fair, or helpful, to waste time laying blame on the authorities and political leaders who have the unenviable responsibility for trying to bring order out of chaos. In the few group crises I've experienced in my life, I've observed that the most useless people--the ones you just want to throttle and toss overboard--are the ones who are constantly bitching about how incompetent the leadership is. The only thing these whiners accomplish is to make everyone angry at everyone else and to make others feel more helpless, lost, and miserable than they are already. The best use to make of such people (assuming one is not permitted to give them a massive injection of thorazine) is to sit them down well off to the side where they can't get in the way, give them a box of pencils and a fat spiral notebook, and tell them that they have been specially selected for the very important assignment of making a list of everything that is totally screwed up.

Their list might actually come in handy later.

But right now there isn't time to have an election to choose new leadership. We are stuck with the fallible humans we have collectively put in charge. So instead of bitching about the people in leadership positions, it would be better if we all try to refrain from carping, find a way to be useful, or at least provide moral support to the ones who are trying their best to make things better, give calm and constructive advice if in a position to do so, and pull together instead of apart.

If you can't do that right now, then kindly please do shut the hell up.

Yes, we've noticed things are screwed up. We had heard that disasters usually don't run smoothly, but thank you so much for reminding us. Yes, all sorts of things that should have been done, both before and after this disaster struck, were left undone or done in a way that now looks ridiculous. Yes, even now all sorts of things that could be done differently aren't being done exactly the right way at exactly the right speed. Yes, it's pandemonium. We'd really appreciate it if you would try not to add to it. If you've got an idea that might work better, let's talk it over quickly and quietly, without getting bogged down on who's to blame for this or that.

Whatever you do, don't you dare start agitating about race and class. If you do that, then as far as I'm concerned you're worse than the street looters. In a time of crisis, you brazenly loot the stores of the public trust to haul off a garbage bag full of ephemeral political trinkets. I hope you drown under the weight of it in hell's molten brimstone.

The right steps to take in a crisis always seem obvious to people who have no responsibility for getting something done in that crisis. Decisions are easy when nothing depends upon them. So if pointing out the leaderships' failures is the only contribution you have to offer at the moment, then come sit over here in this quiet corner where there's a big box of pencils with your name on it.

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The New Iraqi Constitution: The Impetus to an Islamic Reformation?

2005-08-22T14:12:00.000-05:00

If breaking reports are correct (here, here, and here), the draft of the new Iraqi constitution will be unveiled today. In the Western press, that event will unleash unending spin, much of which for all intents and purposes had already been prepared in advance and will now be slightly modified so as to appear to respond to the actual contents of the document itself.

Among the more pervasive lines of spin will be the allegation that the draft constitution does not sufficiently protect the values we in the West hold most dear (or claim to hold most dear), particularly religious freedom, which the critics will disingenuously define more specifically as "separation of church and state." Interestingly, critics who have spent the last four years complaining what a mistake it is to attempt to "impose" (to use terms they prefer) "Western-style democracy" and "Western values" on Muslim countries will now complain that the new Iraqi constitution is a failure because it does not create a "Western-style democracy" enshrining every Western value.

Much will be made of the fact that the new Iraqi constitution cites Islam as "the main source" or "a main source" of law. As of this moment the final draft has not been released, so it is not clear which, if either, of those formulations will be present in the final document. Not sharing the critics' (soon to be abandoned) concern about "imposing" Western values on Muslim countries, I would have much preferred that neither formulation exist in the Iraqi constitution. But there is a world of difference between a statement that Islam is "a main source" and "the main source" of law. In either case, I also recognize that the Iraqi constitution is ultimately for the Iraqis themselves to write, to accept or to reject, and presumably to amend or to replace, if they discover that relying on Islamic religious law does not enhance their well-being.

One should also note that any statement citing Islam as a source of law most certainly will be counter-balanced and moderated by other constitutional provisions that guarantee such things as due process, freedom of worship, and freedom of speech and of the press. (Perhaps this is a good place to remind ourselves that our founding documents, indeed our human rights, rely implicitly on the religious concept of a "creator" who endows us with "certain unalienable rights.")

Once the critics have exhausted themselves decrying what they assume will be the pernicious influence of Islam on Iraqi law, perhaps they should allow themselves a moment of optimism to discern the opposite possibility, that the influence will operate in the opposite direction in the opposite way, that the inclusion of the principle that Islam is "a source," but not the only source, of Iraqi law will have the effect of purging from Islamic theory the worst and most extreme interpretations of Islamic religious law, that the "mixture" of Islamic legal theory with humanistic politics and secular law will ultimately have the effect of advancing the status of more moderate strains of Islamic theory.

According to early reports the new constitution will provide that:

[N]o laws would be adopted that contradict the principles of Islam. In addition, no law shall be adopted that contradicts human rights and democratic principles.

The drafters of the Iraqi constitutions appear to believe that these two sources of fundamental principles, Islamic legal theory and secular political theory based on human rights and the consent of the governed, can be reconciled. The presence of these two potentially conflicting bodies of fundamental principles will necessitate debate in the public square and argument among and between Iraq's political and religious elites as to what is required by Islamic religious principles and what is required by secular humanistic principles. It almost goes without saying that extreme interpretations of Islam cannot exist side by side with genuine human rights and a truly democratic form of government. Therefore, reconciliation of these two sources of fundamental principles (and it would be a mistake to presume these two cannot be reconciled) will necessitate the establishment in Iraq of a moderate interpretation of the requirements of Islamic religious law. By placing Islamic principles and secular humanistic principles side by side in their founding document, the drafters of the Iraqi constitution, whether or not they intended to do so, will have inspired a debate (not a theoretical debate, but a debate with immediate real world consequences) the results of which hold the promise of a "reformation" of Islam that is the necessary precondition to peace in the Muslim world.

So one could take the pessimistic view and assume that a constitution that seeks to mix Islamic legal theory and human rights necessarily renders human rights a nullity. One could as easily assume that the same mixture will render Islamic legal theory a nullity. But perhaps the most likely prospect is that the mixture will lead to a modification and a moderation of both Islamic theory and secular humanistic political theory. As a citizen of the West, who--though immensely proud of the heritage we have built for ourselves--often gazes sadly upon the crudity and debasement that has lately come to dominate so much of our own culture, I cannot yet judge that the Iraqi version of the never-ending democratic experiment will turn out so badly as the pessimists will hasten now to predict.

UPDATE 8/22/2005 at 7:30 P.M.: According to a U.S. State Deparment press release, the draft text of the constitution has been submitted to the Iraqi National Assembly, which apparently has been given three days to make amendments before voting on the final text. New York Times writer Dexter Filkins calls the submission with the three day period for amendments a "legal sleight of hand" designed to allow the drafters to claim that they met today's deadline even though the document remains subject to revision. Sleight of hand or not, by exposing the draft to further discussion and revision in the National Assembly, the drafters will have broadened the legitimacy of the document that finally emerges. Of course, the whole process remains fragile and could descend into anarchy at any moment, but I remain optimistic and am encouraged that the descriptions of guaranteed rights are rather more specific than the rather vague references to Islam as a "main source for legislation." As of now, the proposed text provides, inter alia, statements of guaranteed rights that counter-balance and moderate the statement that Islam is a "main source for legislation":

Article 2

The political system is republican, parliamentary, democratic and federal.

1. Islam is a main source for legislation.

- a. No law may contradict Islamic standards.

- b. No law may contradict democratic standards.

- c. No law may contradict the essential rights and freedoms mentioned in this constitution.

2. This constitution guarantees the Islamic identity of the Iraqi people and guarantees all religious rights; all persons are free within their ideology and the practice of their ideological practices.

* * * *

Article 36

The State guarantees:

1. Freedom of expression by all means.

2. Freedom of the press, printing, advertising and publishing.

Article 37

Freedom to establish political groups and organizations.

* * * *

Article 39

Iraqis are free to abide in their personal lives according to their religion, sects, beliefs or choice. This should be organized by law.

UPDATE 8/23/2005:

From the debate NRO has going in The Corner:

Ramesh Ponnuru agrees that the mutual influences of secular rights and an Islamic tradition upon each other is not necessarily a one way street, that the statement of rights in

[the Iraqi] constitution can influence a culture for the better.

Michael Ledeen has similar thoughts about reasons for optimism:

First, there is hardly a country in the region without some language acknowledging Sharia as either "the" or "a major" basis for national legislation. But Iran, for example, says that Allah is the sole source of authority, while the Iraqi constitution says that the people are the only legitimate source of authority. This in itself is a revolutionary event.

And even Andy McCarthy, who said he was getting "off the bus" if the Iraqi constitution established "supremacy of Islam" in legislation, appears to be willing to hang on for the ride at least a little longer:

[M]uch of my trepidation may be based on the version of the draft constitution reported in the mainstream media, which your last post indicates is way overblown in its description of how firmly Islam is installed as the law of Iraq. There is a world of difference between "a" and "the," and a bill of rights that actually guarantees equality and civil rights would assuage many concerns.

Shall We March Out the Grieving Mothers?

2005-08-16T17:55:00.000-05:00

In a society in which politicians are admired for the capacity to "feel your pain," or to appear to do so when they bite their own lips, a society in which otherwise ordinary folks come to blows to win a camera's attention so they can emote about their family members' private failings on national daytime television, a society in which the successes of our most prominent interviewers--the Winfreys and the Walters--are measured by the facility with which they can extract tears from interviewees as if on cue, in such a society--one in which emotion has never before been so widely and thinly dispersed, nor so close to the surface of the national psyche--the powerful contrast of a mother's deep and genuine grief rises to the status of a sanctified thing.

It is always said that there is no grief greater than that of a mother who has lost her child. Every decent person knows instinctively that such grief, in and of itself, should never be questioned. Yet one may still ask, "What can that grief demand? What is owed to such grief?"

When the mother has lost her son to war in the service of this nation, she is owed, and should never have to demand, for herself a sincere regard for her loss and every other consolation her fellow citizens can reasonably bestow, and for her son the unstinting honors of a grateful nation.

Even beyond that, if she wishes to speak about her son's death and the cause for which he gave his life, whether or not she supports or opposes that cause, she does deserve to be heard. Yes, she does deserve to be heard because it is quite possible that the immeasurable loss she has suffered has inspired her to think about that cause more deeply and more carefully than those whose lives have not been similarly affected. At the same time, one must keep in mind that it is also possible that the loss she has suffered might instead have caused her to think less rationally, more angrily, more vengefully.

So when Cindy Sheehan speaks, decency obliges us all to give her a respectful hearing. But though we are obliged to hear her, we are not obliged to heed her.

Unfortunately, her wrathful voice brings no new insight. Her opinions are nothing more and nothing less than re-amplified repetitions of the hyperbolic irrationalities that have been heard from her manipulators on the extreme left since before the war in Iraq began. Thus, we are obliged to give Cindy Sheehan a fair hearing, but we are not obliged to heed her when she says:

The Halliburtons, Bechtels, KBRs, and the oil oligarchs of the world, who are laughing all the way to the bank, think of Iraq with greedy glee each day.

When will the rest of America finally come out of its coma? When, God forbid, the jack-booted thugs come pounding on their door some midnight?

[T]ens of thousands of the other victims . . . have been killed for nothing but outright lies and bald-faced betrayals.

Your grandchildren and children who will be entering Kindergarten this fall will be fighting George’s endless war if he gets his way and is allowed to continue spreading the cancer of imperialism in the Middle-East.

I know it was "worth it" to Dick Cheney who was the CEO of Halliburton, (of no-bid contract fame) which has raped billions of dollars from our government, from the people of Iraq, and from our soldiers who are not getting what they need to survive in a combat zone.

Our "president" thinks stolen elections confer a mandate.

Our media was, and still is, a willing shill for the Administration and has never told the American public the truth.

Casey was sent to die in a war that was based on the imagination of some Neo-Cons who love to fill our lives with fear.

This war was sold to the American people by a slimy leadership with a maniacal zeal and phony sincerity that would have impressed snake oil salesmen a century ago.

We are not obliged to heed her when she says:

Is there yet an American who can not clearly see that Dick Cheney . . . whether it be 1975 or 2005. . . will say whatever he thinks is required to ultimately cause wealth and power to move to himself and to his friends?

Is there anyone in America who cannot yet see that Donald Runsfeld is a liar . . . that he, as with Hitler and Stalin . . . will say anything so long as he thinks it will help shape the world to his own liking?

Our country has been overtaken by murderous thugs . . . gangsters who lust after fortunes and power; never caring that their addictions are at the expense of our loved ones, and the blood of innocent people near and far.

We are not obliged to heed her when she says:

You get that maniac [Bush] out here to talk with me in person.

[J]ust what was the noble cause Casey died for?' Was it freedom and democracy? Bull---t! He died for oil. He died to make your friends richer. He died to expand American imperialism in the Middle East. We're not freer here, thanks to your PATRIOT Act. Iraq is not free. You get America out of Iraq and Israel out of Palestine and you'll stop the terrorism.

We need not heed her when she says:

If anyone reading this has children, would you think it was worth it?? Instead of some Congress leaders showing ink-stained fingers at the SOTU address they should have held up blood soaked hands. . . . [M]y first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel. [Note: Sheehan has recently denied writing these particular statements, but the evidence indicates that she did write them.]

Nor are we obliged to heed her when she says:

We are not waging a war on terror in this country. We’re waging a war of terror. The biggest terrorist in the world is George W. Bush. How many more people are we going to let him kill before we stop him?

I know that George Bush and his band of neo-cons and their neo-con agenda killed my son.

America has been killing people, like my sister over here says, since we first stepped on this continent, we have been responsible for death and destruction. I passed on that bullshit to my son and my son enlisted. I’m going all over the country telling moms: This country is not worth dying for. . . . We might not even have been attacked by Osama bin Laden[.] [I]f 9/11 was their Pearl Harbor to get their neo-con agenda through and, if I would have known that before my son was killed, I would have taken him to Canada. I would never have let him go and try and defend this morally repugnant system we have.

They’re a bunch of fucking hypocrites!

Such statements by Cindy Sheehan reveal an undeniable depth of feeling, a blind and inconsolable anger, an insane grief--and nothing else.

Yet in our time, "feelings" are being elevated to be the ultimate measure of the validity of one's opinions, such that if one's feelings are known or asserted to be "deeply held," those feelings thereby satisfy every deficiency of reasoned argument. Thus, we are told that "the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute."

So now shall we round up all the grieving mothers, divide them into contingents of those who support and those who oppose the war, arm them with placards and megaphones, march them onto opposite sides of a field in Crawford, let them have it out, and televise the whole thing in weekly installments, with a grand finale during May sweeps? But how shall we judge the result? By the volume of their wailings. By the number of tears shed on either side? By the number of votes cast via a 1-800 number?

Such an appalling scene is the grotesque end toward which the growing spectacle of Cindy Sheehan, nurtured by the media, would point us. There is nothing that could be learned from it as to whether or how to conduct the war, and the same can be said of the sad spectacle that Cindy Sheehan has made of herself, with her claim that her son was "murdered by the Bush crime family" or her claim that her son "was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel."

As Cindy Sheehan continues with such irrational statements, just as decency obliged us to listen to her in respectful silence, the very same decency now obliges us to turn away and listen no more, lest we encourage her in displays that even the deference accorded to insufferable grief cannot prevent from becoming hideous self-humiliations.

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤
Yet though it is now clear that there is no lesson to be learned from Cindy Sheehan about how or whether to fight the war, there is a lesson, more personal but no less universal, to be learned from the way she has chosen to channel her grief and the way some other grieving mothers have dealt differently with the same terrible blow.

Consistent with the liberal theology of victimology, in which only victims can be heroes, Cindy Sheehan always refers to her son, Casey, as a "hero." And in truth, Casey is a hero--not a passive "victim-hero," as Cindy Sheehan would have him remebered, but a genuine active hero who died in service of his country. Yet if she does have her way now, Cindy Sheehan will transform her son from an active hero into a helpless pawn. Before he went to war, when Cindy Sheehan "begged him not to go," her son told her:

Mom, I have to go. It's my duty. My buddies are going.

But now, according to Cindy Sheehan, her son's life, his legacy, is not one exemplifying the nobility of individual free choice, loyalty to comrades, and devotion to duty. That legacy, which is Casey Sheehan's by every honorable right, is by her now to be obliterated and supplanted by a legacy of infantile victimhood, in which he is held forth as an example of a man who, once he ventured beyond the perimeter of his mother's skirt, lacked the good sense to avoid being duped and misled:

Sheehan . . . never wanted Casey to join the military. She said he did after being misled by his recruiter.

Ultimately Cindy Sheehan would make even that ignoble legacy of ignorant victimhood depend not upon her son's own actions, but upon her actions. You see, Casey's legacy now depends upon Cindy Sheehan, who explains:

If anything I do can shorten the war by one minute or save one life, or bring discredit to the evil bastards in the administration, my life will have been worthwhile, and Casey's sacrifice meaningful.

In other words, according to Cindy Sheehan, the meaningingfulness of her son's life and death should not be determined by the decisions he voluntarily chose while he lived, but should be determined, after his death and contrary to his own free decisions, by the actions of Cindy Sheehan. Casey Sheehan's legacy is not to be found in his own noble choice to serve his country and risk death in war. No, his legacy is to be determined by whether or not Cindy Sheehan succeeds in her own cause. According to Cindy Sheehan, her son's life will be "meaningful" only if she succeeds.

Cindy Sheehan has taken from her son, and abrogated to herself, the power to determine the meaning of his life.

But Cindy Sheehan is not the only grieving mother.

Penelope Gavriel also grieves. And she too deserves to be heard.

Her son, Dimitrios Gavriel was killed fighting in Iraq on November 19, 2004. Four days later, Bob Oakes interviewed her on the radio show Here and Now:

Penelope Gavriel: He was a very idealistic person. He believed in integrity, leading by example, honesty. He was always mentoring people to do the right thing ever since he was in highschool. He was one of the youngest captains on his wrestling team. Then after his college years when he joined the working people ranks, he realized that the world is a lot different than what he imagined it to be . . . . And then it was Sept 11. During that tragic incident he lost two of his closest friends, and that emboldened his belief that that is really what he has to do, that he needs to enlist, go serve his country, give back to his country a little bit of what he can. And also he felt like many young men and women who joined after September 11, that this was a calling for them.

. . . .

Q: What made you decide you had to let him go?

A: It wasn't a matter of a decision on our behalf. The only role we played at that moment was, just bless him, and let him go. . . . He told one of his friends I could not go on living my life until I go through this. He enlisted last year, October 23rd. He did boot camp for three months, and then went to Camp Lejeune where he was based. After drills in urban warfare, they rated them for Iraq, and they left. They were deployed June 23rd of 2004.

Q: What do you know about his duty in Iraq? Did he seem concerned?

A: Not at all. Because he knew we were very concerned about his safety from conversations and questions we were asking him, every time we communicated with him . . . [he said], "Everything is great, I'm in good shape, I'm eating well, I'm healthy, the weather is getting nice now. It's not as hot. . . . Don't worry about me. I'm in great shape. I'm looking forward to finish the job we have to do here and come back home."

