Remember Dennis the Menace? Hank Ketchum created the annoying but loveable Dennis nearly 60 years ago to menace the stuffy neighbor, Mr. Wilson.
I think we need someone to menace Representative Addison Graves "Joe" Wilson, Sr. of South Carolina's 2nd Congressional District. First, one can sympathize with his use of "Joe" when he is actually named after two rather awful diseases. That may account for some of the odd bent of the man. Mr. Wilson cut his political teeth working for Floyd Spence and Strom Thurmond both (R-Racism). Joe has a penchant for blurting out an inappropriate comments in public to his betters and then, dripping crocodile tears, making a public apology that no one takes seriously. And, of course, he's done it again during President Obama's speech to Congress on health care reform on September 9, 2009.
Rep. Wilson has apologized to President Obama (drag out the crocodile!*) and the President has once more demonstrated that he is an infinitely better and more gracious human being that Joe Wilson or, in fact, the bulk of the Congressional Republicans of both Houses by accepting Wilson's apology. Once again President Obama has demonstrated why he, rather than any Republican drawing breath today, deserves to be the leader of the nation.
During a speech in which the President went out of his way to validate Republican concerns, Republican ideas and Republican legislators who have a serious interest in improving health care for all Americans, Wilson and the neo-fascist, ultra-rightist jackals booed the President and, in their pusillanimous, partisan response, rejected his extended hand. By doing so the Republicans show clearly that they feel that by leaving millions of Americans without adequate health care, allowing insurers to steal the premiums of thousands of taxpayers only to revoke their coverage in time of need, and sewing lies and fear about health care reform they can win back control of Congress in 2010 much as they did in 1994. The problem with that strategy is that it's not going to work this time.
The President has met the Republicans more than half way and a majority of Americans know that despite the screaming antics of lunatics and bought-and-paid-for professional protesters. For every family afraid to go to a doctor because they have no health insurance, for every hard-working American denied coverage during an illness, for every household forced into bankruptcy by outrageous medical bills there are friends, neighbors, relatives and co-workers who are going to hold the Republicans responsible for any failure of reform in the 111th Congress. The Republicans are not going to be able to claim that they are running against a "do-nothing" Congress because, this time around, Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi and the President are going to be out hanging any failure of health care around the necks of the Republicans of the House and Senate.
Joe Wilson won't have any trouble being re-elected, of course. The professional soldiers, veterans and retired military personnel who form the core of his support in and around Beaufort, South Carolina will rail against "socialized, government-run" health care to and from visits to the base and VA Hospitals. But other Americans are going to hold Wilson's party responsible when a friend or loved one dies.
The issue that was the proximate cause of Wilson's outburst during the President's speech was the matter of extending health care to "illegal" immigrants. Right now I'm not going to take up the issue of "illegal" immigration other than to say that no immigrant is "illegal" until we make him so. If the Wampanoag tribe in coastal Massachusetts had had an immigration policy similar to America's currently my ancestors, William, Susanna, Resolved and Peregrine White would have been summarily deported from Plymouth Rock. Yet Wilson's narrow partisanship is more to the point. So is his profoundly un-Christian attitude. After all, isn't it better that we treat the 1 "illegal" than leave the 90 and 9 uninsured and untreated? Not in Joe Wilson's world of Old Testament wrath it's not.
President Obama's call was to rise above partisanship and care for our neighbors. It was a call to take both personal and societal responsibility for the health of our nation and its citizens. The President called us to look in the eyes of our neighbors and offer our help. The Republican response was a resounding "no". The Republicans, as they always do, put themselves and the profits of those who pay their bills ahead of the good of the nation while couching their disdain for their fellow citizens in concerns for deficits and "illegal" immigrants and other nonsense that is just, as the President said, plain lies.
The problem with Mr. Wilson is that he's lied so long and so hard that he can't recognize a real lie, especially his own.