Q: He was a gung ho guy.

A: Absolutely.

Q: A real Marine. He was interviewed by the NY Times just a few months back, and he was quoted as saying, "We're locked, cocked, and ready to rock."

A: And ready to rock.

Q: And "that's about how we feel."

A: And that's who he was. He wasn't though the polemical war monger as he might sound from these words. He was a lot softer than that. The Marines though are a tough corps, and you cannot act softly. You need to talk boldly and act boldly. Inside he was a very loving, soft giant, and he had very many ways that he demonstrated that among his friends and his family.

Q: He told a friend of his, a former room mate at Brown University, that he was concerned about his legacy. And I know it might be a little early to think about this, but what do you think his legacy is?

A: . . . . I think he's going to have the best legacy he ever dreamed of. At what price though? He wanted to be remembered as somebody who never backed off out of a difficult moment, fearless, and always striving the hardest. He wanted to be challenged, always.

Q: Mrs. Gavriel, I'm sure there are folks who are listening to us talk who wonder how you have the strength do this at this time, and so eloquently I might add. I know that part of the reason you want to talk to us and to other reporters is that you want Demi to be remembered as a role model for other children.

A: Exactly. With these interviews and meetings we have with media, we like to convey to the youth primarily of this country that bravery is not an advantage [you are born with]. It's something that everybody can do. You can always be brave, love your country, be a good person, and achieve high in life, if you want to.

Q: Penelope Gavriel, I'm sure that I speak for most everyone who's listening when I say thank you so very much for speaking with us and we're very sorry for you loss.

A: I thank you, too. We are grieving for his loss, but he was another good man of the many who were lost in this cause.

Like Cindy Sheehan, Penelope Gavriel tried to discourage her son, Dimitrios, from joining the service to fight in Iraq. But she understood that it was his life and his decision. "Just bless him and let him go."

To comprehend the full meaning of Ms. Gavriel's words, I urge you to click this audio link to listen to the sound of her voice, which reveals a love and respect for her son that printed words cannot convey. In her grief, Penelope Gavriel does not seek to transform her son's legacy into that of a dupe and victim. She does not seek to transform the meaning of his life and death to suit her own political aims. For all we know, Ms. Gavriel herself might oppose the war. But her respect for her son as a man, as his own man, inspires her to proclaim simply and honestly the honorable legacy Dimitrios Gavriel sought, and won, for himself.

Maybe she's really a libertarian ...

2005-08-15T07:33:00.000-05:00

This just in concerning the further exploits of media whore Cindy Sheehan.

BUSH PROTESTING MOM CALLS FOR 'ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE'; VOWS NOT TO PAY TAXES

Anti-war protestor Cindy Sheehan, whose soldier son Casey was killed in Iraq, is calling for Bush's "impeachment," and for Israel to get out of Palestine!"You get America out of Iraq and Israel out of Palestine and you'll stop the terrorism," Sheehan declares ...

Right you are, Cindy. And if I simply give my wallet to the thug in the subway station at 3:00 a.m., I'll stop a robbery. Hell, commit suicide before the assailant pulls the trigger and you'll stop the murder.

She goes on to say:

"My son was killed in 2004. I am not paying my taxes for 2004. You killed my son, George Bush, and I don't owe you a penny...you give my son back and I'll pay my taxes. Come after me (for back taxes) and we'll put this war on trial."

I want to offer a public apology (sort of) to my blogmate and owner of this site, Bathus, to whom I have argued repeatedly that grieving mothers of sons lost in combat must be forgiven their subsequent defeatest idiocy.

This broad's cracked.

Poor Cindy misses a few points, and you'd think some of the sleazaball democrats in Congress exploiting her moronic protest in another flaccid attempt to embarass Bush would have clued her in. After all, each left wing kook that gets a lot of coverage from his or her fellow travelers in the left wing media reflects poorly on the Party. Not that she would have listened (did George Soros or Michael Moore?), but that's another story.

The first point is that, Ms. Sheehan's pathological narcissism notwithstanding, the war has been on "trial" in the court of public opinion for years, with the left wing media acting as prosecutor and the right wing media playing defense (ineptly, but that, too, is another story). Hollywood liberals, some of whom are shall we say slightly more photogenic than mama, were protesting this thing before it even started. Unless this idiot thinks the entire country was waiting three years for her to attack Bush and the conflict in Iraq and the wider war against the Great Redundancy - i.e., Islamofascism. If she exhibited this same solipsism as a mother, no wonder her kid ran off and joined the army. It appears Casey exhibited his own defiance in the face of mom's monomaniacal desire to become an ugly Jane Fonda.

The second point is that the bulk of the federal income tax goes to education, health, farm subsidies, unemployment benefits, highways, and a variety of socialist programs large and small that are close to Ms. Shithead's heart and the hearts of her hairy, smelly fellow protestors in Crawford. If you don't pay your taxes, Cindy, PBS will suffer before the army does.

But if we were to humor her and her doofus friends' nincompoop notion that non-payment of federal income tax will "hurt" the military, you have to wonder about the motives of a grieving mother of a KIA who wishes to do her part to see that other soldiers are KIA. How much does she mourn her son's death if she is willing to deprive the military he belonged to of the defense dollars needed to provide its soldiers with the armor and whatnot they require in order to protect themselves? Implicit in her "defiant" refusal to fund the military is her admission that her son, along with his buddies, in fighting the "unjust" war in Iraq, was as much a war criminal as President Bush. President Bush, therefore, did not kill her son, but made him a "criminal".

Third, if she thinks an IRS prosecution of her for not paying taxes will literally put the war "on trial", in a courtroom, then she's really wasting her time protesting and should instead become a stand-up comic in a loony bin. Oh, right, she's from California. That would be redundant, too. About the only defense to non-payment of taxes is death of the taxpayer. Okay, maybe insanity. So, maybe she will get away with it, after the wage garnishment (assuming she works, which will put her one step ahead of her fellow protestors) and the liens against her property that follow the requisite warnings from the IRS. Maybe the Democrats will regain their majority in '06, and call for an investigation of the IRS's harassment of Ms. Sheehan, provided anyone remembers who the hell she is by then.

For a guy who hates Catholics, he's sure parochial ...

2005-08-09T11:10:00.000-05:00

"The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." -From Article VI of the Constitution of the United States [italics added]

"I sometimes get more praise from right-wingers or Republicans than I want." – Slate contributor Christopher Hitchens.

“You don’t have to worry about that with me.” – Adeimantus contributor Tom

Somebody once said - I don't know, maybe it was Hillary - that after talking to Bill Clinton and walking away, you were compelled to check for your wallet. If you catch Christopher Hitchens on a liberal blab show like MSNBC’s Hardball or PBS’s Broadway Charlie Rose, or on CNN or NPR, you have the same reaction. Hitchens' smarminess truly shines on TV and radio: That faux sonorousness dressed up in a limey accent as he tries to pass off his left wing ideology as independent thought. For some reason, Yanks are easily sucked into believing that anybody who sounds like a character from a Renaissance Fair must know what the hell he or she is talking about. Why do you think Madonna fakes the British accent? In Hitchens' case, that basset hound-begging-to-be-adopted-before-the-shelter-gasses-him expression works in his favor, too. Anybody that morose looking must be an intellectual.

One big reason why Hitchens gets away with this is that hardly anyone watches or listens to the shows he appears on. I understand he has a steady gig on MSNBC’s The Situation with [National Review columnist] Tucker Carlson, which immediately follows Hardball, which means the entire audience is Chris Matthews' immediate family. Okay, some of them. Hitchens' columns pose more of a problem. They’re found all over the internet like a fungus, and appear regularly in the lefty blog that pretends it’s an on-line magazine, Slate. There his words can be studied a little more closely and as a result they yield up his dirty secret: Like most so-called "independent" political writers, he’s a biased piece of shit doing his damnedest to convey his prejudices as fact.

Don’t get the idea I completely dislike the guy, and in the interest of fairness, let me say that it’s to Hitchens' credit his columns need to be read more than once before you realize what a crock it all is. Most other lefty hacks are exposed after one reading. I think the accent thing helps here, too – indirectly. If you’ve heard Hitchens’ speaking voice on one of the aforementioned shows, it’s only natural that upon an initial reading of his written words the echoes of the Sir Ralph Richardson School of Elocution reverberate in your head and you think, “Gee, this guy’s smart.” Once you get hold of yourself, though, and reread him a few more times, your own internal voice takes over and you can more closely examine the left wing pitch he’s throwing at you like a Ford salesman telling a 21-year-old male customer that women go nuts over a guy that drives a Focus.

A recent column, Catholic Justice – Quit tiptoeing around John Roberts' faith (Aug 1) is a good example of the Hitchens Method of Discourse – essentially leftist propaganda with a Continental flair – and is probably the best example of his neurotic Catholic-phobia since he attacked Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ a year ago. You're forgiven if you missed his hysterical overreaction to the film as liberal anti-Christian neurosis was virtually pandemic at the time, but it was a real hoot. His outraged secularist routine was in full bloom on the aforementioned Charlie Rose's show (PBS’s answer to the piercing intellect of CNN’s Larry King). It was here he claimed Gibson tailored his film to appeal to the Gay Catholic Sadomasochist market. We’ve all heard of that demographic, surely, and with a box office take of a gazillion dollars, who can deny Gibson’s success at appealing to it? Again, to be fair to Hitchens, his appearance on Rose’s show may have been preceded by a few jolts of single malt.

Then, in The Gospel According to Mel (Vanity Fair March 2004) and various Slate columns, Hitchens the libertarian – i.e., a liberal who doesn’t like taxes – invented a new requirement for filmmakers. Well, not all filmmakers, only those that make sincere movies adapted from the New Testament. Appalled that Gibson adapted a screenplay from the Gospels, he demanded Gibson justify the film in a debate with his critics. This meant Hitchens himself, presuming he could squeeze a sober moment into his drinking schedule. As anyone who reads Hitchens with any regularity knows, he like all lefties is deeply committed to free expression – so long as everyone expresses leftist dogma, particularly when it comes to the Marxist idea of religion as the opiate blah, blah, blah.

Pardon this digression into a debate Gibson himself won long ago through the sheer force of his film, as well as with the domestic and foreign box office receipts. The Passion’s audience was obviously much wider than the one Hitchens imagined after tossing back a few, and the left wing bigots with whom Gibson refused to debate are still wiping the egg off their faces for predicting his professional demise. Lest we forget, New York Times entertainment columnist cum political writer Frank Rich predicted that Jewish movie executives would avoid Gibson like the plague (pardon the Biblical imagery) after The Passion. Michael Eisner obviously missed the memo, because Gibson is currently working on another subtitled historical epic, this time dealing with the Mayan empire, that Disney will be distributing. Rich should stick to writing about Gay marriage. And Hitchens should stick to writing about his support for the war against Islamofascism, the phony “independent” position he has staked out that has supposedly alienated all of his left wing friends at The Nation and has resulted in “more praise from right-wingers or Republicans” than he wants. Only the dumbest lefties and righties have fallen for this con. Anyone with an ounce of common sense realizes that it isn’t the fascism part of Islamofascism that has made a hawk out of Hitchens, but the Islamo part.

Ann Coulter has correctly pointed out that were it not for the use of terror tactics against the US and its citizens, liberals would despise fundamentalist Muslims precisely because of their religious fundamentalism. Hitchens is one of those cracked liberals that despise them only for their fundamentalism. Rest assured that had 9-11 been perpetrated by secular socialist anti-westerners whose manifesto promised the extermination of all religious cults (Judaism, Catholicism, etc), Hitchens would be echoing the cries of the anti-war crowd until he was hoarse. Politically, Hitchens is pretty much a limey version of Fox clown Bill O’Reilly - he's only as “independent” as his audience is stupid enough to believe he is. He tries mightily, and fails miserably, to hide his own tendency toward intellectual fascism. He doesn't demand everyone think alike, though. He prefers everyone not think at all – especially about his opinions.

Catholic Justice is a rambling diatribe with more holes in it than his liver. Its premise is that Catholics – believing, practicing Catholics, not free-wheeling pigs like, say, the Kennedy clan – are disallowed by the United States Constitution from serving on the Supreme Court, or any court for that matter. See, their beliefs may conflict with the Constitution, because, see, the Constitution is totally secular. See, God is not mentioned. Hitchens no doubt could explain who bestowed the “blessings of liberty” extolled in the Preamble after having a few stiff ones. Be that as it may, because God is not mentioned by name, it therefore follows in Hitchens’ universe that anyone who believes in the unmentioned God is unqualified to interpret that document.

I can hear the chorus of morons screaming, “Where does Hitchens say that in his article?” Hitchens himself would be the choir director.

Please. Just as he required Gibson, a Catholic, to “debate” him because Gibson’s work did not conform to Hitchens’ personal interpretation of the subject matter, Hitchens demands that Judge Roberts, a Catholic (see a pattern here?), take an oath that he will conform to Hitchens' personal interpretation of the Constitution. It’s a mystery why Hitchens doesn’t simply say up front, “Catholics should be barred from the federal judiciary.” Or maybe it’s not so mysterious, since bigotry is rarely called such by those who practice it. So Hitchens has to begin his claptrap speculating about the rumor that Roberts told someone somewhere that if he is confirmed (remember, we’re talking about the Supreme Court, not the Catholic sacrament), he would recuse himself from deciding cases that conflict with his religious beliefs. Those cases are, for example, the teaching of creationism in public schools (we assume “public” – Hitchens doesn’t specify in the article and with him, one never knows) and abortion (yawn). Roberts denies making the recusal statement, but Hitchens asks, “[H]ow probable is it that the story is wrong?”

A clever conservative friend writes to me that obviously Roberts, who is famed for his unflappability, cannot have committed such a bêtise. For one thing, he was being faced with a question that he must have known he would be asked. Yes, but that's exactly what gives the report its ring of truth. If Roberts had simply said that the law and the Constitution would control in all cases (the only possible answer), then there would have been no smoke. If he had said that the Vatican would decide, there would have been a great deal of smoke. But who could have invented the long pause and the evasive answer? I think there is a gleam of fire here. At the very least, Roberts should be asked the same question again, under oath, at his confirmation.

Whether Roberts made the statement is not my concern here. As a matter of fact, if he did rise to the left's bait and make such a promise on or off the record, he's as stupid as his detractors and should be rejected out of hand just for that. But I’m not defending Roberts' nomination per se as much as exposing how stupid supposedly intelligent writers get when they try to hide their anti-religious bigotry behind a concern for the Constitution, the “rule of law”, and all of their other pious nonsense. This reflects either 1) their ignorance of the fact the Court is a highly politicized body and has been ever since Chief Justice John Marshall handed down his self-serving opinion in “Marbury v. Madison”, or 2) their dishonesty. I vote for 2) in Hitchens’ case.

Does anyone seriously believe he needed this third-hand story before demanding that Roberts renounce his Catholicism under oath or else promise to recuse himself from cases conflicting with his Catholicism? No doubt his fans believe this, just as they fall for his demand that Roberts state explicitly the law and the Constitution will control in all cases – indeed, that’s “the only possible answer” Roberts can provide to the committee before Hitchens will vote for his confirmation. What “law” Hitchens is referring to remains to be seen.

It’s bad enough that this lush thinks we need him to interpret the Constitution; he also demands we accept that his liberal interpretation of what are in effect liberal interpretations of the Constitution actually cite the document itself. The nutty recusal standard he advocates for Roberts wouldn’t apply to, say, queer justices when so-called “gay rights” cases come before the Court. An Hispanic justice of Mexican descent would not be required to recuse him- or herself in cases involving immigration. In cases involving Affirmative Action, Black and White justices alike would not have to recuse themselves [even though both bring their racial and cultural biases into play, no?]. And of course, should a case of discrimination against persons ugly enough to stop a clock come before the Supreme Court, Hitchens would not demand that Ruth Bader Ginsburg recuse herself. He doesn’t say so, naturally, but he doesn’t have to. Not only because everyone knows he is a mush-headed, politically correct lib masquerading as an “independent” thinker, but because he is a bigoted, mush-headed, politically correct lib masquerading as an “independent” thinker.

In an attempt to convince people that what they see is not really there, Hitchens asks the following:

“Why should this question be asked only of Catholics? Well, that's easy. The Roman Catholic Church claims the right to legislate on morals for all its members and to excommunicate them if they don't conform.”

He’s right, it’s easy to come up with nonsense, something he’s demonstrated countless times in the past when his paranoia about people who express their faith in something other than a keyboard, a monitor, and a bottle of booze has gotten the better of him. To paraphrase Hitchens, the only possible response to this silliness is to say, “So what?” Any person – well, any sober person, that is – who has watched the confirmation hearings of federal judges for the 40 something years the Democrats had the majority in Congress and therefore chaired the Judiciary Committee knows that Liberal Democrats claim the right to legislate on morals for the enitre country and smear all nonconformists, particularly those nonconformists with the temerity to believe they’re qualified to sit on the Supreme Court. Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas are only two prominent examples of what happens when one’s judicial philosophy challenges liberal dogma, which is as intransigent as any Hitchens can find in Catholicism. Pro-life Democrats especially are for all and intents and purposes excommunicated by the Party. If Hitchens can find one that the Democrats have allowed to speak at their conventions, he can drop me a line.

Hitchens asks, “[W]hat happens when a religious affiliation conflicts with a judge's oath to uphold the Constitution?” Note the assumption that such a “conflict” must necessarily arise among Catholics, because not only does the Constitution not recognize God or religion in Hitchens’ alcoholic fantasies, it does not recognize “morality”, either, irrespective of its source. The assumption, too, is that the Constitution as written contains anything that conflicts with Catholicism or any other faith. I welcome this celebrity "rebel" to find any clause in the nation's founding document that reflects this.

Be that as it may, if we were to humor Hitchens’ silliness, the answer to what happens with a justice's Catholic affiliation would be the same as what happens when a racial, cultural, political affiliation conflicts with his oath – nothing that hasn’t happened in the past half century that the liberal political hacks in the judiciary have been making up the “law” based on their own liberal dogma.

Like all of the liberals going apeshit because Roberts is a practicing Catholic, Hitchens can’t admit that what he wants from Roberts are specific rulings that conform to his dogmatic beliefs vis a vis abortion and the myriad other “rights” liberal justices have created out of whole cloth for years. So, he attempts an around-end by attacking what he thinks, but could never prove, the Catholic nominee will use as a basis for his own decisions should he sit on the Court. Implicit in all of Hitchens’ Constitutional gibberish is the claim that Liberal political beliefs disguised as “law” already conflict with Roberts’ Catholicism. It wouldn’t matter what Roberts believed; he is precluded from overturning, say, Roe v. Wade whether he is a Catholic, Orthodox Jew, Wiccan, or an atheist that happened to be pro-life.

This is the same gag Hitchens pulled last year with Gibson. According to him, the Gospels are a lie; therefore, any sincere artistic interpretations of them are suspect. Gibson was therefore obligated to defend his belief in the source against Hitchens’ own biased interpretation of the source. Gibson would have “lost” the debate before it had even begun because there was essentially nothing to debate. Hitchens and the other duplicitous libs determined to sink judicial nominees out of their own bigotry and spite, but conscious of the fact they wouldn’t last if they admitted to it, tiptoe (to use Hitchens’ own effeminate metaphor) around the fact they believe the “rights” invented by Liberal justices over the years, especially the right to abortion as it is cockamamily defined in Roe v. Wade, are Constitutional facts.

Continuing with the invented right to abortion example, the gospel according to Hitchens states: Abortion is without a doubt contrary to Catholic dogma. Roberts is a practicing Catholic. Therefore, Roberts must be anti-abortion and will overturn Roe on that basis. When he goes before the Judiciary committee, according to the Hitchens Rules of Procedure, he must renounce his Catholicism – for what would account for Roberts' belief that Roe is “bad law” other than his fealty to the Pope? – or else be barred from the High Court. Roberts loses before he even attends the hearings. Hitchens can’t possibly acknowledge that the alleged right to an abortion created by the Court 30-something years ago is actually grounded in an alleged “right to privacy” that liberal Justices read into the Constitution in the first place. If he did, he would have to acknowledge that the only way to prove Roberts was in favor of overturning Roe purely because his Church demanded it were if Roberts explicitly stated in an opinion that he cannot as a good Catholic uphold such a wicked “right”. Fat chance of that happening any more than you'd have Ginsburg admitting her experience as a left-wing lawyer with the ACLU will not permit her to rule in favor of the Boy Scouts. Without the religious test Hitchens demands but that is barred by the Constitution, he and his leftist (pro-war so long as the war is against a religion) friends are fucked - royally. Because, as the average 12-year-old knows, Roberts' opinion will address the fourth amendment; the moral basis for his interpretation Hitchens has no way of pre-determining under a Constitutional political process. So Hitchens has to invent some exception, because he loves the “secular” Constitution of his adopted land so much, to the prohibition against religious tests. He has to pre-empt appointments to the federal bench that fail to conform to his totally biased interpretation of the US Constitution, which is, as stated earlier, already based on the biased interpretations of liberal justices.

Instead of blowing smoke up everyone’s ass about the "legislative" authority of the Catholic Chruch and the status of the Vatican as an independent state and how John Roberts' adherence to Church precepts renders him unfit to sit on the High Court, Hitchens might have done better to specifically address the very emphatic Aricle VI statement that "no" religious test shall "ever" be administered, even though the Article requires an oath to "support" the Constitution. Which suggests perhaps Hitchens should have examined what is meant by the term "support" versus his invented Constitutional restriction on moral decisions based on religious beliefs. Perhaps Hitchens might have done better admitting that Article VI was written by the Framers precisely because they knew what bigoted morons like him would do if they managed to get elected to the United States Senate.

Then we wouldn't have to waste our time reading his blather.

A Little Oppo Research

2005-07-20T11:36:00.000-05:00

In a recent Weekly Standard article, Dean Barnett examined the pernicious influence liberal blogs have wrought upon the Democrat Party:

While conservative blogs remain for the most part virtual op-ed columns (with the notable exception of Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs), the Daily Kos has become a virtual family which allows readers to write their own blogs-within-the-blog (called diaries) and to engage in limitless amounts of commenting. . . .

. . . .

[T]he Democratic party seems to be under the impression that [liberal] bloggers are an enormous, important constituency--and that it must go to whatever lengths necessary to win the hearts and minds of this virtual community.

This seems like a major miscalculation, because the politics of the left-wing blogs are far out of the American mainstream. Where most of the 120 million Americans who voted in the last election bear a benign indifference to political matters, the left half of the blogosphere seethes with hatred for George W. Bush and his supporters. What's more, the blogs take numerous positions that would strike all but the most passionate Democratic partisans as patently preposterous. . . .

Also, the level of discourse on the Daily Kos and other prominent liberal blogs is not something that would be attractive to the majority of the American public. The writings are often obscene and usually relentlessly hostile and negative. Crude personal attacks, whether aimed at right-wing bloggers or politicians, are the order of the day.

A few minutes scanning any of the more popular liberal blogs will confirm Barnett's thesis. Take for example this comment thread, excerpted from the most popular left-wing blog, Daily Kos, on Bush's nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court:

Did You Catch His Wife. When Roberts thanked his family, he mentioned his son, Jack...Roberts' wife's face fell. It was like a poker tell. I think we should research Jack.
by mayan on Tue Jul 19th, 2005 at 13:13:01 PDT

interesting observation, wonder if anything will come of it...
by storme on Tue Jul 19th, 2005 at 13:19:01 PDT

He's probably gay. Of course, this is how ridiculous rumors get started, but extreme conservatives seem to have a lot of homosexual children...
by Geotpf on Tue Jul 19th, 2005 at 13:19:08 PDT

Worse - he's a lesbian
by moltar on Tue Jul 19th, 2005 at 13:41:10 PDT

A Trangendered One at that. And an alcoholic and drug addict...That's how Karl starts the smearing process, isn't it???
by Volvo Liberal on Tue Jul 19th, 2005 at 13:50:14 PDT

Robert's son, Jack, is four years old.

Like Rabbits

2005-07-15T13:49:00.000-05:00

From: Bathus
To: Victor Davis Hanson
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 1:30 PM
Subject: Why Do We Hate Us

Dear Mr. Hanson,

Thanks for another excellent analysis, which I would refine to this extent:

All three phenomena--moral equivalence, utopian pacifism, and multiculturalism--which you identify as the cause of the left's "false narrative" can be traced to a single origin: relativism. That origin seems to me to be obvious as to the first and the last of the three, and less directly, but no less completely to account for utopian pacifism as well. (I've explored this topic in my usual clunky and round-about way in a recent blog post titled The Final Paradox.)

The question (I ask rhetorically) is, What is it that seems to make contemporary Western culture so especially susceptible to the seductions of relativism?

I think the source of that susceptibility can be located in the predominate passion of a democratic people, the passion Tocqueville catalogued so well: the love of equality. Relativism appears to allow one to hold all things equal, which is the first instinct of the democratic soul.

Add to that instinct the Western intellectual heritage of self-examination and self-doubt (e.g., Socrates and Descartes), a heritage grotesquely corrupted by relativism; and then add to that relativism's false promise to free us from the weight of moral judgment, thereby allowing all of us to do (with a clear conscience and mutual "tolerance") whatever our desires suggest, and relativism's seduction is, for us good democrats, almost irresistible.

The left's "false narrative" you recount is merely a particular manifestation of the intellectual confusion and moral self-loathing that relativism finally engenders.

So then the question becomes: What: can we do about it? What sort of thing can help democracy resist this dangerous inclination toward relativism?

Formerly, the main answer was religious instruction, but that doesn't seem to be working out so well these days. Perhaps our saving grace might be the painful yet fortuitous reception of external forces, which by creating a clear and immediate threat to our very survival would cause us, as a matter of self-preservation, to abandon the self-indulgent luxury of self-doubt. However, that "solution" works only so long as the external threat has a certain intensity and immediacy. In other words, if the Islamists are smart, they will treat us somewhat like the proverbial frog in the pot of boiling water: more 7/7s but no more 9/11s. (Don't you think bin Laden would admit in hind-sight that 9/11 was a too spectacular to serve his ends?)

One is rescued more often by one's enemies' vices than by one's own virtues. In that regard, I would add another animal analogy: If we aren't going to fight this war aggressively (an uncertain matter after the expiration of GWB's term of office), perhaps our best hope is that the "chase instinct" of our adversaries will divert them from the more patient and cerebral tactic of boiling the Western frog slowly, i.e., that the jihadists' vicious passions will tempt them to close in for the kill prematurely, or at least to kill too many too soon. Indeed, one could say that the jihadists' animal instinct to kill what they see as weak and contemptuous (i.e., us!) is almost the only explanation for their resort to terrorism because, without setting off a single bomb, the jihadists could more easily defeat us demographically and culturally, as they are now defeating the French and the Germans. How strange it would be if it turned out that the better course of action for us, rather than sitting idle like frogs in the pot, might be to run like rabbits--enticing our enemies to chase and to corner us while we still retain some latent capacity to resist. (Salamis!)

That's all very interesting, to me at least, but perhaps the best solution to our confounded moral, military, demographic problem is a lot more straightforward over the long haul: Marry and have babies!

Thanks again for all your fine writing.

Bathus

Manufactured in West Yorkshire, U.K., under Exclusive License Granted by the Government of Her Majesty the Queen

2005-07-12T22:14:00.000-05:00

It appears that the London bombers differ from the 9/11 terrorists in one crucial respect.

If the breaking press reports turn out to be true, the London terrorists, just like the 9/11 hijackers, were young Muslim men of middle-eastern heritage. [Correction: One was a Jamaica-born convert to Islam.]

But unlike the 9/11 hijackers, all of whom had been recently exported to the United States specifically to carry out their attacks, the young Muslim men who killed themselves and their fellow passengers in London were British citizens or long-time residents, reared, educated, and indoctrinated within burgeoning Muslim communities of West Yorkshire, just a quick train ride from London.

Blair's government will certainly do all it can to overlook the disturbing fact that the London transit bombers were "home grown" terrorists. To the extent that Blair does acknowledge that fact, the emphasis will be on alleged "root causes," such as "poverty" and "social alienation."

In what will surely be a Herculean demonstration of studied ignorance, Blair will seek and no doubt receive the moral assistance of men such as Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. At the very moment when bodies living and dead still smoldered unfound in dark and burned out tunnels beneath London's streets, the Archbishop was enjoying morning tea with his "Muslim colleagues and friends in West Yorkshire," whence he emerged to mumble placatory pieties about how "faith communities will have to continue to stand and work together for the well being of our nation." Yes, Blair will seek to ally himself in studied ignorance with men like Rowan, even though the most reverend doctor had previously implied that Blair's "regime" was a "threat to its citizens and others" and had "jeopardise[d] its claim to obedience."

Were these Muslim youths from West Yorkshire listening closely when Rowan preached that Blair's government was such a threat to them that they owed it no obedience?

For additional support, Blair can also count on a man whose visage cannot fail to inspire confidence, West Yorkshire Chief Constable Colin Cramphorn, the chief local law enforcement official in the area the London bombers called home. Perhaps to avoid distracting the citizenry's attention toward the danger of terrorist clubs expanding their ranks among Muslims within his jurisdiction, Cramphorn had counseled those terrorists' future victims that they must never use "the misleading terms 'Islamic' or 'Muslim' to describe supporters of violence against the west" because those appellations "risked alienating a significant community which had no sympathy with violence." (Historical note on the West Yorkshire Muslim community's sympathies: A quarter century ago, when Khomeini issued his fatwa condemning Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, Muslims in Bradford, West Yorkshire, famously rioted to display their support--for the fatwa--and burned a few copies of Rushdie's book for good measure.) To drive home Cramphorn's point, late last year West Yorkshire police, working with Blair's Home Office and the Crown Prosecution Service, arrested British National Party Leader Nick Griffin along with several other BNP members on suspicion of inciting racial hatred.

My purpose here is neither to advocate nor to defend Griffin's politics or his positions. My point instead concerns the juxtaposition of his story and that of Omar Bakri Mohammed:

It appears that Griffin, who was running for Parliament from a West Yorkshire district, had gone on record stating that Islam is an "evil and vicious religion." According to this report, "in a statement following the arrests, West Yorkshire police proudly announced that it had deployed a team of officers on the case 'five days a week, ten hours a day'" for at least six months, presumably to further establish the case against Griffin and his fellow party members. When Nick Griffin announced that Islam was an evil religion, the West Yorkshire police, under the leadership of their aforementioned Chief Constable Colin Cramphorn, diverted against him substantial resources that might have been used to monitor terrorist rumblings in a region within their jurisdiction that had "become known for the growth of radical Islam."

In the days immediately following the 9/11 attacks, and even before the war in Afghanistan was launched, a Muslim cleric, Omar Bakri Mohammed, went to West Yorkshire to lead protests against the United States' actions against the Taliban. Bakri,"suspected of having links with Abu Qatada, the alleged Al-Qaeda leader in Europe," is the founder of the radical Muslim group, al-Muhajiroun ("the immigrants"), which is "known to recruit among young British Muslims." But the West Yorkshire police declared that they were "powerless to stop" Bakri from leading protests in Bradford "despite a Government ban on political rallies." One month later Muslim youths from Luton were the very first Brits to die in Afghanistan, where they were fighting on the Taliban side. All signs indicate that they were recruited through Bakri's organization. More recently, two of Bakri's "students" matriculated from his tutelage to take up "advanced studies" as suicide bombers for Hamas in Israel. A yet more chilling "coincidence": right after the Madrid bombings, Bakri warned in a published interview that it was "'inevitable' that London would be hit by a large attack 'because they are being prepared by various groups'" that were on "the verge of launching a big operation." Bakri is said to have recently "disbanded" al-Muhajiroun, but, at last report, the man himself still walks free in Britain.

A prediction: I have no idea whether the London bombers (whose names have just now been released) were in any way connected with Bakri. But it seems likely that these young men received an indoctrination and were recruited domestically. After bloggers and the MSM have a little time to scrutinize the bombers' backgrounds and "connect the dots" between them and their handlers, or even if it turns out that these four young men were acting entirely on their own initiative, the Blair government's embarrassment will increase a hundred-fold as the British public begins to learn the extent to which the resources of Her Majesty's Government have been deployed in ways that failed to prevent, enabled, and even encouraged an "education in terror" for specifically these four young Muslim men from West Yorkshire.

UPDATE (07/14/05) This is no surprise:

LEEDS -- The transformation of four young British men into terrorists appears to have taken place at a government-funded storefront youth centre in Leeds that, according to youth workers, was a hub of radical Islamist activity.

The centre was sealed off and searched by police yesterday after three of its workers said in an interview on the street outside that at least two of the suicide bombers had been "very regular" visitors at all hours to the Hamara Youth Access Point, and a third had been seen there occasionally.

"It had become so radical and so hateful that I asked if I could stop working there," said one of the workers, who along with two others described the storefront drop-in centre as a hub of radical Muslim politics and a hotbed of Islamic organizing, routinely hosting mysterious figures to speak about extremist politics.

. . . .

"It's fair to say that there was some kind of recruiting going on here," one of the workers said. "Some of the youth workers were really involved with it, and it got to the point where they were acting really hostile to anyone who wasn't their kind of Muslim."

As the interview was taking place on the street, police cordoned off the building, expelled people from neighbouring buildings and began a detailed search of the youth centre.

The centre receives funding from the British government and the European Union, as well as charitable funds, and as such is officially secular and non-political. But in practice, it was neither. On its walls were posters from the Respect Party, an extremist pro-Islamic party founded by MP George Galloway, that showed Israeli soldiers pointing rifles at Palestinian children. When some workers complained about these, they were harassed by other staffers.

The Final Paradox

2005-07-08T06:32:00.000-05:00

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Though Roosevelt spoke not of violent conflict but of economic collapse, his famous paradox has become the line most often quoted both by those on the political right and by those on the political left to justify their prescriptions in the West's present confrontation with Islamist terrorism.

Those on the pacific left quote Roosevelt to legitimize their accusation that right-wing warmongers and profiteers have incited and exploited irrational fear to coerce a sheep-like public to accept an overly-militarist and misdirected response, to the detriment of implementation of a more peaceful solution and preservation of individual rights. Those on the right quote the same words, calling into question the courage of the anti-war left, with the charge that their fear of retaliation makes them grovel toward an irrational and ultimately self-defeating appeasement.

There is, potentially, a grain of truth in the charges both the right and the left bring against the other: a reaction to fearful circumstances could be excessive in either direction. And so, it seems that Roosevelt's rhetorical flourish, while heightening our consciousness of the dangers at either extreme, gives us no guidance as to how closely our present course adheres to the virtuous mean.

Notwithstanding its grains of tautological truth, in our day Roosevelt's stirring paradox not only fails to reveal the truth about our present condition, but actually veils and nurtures a deeper and more dangerous paradox. These days Roosevelt's words hardly inspire confidence and are rarely used with an intention to inspire confidence. Instead, the intent and the effect nowadays of almost every use of Roosevelt's words is to inspire us to wonder, "Are we fearing the right kind of fear?"

But the real danger for us is neither a paralyzing fear nor an irrational rage. Those who oppose a forceful response to terrorism are anything but paralyzed. To the contrary, they are among the most active, with their movies, their protests, and their endless litigations. They do not seek to appease our enemies. What most of them seek, let us speak the obvious truth, is to incite and inflame our enemies' anger toward us, and, more than that, to incite a self-hatred among our own people. As much as those activists would have us believe otherwise, the real danger for us is not that we could be misled by our own purportedly irrational rage. A nation that tortures itself on the minuscule details of an accusation, ridiculous even if true, that its warriors have "mishandled" a few Korans, cannot colorably be accused of excessive rage. The real danger for us is not "fear itself," but self-criticism transformed into self-doubt, transformed into self-loathing, and finally into self-negation.

If he were speaking in the latter half of the twentieth century, and especially if he were speaking to the post-9/11 Western world, Roosevelt would have more aptly said, "We have nothing to fear but self-doubt."

Yes, fear can be paralyzing to some, but in the event rarely is so. The instinctive human response to the fear of grave and immediate danger is not to stand still but "to fight or to flee." If there is nowhere to flee, to fight becomes the only possible response. Thus, in the months immediately after 9/11, while we remained as it were in the grip of fear, when it seemed there was no place of safety from attackers who crashed civilian jets into our tallest buildings in our largest city, to flee was not an option. As a people, we seemed resolved to fight. Self-doubts were, if not extinguished altogether, submerged in the moment of existential fear.

It is only as fear abates that self-doubt can begin to re-emerge.

The terrorists understand this. They understand that, for all but a very few extremely weak-willed or horribly corrupted souls, the immediate instinctive reaction to their brutal attacks will be rage. Indeed, if the terrorists still fear anything about us, it is our rational rage, that healthy life-affirming emotion for which we yet retain a latent capacity. They understand that, so long as we retain that capacity, after each attack they must expect to absorb or avoid the blows of our rage for some time. But they are confident that as our immediate fear abates, our rage will dissipate also. For the French and the Germans, that rage can be measured in days. For the Spanish, it can be measured in hours. For the Americans, the clock is still ticking. For the British people, with the bombings in London yesterday the clock was reset, and no one knows this time how long it will run. But the terrorists are confident that eventually we will lose even the instinctive capacity for rage, and the clock will stop altogether.

Thus, they employ fear merely as a catalyst, administered judiciously with varying intensity in cycles of various lengths. Within each cycle, as our fear is absorbed and metabolized in the collective psyche, the fear refines and crystallizes the prevailing sentiments. In the presence of a dissipating fear, pre-existing sentiments of self-doubt transform and harden into self-loathing and a will to self-negation. Pre-existing sentiments of self-respect and self-confidence transform and stiffen into the calm resolution of a will to prevail against enemies who are so obviously our moral inferiors.

The doubt I speak of is not a Rooseveltian concern about whether we fear too much or fear too little or fear the wrong things, but rather the more fundamental doubt about whether we--we the United States and we the West--deserve morally to prevail in our confrontation with Islamic fundamentalism.