* It seems that we now know for a fact that Wilson's apology was not his idea (as if he had any). He was told to call and apologize to President Obama by the House Republican Leadership. Of course, Minority Leader John Boehner has gone as far as to repeat the lie that health care reform will cover "illegal" aliens and defend Wilson. One wonders if one has to be born craven and corrupt to be a Republican or if it is a fault acquired as one grows? Given the extent of inbreeding amongst Republicans it is very hard to know, especially when we are speaking of Southern and Ohio Republicans.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Code Talkers
No. This has nothing to do with the heroic Navajo who sacrificed much to win the war against Imperial Japan in the 1940s. It certainly has nothing to do with anything one can reasonably call heroism.
No. I am writing about the talking heads like Glenn Beck, Steve Doucey, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs. I am talking about the hardcore of racists who have learned to frame their bigotry in code.
When an American president cannot tell the nation’s school children to work and study hard without being accused of “socialist indoctrination” we are off into something other than simple political disagreement. We are in the realm of something darker, more vicious and more odious, something that, if dragged out into the light, would discredit its purveyors completely. This, of course, is why those purveyors take such pains to hide it in irrelevant language, disguise it as religious preference or even claims of upholding the law.
The storm of protest over disseminating President Obama’s speech on the opening of the public school year on September 8, 2009, had nothing to do with conservatism, nothing to do with indoctrination, nothing to do with socialism. It was the most thinly disguised expression of racism yet by the neo-fascists who call themselves Republicans. The accusation of “indoctrination” is of a piece with the “Birther” insanity. President Obama is not “white,” therefore he is not one of “us.” His father was an immigrant from Kenya and, therefore, his Hawaiian birth certificate must be phony. He must have been born in Kenya say O’Reilly, Dobbs and Hannity and many whose fathers were Italian, Greek, German or Polish. Clearly no one whose father or grandfather or some ancestor was born outside the United States can’t be a real American especially if he’s not white. Clearly, if he’s not white, President Obama is out to control the minds of our children and better hide the white women while we’re at it.
Basically, the right wing of this nation is racist at its core. It built itself just as the German Nazis and Italian Fascists did on fear and bigotry. We have simply substituted Afro-Americans and “non Aryan” immigrants for Jews. The fascist America Firsters of the late 1930s dug in while Liberalism fought World War II only to reemerge as the Red Scare McCarthyites of the post-war period. And at the very moment when their heroes, Tailgunner Joe and his vile factotum, Roy Cohn, discredited themselves and their movement, Brown v. the Board of Education came along to reinvigorate the American neo-fascist movement with an influx of racist rednecks. It took a while. After all Dwight Eisenhower sent troops into Little Rock, Arkansas. He was a Republican and a war hero which is why the billboards in the South all demanded, “Impeach Earl Warren,” and never called for Eisenhower’s impeachment. But the cultural shifts of the 1960s that disoriented those who, having lived through World War II, wanted no more upheavals and a nation conditioned to see any cause in which America fought as just, regardless of all contrary evidence, gave the neo-fascists their opening to join sweaty palms with their white racist brethren in Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.”
This marriage of bigotry and fear has a pantheon of Boogie Men. They raise up the straw men of “socialism”, “communism”, “homosexuality”, “indoctrination” even as the Log Cabin Republicans commune with their peers at the country club and indoctrinate anyone within earshot about a “free market” that demands billions of taxpayer dollars to salvage it from their mismanagement. We have had tastes of this vile bigotry before. It has been test marketed with the accusations of homosexuality by Teletubby Tinky Wink and Sponge Bob Squarepants. But now the veneer applied to this racism is getting thinner and more transparent.
Glenn Beck and the rest of the neo-fascists will certainly trot out black and brown friends to claim that they are not racist. Unfortunately, those black and brown right wingers prove nothing of the kind. They merely prove that there are minorities too who are as venal, amoral and self-promoting as there are whites.
We have reached the point at which we need to start calling this racism and bigotry for what it is. We need to drag it out in the light where the good people easily confused by rhetoric can look at this deformed, odious, disgusting thing and shun it before it churns their stomachs further.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
It’s Not You; It’s Me.
His guilt or innocence is irrelevant.
His reception at home is irrelevant.
The complexity of the government’s motives is irrelevant.
It’s not about him. It’s about us.
When the Scots Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill gave compassionate release to the only person convicted of the 1988 PanAm Flight 103 over Lockerbie on August 20, 2009 he faced a storm of criticism. The storm rose in volume and intensity when Abdelbeset al Megrahi landed in Libya to cheering crowds. The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has washed his hands of the matter while expressing outrage at Megrahi’s reception and President Obama has similarly expressed his dismay. Subsequent releases of government documents and speculation on the multiple considerations that lead to Megrahi’s release have further incited anger and conspiracy theories. Amongst the families who lost children and other family members aboard the PanAm flight a range of equally stormy emotions rage. Some are plainly angry. Others despair that they will never know whether Megrahi was a mass murderer or simply a sacrificial goat.
Before going further, let’s consider what we actually know. On Wednesday, December 21, 1988 a bomb loaded inside luggage at London’s Heathrow Airport exploded on board PanAm Flight 103 as it passed over Lockerbie, Scotland on its way to New York. The bomb killed 243 passengers, 16 crew members and 11 Lockerbie citizens on the ground. An investigation lasting nearly 3 years concluded that Libyans al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifah Fhimah had participated in the bomb plot. The Scottish arrest warrants for al Megrahi and Fhimah could not be served for 8 years during which time sanctions and negotiations proceeded with the Libyan government. Finally the parties created a compromise that allowed the Scottish Courts to try al Megrahi and Fhimah in the Netherlands on a former military base and under Scottish Law. The result was that al Megrahi was found guilty and Fhimah was acquitted. Al Megrahi was sentenced to life in prison.
But al Megrahi and his attorneys continued to protest that he was innocent of the charges. Many people in Lockerbie and even some of the victims’ relatives came to believe that al Megrahi was simply the goat sacrificed to atone for and mask the guilt of others in Libya or possibly Iran.
Iran?
Yes, Iran. Possibly Iran
Lest we forget these things too quickly, on July 3, 1988 a missile from the USS Vincennes destroyed Iran Air Flight 655 over the Straight of Hormuz killing 290 passengers and crew. Some felt that it was a greater and far more proximate cause of the PanAm 103 bombing than the air strike on Libya on April 15, 1986 that killed 40, including a 15-month old adopted daughter of Libyan leader Muammar al Gaddafi.
The point is that there has always been some doubt about al Megrahi’s guilt. But whether he is guilty or innocent is utterly irrelevant. The facts, as we know them are that a plane was blown out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland killing 270 people. An investigation ensued followed by a trial and a conviction. Those are facts. Guilt or innocence are at best findings, judgments. Without specific evidence those judgments can be wrong. But in this particular case let’s grant out of hand that the judgment against al Megrahi was correct and just and he was guilty. Even so his guilt is irrelevant.
Let us also grant out of hand that doing business with Libya, exploiting its oil reserves was one of the complex of considerations that motivated the British Government in its acts or inaction surrounding Megrahi’s release. That too is irrelevant.
What is relevant to the issue at hand is that al Megrahi is dying. He has spent 8 years in prison. Now he will be dead in a matter of months…3…6…who cares? Al Megrahi is dying. That is a fact. The length of time until his death is not relevant to anything. That Libya has orchestrated a hero’s welcome for a murderer is not terribly relevant either.
What is relevant – perhaps the only thing relevant to MacAskill’s decision - is compassion. I think that we can agree that whoever blew up PanAm Flight 103 for whatever reason was utterly lacking in compassion. Whoever plotted and carried out that horrible murder showed no compassion for the people on the plane, those on the ground or the families who survived those victims. The act was despicable and criminal. Anyone who participated in that horrible act deserves ostracism from the community of all decent people. But it is a mark of our decency, our compassion that we supersede our anger and outrage and, especially, our lust for revenge.
If we are in fact decent people, better, more civilized and of higher moral standards than Megrahi, Gaddafi or any other person who participated actively or passively in the bombing of that plane 21 years ago MacAskill’s decision was correct.
When faced with vile acts the lust for revenge is understandable. Yet if we are to display why those acts are vile we must be able to rise above them. We must be able to assert compassion in the midst of our anger and disgust for by doing so we demonstrate that as a society we are not on the level of the murderers, the terrorists, the criminals.