We in the West must balance ourselves forever in a precariously paradoxical position, one that requires an equilibrium that it would be unimaginable to sustain for long had not the culture of the West been performing that magical act with generally increasing success for the last several hundred years. For self-questioning is itself a vital principle of Western values. With an honest irony that eludes contemporary self-doubters, Socrates could brag that his superior wisdom consisted in his knowledge that he knew nothing. In self-doubt, Descartes managed to confirm the palpable truth of his own existence. His "I doubt, therefore I am," expresses perfectly the paradox of Western culture. To us in the West, self-examination has rightly been understood as, if not virtue itself, a pre-condition of virtue. Yet in our present struggle against Islamofascism, more so even than in our struggle against communism, this impulse to self-criticism, this pre-condition of Western virtue, has been corrupted in a way that could finally be our moral and mortal undoing. We are losing our balance.

For this loss of balance, we can blame the ascendancy of the moral and cultural relativists, who assert that all purported "truths" espoused anywhere at any time are in reality merely the preferences of a particular culture in a particular place in time. In other words, all "truths" are "culturally relative" and "historically relative." The "truths" an Islamist terrorist holds dear are as valid from his point of view as the "truths" we hold dear are valid from our point of view. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. There is no genuine basis to distinguish between them. The relativisists teach that the "truths" we hold to be "self-evident" are not truths at all, but are merely the preferences of some long-dead white guys (who really didn't believe those so-called truths themselves, but were only mouthing those fancy words to distract the masses from their power grab).

Furthermore, even aside from the non-existence of moral truth, the relativists explain that, because we are all blinded by the value system in which we were acculturated, we have no capacity to judge the goodness or evil of any culture of which we are not a part. Inasmuch as we have no grounds to judge the goodness or evil of the acts and practices of other cultures, we have no moral standing to judge ourselves superior to them, and we certainly have no moral standing to go to war against them, even when they attack us, because we simply cannot make a valid judgment about whether their attacks were just or unjust. Sure we didn't like it when they killed thousands of our innocent civilians, but they didn't like it when we started selling Coca Cola in Saudi Arabia. Who's to judge which was the worse offense? Besides, you can't properly discuss these things using words like "justice" and "innocent" because such terms are laden with impermissible value judgments.

Yet, even though we cannot, according to the relativists, justify our wrath on moral grounds, can we not--aside from any moral question--appeal to a basic instinct of self-preservation of which the impulse to rage in the presence of danger is the most obvious natural manifestation? But then arises the question, "Do we even deserve to survive?" In making that judgment we are not permitted to compare the goodness of our culture with that of one that seeks to exterminate us. No, the relativists remind us that all we can rightly assess is our own culture, the extent to which we adhere to the moral principles we purport to uphold. We cannot make moral use of the comparative fact that our enemies slaughter children for their parents' religion, while we, albeit imperfectly, uphold a principle of freedom of religion for all faiths.

Abstracted from any trans-historical or trans-cultural context (i.e., abstracted from the practical and imperfect world as it is, as it was, and as it is likely to be), self-examination becomes an unbalanced process, a spirit-draining one-sided game we play against ourselves and are guaranteed to lose, a game in which we measure ourselves against an absolute scale of our own highly developed standards of civilized behavior, while granting our implacable enemies complete immunity from all moral judgment. We inevitably discover that we fall short of the principles we espouse. To the relativists, the fact that our enemies slaughter children for their parents' religion is irrelevant, while the "mishandling" of a few Korans is highly revelatory. Indeed, insofar as adherence to their principles is concerned, our enemies are superior to us in that they adhere more consistently to their principle that children of infidels can be slaughtered to advance the jihad, while we do not perfectly uphold our principle of respect for all religions. The relativists believe that there is no truth worth dying for, yet believe at the same time that our enemies' apparently endless willingness to sacrifice themselves and numberless innocents somehow lends credence to their bloody cause. Unlike the philosophy of a Socrates or a Descartes, for whom self-doubt was the impetus for deeper moral inquiry, in the contemporary thought dominated by relativists, self-doubt is a moral dead end--not exactly an absolute dead end, but a dead end with a trap door opening into an empty abyss of self-negation.

Relativism, is of course, utter nonsense, manifestly self-contradictory in its fundamental claim: "There is no truth!" a contradiction rendered only slightly more obvious when fully restated as, "The truth is there is no truth!" It is all too easy to understand why generations of academicians would have become enraptured, and still are enraptured, by such foolishness. What is slightly more difficult to understand is why the nonsense assertion that "the truth is there is no truth" could have gained currency in popular (small d) democratic political thought.

To some extent the emergence of popular relativism is attributable to the elite relativists' having in the last century secured a virtual monopoly in the social institutions--the arts, academia, the press, and to a lesser extent religion--that have historically served as anchors of moderation and counter-weights to extremes in popular political opinion. But a more complete explanation of the ascendancy of relativism in popular political thought can be traced to the innate and powerful inclination of democratic peoples to want to hold all things equal.

In democracies, with our love of equality, we are overly fond of believing that no one's opinion is superior to any other's. In the face of conflicting truth claims, we seem forced to choose one as superior to the other, and we are uncomfortable making such a choice because it would seem to violate the democratic principle that every man (and his opinion) is the equal of any other man (and his opinion). Relativism saves us from the distressing choice. It allows us to say with a straight face that both opinions are equally true for the persons who hold them. Everything becomes a matter of personal preference, and it all seems so affable and tolerant. As the relativists mouth their pernicious pseudo-philosophy, they can congratulate themselves for their intellectual subtlety. One of the subsidiary paradoxes of relativism is that each of its proponents considers himself an intellectual superior. But the relativist is intellectually the laziest and most self-deceiving of human types, for he believes he vanquishes every opponent with just one triumphant rejoinder: "That's just your opinion, and who are you to judge!" Whenever someone deploys that non-sequitur, you can be sure that he is a relativist, even if he would not recognize himself as one. And if you ever make use of that line yourself, you should consider the possibility that insidious relativism has taken hold of your own soul as well.

Just as relativism relieves its adherents from the discomfort of expressing moral judgments about others, which every democratic spirit by nature wishes mightily to avoid, it also seems to relieve them from the awful weight of moral judgments about themselves. The great seduction, and the great deception, of relativism is that it promises to free its adherents from self-doubt, because it allows them to assert confidently without examination or argument that whatever moral values they settle upon are as good as any others. What once appeared to be dubious moral values are now all merely "alternative lifestyle choices." Any argument against them can be easily dismissed: "That's just your opinion, and who are you to judge!" When one's lifestyle choices are challenged, one need not defend them with rational arguments about the better and the worse. There is no better and worse. In the relativist world, even "opinion" becomes too strong a word because an "opinion" implies underlying reasons, but for the relativist there can be no valid reasons. Eventually all that remain are "preferences." It's enough to say, "This is my choice based on my preferences, and it is as good as any other." To suggest that some choices are better than others is to commit the only relativist sin--the sin of intolerance.

So how does one exist as a relativist? Well, the truth is one can't actually operate in the world as a practicing relativist. The relativists, being human, make moral judgments. They tell us that it is "wrong to be judgmental," but the command not to be judgmental entails, of course, a moral judgment. We humans are, by nature, judging creatures. Our psychic life requires moral judgment as much as our physical life requires air to breathe. And so the moral self-doubt reappears when relativism, which seemed so comfortably attached to democratic values of freedom of thought and tolerance, pronounces as it must that those very democratic values are in fact no better than any others. This marks the beginning of relativist self-doubt among democratic peoples. For one cannot live without self-doubt under a theory that judges that the devotion one feels to Western values has no rational moral basis and is merely a "preference," no more worthy to persist on this earth than the Islamofascist preferences of its attackers.

Yet instead of abandoning their contradictions, which would require giving up a pleasant amorality, (actually an immorality that promises to permit the unquestioned satisfaction of all desires), the relativists--like all zealots--become more vehement in their fallacy, which they champion under the noble-sounding cause of tolerance. But at the core of their souls, the democratic relativists have those doubts, and those doubts are the fertile ground for the growth of self-loathing. As I have written previously in this space:

The shapers of opinion on the left embrace the contemporary moral laxity, which allows them openly and freely to pursue and enjoy the personal and financial fruits of debauchery while ridiculing their critics as "judgmental moralistic bigots." Yet at some deep level they feel ashamed of themselves and this shame manifests itself in self-loathing. Those on the left, lacking steadfastness of moral principles of their own, find something attractive in the steadfastness of the moral clarity the Islamofascists claim for themselves. Thus, twenty-five years ago the political and intellectual leaders of the Western left made their pilgrimages to Paris to sit cross-legged at the feet of Ayatollah Khomeni. In domestic economic matters, this phenomenon of leftist self-loathing has long been correctly identified as "limousine liberalism." They sense that, morally speaking, we are all going to hell in handcarts. But the ride is too pleasant to resist, so they assuage their guilt by fretting over whether the upholstery of some handcarts is too plush compared to some others.

Now consider all this in light of yesterday's terrorist attack in London. When terrorists attack a Western people, they know well that among its countrymen and allies will be many whom relativism has predisposed not only to equivocate the brutality, but to form a fifth column.

Yes, while fear prevails, we can expect to hear the usual statements of national and international solidarity against terrorism. While fear prevails, most of the relativists will remain confusedly silent, for among them are many of those thoroughly corrupted souls in whom fear engenders not rage, but a confused paralysis. While the fear prevails, some relativists, even those who had in the not too distant past openly embraced terrorist sympathizers, might now go so far as to vent what remains of their honest instinctual rage in an almost unequivocal condemnation of the attacks. But as the fear abates, the voices of the self-loathing critics will gain strength and multiply. As the fear subsides further, the relativists, even the ones who were initially (mildly) outraged, will be unable to bring themselves to condemn their attackers because that would require what is for them an impermissible trans-cultural value judgment.

And thus, as the fear abates, the relativists' critique can only turn inward. (How quickly this can happen!) But though the relativists make moral judgments as much as (even more than) anyone else, the intellectual flaccidly of their theory has left them bereft of the capacity for sensible and rigorous judgment, the kind of sense and rigor that is a pre-requisite to the most difficult, dangerous, and necessary critique: the moral examination of one's own self. And so the relativists will not aim their criticism directly against themselves, for the lazy habits of their theory ("That's just your opinion!") have cost them the moral strength that a such a precise self-criticism would require.

Instead, they will excuse themselves and deflect the ire of their self-loathing toward their own people, their own culture, their own values, their own leaders, their own soldiers, their own countries, which are no longer really their own, because--as the relativists themselves would assert--an attachment to their own people and culture and values depends entirely upon historical accident. As their fear subsides, the vehemence of the relativists' critique will exactly equal the vehemence of their self-loathing. They will try to teach others the bitter lessons of their angry self-doubt, the lesson that we are no better than our enemies, the lesson that we fail to uphold our own values, the lesson that it's all about blood for oil, the lesson that we have no right to impose our values on other peoples, the lesson that we have unjustly incited our attackers, and the ultimate lesson that we do not deserve to prevail in our death-struggle against the Islamists.

After the fear subsides, the terrorists will wait to give the relativists time to spread their teachings as far as possible. Then they will strike us again, and the cycle will begin anew. At the end of it all, if the terrorists have calculated correctly, we in the West will all have arrived at the ultimate paradox, the point at which one does not have to be a relativist to ask oneself, "Does a culture that can no longer locate the moral grounds from which to defend its own values deserve to survive?"

A Declaration of War

2005-06-27T01:11:00.000-05:00

From: Bathus
To: David Frum
Sent: Monday, June 27, 2005 12:54 AM
Subject: formal legal code governing anti-terror operations

Dear Mr. Frum,

In your NRO Diary, you argue that "the administration should work with Congress to write a formal legal code governing its anti-terror operations" so as "to deprive liberals of any excuse" for acting like Dick Durbin.

I don't think that's such a good idea:

The very first executive power the Constitution grants to the president is that of commander-in-chief, an authority the boundaries of which are, for the most part, not otherwise explicitly delineated. Thus, the Constitution already assigns to the president whatever powers can constitutionally accrue to a commander-in-chief. In other words, with only a few explicit exceptions (e.g., the power to declare war reserved to Congress; the prohibition of quartering of soldiers except in time of war and as prescribed by law), every conceivable war-making power that is constitutional is already within the president's power. On the other hand, the Congress obviously cannot legislatively grant to the president any unconstitutional war-making power.

Therefore, since the president already possesses (almost) every possible constitutional war-making power, and since the Congress does not have the power to expand a president's war-making power beyond what is constitutional, any legislation that delineates some aspect of a president's war-making powers can in its effect only be either a limitation of those powers or a nullity.

The president needs flexibility in his exercise of the powers of commander-in-chief to deal with the unpredictable exigencies of war. As you say, "success in this war will require the United States government to take actions that it has never taken before," and it is impossible now to know exactly what those actions might be. For that very reason the courts have historically interpreted the president's war-making powers quite broadly to meet the exigencies of the moment. Such flexibility is especially necessary to prevent and to defeat asymmetrical attacks waged by terrorists. Any law delineating the president's war-making power would threaten that flexibility.

In light of the above, it would be rash legislatively to delineate (i.e., effectively to limit) the president's war-making power. Indeed, our enemies (who have no difficulty finding clever lawyers) could use your law "governing . . . anti-terror operations" as a blueprint to organize their own operations and methods so as to exploit areas in which the president's war-making power has been effectively circumscribed. In war, it's unwise to explain to the enemy every limit of one's powers and every circumstance in which one might or might not employ them. Yes, the long drawn out ad hoc litigations to resolve the scope of presidential war-making authority (accompanied by grandstand posturing by the president's political opponents) seem endlessly frustrating. But keep in mind that these lawsuits entail post hoc determinations, which means that in a crisis the president remains free to do what he thinks needs to be done right then, based on his best judgment of the boundaries of his constitutional authority, and he can let all the lawyers fret over sorting out the murky legal theories later. Your "formal legal code governing . . . anti-terror operations," even if its committees of drafters do not intend unreasonably to restrain him, might tie the president's hands in advance in unexpected ways so that he would lack the power needed to confront an unpredictable emergency.

With regard to your desire "to deprive liberals of any excuse" for acting like Dick Durbin, a new law "governing . . . anti-terror operations" would not deprive them of an excuse because they already have no excuse.

Many liberals do not require an "excuse."

They require only an "occasion."

Thus, as we have seen with the Patriot Act, the attempt to pass a law "governing . . . anti-terror operations," and--in the event of its passage--every attempt to employ that law in the exercise of a war-making power, would not mute the liberal cacophony or help this country to "hold together its war-fighting coalition," but would merely provide infinitely more numerous "occasions" for certain liberals to do the usual sort of things for which the lack of an excuse has heretofore been no restraint.

The very best thing this president could do to diminish uncertainty about the scope of his war-making authority is not to hamper himself and his successors with another War Powers Act that will be dangerously obsolete before the last bound copy rolls off the presses at the Congressional Printing Office, but to request from Congress a formal Declaration of War.

I admire your writing and remain . . .

Your loyal advocate,
Bathus at Adeimantus Blog

Sometimes the Truth Hurts

2005-06-24T12:24:00.000-05:00

Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.

White House Advisor Karl Rove

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I would hope Mr. Secretary that you and other members of the administration would immediately repudiate such an insulting comment from such a high ranking official [Karl Rove] in the President's inner circle.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton

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We’ve got to ask, why is this man [bin Laden] so popular around the world? Why are people so supportive of him in many countries that are riddled with poverty? He’s been out in these countries for decades, building schools, building roads, building infrastructure, building day-care facilities, building health-care facilities, and the people are extremely grateful. We haven’t done that. How would they look at us today if we had been there helping them with some of that rather than just being the people who are going to bomb in Iraq and go to Afghanistan?

Senator Patty Murray

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The war on terror . . . is occasionally military . . . . But it's primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world -- the very thing this administration is worst at. And most importantly, the war on terror is also an engagement in the Middle East economically, socially, culturally, in a way that we haven't embraced, because otherwise we're inviting a clash of civilizations.

Senator John Kerry

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I've resisted pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found. I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials. . . . it's best to say that the full range of penalties should be available. But it's not so great to prejudge the judicial system.

Democrat Party Chairman Howard Dean

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I think Karl was very specific, very accurate, in who he was pointing out.

White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett

We Are Blessed to Have Them Among Us

2005-06-22T01:16:00.000-05:00

From: Bathus
To: Victor Davis Hanson
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2005 12:37 AM
Subject: A Force of Nature: Illiberal Aspects of Illegal Immigration

Dear Mr. Hanson,

You are right that there is much that is illiberal about the way we manage, or fail to manage, illegal immigration from Mexico.

However, I am convinced that the human waves arriving from that country are impelled and attracted by economic, cultural, and political conditions that make that migration akin to a force of nature. Those economic, cultural, and political conditions will not change soon, and until they do, neither demagogic laws nor more rigorous enforcement to prevent those human movements will do much good--and might do much harm.

We might as well pass laws to prevent birds from flying south in the winter.

We might as well make it illegal for hurricanes to enter the Gulf of Mexico.

Yes, we and Mexico should set to work on the underlying causes, but in the meantime and so long as those underlying causes exist, a more rational approach would attempt to divert those human waves into manageable channels, increasing by several multiples the number of Mexicans legally allowed to enter this country, so that: (1) the immigrants who come here will both receive the benefits and bear the burdens of our laws and our culture (i.e., get them legal, get them into the mainstream, get them moving up the ladder of success, and then tax the hell out of them like everyone else!); and (2) we can then focus our attention more narrowly on the serious national security risk presented by the remaining few who would attempt to enter the country illegally. As to the latter point, the way things are now, terrorists and drug smugglers can easily hide themselves in the massive waves that cross our borders every day and night. By diverting the vast majority of illegals into a legal process, we would at least have an opportunity to scrutinize them as they come in the front door, and we could then assume that those who do not take a legal route are coming here to do harm.

I confess I am a great admirer of the work ethic and family ethic that one sees in the overwhelming majority of Mexican immigrants, whether legal or illegal, and I agree that the treatment illegal immigrants get under our present system is embarrassingly illiberal. Our illiberality is especially embarrassing inasmuch as these are people who raise and serve much of our food and many of our children, put roofs on our houses, pave our streets, clean the toilets in our homes and offices, and empty our aging parents' bedpans, all done with smiles on their faces, goodwill in their hearts, and for wages at which most any American would turn up his nose. We are truly blessed to have such humble and hardworking people among us.

With very few exceptions, the ones who decide to stay here will turn out to be very fine citizens if we give them half a chance. And unless we suddenly become willing to do a lot more of the "dirty work" for ourselves (and also willing to pay a lot more for the houses they'll no longer be building for us, the crops they'll no longer be picking for us, and the care they'll no longer be providing to our children and our old folks), there's no getting around the fact that we need them desperately.

Perhaps this is a sad commentary on the soft state of our own society: From my personal experience of having lived and worked on the Texas Gulf Coast for twenty-five years, if I had to choose--out of fifty "natives" and fifty illegals selected at random--ten people who would work hard and stick with it in a pinch, I'd probably take seven Mexicans and three US citizens. (At least one of the Anglos would have to speak Spanish, because my own Spanish still ain't so hot. I'm working on it.)