Though I have never seen it adequately expressed the failure to understand that just chanting, “We’re number 1,” does not make it so. We have to demonstrate our moral superiority by our acts. In fact, the utter failure to understand that it is by our acts of empathy and compassion that we establish that superiority is one of the hallmark differences between the right and left wings of American politics.
George W. Bush demonstrated his absolute unsuitability for the office of president by proceeding with the execution of Karla Faye Tucker and further confirmed his unsuitability by mocking her pleas for clemency. That vile, vengeful inability to rise above his basest instincts also played out when he sent inadequately armed and armored American troops to die in an unnecessary war in Iraq. He also demonstrated his basest instincts with his insensitivity to the plight of the people of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit.
Bush and Cheney more clearly demonstrated that they are no better than the murderers and terrorists they claim to abhor by instituting their own reign of terror with secret prisons, renditions and torture. Certainly they cloaked their confirmation that they are no better than Megrahi, Gaddafi, or bin Laden in claims that they were defending the nation against a terror that their acts further incited. Still by surrendering to revenge and sadism their whole Administration demonstrated that they are not to be trusted with any level of power.
More broadly the neo-fascist Republicans have demonstrated that they are, as a group unsuitable for high office let alone leadership by defending those violations of law and decency perpetrated by the Bush-Cheney Administration. They continue to do so by sewing lies and fear to defend the profits of insurance companies in the health care debate and polluters in the debate on climate change.
In the health care debate Republicans have abjured any sense of compassion for their fellow citizens by actively campaigning for the implicit exclusion of their fellow citizens from effective medical coverage. The Republicans couch their arguments in red herrings like the cost of extending coverage when they really are concerned with the profits of their supporters in the insurance industry. They terrorize elderly citizens with false claims that they will lose Medicare coverage when the real purpose is to extend Medicare to every American. The opposition is mean, dishonest and utterly lacking in compassion for their fellows.
In the debate over mitigating climate change, the Republicans make great and loud lamentation over the cost to this and future generations of reducing dependence on oil and coal while defending their contributors and employers in the oil industries even as they jeopardize the health and welfare and even the life of future generations.
It is about us. Are we better? Are we decent enough to translate our concern for our children and grandchildren to the children and grandchildren of every person on our small, blue-green planet? Are we decent enough even to a murderer to show compassion? If we are, then we have some claim to that chant of “We’re number 1!” If we cannot, then we are down in the sewers with the murderers and terrorists we claim to abhor.
Kenny MacAskill did the good and right and decent thing in releasing a man, Abdelbeset al Megrahi, who is probably neither good nor right nor decent. I repeat, it is not about Megrahi. It is about us. It is about demonstrating our goodness, our rightness and our decency. Is it not, after all, what we are commanded to do in that cliché voiced by some old, dead white guy, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”?
His reception at home is irrelevant.
The complexity of the government’s motives is irrelevant.
It’s not about him. It’s about us.
When the Scots Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill gave compassionate release to the only person convicted of the 1988 PanAm Flight 103 over Lockerbie on August 20, 2009 he faced a storm of criticism. The storm rose in volume and intensity when Abdelbeset al Megrahi landed in Libya to cheering crowds. The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has washed his hands of the matter while expressing outrage at Megrahi’s reception and President Obama has similarly expressed his dismay. Subsequent releases of government documents and speculation on the multiple considerations that lead to Megrahi’s release have further incited anger and conspiracy theories. Amongst the families who lost children and other family members aboard the PanAm flight a range of equally stormy emotions rage. Some are plainly angry. Others despair that they will never know whether Megrahi was a mass murderer or simply a sacrificial goat.
Before going further, let’s consider what we actually know. On Wednesday, December 21, 1988 a bomb loaded inside luggage at London’s Heathrow Airport exploded on board PanAm Flight 103 as it passed over Lockerbie, Scotland on its way to New York. The bomb killed 243 passengers, 16 crew members and 11 Lockerbie citizens on the ground. An investigation lasting nearly 3 years concluded that Libyans al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifah Fhimah had participated in the bomb plot. The Scottish arrest warrants for al Megrahi and Fhimah could not be served for 8 years during which time sanctions and negotiations proceeded with the Libyan government. Finally the parties created a compromise that allowed the Scottish Courts to try al Megrahi and Fhimah in the Netherlands on a former military base and under Scottish Law. The result was that al Megrahi was found guilty and Fhimah was acquitted. Al Megrahi was sentenced to life in prison.
But al Megrahi and his attorneys continued to protest that he was innocent of the charges. Many people in Lockerbie and even some of the victims’ relatives came to believe that al Megrahi was simply the goat sacrificed to atone for and mask the guilt of others in Libya or possibly Iran.
Iran?
Yes, Iran. Possibly Iran
Lest we forget these things too quickly, on July 3, 1988 a missile from the USS Vincennes destroyed Iran Air Flight 655 over the Straight of Hormuz killing 290 passengers and crew. Some felt that it was a greater and far more proximate cause of the PanAm 103 bombing than the air strike on Libya on April 15, 1986 that killed 40, including a 15-month old adopted daughter of Libyan leader Muammar al Gaddafi.
The point is that there has always been some doubt about al Megrahi’s guilt. But whether he is guilty or innocent is utterly irrelevant. The facts, as we know them are that a plane was blown out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland killing 270 people. An investigation ensued followed by a trial and a conviction. Those are facts. Guilt or innocence are at best findings, judgments. Without specific evidence those judgments can be wrong. But in this particular case let’s grant out of hand that the judgment against al Megrahi was correct and just and he was guilty. Even so his guilt is irrelevant.
Let us also grant out of hand that doing business with Libya, exploiting its oil reserves was one of the complex of considerations that motivated the British Government in its acts or inaction surrounding Megrahi’s release. That too is irrelevant.
What is relevant to the issue at hand is that al Megrahi is dying. He has spent 8 years in prison. Now he will be dead in a matter of months…3…6…who cares? Al Megrahi is dying. That is a fact. The length of time until his death is not relevant to anything. That Libya has orchestrated a hero’s welcome for a murderer is not terribly relevant either.
What is relevant – perhaps the only thing relevant to MacAskill’s decision - is compassion. I think that we can agree that whoever blew up PanAm Flight 103 for whatever reason was utterly lacking in compassion. Whoever plotted and carried out that horrible murder showed no compassion for the people on the plane, those on the ground or the families who survived those victims. The act was despicable and criminal. Anyone who participated in that horrible act deserves ostracism from the community of all decent people. But it is a mark of our decency, our compassion that we supersede our anger and outrage and, especially, our lust for revenge.
If we are in fact decent people, better, more civilized and of higher moral standards than Megrahi, Gaddafi or any other person who participated actively or passively in the bombing of that plane 21 years ago MacAskill’s decision was correct.
When faced with vile acts the lust for revenge is understandable. Yet if we are to display why those acts are vile we must be able to rise above them. We must be able to assert compassion in the midst of our anger and disgust for by doing so we demonstrate that as a society we are not on the level of the murderers, the terrorists, the criminals.
Though I have never seen it adequately expressed the failure to understand that just chanting, “We’re number 1,” does not make it so. We have to demonstrate our moral superiority by our acts. In fact, the utter failure to understand that it is by our acts of empathy and compassion that we establish that superiority is one of the hallmark differences between the right and left wings of American politics.
George W. Bush demonstrated his absolute unsuitability for the office of president by proceeding with the execution of Karla Faye Tucker and further confirmed his unsuitability by mocking her pleas for clemency. That vile, vengeful inability to rise above his basest instincts also played out when he sent inadequately armed and armored American troops to die in an unnecessary war in Iraq. He also demonstrated his basest instincts with his insensitivity to the plight of the people of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit.
Bush and Cheney more clearly demonstrated that they are no better than the murderers and terrorists they claim to abhor by instituting their own reign of terror with secret prisons, renditions and torture. Certainly they cloaked their confirmation that they are no better than Megrahi, Gaddafi, or bin Laden in claims that they were defending the nation against a terror that their acts further incited. Still by surrendering to revenge and sadism their whole Administration demonstrated that they are not to be trusted with any level of power.
More broadly the neo-fascist Republicans have demonstrated that they are, as a group unsuitable for high office let alone leadership by defending those violations of law and decency perpetrated by the Bush-Cheney Administration. They continue to do so by sewing lies and fear to defend the profits of insurance companies in the health care debate and polluters in the debate on climate change.