I read and very much admire all your writing, and I remain . . . .

Your loyal advocate,

Bathus at Adeimantus Blog

The End of Culture in America

2005-06-13T00:24:00.000-05:00

The moment a people acquires a certain awareness of an activity as being part of its "culture," at that moment the activity begins to cease being a part of that people’s living culture, and begins to be transformed into something else, something that might be art, or politics, or civil religion, but no longer exists as culture. At a certain moment of self-consciousness, culture ceases to exist because culture, in the truest sense, consists of activities that are carried on for the most part unselfconsciously in the everyday course of the life of a people. According to this formulation "culture" is mostly, if not always, unselfconscious. "Non-culture," for lack of better word, is artificial and self-conscious.

One can hardly speak of one’s own "cultural activities." To speak of them as such is to begin to destroy their character as cultural activities. Similarly, one absolutely cannot--not purposefully--preserve one’s own culture because a purposeful act of "cultural preservation" requires a degree of self-consciousness corrosive to genuine living culture.

Culture is never preserved. Culture is lived. And living (in case you hadn't noticed) is a mostly unselfconscious activity. What we call "cultural preservation" is actually a formalized entombment of never-living, dead, or dying cultures.

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The most conspicuous example today of "non-culture" presented as "culture" is Kwanza. Culture might well involve celebration, but culture itself can never be the thing celebrated. Genuine culture cannot exist as a celebration of itself. When a people purports to celebrate its culture, the very activity in which that people consciously engages, ostensibly in celebration of its culture, is no longer truly part of that people’s culture (if it ever were), and the culture purportedly being celebrated has become moribund (if it ever were alive). Such a celebration is, at best, some sort of staged re-enactment, not so different from a re-enactment of a Civil War battle. The staged affair might well be art or drama or political theater; it might even be historically accurate, but it is not culture. It is not the artificiality or the historical inaccuracy of Kwanza that distinguishes it as non-culture. It is the self-consciousness of the endeavor that renders it inauthentic non-culture.

A people’s genuine culture, like an individual person’s breathing, is carried on normally and naturally without thinking, the difference being that when a person reflects upon his act of breathing he can still breathe. His natural rhythm of breathing, burdened by thought, will become artificial and labored, yet he does not stop breathing and expire. But when a people begins to reflect upon its culture as culture, the aspect of culture upon which that people reflects ceases to exist as culture for that people.

Unlike a person who thinks about breathing, yet still breathes, if a people thinks too much about its culture, that people might cease to exist as a people. A culture cannot exist among a people with a refined consciousness of its culture as "culture." Yet a people cannot exist as a people unless its members share a culture.

This formulation of "culture" excludes not only Kwanza and Native American Pow Wow dances, but also all of what we think of as "high-culture," the latter for the very reason that production or participation in high-culture requires self-examination antithetical to unselfconscious action. High-culture is trans-cultural, and therefore not culture of the sort that is attached to or "belongs to" a people. On the other hand, the very word "culture" denotes a civilized refinement of natural growth--the difference between a thing growing wild and a thing that grows in a certain way because it has been attended to purposefully, if not obviously. So one can’t insist upon this formulation of culture as comprehensive. Yet this formulation is somehow fundamentally accurate and sheds some strong light on contemporary American culture.

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Yes, there is a genuine contemporary American culture.

Nowadays one could say that the archetypal American cultural activity is the activity of celebrating culture. In other words, our culture is to "celebrate culture." Our culture is to "preserve culture."

This is both strange and seemingly contradictory.

How strange it is that, with all our Greek Festivals, Italian Festivals, Asian Festivals, Korea Festivals, Polish Festivals, Kwanzas and Pow Wows (and one might even go so far as to include our religious celebrations as well), the foremost cultural activity of American life today is the entombment of non-living or dying cultures, an entombment we accomplish through the very act of "celebrating" these cultures.

How much stranger and seemingly contradictory it is that this hyper-romantic activity of entombing non-living and dying cultures, though excessively self-consciously concerned with the idea of culture, nonetheless begins to qualify as "culture" for us because the activity of entombing is carried on without consciousness of what is actually being done.

We self-consciously believe we are celebrating culture, but the self-consciousness precludes the possibility of any of the cultures we purport to celebrate being our own true culture. At the same time, we unselfconsciously entomb the cultures we purport to celebrate. Thus, not the cultures celebrated, but the activities of mummification and entombment, which we call "cultural preservation," are our true culture. Our self-conscious intent to celebrate diverse cultures is the very thing that finishes them off. At the same time, our lack of awareness that, by "celebrating cultures," we are clumsily yet thoroughly finishing them off, makes these celebrations of culture our genuine culture.

So, as of now, our predominant "cultural activity" in America consists of an interminable wake for dead, dying, or never-living cultures. Would knowledge of that fact begin the process of entombing the contemporary American culture which itself entombs other cultures? Thence the possibility of a return to a more unselfconscious development--from our own shared experience of everyday life--of a genuine American culture, one less strange and contradictory?

Potty-Mouths

2005-05-29T16:52:00.000-05:00

At work, twenty minutes before the start of the Memorial Day Weekend:

Most everyone has cut out early. The few who remain are going through the motions. Cindy (not her real name) is doing a little non-work-related internet surfing (officially prohibited, but we all do it). In a voice loud enough to be heard all over the office, she announces with unrestrained glee, "Aha! I knew it! The Pentagon just admitted that they did flush the Koran. Now let's see if Bush apologizes to Newsweek!"

That's how our little chat began.

"Really?!?!" I said. "Hmmm? I wonder if that is exactly correct. There's been a lot of misleading stuff on the internet lately about that, a lot of misleading headlines. But even if it were true, I wouldn't worry about it too much. There's a war on, so some unpleasant stuff is bound to happen. Ridding the world of a few copies of the Koran is way down the list."

"Well, how would you feel if they [meaning, I suppose, our enemies] were flushing Bibles?"

"Except for hoping the pages might clog their toilets, I couldn't care less. It's only ink and paper. It's the ideas that matter. . . . On second thought it occurs to me that if the worst they did was flush Bibles, that would be an immense improvement over what they do now. Are you unaware of the horrible incitements and outrageous lies they publish, in their state controlled media, about Christians and Jews, the horrible things they do to Christians and Jews only because they're Christians and Jews? Are you unaware that Christians can be arrested in many places in the Muslim world for simply holding a religious service? Are you unaware that Christians and Jews are 'strictly prohibited from entering Mecca and Medina'?" I'm revved up now, so I keep rolling. "Compare that with the way we treat Muslims on our soil. Now, I admit there are way too many stupid people in America who would like to beat up the Pakistani guy at the corner convenience store if they thought they could get away with it. But we don't encourage those cowards; we discourage them; and we even have laws that increase the punishment for the scum who perpetrate these hate crimes. I think it's right to respect other people's religions (so far as they are respectable, and even a bit more than that). I only wish that liberals felt the same way about respecting Catholics and conservative Christians here in America, whom one liberal has called the Brownshirts of American fascism."

At some point along here, our co-worker Sally (not her real name either) had chimed in on Cindy's side. "We're no better than our so-called enemies. Look at all the horrible stuff we've done. Bombing their country. Starving their children."

As you might have guessed, this account of my chat with Cindy and Sally is not a verbatim rendition, but only the substance. You might consider it an unfair rendition, because it excises so many of the words Cindy and Sally actually said. So, for fairness' sake, here's a reliable synopsis of what's been left out: "Bush lied to get us into an illegal war. No WMD. Bush is stupid. Abu Ghraib. Bush is evil. Haliburton."

Me, trying to return to the subject of showing respect for other religions: "As a matter of political policy and social mores, we not only protect Muslims' right to practice their religion on our soil, we bend over backwards to avoid doing anything that would hurt their feelings. To avoid insulting 25 year-old Muslim males from Saudi Arabia by singling them out for special scrutiny, our government's strategery for preventing terrorist hijackings requires that a proportionate number of 80 year-old widow ladies must be strip searched before they can fly back home from a trip to see the great-grandkids. It is astounding to me that people get so up in arms about how we have to respect our enemies' religion in every jot and tittle when they not only do not respect ours, but want to kill us because of it. We aren't perfect, but on any scale that reasonably takes into account the way the world actually operates, we are superior to most, if not all, when it comes to respecting other people's religions."

Sally, who had a while ago completely taken over the discussion from Cindy, now retreats fully into the sanctuary of cultural relativism, wherein supplicants at the alter of moral equivalence render themselves immune to the compulsions of rational discourse: "Well, you can't judge whether one culture is superior to another because you can't know what it means to respect religion in another culture. They might have a different standard for what it means to respect religion, and from their point of view what we do is more disrespectful toward their religion than what they do to us."

One wants to scream, "So you think killing Christians and Jews for being Christians or Jews might qualify as a respectful way to treat people of those religions?!?!?" Instead, I try to tone it down. "How can you suggest that it is more disrespectful of us to allow them to practice their religion than it is of them to prevent us from practicing ours? That conclusion cannot be supported on the grounds of a difference in cultural standards. Support for that conclusion requires a double standard. Besides which, if your cultural relativism were true, we shouldn't pay the slightest attention to Muslims when they accuse us of being disrespectful because they can't judge what's respectful or what's not in our culture."

When a liberal discovers an acquaintance happens to be a Republican, the reaction is well nigh universal: "You seemed like such a nice person!" Thence from Sally, out of the blue yet predictable, the coup de grâce, "I'm shocked to hear you talking like that. I just can't believe it. You always seemed like such a nice and smart guy, but now it turns out you're [sneer and gasp] a Republican!"

Yours truly is not what he seemed, "nice and smart," but implicitly the opposite, "evil and dumb," i.e., a Republican! To which I want to say, "How f*cking original, you ignorant sl*t!" But instead I give Sally my stock answer, "Yes, it is true. I am a dastardly red-state-Republican-moron. I know it is shocking how I've been deceiving you all this time. But there you have it. I just have to try to learn to live with myself."

If a workplace conversation ever reaches the point when your interlocutor intimates the shocking discovery that you are mean and stupid, further discussion will get you nowhere fast. Indeed, this is exactly the kind of conversation that no one in his right mind gets into at work. It's just too risky, too disruptive to inter-office relationships. Sometimes I can't resist rising to the bait when it's waved in my face, but I really do know better.

So I start looking for a graceful exit.

I retreat and offer a truce. "You know, Sally, I think we are just going to have to agree to disagree. Our positions are just too far apart, and us talking about it is not going to do any good. Anyway, we really shouldn't be having this kind of conversation at work, and it would be very wrong for us to let politics mess up a good working relationship since we all get along so well on everything else."

Sally, a decent rhetorician, assumes the victorious posture. "So you're afraid to talk about it."

"No, Sally, it's not that I don't have arguments to offer. It's just that I see my words begin to fall on deaf ears. I think we comprehend each other as well as we both want to on this subject. You think Bush, whom you probably hate, is a dummy who lied us into an illegal, immoral, and unwinnable war to create a pretext for stealing oil, enriching Cheney's friends at Haliburton, curtailing free speech, and accusing good liberals of being unpatriotic. (Have I left anything out?) I disagree to an extreme degree. We've gone through enough of the basic points on either side that I think it's safe to conclude that nothing you're saying makes me think I should change my mind. And I'm pretty sure there's nothing I can say to change yours. So we'd best just not discuss it."

Notwithstanding that only a few moments earlier she had condemned me with that most vile of epithets ("Republican" viz. "stupid and evil"), Sally now ascends to a huffy superior position of righteous indignation. "You don't have the right to accuse me of hating anybody. I don't hate anybody. I respect the president because of the office he holds."

Well, that's generous, if true. Yet somehow I don't believe Sally respects the president, just like I didn't believe Mark Fuhrman when he said he never used the N word. But I swallow my disbelief and reply, "You are right. I was wrong to say that you hate Bush. I'm sorry I said that, and I want to take that back. But I really do think that there's no point in us arguing over this anymore."

So ended my talk with Sally on this particular subject. I shall never be so foolish as to take it up with her again. I have been around long enough to know how deadly can be any workplace political disagreement with a member of a doubly protected class, a female of color, who aggressively hefts a large chip on her shoulder. I'd like to keep my job a while longer, along with whatever remains of my reputation as a "nice guy."

However, a few minutes later (a little out of earshot of Sally), I was not so unfoolish as to pick things back up with Cindy, whose announcement had kindled the conversation. She was sitting at her computer surfing the internet. "Cindy, I'm still wondering what was the source of your story that the Pentagon admitted flushing Korans? There's been a lot of confusion about what's actually been reported."

It just so happened Cindy had the web page still open on her desktop (discretely hidden, of course, under a window with something that looked like work). The source of the story was a lefty chat board at Democratic Underground or some such site. There in large bold letters a helpful lefty poster had hyperlinked the title of his entry: Pentagon Admits Flushing Korans. Cindy clicked the link to open the original news item, slightly differently titled, Pentagon admits to Koran abuse.

So I asked Cindy, "Where does it say the Pentagon has admitted Korans were flushed?"

"Well, it says the Pentagon has admitted there were incidents of Koran abuse."

"Yes, I had heard about that. But I heard those incidents were few and relatively mild. Where does it say the Pentagon admitted Korans were flushed?"

"Well, I think it says an FBI agent said they were flushed."

"No, I don't think that's quite what it says. Can you read it to me?"

"It says, 'At a Pentagon news conference, Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, who commands the detention center in Cuba, said a prisoner who was reported to have complained to an FBI agent in 2002 that a military guard threw a Koran in the toilet has told Hood's investigators that he never witnessed any form of Koran desecration.'"

"Yes, that's what I was guessing it might say. So all that we can be certain of so far is that a terrorist suspect has alleged that a Koran was flushed. But now it looks like he's recanted that claim."

"Well, he's a prisoner under U.S. military control so who knows whether he's able to speak freely."

"Yes, but we do know he was at least allowed to speak freely enough for the FBI guy to record his original allegation. It's really up to you whether you choose to believe a terrorist suspect more than your own government. But back to the point. That was only an allegation. What we were looking for is the part where the Pentagon admits Korans were flushed."

"Well, it doesn't exactly say that."

"Looks like you have to read a little beyond the headliine."

"Yeah, I guess that's different."

There's hope for Cindy.

Another Sip of Latte

2005-05-03T00:39:00.000-05:00

Because it tends to encourage a more pleasing arrangement of wrinkles, in lieu of frowning I've learned to smile when I receive an invitation to self-reflection and find enclosed in the same envelope the standardized text of another lecture about "oppression" . . . especially when the teaching on oppression (abbreviated and second hand in this case) originates from a man who commands $15,000 a pop for the 120 public speaking appearances he makes each year.

I enthusiastically accept almost any honest invitation to reflect upon my own vices and virtues and how these have harmed or helped my fellow creatures. Yet my exceedingly impure blood, besides muddling my skin to a lovely shade of tan, also seems to have made me immune to infections of collective guilt. As a result, lucky me, never have I felt the urge to purge my guts in the convulsions of that contemporary hypochondria.

But I do talk with my liberal friends about oppression all the time. It's one of their favorite subjects. And though, as I said, I do not myself indulge in the mass hysteria, I always want to indulge my friends. Our conversation on this topic usually takes place in comfortable surroundings--a restaurant, a coffee shop (other than Starbucks), one of our own artfully yet modestly decorated living rooms, etc., with some fine music in the background and an inspiring beverage on the table in front of us. Notwithstanding our eschewal of Starbucks for a less globalistic purveyor, the typical setting tends to exacerbate their confusion because they wish oh so much to be able to think of themselves as oppressed. Yet in such circumstances, it is very hard to consider oneself oppressed unless one intends to assert how oppressive it is to have been served a latte at not quite the proper temperature.

Inasmuch as we are not oppressed, the alternative must be seized upon: We are oppressors. Yes, such is the perverse psychic refuge to which liberals always retreat in circumstances wherein, though they wish to remain faithful to the sacred religious tenets of victimology, it would be ludicrous to claim a heroic status among the oppressed. Theirs is a world divided between oppressed and oppressors. And because so few, if any, of them have ever truly been oppressed for more than the briefest moment, the only possible solution is a cathartic confession that they themselves are among the oppressors.

The expectation is that, if I were a decent fellow, I should join in their communal confession. The more civil of my liberal interlocutors apprise me of my probable guilt with a gentle and generic hint about the need for self-reflection: “we must always remember to look for injustice in our own lives and in ourselves as well.” But when the conversation takes this inevitable turn, I have an unfair advantage: my skin is more often than not a shade darker than theirs, and in every case dark enough to make them hesitate to overtly accuse me of oppressing anyone. I am similarly blessed with friends who are, for the most part, financially better off than I am, or at least have better and more regular incomes. If you knew my meager earnings, unlikely ever to be supplemented by substantial gift or inheritance, you would probably want to enroll me in the lists of oppressed. My liberal friends in their generosity stand willing to enroll me on the slightest evidence. But I'll have none of it. I've chosen this paltry life, I enjoy it, and I refuse to be classified as oppressed. I refuse that appellation not because I'm too proud to admit my lowly condition, but because I simply ain't. As to my being an oppressor, the truth is, as I have discovered after extensive self-examination, I am a tolerably kind and considerate fellow, if I do say so myself, and at all events rather powerless to oppress anyone.

It is impossible colorably to accuse me of being an oppressor except in the most theoretical and attenuated sense. You can try, but you will look mean and silly in the attempt.

So here I am, neither obviously an oppressor nor obviously an oppressed. But, with their lattes growing cold, my liberal friends take the predictable tack. While I am not obviously oppressed or oppressor, I am, they patiently explain, guilty (probably unknowingly) of collaborating with the oppressors. At this I do take offense because a collaborator is to my mind perhaps worse than an active oppressor, doing the same harm but with cowardice or laziness. The implication is that I am either a disgusting race-traitor or a feckless idiot. But wait a second, other than shopping at WalMart, what do I do differently than they that makes me a quisling? As it turns out, not much of any consequence.

So now we play tit for tat. For every sin of mine, such as my venal WalMart shopping, I can point to an equal or more egregious sin of theirs: they drive a car bigger than mine, work for a corporation, work in management, eat non-free-range chickens, wear leather, etc., ad nauseam. The list of sins is endless, and consequently, the conversation often takes a nasty turn downward at this point.

In the end the main difference between them and me comes to this. My liberal friends have confessed their sin of oppression, while I have not. I suppose that means they will be admitted by grace to a liberal heaven and I shall not. But, aside from that curious result, I swear to you there's hardly a dime's worth of difference in how we live our lives from one day to the next. My real sin, the only one that distinguishes me from them, is that I think differently than they do.

So I am desired to confess to a thought crime, and that really does make me begin to feel oppressed.

But another sip of latte makes me feel better.