In the health care debate Republicans have abjured any sense of compassion for their fellow citizens by actively campaigning for the implicit exclusion of their fellow citizens from effective medical coverage. The Republicans couch their arguments in red herrings like the cost of extending coverage when they really are concerned with the profits of their supporters in the insurance industry. They terrorize elderly citizens with false claims that they will lose Medicare coverage when the real purpose is to extend Medicare to every American. The opposition is mean, dishonest and utterly lacking in compassion for their fellows.
In the debate over mitigating climate change, the Republicans make great and loud lamentation over the cost to this and future generations of reducing dependence on oil and coal while defending their contributors and employers in the oil industries even as they jeopardize the health and welfare and even the life of future generations.
It is about us. Are we better? Are we decent enough to translate our concern for our children and grandchildren to the children and grandchildren of every person on our small, blue-green planet? Are we decent enough even to a murderer to show compassion? If we are, then we have some claim to that chant of “We’re number 1!” If we cannot, then we are down in the sewers with the murderers and terrorists we claim to abhor.
Kenny MacAskill did the good and right and decent thing in releasing a man, Abdelbeset al Megrahi, who is probably neither good nor right nor decent. I repeat, it is not about Megrahi. It is about us. It is about demonstrating our goodness, our rightness and our decency. Is it not, after all, what we are commanded to do in that cliché voiced by some old, dead white guy, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”?
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Military Prisoner
Entering office on the hopes of a majority of Americans so large that race became irrelevant and the political machines of the Republicans could not steal sufficient votes to upset elections as they did in 2000 and 2004, President Obama tried to make good on his pledges to restore Constitutional Law and decency to America at home and abroad. He even pledged to make a government made impenetrably opaque by the neo-fascists of the Bush Administration and their cronies on the U. S. Supreme Court, transparent to the people who are the government in a democracy.
To his credit, in one of President Obama’s first acts he signed an order requiring that the infamous concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay close by the end of 2009. Of course, the neo-fascists immediately launched a campaign using their most familiar weapon: fear. In no time at all Congressmen and women had hysterical constituents calling to oppose housing Osama bin Laden under each of their individual beds.
The fact that the neo-fascists were able to spread fear so effectively highlighted the main failing of the Obama closing order: that in the rush to perform the symbolic act of closing the Guantanamo concentration camp, the President failed to decide where those prisoners would go. Certainly President Obama, during his first days in office, thought that we needed to look at individual prisoners to determine whether they needed to be held at all or not. Still, let it never be said that the American herd will stand around for nuanced explanations when a bunch or drunken cowboys with guns like Rash Lamebrain, Glenn Beck, Steve Doucey and Bill O’Reilly are bent on starting a stampede.
To date, prisoners remain at the shameful concentration camp on American occupied Cuba and the closing date becomes ever more hazy and distant. Reality has pulverized decency, law and good intentions. But the clearest example of the ineffectuality of Constitutional Law, decency and humanity in the face of negotiation is the death of openness in the name of pursuing an effective strategy in the Afghan War. We can call the political calculus, at best, pragmatic but truly it is ruthless and Machiavellian. In our violent society rife with patriosity rather than patriotism, people who stop wars are reviled while those who pursue them, however wrong headed, are exalted. President Obama needs to put an end to the neo-fascists’ imperialist debacle in Iraq. In order to do that he unquestionably must rattle the sabre elsewhere and the logical place to do so is Afghanistan. American militarism requires that he do so. That is one of the ugly truths about our society.
Upon entering office, President Obama inherited a gung-ho military commander in Army General David McKiernan. General McKiernan’s tenure in Afghanistan was much like the disgraceful mismanagement of William Westmoreland in Vietnam forty years ago. His portfolio was the kind of “get the country ‘pacified’ by any means necessary” use of massive force against the Taliban’s guerrilla campaign that resulted in the fall of Saigon in 1975 and was having similarly poor results in the mountains of Afghanistan. Meanwhile, all the information coming to military and civilian experts convinced them that the Afghan people hate the Taliban but hate the random violence and insults from NATO and especially American invaders more. The inescapable conclusion reached by those not blinded by neo-fascist ideology was that a policy that respected the population, confined violence to bad actors like the Taliban and helped build a stable infrastructure one school, road, hospital and town meeting at a time could defeat the Taliban, up-root Al Qaeda, capture bin Laden and stabilize Afghanistan to a point unknown since 1979. General McKiernan was definitely not the person to implement that policy.