Sadly, their next sip of latte doesn't seem to have the same effect on my liberal friends. Instead it makes them feel even more guilty. And then I see resolution forming in their tensed brows. Because I have pointed out how little we seem to differ in the way we actually live our lives, they are going to go out and do something--to prove me wrong, so they say silently to themselves, but in reality to absolve their guilt: recycle more scrupulously, attend a rally, sign a petition, work at a food bank, march in a protest, take public transportation. If you’re a liberal, you know the drills.

On a moment's reflection, I realize I've done them no good. I've succeeded only in pushing them deeper into their undeserved self-loathing, which the ceremonial scourgings and sacrificial rituals of the liberal religion of victimology (e.g., sorting the trash for recycling, marching in a protest, riding the bus, etc.) will not long relieve.

Their lattes sit there practically untouched, they have clammed up entirely, and I am beginning to feel guilty about making them feel guilty. This is not turning out to be the relaxing evening we had all hoped for. My wife is glaring at me. I want to make amends. “Look” I say to them (and I really do mean it), “you are a good and kind person. One of the best I know. Otherwise, I wouldn't be your friend. We are all doing the best we can. I honestly don’t think you oppress anyone and neither do I, at least not on purpose, so let’s forget this social politics bullshit. It's hard to know how to change the world; even if we could, it's hard to know what's the best way to go about it. No matter what you try to do, these things can get so screwed up. You treat me fair, better than I deserve considering how obnoxious I can be sometimes, so I know you try to be fair to everyone. And you are a great husband, wife, mother, father, teacher, friend, etc. It's not wrong at all to put most of your energy into those things. That's how the world gets changed for the better. Geez, with all this yacking, we've let our coffee get stone cold. I'm gonna go get us some fresh ones. Whadya want in yours?”
-

Re-reading David Brooks

2005-04-20T20:18:00.000-05:00

From: Bathus
To: dabrooks@nytimes.com
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2005 10:47 PM
Subject: Re-reading a Piece of Your Work

Dear Mr. Brooks,

Today I happened to re-read one of your pieces that I had taken issue with a few months ago in something I wrote on my blog. This time around, a few lines in your article, The Power of Marriage, really jumped right out at me:

Some conservatives may have latched onto biological determinism . . . as a convenient way to oppose gay marriage. But in fact we are not animals whose lives are bounded by our flesh and by our gender. We're moral creatures with souls . . .

Those words, Mr. Brooks, noble as they aim to be, nevertheless express a fatal ignorance of human nature.

It is the opposite of ironical that you would exalt liberation from the bondage of our fleshy natures as a justification for homosexual acts. If human beings have evolved so far as to be liberated from demands of the flesh, then why isn't homosexual sex, or all sex for that matter, something that can easily be done without? One suspects that those claiming liberation from the flesh wish not so much to be liberated from their fleshy desires, but rather to avoid an accusation that their acts in fulfillment of those desires are proscribed as "unnatural."

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

The truth is our lives are "bounded by our flesh and by our gender."

Consider the boundary of our flesh. The "three score and ten" years traditionally allotted has, for a fortunate few in developed countries, been extended somewhat and will no doubt be further extended through the miracles of modern science and technology. Yet no matter how many years we might add to the human life-span, that boundary of our fleshy existence, our mortality, will remain one of the essentially defining facts of our earthly being: We are mortals, contrived of mortal flesh, and by that boundary we are defined in contradistinction to the immortals.

Our mortality is a boundary placed by nature (or, if you prefer, by God) upon our flesh. And if our wonderful science should ever proceed so far that we can escape that boundary here on earth, I am certain that we would be the worse for it--not because life is not sweet, but because in myriad ways death offers meaning to human life, not the least by inspiring us urgently to seek life's meaning and to try to live by it, thereby saving us from an eternal triviality of a perpetual juvenility.

Our fleshy mortality reminds us that the eternal is not (yet) ours and is (still) beyond us. The boundary of our mortal flesh reminds us that the universe is not formed by our desires, that not everything is allowed to us--in other words, that we are not gods.

We should try to keep that in mind.

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

Now consider the boundary of gender. This boundary, the boundary of our reproductive nature, is entwined by nature with the boundary of our mortality. For our reproductive nature is both a reminder of and a compensation for the fact of our mortality. The ever-perspicuous duality of the sexes reminds us that, as mortal humans, we are individually incomplete and insufficient beings, autonomously incapable of sustaining or generating life. Precisely because none of us is immortal, we must procreate to continue human life. The sex act is a primal acknowldgment of one's own mortality. Yet by procreating we participate in some measure here on earth in the eternal being that is otherwise denied to our fleshy nature. But in this, too, we are naturally limited by the boundaries of gender: No man will ever give birth. No woman will ever father a child.

But wait! Have I spoken too soon? Our applied science is already making such things commonplace. (A friend of mine likes to joke that no male will submit to giving birth until technology makes it possible to gestate a baby in a gym bag. Her joke isn't quite as funny as it used to be.)

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

We marvelous humans have before broken through and will in times to come break through many of the boundaries nature has seemed to set for us. Some of those boundaries no doubt should be breached, or at least pushed farther away. But some others should not be. It's a tricky business and deserves more thought than you have put into it.

For it manifests an awesome Sophoclean hubris for you to claim that, as moral beings possessed of souls, we need not consider ourselves bounded by mere flesh. More likely the opposite is true. If we are to remain "moral creatures with souls" intact, then we must remain acutely aware of limits designed upon our mortal nature. If we fine creatures "are not . . . bounded by our flesh and gender," the two most conspicuous and enduring constraints that nature has placed upon us, then one must conclude that there is absolutely nothing in nature that should restrain us. And if we are not bounded somehow by our very own human nature, then what could possibly be an external boundary that we, collectively, should respect? Or do you believe the wish of a majority can license anything, without regard to any external rule? Without even human nature as a standard, by what measure shall we discover any boundary for human action? Surely you don't mean to propose God's law as a socially enforceable limit?

You see, Mr. Brooks, it's not about "biological determinism," but about living in accordance with our natural status as limited creatures. To claim that we are "not bounded by our flesh and gender," the intertwined mortal boundaries, is to stake a claim to godhood.

Oedipus, no doubt, did very much love his mother, yet that did not seem to be a sufficient excuse. As unfair as it seems, and I absolutely insist that this is not a theological statement, some things are not allowed to us as humans, which is not to say that we can't succeed in doing many, most, or all of them anyway at some time or another, but rather that in the process we risk becoming something other than human. When we have learned to despise every limit nature has set before us (or, if you prefer, every limit set by God), will we then have become gods ourselves? Or something else?

There's No Fool Like an Old Fool Who's Trying to Be Cool

2005-04-05T21:45:00.000-05:00

My faithful blogmate Tom, in an attempt to rouse me from the depths of bloglethargy, emailed me today:

I'll know you're overworked if you don't manage to post something on this at the blog.

Against the grain of my natural indolence, I clicked the link, which opened to this amusing article:

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore on Monday unveiled his new television network, "Current," which aims to attract younger viewers with short videos and a tie-in with the popular Google Inc. search engine.

The network plans to debut on Aug. 1 and be available to 19 million subscription television viewers, Gore said at a news conference at the cable industry's annual convention. Gore led an investment group that last May bought the network from Vivendi Universal for an undisclosed sum.

The channel will show professionally produced segments as well as viewer-produced videos mostly short in length, running from a few seconds to up to 15 minutes.

"We are about empowering this generation of young people in their 20s, the 18-34 population, to engage in a dialogue of democracy and to tell their stories about what's going in their lives in the dominant media of our time," he said.

Viewers will also be able to vote for their favorite videos and get tutorials via the Internet on how to produce their own segments, according to network officials.

"We're starting something new and we're trying to bring about a change in the way the television medium is used," said Gore. "We know it's hard, but we're excited about trying."

. . . .

"We have no intention of being a Democratic channel, a liberal channel, or a TV version of Air America, that's not what we're all about," he said, referring to the liberal radio network.

Gore serves as chairman of the board of that channel.

My dear friend Tom, it is so very kind of you to try to goad me gently off my fat duff. (And since I do appear to have arisen from that most vital organ, let me remind you that it is now your turn to post something.)

But the topic you propose has just barely enticed me to stir from my lethargy. Limo liberals collaborating on a "new" media venture to interest a youthful demographic in political issues was already a worn out concept some twenty years ago when MTV et al. gave us Hands Across America. Inasmuch as Al Gore has promised that Current's founders "have no intention of being a Democratic channel, a liberal channel, or a TV version of Air America," we can safely assume the opposite, which is a guarantee that Current cannot succeed in its stated purpose.

There is nothing in that story to excite me from my happy repose.

On the other hand, the mere mention of Al Gore supplies all the justification I need to republish (for the third time!) the photo affixed to the conclusion of this post. That's my only real reason, Tom, for responding to your feeble incitement. Everything else written hereafter is just a pretext for re-posting that photo, which may be the best damn piece of work I've ever done in my entire life.

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

So now, on with the pretext . . .

Regarding Al Gore's yearning to . . . ahem . . . stimulate, er, I mean empower, the young: Given a choice between mindless politics mixed with other forms of mindlessness, and mindlessness exclusively devoted to more closely related subjects (i.e., sex, parties, sex parties, getting a good buzz on, and music you can dirty-dance to), the members of Current's target demographic will always prefer the purer stuff.

Alas, one of the classic condescensions of the liberal mind is the assumption that the young, and every other demographic for that matter, cannot digest political material unless it first is slathered with an age-appropriate condiment, i.e., sex, fast-moving images, and other cool stuff for the youthful, the predictable ethnic seasoning for minorities, etc.

Then again, a sentence like the latest Gorism,

We are about empowering this generation of young people in their 20s, the 18-34 population, to engage in a dialogue of democracy

which is apparently Current's manifesto, illustrates precisely why today's liberals must always employ the mental equivlent of a thick enteric coating to render their excretions marginally palatable for human consumption.

So Al, could you get back to us with a more definitive answer about whether "this generation of young people" includes persons 18 to 34 or is restricted to those in their 20s?

That amusing demographic confusion, while saving Gore's "empowerment" pabulum from being ignored out of hand as typical liberal fatuity, does so only by exposing (once again) the speaker's self-ridiculing vapidity. Whatever noble thought Gore hoped to inspire with his promise to "empower this generation" was dragged straight to the ground by his brief but deadly foray into an impossibly banal demographic question. Would a person who actually cared about "empowering young people" trip himself up on the overly nice question of whether 18 to 20 year olds and post-thirty year olds fit the definition? One could exhaust many hours in Freudian speculations about what kind of concerns must be flitting about in the Gore's strange mind to cause him publicly to exhibit such inapposite confusion. The end of those speculations would inevitably confirm what we already know: Al Gore is an excruciatingly vapid man.

Yet now, with his clumsy appeal to youth, Al Gore's vapidity has acquired a hideously comic quality, like an old lady wearing hotpants. It really is funny if, that is, you can stand to look without gagging.

As the saying goes, there's no fool like an old fool, especially an old fool trying to be cool, most especially when the old fool trying to be cool happens to be Al Gore.

The fact is, to the extent that the young do take a genuine interest in matters political, they prefer theirs without spurious flavorings, coatings, and packagings. The least bright and the most spoiled of the young perhaps will not notice when they are being pandered to with a vengeance, and if they do notice, they might even appreciate it if a little high-sounding political talk lends a more noble character to the indulgence of primal youthful inclinations. But even the dull and the spoiled will grow bored quickly if the political content distracts much from their primary interests. So if Current's programming quickly evolves (and it would be an evolution, not a devolution) to contain amid pure and mindless sex-promotion not more than a hint of the mindless liberal sloganeering so well-illustrated by Gore's fatuity, the new channel might help sell a few six packs of Budweiser or ten packs of Trojans.

Most likely, the enterprise will fail altogether. In the meantime, we have the amusement of watching a spectacle combining a novel form of comedy with an ancient one:

worn out old fart liberals, like Al Gore and his liberal last-generation internet millionaire buddies, making fools of themselves by throwing away their own money, which would be something new,

and

worn out old fart liberals, like Al Gore and his liberal last-generation internet millionaire buddies, making fools of themselves by trying to be cool with the kids, which is something old fart liberals have been doing from time immemorial.

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

Post Script: As promised, and to further empower this generation of young people (whether they be in their 20s or in the 18-34 population), I include herewith the following classic image, slightly photoshopped by yours truly, showing Al Gore engaging in what he seems to think is the "dialogue of democracy."

Death Made Easy?

2005-03-24T21:28:00.000-06:00

I have somewhat mixed feelings about "living wills."

Perhaps it is my instinctive aversion to accepting any fashionable concept that needs a euphemism for its name.

Maybe I wouldn't object if they called it a "dying will," so we could be a little more sure that we aren't kidding ourselves about exactly what's involved.

Yeah, I understand the idea is to relieve your family members of the burden of difficult decisions about end-of-life care and also to make sure that your own wishes are clearly expressed and honored.

On the other hand, as a lawyer I have learned entirely to disrespect the power of any flimsy piece of paper to ensure that people's true intentions will be honored. In the event of a real conflict, whether about end-of-life questions or anything else, a piece of paper usually serves merely to provide additional pretexts for whatever machinations the most manipulative person in the situation wishes to pursue.

The words we sign our names to today--words which seem so unambiguous, iron-clad, definitive, and comprehensive when they only apply in the abstract to some vaguely described future hypothetical situation--rarely retain that power and clarity when it's time to try to put them to work to deal with the hard cold reality of an actual life-or-death situation. If you are gravely ill, I'm sorry to inform you that no piece of paper is going to protect you from scheming in-laws, vengeful ex-spouses, selfish children, soulless lawyers, or callous money-grubbing doctors, if they have something to gain from either your excessively extended life or your untimely death.

These days, it seems to me the increasingly greater risk is not that your fleshy existence will be dragged out a bit too long, but that the chorus will already be warmed up to sing your swan song halfway through the second act.

When I hear people say, with reference to someone else who is suffering through (what looks like) the end of their days, "If I'm ever in that condition, I hope someone will put me out of my misery," I want to say, "Hey, what makes you think you deserve to get off so easy!" What I mean is, dying isn't designed to be convenient or easy. Elsewise too many of us might find assisted suicide, or withdrawal of life support, or withdrawal of feeding, or prohibition of extraordinary care, or whatever you want to call it, just too tempting a solution for all manner of life's difficulties--both for ourselves and for other inconvenient persons.

The truth is, as we sit here relatively healthy and only minimally capable of imagining the confusing circumstances that might surround what might be, or might not be, the end of our days (for the human mind naturally closes itself off to all conceptions of the circumstances surrounding one's own death), it is impossible for us to rationally say "this is what I would want."

No one really knows what he would want. All we know now is what we think we would want, but we have no idea what we would actually want when the time comes.

A little trick that life plays on us dozens of times every day is that we really don't know what we want until we find ourselves in an actual situation that presents the concrete choice that we had previously considered only in the shallow abstract. Death is a bridge we can't know exactly how, or when, to cross until we actually come to it. Unfortunately, when it comes to grave illness, at the moment when the choice becomes sufficiently concrete that we might know what we really would want, we often aren't able to express our wishes, much less to insist upon them.

But instead of trusting in some legalistic piece of paper, which only expresses what we wanted at the time we signed it and is obsolete to deal with the horrible complexity of that moment when we need it most, the best we can hope for is to have a spouse or a child who knows us well enough and loves us well enough that they will then enter into our hearts so far as to understand what would be our true wish. That is a terrible burden for a loved one to bear, but it is also the kind of burden that is given to love and that love can bear.

So yes, my wife and I occasionally talk about "what we would want when the time comes," but those vague and abstract musings cannot and should not, any more than some legalistic document, be presumed to supply an easy answer about what's the right thing to do with my bag of bones in the particular real life situation when it looks like my time might be up. Instead, my wife's just going to have to play it by ear. Like all of life's most difficult decisions, the best way to approach it is not to go into it with preformulated ideas about what must be done, but to muddle through when the time comes.

That approach is definitely a lot harder than just pulling out the notarized form to verify which box has been checked. What makes us think it's all supposed to be so damned cut and dried? Can't we leave aside the legal forms and act in accordance with our God-given humanity for just this one thing? Dammit, it's right and natural that these things should be difficult, that they should be confusing, that they should require tears and tribulation.

So, assuming I'm not blessed with the good fortune of getting hit by a dump truck, when the time comes that it looks like I might be sliding irretrievably into the abyss, my poor wife's just going to have to pray and cry and be confused. No piece of paper is going to let her off the hook. But when she's done praying and crying and being confused, I trust that she'll make the right decision much more than I would ever trust some legal paper to make the decision for her. I trust her future judgment more than I trust my own present judgment, even assuming that a legal form written by an anonymous lawyer could capture even my present conceptions about the subject.

I wish Terri Schiavo had a spouse like mine.

Don't get me wrong. It's not that I would want to hang onto life at any cost for my own selfish sake, but I really do think we all have a God-given duty to keep up the struggle to live the life He gave us until it's beyond question that He has better plans for us. Exactly when that moment has arrived is something that can't be determined in advance according to some dry legal formula.

So in case anybody ever asks you, my message to the doctors is, "You haughty SOBs had better keep doing everything you can to keep my body and soul on speaking terms until either I or my wife tell you otherwise." And my message to the lawyers is, "You bastards just leave us the hell alone." If there's a living will composed of just those two sentences, then maybe I'll sign it. Otherwise, I think a living will is at best useless (accomplishing nothing that would not come about soon enough anyway) and at worst might very well get you killed off before your time.

"I just want to thank the defendant for murdering our child. The insurance payoff helped immensely with the bills."

2005-03-18T06:52:00.000-06:00

Next to the concept of "hate crimes" (the killers of James Byrd were given the death penalty, but should also have attended racial sensitivity classes), victim impact statements during the sentencing phase of a murder trial have got to be the stupidest thing in our criminal justice system. Historically, a "victim impact statement" involved the actual, legally defined "victim" of an offense cataloguing for the court his financial losses, in the case of an economic crime, or his physical suffering, in the case of a violent crime, for the purpose of restitution. Within the past two decades or so, such statements are permitted during the sentencing portion of homicide trials, and were we not a culture in which victimization of one kind or another is the basis for individual identity, we would laugh at the asinine misnomer in this context: The victim of a homicide is dead and (try not to be too shocked) therefore not present in court to make any statement as to what he lost at the hands of the perpetrator. Alas, our contemporary pop-psych, Dr Phil culture has invaded the courts, and there are other "victims" of the crime - emotional victims - who are now permitted to catalogue for the court the tears they've shed as a result of the murder. Were they not so pathetic, some of the instances in which these statements have been given would be funny.

Take the case of the cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer. Here's a guy convicted of something like 30 or so counts of murder one after police discovered severed body parts of his victims throughout his Wisconsin apartment, including in his refrigerator. Tell me a court, not to mention the society it represents, before it could come up with a punishment to fit the crime(s), really needed the relatives of Dahmer's victims to tell it how horrible it was for them that their sons and brothers were murdered, dismembered, and eaten by the defendant.

All right, I'll admit I've held this low opinion of VISs for quite some time, but I was compelled to write this piece expressing my disdain after reading and watching the numerous reports of Sharon Rocha's so-called testimony concerning the emotional impact of her daughter Laci's and unborn grandson Connor's murders at the hands of her son-in-law, Scott Peterson. Actually, I expressed this opinion to my good (virtual) friend and owner of this site, Bathus, almost immediately after Mrs. Rocha had apparently "convinced" the Court that Scott deserved the penalty the jury handed down over two months ago. He wasted no time in putting me in my place:

At the risk of offending your callousness (or should I say your "sensitivity"?) about excessive and misplaced sensitivity for "victims" (both real and imagined), I must strongly disagree with your assertion that "'victim impact statements at murder trials have got to be the stupidest thing in our criminal justice system." If you think hard for about five seconds you surely will easily recollect, in addition to "hate crime" laws, a multitude of other laws and practices in the criminal justice system that are far more stupid than victim impact statements, which are at worst harmless. The effect on a family of losing a loved one to violent crime is absolutely devastating, and most families never really recover from the nightmare. Yes, the family members are real victims, in some senses moreso than the dead, who has not to cope with the aftermathof his own death. It's just not the same as losing someone to illness or even to accident. So, yes, I believe it is a healthy thing for judges and lawyers and other criminal justice bureuacrats (who tend to get so wrapped up in process that they forget about the flesh and blood human beings) to be forced to pause and see for just a few moments what the families will have to cope with for the rest of their lives. Yes, it is an awkward, uncomfortable, and even ugly thing to see surviving family members clumsily and inarticulately vent their grief and anger with words that cannot but fail to miss the mark. Such primal statements offend the rarified dignity of the judicial process. But the fact is, justice ain't pretty.

In these sentimentalist times it is highly unfashionable to express this thought: Until the day that human beings become angels, retribution ("getting even," so to speak) will remain a goal of every healthy system of justice - much more than rehabilitation or deterence. Allowing surviving victims to express how they have been harmed, while perhaps it should not influence the outcome of a particular case, nevertheless contributes to the general understanding of just how much it would take to really "get even," in the light of which calculous, stiff sentences for brutal criminals begin to appear less harsh and more clearly just.

Not so strangely, my wife, who has spent menna-menna years in courtrooms, including a decade in criminal court (which includes homicide) agrees with my buddy. She believes the survivors' statements go beyond convincing the court of their grief, but satisfy what she thinks is their "right" (which she grants you can't find in the Constitution, but who has that ever stopped?) to confront the defendant directly and punish him with their emotional outbursts as compensation for not being allowed to pull the switch (or administer the lethal injection as the case may be) themselves.

My friend (and my wife through his argument) and I are arguing from flip sides of the same cultural coin:

“In these sentimentalist times it is highly unfashionable to express this thought: Until the day that human beings become angels, retribution ("getting even," so to speak) will remain a goal of every healthy system of justice - much more than rehabilitation or deterence.”

I believe victim impact statements in murder trials, dripping as they do with expressions of revenge that would make Old Testament authors cringe, are not a defiant retort to our “sentimentalist times”, as his statement implies to me, but an echo of them. They reflect the court’s surrender to the cultural need that everyone not only perceive themselves as victims, but that they must be afforded a stage upon which to emote. This was reinforced for me the day of Rocha's statement as I listened to the comments of Jeffrey Feiger on MSNBC's Abrams Report (and a question to anyone who saw the same show: When did sociopaths like Peterson become so distasteful to the defender of Jack Kevorkian?), where he used the dramatic terms “catharsis” and “performance” to describe Rocha’s long harangue. Apparently, it’s not enough that lawyers themselves (and sometimes judges) often turn a courtroom into third-rate dinner theater without the meal throughout the actual trial, we also need a parade of other actors once the evidence has been decided after months – sometimes years - to drag out what is already a protracted process by telling us what we know to be true already: To have a loved one murdered is devastating.

It is, in a word, gratuitous, particularly in light of a homicide trial that has already resulted in a guilty verdict and a sentence of death. If any judge requires relatives of the legal victim of a murder involving dismemberment and/or other patently heinous elements of the crime to tell him how devastated they are in order to decide or give his imprimatur to the penalty, then the law is truly, as Dickens said, a ass. Which, by the way, I think Bathus is saying is exactly why these statements are required. If so, then we have to place statements like Rocha's in the larger context of the entire process, from arrest, through conviction and sentencing, up to actual execution of the sentence. In this case, Peterson will likely sit on death row for a decade or more before he takes the needle – if he ever does. There's a chance he will outlive Laci's mother given the appellate process in California capital cases. So, again, what do these solo arias by survivors in these courtroom operas accomplish in the grand scheme of “justice” which, if I’m not mistakenly reading the caption sheets in criminal trials, is enacted on behalf of the people of a state, not the individuals related to a victim? They are added to what is supposed to be a legal process, but they are not based on any legal necessity, merely a contemporary cultural one: the surviving family members have a right to “feel better” by venting their spleens against a defendant whose crime – one proven beyond a reasonable doubt, let's not forget - anyone in his right mind knows is horrible.

What makes Rocha's statement even more gratuitous are the reports that Scott Peterson was not only stoic in the face of her courtroom diatribe (which is the stance most defendants assume during these statements), but that he completely ignored some parts of it: he bullshitted with his attorney, glanced absently around the courtroom, etc. His demeanor was one of total indifference. I invite anyone to give Mrs. Rocha a call or drop her a line asking her if she achieved “closure” or experienced a “catharsis” after her statement. Tell you what, save the quarter and go here, where you can read yet another statement the grieving mother was scheduled to give to the press after the sentencing, but canceled when she was reportedly too overwhelmed emotionally to go before the cameras. She tells you herself (though of course not in so many words) that the courtroom theatrics achieved nothing in terms of justice - for herself or the people of California. Was the Court, as it watched a convicted murderer like Peterson show what was very near contempt for Mrs. Rocha's pain, and given the fact it’s been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he murdered his wife and unborn child for no other motive than he no longer wanted them around, going to be swayed toward a harsher penalty? Or, given the brutality of his crime, would a Peterson who listened to her with tears in his eyes sway a judge to give a lesser penalty? Should he be able to? (Set aside for the moment the absurd notion that Peterson's "lack of remorse" in the face of his mother-in-law's grief figures into this equation at all. Why absurd? Who in their right mind expects a defendant who claims he's innocent to show remorse for a crime he won't admit commiting?)

There are instances on record where a murder victim's parents have not gone apeshit and verbally attacked the convicted killer for whom a jury has recommended a death sentence, and instead expressed in the best tradition of Christian charity that they forgive the murderer, or have taken the opportunity to express in their VIS their oppostion to the death penalty. The rape and murder of a young Pennsylvania woman, Aimee Willard, in 1996 resulted in a sentence of death for her killer, Arthur Bomar. Willard's mother took the opportunity during her impact statement to argue against the sentence. The question is, should a court that represents the "people" of a state, draws 12 of them from a hat, and admonishes those jurors to maintain their objectivity throughout the trial and their deliberations, all of a sudden turn the process over to one person and allow him or her to determine the ultimate outcome?

What Bathus considers “harmless” about victim impact statements doesn’t make them any less gratuitous. Perhaps isolated statements like Rocha's are harmless in and of themselves, but in the aggregate and over time they could harm the justice system just as the obsession with “sensitivity” has harmed other systems in our society. The ideal is an objective justice system, but these subjective statements of the obvious, now deemed an integral part of the post-trial process, can over time easily be finagled into the trial itself. Hey, if we can extend the legal definition of a victim of crime to include everyone affected beyond the actual victim, why not extend the facts of the crime to include their feelings? Now in criminal trials the actual victims of non-capital felonies are asked how the crime has affected their lives. Why should such questions be restricted to them and why limit them to non-capital cases? During murder trials, we can have such questions posed by the prosecutor as, “And what would you say to the murderer of your (insert relative here) if he were in the courtroom today?” Far-fetched? Sure. Just as it was far-fetched a generation ago that sensitivity toward the feelings of a student would lead to semi-literate morons being churned out of public schools.

I do not lack empathy for the surviving relatives of victims of particularly heinous murders like the Rochas. It's the modern victim impact statement as a required part of the legal process in homicide trials that I object to; it is one more appendix to a process that has far too many already lacking any legal sense. Consider the flip side to the victim impact statement, the practice in many jurisdictions to allow a convicted defendant’s family to plead before the court prior to sentencing: "He was really a good boy, your honor. He didn’t mean to stab his victim 32 times. Please, please, give him another chance." This is not callousness toward parents that had a child go bad on them, probably through no fault of their own. If anything, having seen and heard it myself in courtrooms (as an observer – I don’t want any false impressions given here), my heart went out to parents and relatives that actually believed their son was "really a good boy” in light of the brutal crimes he committed. I won’t hold my breath waiting for conservatives to defend the usefulness of this “harmless” practice, which gives a voice to those who can also be called “victims” of the defendant’s acts, and as a matter of fact are deemed so by those despised liberal bleeding hearts.

My contention is that the statements contribute nothing to the justice system. With all due respect to my friend Bathus, that IS what is under discussion here - the system, “rarified” and all. Were the platonic ideal of “justice" really a concern in justifying the survivors' verbal attack on the defendant, then why stop with a mere impact statement? Why not argue the need to enact laws that permit relatives of murder victims to in fact be the ones who pull the switch or administer the lethal injection?

As it is, the argument is simply for more rhetoric in a system drowning in it already, and emotional rhetoric at that, predicated on our “sensitivity” toward “victims”.

It all sounds liberal with a capital L to me.

Great Job!

2005-02-02T19:38:00.000-06:00

A commenter to an earlier post writes that my congratulations to the voters of Iraq were "misplaced," and that it is the American people who deserve congratulations because they "stayed the course":

[T]he outpouring of support for Iraq and the swelling of the American breast are both warranted and inspiring. However, I believe that it is misplaced to commend the Iraqis for merely voting. (I do realize that there were SEVERE inducements not to vote.)The U.S. has been in Iraq for over two years. We have stayed the course and proven that we will not leave the Iraqi people helpless in the hands of a new tyrant. At some point, the child must grow up, regardless the pain.

I am cheered that they voted in such numbers and believe that we, the U.S. and Iraq, have taken a momentous step toward stability in the Middle East. MY breast swells with pride when I realize that it is the American people that have made this remarkable event possible.

As to my commenter's suggestion that the Iraqis were "merely voting," I couldn't disagree more strongly. Before the election, terrorists specifically targeted voters, trying to intimidate them with brutal threats, "Min Al-Sanduq il Al-sanduq!" ("From the ballot box into the coffin!") As the number of Iraqis who have died at the hands of terrorists attests, that was no idle threat. Thank God (and some others mentioned here later), the terrorist could not make good on their threat, though we can be sure it wasn't for lack of trying.

And so that purple finger is an indelible mark of eight million individual acts of courage and an enduring symbol of the courage of an entire people. The mere thought of it humbles me, and I say that as one very, very proud American.

One could wonder how many of us Americans would have summoned the courage to vote under similar circumstances. But on such a joyous occasion, it would be ungracious to skimp on congratulations. So, yes, the American people (minus about 59,000,000 who voted the wrong way in our last election) do deserve to give themselves a pat on the back.

And while we are busy passing out kudos, let's not forget to thank God for the ones who really "made this remarkable event possible." Speaking of whom, here's a report that was forwarded to me today. It was penned by one of those who most deserve the thanks and congratulations of both the Iraqi people and the American people . . . and every other free people on God's green earth:

The following is a note from a Louisiana National Guard member [256th Infanty Brigade] who provided security on election day. A friend here in Baton Rouge forwarded it to me. (The writer is a Baton Rouge native, and a business professional in his day job.) His comments about the Iraqi police and their national guard--and the Iraqi public's perception of them--is encouraging.

Dan

P.S. I cracked up when I read his Geraldo comment.
Bettsie:

I was exhausted when the elections finally happened. We worked really hard to put all the pieces together to ensure security of the polling places. We were securing the police stations while the Iraqi Police and the Iraqi National Guard were providing direct polling center security. We also secured the elections operations centers in each district and provided Quick Reaction Force for the police (which was not needed). The turnout was huge. We had a couple of rockets hit our base on election day, but for the most part it has been peaceful. The rockets did not hit anything or hurt anyone. Mid-morning there were 8 rockets launched at the green zone but to no effect. Some suicide bombers but the Iraqi Police stopped them before they could kill voters (one of the biggest successes). Some Iraqi police died. The greatest thing that happened is the confidence gained by the Iraqi Police and National Guard. It also boosted confidence that the people have in the Iraqi Police and National Guard. Other notable notes: No VBIEDs (car bombs) and no suicide bombers outside of Baghdad. It was really a historic moment.

Geraldo Rivera was imbedded with us for the election. I kept my distance. The Election Rules of Engagement (ROE) were intensely negotiated with the interim government. The JAGs gave input but for the most part the emergency measures and the ROE were dictated by the government. Everything came together at the last minute, then we had to get the troops trained on the emergency measures and the ROE. Well worth it. I'll have to tell everyone about it one day. The 256th did a great job.

John

Great job, John!

Great job, 256th!

Great job, all you guys and gals serving in Iraq!

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

The 256th has a long and glorious history.

In the month before the elections in Iraq, eight of its members gave their lives for freedom in Iraq:

Spc. Warren A. Murphy, 29, of Marrero, LA; 256th Infantry Brigade (Mechanized), Army National Guard, Lafayette, LA.

Spc. Armand L. Frickey, 20, of Houma, LA; 256th Infantry Brigade (Mechanized), Army National Guard, Lafayette, LA.

Spc. Huey P. L. Fassbender, 24, of LaPlace, LA; 256th Infantry Brigade (Mechanized), Army National Guard, Lafayette, LA.

Spc. Bradley J. Bergeron, 25, of Houma, LA; 256th Infantry Brigade (Mechanized), Army National Guard, Lafayette, LA.

Sgt. Christopher J. Babin, 27, of Houma, LA; 256th Infantry Brigade (Mechanized), Army National Guard, Lafayette, LA.

Sgt. 1st Class Kurt J. Comeaux, 34, of Raceland, LA; 256th Infantry Brigade (Mechanized), Army National Guard, Lafayette, LA.

Sgt. Robert W. Sweeney III, 22, of Pineville, LA; 3rd Battalion, 156th Infantry Regiment, 256th Infantry Brigade, Army National Guard, Lake Charles, LA.

Staff Sgt. William F. Manuel, 34, of Kinder, LA; 3rd Battalion, 156th Infantry Regiment, 256th Infantry Brigade, Army National Guard, Lake Charles, LA.

A Last Word or Two for John Kerry

2005-02-01T01:48:00.000-06:00

Okay, so maybe this is beating a dead horse.

Maybe this is beating the putrid carcass of a very, very dead horse. Heaven knows I'm not the first blogger to beat this particular piece of this particular dead horse.

The putrid dead horse carcass I am referring to is, as you might have guessed, Senator John F. Kerry. And the particular piece of the dead horse I'm going to flail away at right now is, of course, the senator's recent appearance on Meet the Press with Tim Russert:

MR. RUSSERT: Election day, Iraq. Condoleezza Rice, the new secretary of State, has just told the United States and the world, "It has gone better than expected." What is your sense?

SEN. KERRY: I think it's gone as expected. . . .

Secondly, it is significant that there is a vote in Iraq. But no one in the United States or in the world-- and I'm confident of what the world response will be. No one in the United States should try to overhype this election. . . .

MR. RUSSERT: Do you believe this election will be seen by the world community as legitimate?

SEN. KERRY: A kind of legitimacy--I mean, it's hard to say that something is legitimate when a whole portion of the country can't vote and doesn't vote. I think this election was important. I was for the election taking place.

Vintage Kerry.

Still trying to have to have it both ways.

Kerry now tells us the Iraqi election went "as expected." Ho, hum. Nothing to get excited about. Right? But just a few months ago Kerry sure sounded like he expected something entirely different:

the people who are supposed to run that election believe that they need a longer period of time and greater security before they can even begin to do it, and they just can't do it at this point in time. So I'm not sure the president is being honest with the American people about that situation either at this point.

And now Kerry tells us that he really was "for the election taking place," and the "election was important," and it was "significant." But for an infinitely nuanced man like John Kerry, still "it's hard to say" whether the Iraqi election was legitimate.

So, you might ask, "Which is it, Senator Kerry? Are you suggesting the Iraqi election was illegitimate?"

What a stupid question! Only a Red State Moron could fail to appreciate the supple nuance of Kerry's qualifier: "kind of."

"Kind of legitimate" also means "kind of illegitimate." Kinda, but not really. Just sorta. It's hard to say. Sorta, kinda. And, oh by the way, did I mention the U.N. and world opinion?

Thank you, Senator Kerry, for that piercing analysis.

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤
Yet even beyond the stale stench of the double-talk still emanating from the dried-up carcass of John Kerry's failed presidential aspirations (a commentary that has lately become blackly comic, like an overlong death rattle), there's something yet more odious in the Senator's most recent words, something yet more repulsive and ignoble:

On January 30, 2005, some eight million Iraqi voters risked their very lives to participate in that country's first free national election in forty years. No matter what one might think about other events in the recent history of Iraq, the heart of every human being of good will could but swell with admiration to witness such courage in a people that has endured so much for so long.

Yet in that moment of life-affirming hope, ever-ironic history decreed that, to produce an enlightening contrast, a listless senator from Massachusetts should wander onto the set of a Sunday television news show to pronounce these thudingly dull words, "I think it's gone as expected. . . . No one in the United States or in the world . . . should try to overhype this election."

Eight million Iraqis risk their lives to vote, and the freshly air-brushed senator acknowledges their courage by telling them that their election was only "kind of" legitimate.

Eight million Iraqis risk their lives to vote, and a pampered wind-surfing senator worries that their bravery might be "overhyped."

Eight million Iraqis risk their lives to vote, and in the moment of their triumph a senator from Massachusetts, who prides himself on his diplomatic subtlety, cannot offer to them, from his vast and nuanced vocabulary, one single solitary word of congratulations.

Well, if you can pardon the lack of nuance, though you couldn't spare an encouraging good word for the struggling Iraqi people, I can spare a last word or two for you, John Kerry. It is a truly craven man who can't step aside to let someone else enjoy a moment in the sun, a man who can never take real pleasure in someone else's hard won triumph. So then what does it say about you, John Kerry, that you can't stand aside to let eight million Iraqi voters revel in their moment of triumph untainted by your hope-destroying monotone?

So to hell with you, John Kerry, you selfish, spirit-sapping, self-serving, mean-spirited, small-minded man.

History has just passed you by. And you won't be missed.

The Mark of Courage

2005-01-30T13:54:00.000-06:00

Congratulations to the Iraqi People!

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraqis defied violence and calls for a boycott to cast ballots in Iraq's first free election in a half-century Sunday. Insurgents seeking to wreck the vote struck polling stations with a string of suicide bombings and mortar volleys, killing at least 44 people, including nine attackers.

Women in black abayas whispered prayers at the sound of a nearby explosion as they waited to vote at one Baghdad polling station. But the mood for many was upbeat: Civilians and policemen danced with joy at one of the five polling stations where photographers were allowed, and some streets were packed with voters walking shoulder-to-shoulder to vote. The elderly made their way, hobbling on canes or riding wheelchairs; one elderly woman was pushed along on a wooden cart, another man carried a disabled 80-year-old on his back.

"This is democracy," said Karfia Abbasi, holding up a thumb stained with purple ink to prove she had voted.

On this day, there's much we can learn from them.

Resolve? For 59,000,000 Americans, it's nothing more than a rug cleaner.

2005-01-13T08:33:00.000-06:00

My blogmate and the owner of this site, Bathus, has written passionately and eloquently on the subject of American resolve to defeat the insurgents in Iraq and to win the wider war against what has come to be known as Islamofascism. In his most recent essay on the subject, Psychological Warfare, he correctly points to liberal attacks against Donald Rumsfeld's alleged failure to control post-Saddam Iraq, which they couch in pieties about concern for the troops, as part of a grand strategy “to undermine the public will and confidence to pursue the war.” But Bathus is also critical of those conservatives who have jumped on the bash Rumsfeld bandwagon, believing that while theirs is not the conscious attempt to weaken the nation’s resolve it is with liberals, it can result in the same defeatism.

Criticism of Rumsfeld’s direction of the counter-insurgency in Iraq notwithstanding, I question the assumption that there is a "will and confidence to pursue the war” on the part of most Americans to undermine. This multi-front war on terror is being fought by a volunteer military, thus the American “public” is not sharing the burden equally. Americans, liberal and conservative, have so far not displayed a passion for victory so much as a fetish for the number of casualties. And we would be foolish to deny that one political party (take a guess which) is completely controlled by left-wing anti-American socialists totally committed to America’s defeat in the present conflict, has the uncritical support of most mainstream media, and has the undying loyalty of at least 59,000,000 Americans as reflected in the 2004 election tally.

Wanna find out just how many conservatives there are in America? Bring back the draft.

The liberal tendency to narrow the focus of the US war against radical Islam to the conflict in Iraq is understandable. The insurgency there, like all guerilla conflicts holding out the prospect of American defeat, is near and dear to their hearts and offers the most tenuous justification for invoking their Viet Nam fetish. That's the war they gleefully recall America “losing”. Afghanistan, where coalition forces have driven Taliban and al Quaeda refuse into caves and where elections were successfully held last year, doesn’t comport well with the Birkenstock crowd’s need to view all of history through the lens of Viet Nam, their dream war.

Conservatives honestly – and correctly – place the Iraq conflict within the wider context of the war on terror, but in doing so invoke their own Viet Nam fetish when they claim that criticism of strategy and tactics and of leaders both civilian and military should be muted lest the public’s “resolve” to win the war be destroyed as it was during the Viet Nam era. In this regard, conservatives prefer to link the present War with World War II, their own dream war, when almost to a man Americans rallied ‘round the flag, the press, Hollywood and academia were 100% behind the war effort, and the furthest thought from anyone’s mind, even after Pearl Harbor, The Phillipines, Bataan and Corregidor, after Kasserine, Dieppe and the Bulge, was that our country should withdraw from the conflict because the "price was too high."

It’s a well meaning comparison for sure, but in many ways those on the right who invoke the talisman of WWII in the present conflict are “cafeteria” conservatives (my blogmate Bathus excepted). You know, like those cafeteria Catholics who pick and choose what they like about the religion – the pomp and circumstance, particularly when it comes to big weddings and funeral sendoffs, is okay, but they’ll pass on the abortion, birth control, homosexuality and divorce restrictions. A common lament among cafeteria conservatives is the absence of WWII-era patriotic trappings in the present War. Susan Sarandon and the rest of Hollywood in 2005 aren't barnstorming the country and waving the flag like Carole Lombard and her contemporaries in 1942. Just the opposite. The majority of contemporary celebrities go out of their way in personal and television appearances to denigrate the commander in chief and demand his impeachment for waging an "illegal war", while the few who support the president and the war are for all intents and purposes blacklisted in Hollywood. There's no Ernie Pyle among contemporary journalists who wouldn't dream of filing a single battlefield report that didn't include praise for the living combat heroes (more about that shortly). With the possible exception of some Fox News Channel imbeds, again we have the complete opposite situation when it comes to mainstream media coverage of the War. A major network, CBS, under whose egis Edward R. Murrow reported on the courage of the British people as they endured the blitz in 1940 and unabashedly advocated America entering World War II, now peddles forged documents intended to portray a wartime president as a coward and draft dodger in order to sway an election in favor of a candidate committed to ending the conflict. The entire 30 minutes of ABC's Nightline is devoted to listing the names of those killed in action in Afghanistan and Iraq, but its host, Ted Koppel, can't spare five minutes to praise our forces' military successes in those countries. And the list goes on. The point is that many of the same conservatives who condemn these left-wing media defeatists and go so far as to say they border on the treasonous, who long for that patriotism of a bygone era, stop short of expressing the same longing for the shared sacrifices that also marked that bygone era, the greatest of which was the draft, even though they agree wholeheartedly with the Bush Administration and other conservative Republicans that this is every inch a global war as World War II.

Even if we grant that Iraq is not the disaster contemporary liberal mainstream media report it is because they wish it to be, this doesn’t mitigate the fact that our military is stretched thin between the two fronts of Iraq and Afghanistan and is therefore incapable of effectively confronting other serious threats posed by those allied with the Iraqi insurgents. I’m speaking of Iran and Syria, two regimes that have obviously intervened on the side of the terrorists now, but who have in fact been sponsoring and supporting terror against the US and its interests for decades. If this is indeed a global conflict requiring military action in multiple theaters, then commonsense dictates that we need a military of sufficient size to wage it. Today’s volunteer army is simply not large enough to implement the Bush Doctrine, which calls for not only hunting down terrorists, but holding accountable regimes sponsoring them and preemptive strikes against those regimes if necessary. Only the most naïve conservative will deny that Syria and Iran are directly involved in the slaughter of American troops in Iraq and therefore come under the Bush Doctrine. And only the most naïve conservative would deny that the present levels of men (and I do mean men) and materiel in the American military simply cannot confront this alliance effectively, which means that both those regimes are literally getting away with murder once again.

Where does this leave the US? We are once again reduced to asking an impotent UN hijacked by the very enemies dedicated to our destruction to bring “international pressure” to bear on these terrorist nations. A larger United States military would not require the UN’s assistance in begging Syria and Iran to stay out of Iraq (not to mention to beseech Iran to please, please, not develop a nuclear arsenal). It wouldn’t need to turn to the “international community” that with only a few notable exceptions was thrilled with the 9-11 attacks and subsequently refused to support our military response to them.

It’s obvious that we can expand the military needed to face these challenges only through conscription, a fact that itself throws a wrench in the assumption that there’s a national will to win since it’s becoming more and more obvious that recruitment centers around the country are not requesting local assistance in controlling the crowds lining up to enlist. Reinstatement of the draft will probably never happen, but the improbability in no way reflects a lack of necessity, and because the American public will never face this test, it’s difficult if not impossible to measure the will and the resolve conservatives deem so precious and are so hellbent on protecting from dissent. There will always be a doubt in the back of our minds that a majority of Americans may be social conservatives (and even that’s a debatable topic worthy of another post), but their rah-rah, Support the Troops, bumper-sticker boosterism will last only so long as the troops being supported come from other American families.

We just love dead heroes, but for heaven’s sake, don’t honor those who kill the enemy. We might offend "peaceful" Muslims.

Of course, we all remember the outpouring of sympathy from our continental European “allies” after 9/11. What we fail to acknowledge is that all of their affection was so easily offered because we were perceived as the superpower humiliated by the Muslim extremists they really love. They also believed the Bush administration was merely a continuation of Clinton’s when it came to global terror (global meaning every terrorist around the world is out to get us, not that terrorists threaten the globe), and that the second, remarkably successful attack on the World Trade Center would be treated the same as the first, less successful attack, as the proverbial law enforcement issue. Oh, perhaps a few cruise missiles would be lobbed at a few tents in Afghanistan, but the “illegitimate”, “selected not elected” Bush would never mount full-scale military operations in retaliation for 3000 deaths on American soil, especially when one considered that the United States deserved to be attacked as a result of its Middle East policy. Sure, the world was in love with us so long as we were the humiliated giant. As soon as Bush made it known he was not a spineless Clinton (or Jimmy Carter, for that matter), the kind of American President that France, Germany and the rest of the Atlantic Alliance pantywaists have always admired, that he was out for the blood of Muslim terrorists and their state sponsors, well, as our own liberal press announced, he “alienated our allies.”

In the case of our own citizenry, they're quick to whip out the flags to honor our dead, but when it comes to praising those who kill the ones who killed them, that's de classe. There is no national passion for victory. For evidence of this, you need look no further than the 50-state weep fest/group hug that 9/11 has become. Each year (and probably for eternity) the date of the worst attack on America since Pearl Harbor is “commemorated” by a bunch of rejects from a Doctor Phil audience gathering together to cry over a hole in the ground - with the full attention of the media. To those conservatives who like to compare the war on terror with WWII and envision a public “will to win” in danger of being weakened, I ask that they imagine an America in 1941 similar to the national therapist’s couch we lie on post-9/11. Imagine a country of mourners back then seeking not revenge, but closure, wanting to shut down Pearl Harbor and make it a permanent memorial to the dead. Instead of a public outcry for the heads of the bastards responsible, instead of national mobilization to fulfill that end, instead of a commitment to restoring Pearl to its pre-attack efficiency and not only rebuilding the fleet and air forces destroyed there, but expanding them, it wanted only to cry over the victims every year.

Then imagine how long it would have taken the Third Reich and Japan to pretty much sew up their victory.

Our national past-time of honoring the civilian casualities of 9/11 dead has evolved into damn near an obsession with the fallen in Afghanistan and Iraq. We totally ignore those individuals who are killing the enemy out to destroy us. Instead, we're a country of silly yellow ribbons expressing "support" for the troops in the abstract, as if the war against terrorism is the same as the “war” on breast cancer and the “war” on AIDS. We focus only on those who are KIA, crying out for prayers and sympathy (well deserved, of course) for their families, but making no mention of those living soldiers adhering to Patton’s dictum that “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”

Who is the most decorated American soldier to date in the War on Terror? What unit has inflicted the most casualties on the enemy in Iraq or Afghanistan? When was the last televised ceremony on the lawn of the “conservative” Bush Administration’s White House honoring a living soldier or marine who's taken out more than a few of the enemy? This, of course, would be inexcusable. Such a ceremony might offend "peaceful" Muslims here and abroad. Because I have to do a Google search to find out who the living heroes are, I'm convinced there is no American will to win.

Last summer, I attended the second annual Sean Hannity Freedom Concert in New Jersey, co-hosted by that other unabashedly right wing supporter of the War, Oliver North. The first half of the event was devoted to Hannity’s radio show, and a fair portion of that was devoted to honoring those who lost limbs and sustained other injuries in Iraq in 2004. Of course, it's proper to express our gratitude to those who have sacrificed so much for their country, but where is our gratitude for those who are making “the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” Let’s face it, to only celebrate the wounded and the dead is indirectly praising an enemy’s success at inflicting casualities on our troops, just as the annual 9/11 commemoration is as much a celebration of a terrorist victory as it is a memorial to the dead without the counter balancing celebration of life and military success. These gratuitous weep fests, if they continue, will doom us to failure. America since September 11, 2001 is not committed to victory, but to a perpetual crying jag, and our willingness to turn the War into a protracted Oprah segment tells me there is no national desire for victory at risk because Rumsfeld gets blindsided by a planted question about vehicle armor.

59,000,000 Americans voted to end the war. That’s not a number to sneeze at.

This will be quick, because the numbers speak for themselves.

It’s safe to say the Democratic Party is totally and irredeemably controlled by its radical left wing, that the left wing wants the War on Terror (not just in Iraq) to end immediately, and that it would prefer that the war ends in an American defeat a la Viet Nam. After all, nothing short of that will prevent us from ever again using our military against politically incorrect enemies – i.e., non-white, non-Christian, non-European – who seek what the left sees as our well deserved demise. The desire for a relapse to our post-Viet Nam Syndrome is almost palpable among liberal Democrats, and 59,000,000 morons in this country stand right behind them. If there existed a national commitment to victory in this war, the November 2nd election would have found the defeatist Democratic Party with only its cemetery, illegal alien, and felon votes to count. Oh, and of course, 90% of the African-American vote.

Given the number of Americans who voted for failure in November of ’04, criticizing Rumsfeld will no more break America's will to win than criticizing Casey Stengel in 1962 broke the Mets’ will to win. They're all losers to begin with.

COMMENT BY BATHUS

Forgive me, Tom, for the presumption of appending my comment directly to your post. I did not wish to push your very fine post down the page by making a new one of my own, but at the same time I felt that your words, which give us all much to think about, needed an immediate response more prominent than one hidden in this blog's comments section, and that, inasmuch as you introduced your post by citing something I'd written, you might not object if I presumed to continue the discussion in this same space.

Tom, much of what you say is exactly right, especially about our nation's too-delicate disinclination to celebrate as heroes those who are exceptionally good at killing our enemies. That our nation seems to prefer to honor passive victims than active victors does not bode well for our long-term survival.

Yet much of what you say, even if true, is perhaps better left unsaid, insofar as it serves more to further dispirit the populace than to rouse it from its complaceny. And if I understand the implications of the baseball metaphor in your last paragraph correctly, those you call "losers" include not only the 59 million "Americans who voted for failure last November," but also the whole of the American people, who are represented in your metaphor by the hapless '62 Mets. (I detect the same, shall we say, defeatism in your logic that it is improbable that we will reinstitute a military draft, but that without the draft we are incapable "of effectively confronting other serious threats posed by those allied with the Iraqi insurgents.")

Tom, you are perhaps half correct when you gently ridicule "the will and the resolve conservatives [myself included] deem so precious and are so hellbent on protecting from dissent." Yes, I have written more than once in this space that the will to win is precious, and we can lose this war only if we lose the will to win it. As to being "hellbent" on protecting that will to win from dissent, if you mean by "dissent," a rational dissent registered with the degree of discretion which indicates the dissenter actually wishes to improve the prospects of victory, then you are wrong not to count me among the dissenters. But if you mean a kind of dissent that aims or serves to inspirit the enemy and dispirit the citizenry, then you are correct to count me among the "hellbent."

At times like these, when our survival is at stake in a fight against enemies who are so vastly our moral inferiors, expressions of self-loathing can become a dangerously irrational and downright immoral self-indulgence serving no useful end. If you honestly believe we lack, and cannot revive, the will to win, then you would do better to save your mental exertions for Koranic studies.

Though I would express myself differently than you do, I do share much of your concern, as should be clear from my earlier post responding to an article by Victor Davis Hanson. Back then, I wrote:

Hanson is accurate when he points to the current of self-loathing among the comfortable Western elite that enervates the West's capacity to respond to the Islamofascist challenge. At its core, our battle with Islamofacism is a battle of the principles of Western liberal democracy against the principles of religious fascism. We have the physical means to win--the technology, the armaments, the manpower. But do we have the will to win? Do we think we deserve to win? The "current of self-loathing" inspires within Western societies doubts about ourselves. As to whether we are more deserving of victory than our enemies, the cultural relativists answer openly, "No, we cannot be better or more deserving than our enemies because no culture can be said to be superior to any other." Then, paradoxically, the relativists go on to proclaim that not only are we no better than the Islamofascists, we are actually worse than them because we are powerful. In the relativists’ cosmos (which is not a "cosmos," but a "chaos" in which nothing can be judged as morally different from anything else), where no one can be judged as better than anyone else, one exception is made in the case of "the powerful," who are always, unquestionably, and oppressively evil. That is the core of their logic: We are powerful; therefore, so we are evil. But at their emotional core is the paradox of a complacent self-loathing.

Yet the deeper paradox is that Hanson himself, and those who think as he does, are now part of the paradox in that they, too, participate in Western self-loathing. When, for example, Hanson writes that the West long-ignored the terrorist threat so that "we could go from Dallas to Extreme Makeover and Madonna to Britney without too much distraction or inconvenience," the loathing that he expresses for Western moral laxity differs little from that expressed by a bin Laden. Indeed, moral laxity is somehow the cause of self-loathing among those on both the right and the left. The shapers of opinion on the left embrace the contemporary moral laxity, which allows them openly and freely to pursue and enjoy the personal and financial fruits of debauchery while ridiculing their critics as "judgmental moralistic bigots." Yet at some deep level they feel ashamed of themselves and this shame manifests itself in self-loathing. Those on the left, lacking steadfastness of moral principles of their own, find something attractive in the steadfastness of the moral clarity the Islamofascists claim for themselves. Thus, twenty-five years ago the political and intellectual leaders of the Western left made their pilgrimages to Paris to sit cross-legged at the feet of Ayatollah Khomeni. In domestic economic matters, this phenomenon of leftist self-loathing has long been correctly identified as "limousine liberalism." They sense that, morally speaking, we are all going to hell in handcarts. But the ride is too pleasant to resist, so they assuage their guilt by fretting over whether the upholstery of some handcarts is too plush compared to some others.

On the right, the self-loathing is perhaps not so personally self-directed, but aims more at the whole of Western culture, as when a Victor Davis Hanson complains about what the "postmodern West" has become. Hanson ostensibly targets his critique only at "the comfortable Western elite," but when he uses bin Laden's voice to mock the "channel surfers who eat, screw, and talk too much amid worthless gadgetry," we know it is really Hanson himself talking about the lot of us. When we conservatives in the West ridicule the flacid Europeans, we are somehow ridiculing ourselves because we are children of the same father. Yet such criticism of the West's moral decline feeds the enervating doubts no less than the leftist's self-loathing, and perhaps more so because the criticism is all too valid. Hanson’s criticism, true enough as to the West’s present condition, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of the West’s future prospects. It seems that Hanson-like railing cannot succeed and, therefore, seems only to contribute to the West’s internal doubts and divisions.

And there's the dilemma: To sustain ourselves for what will be a very long fight against the Islamofascists, we in the West must first reform ourselves morally, but it seems that the precondition of that reform is a Hanson-like self-criticism which only increases our self-loathing and undermines our will to maintain the struggle.

What is the way out of the dilemma of the post-modern paradox? I do not know. I do know that for a few brief moments after 9/11, the more immediate concern for survival made most of us, even many of those on the left, give up the indulgence of self-loathing. That makes me fear that the threat to survival would have to be much worse--much more obviously, intensely, and prolongedly worse--before we could summon and sustain the will necessary to overcome our enemies. But, as Hanson points out, our enemies are too clever to make us to live with the sense that our culture is being pushed to the brink of extinction; theirs is a strategy of "threaten, hit, pause, wait; threaten, hit, pause, wait." When they hit us hard, we all want to fight back at first, but then we settle into our old habits. Then they hit us again. At the end of each cycle, we find ourselves moved closer to the abyss, we become more confused and disgusted with ourselves, and the abyss becomes alluring.

What's needed now is a Reagan-like figure to save us from the abyss of self-negation, someone who can lead us toward what we can become without making us feel quite so dispirited about what we are.