So President Obama needed a new general. He knew that. Defense Secretary Gates knew that. The Joint Chiefs of Staff knew that. But that also didn’t mean that General McKiernan was without friends either real or ad hoc. The military wanted some things of its own, chief amongst them continued secrecy for the Abu Ghraib photos that might well reveal complicity of high ranking officers in the abuses of that particular torture chamber. Conversations ensued. Ultimately, the President and Secretary Gates got Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, a policy that will tend to kill fewer Afghan civilians, build friendships within the Afghani population and infrastructure to cement the fragments of tribal areas into something sufficiently like a nation to survive NATO withdrawal. In return, the American High Command got secrecy and probably immunity from their involvement in torture and similar war crimes in violation of American and International Law.
President Obama’s choice was, inherently, one of those uncertain “Lady or the Tiger” problems. If by protecting high military officers on whom he must depend to achieve his goals in Afghanistan he can lower the death toll of civilian Afghanis and build a nation that 250 years of Western interventions had repeatedly destroyed, would it not be worth the cost? If we can trade immunity for war crimes by the American General Staff for the destruction of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, will we not have gotten the better of the bargain?
The short term answer is, yes, of course. A policy that saves innocent lives and achieves several important political and military goals, including an end of bin Laden and his lieutenants is worth the price of continued secrecy for the Abu Ghraib photos.
The long term answer is, of course, no. Immunizing military commanders from the consequences of their war crimes has horrible and destructive consequences for American democracy and Constitutional Law. The continued secrecy of information that may show complicity in war crimes by our general officers is detrimental if not fatal to civilian control of the military and raises genuine fears for the future of our democracy.
There are many times in our history when the fate of our nation has balanced precariously on the willingness of our military to accept the authority of our Constitution over their own will to power. General George Brinton McClellan’s political ambitions might well have meant an end to the Lincoln Administration in 1864 had not Ulysses Grant and George G. Meade demonstrated what a disastrously incompetent military commander McClellan was in the field. The nearly unchecked power of the military in the former Confederacy following the Civil War led President Andrew Johnson to belatedly restore some balance between the President and the military by removing Edwin M. Stanton as Secretary of War in 1868. That same threat to civilian rule was a factor in the Faustian bargain struck by Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 to end Reconstruction and pass the much maligned Posse Comitatus Act. In 1933-34 Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler exposed a plot for a military coup against Franklin Roosevelt’s government thereby ending a plan that might have put America firmly in the fascist camp as World War II began. And, of course, in the 1980s we had a presidency controlled by the military and conspirators against Constitutional rule like Defense Secretary Caspar Wineberger, Admiral John Poindexter, Colonel Oliver North and neo-fascists Elliott Abrams, John Negroponte, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
The fact is that any President of the United States who is not at least a tacit co-conspirator of our military interests (uniformed and corporate) is its prisoner. He remains its prisoner so long as he is unwilling to assert control over the military and its true masters, the corporate interests. Right now there is a battle going on within our government. Defense Secretary Gates, while a creature of the military-industrial complex, is certainly aware that its wild excesses are themselves a threat to military-corporate hegemony. Thus we have the fight to kill the F-22 fighter plane and other ridiculously unnecessary war toys from the enormously bloated Defense “budget”. Yet the military still holds an armored fist to the throats of civilian authority in America. I hope that President Obama can break that death grip over the next three and a half or seven and a half years. How he loosens that grip or does not do so will, sad to say, determine whether he has a second term in which to loosen it. Further, it will determine whether a successor Democrat can extend the process for another four or eight years. Until he does so, just as surely as the people held in the concentration camp at Guantanamo, I think we can say accurately that President Obama is a military prisoner.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Reality (TV) Check
One of the more absurd issues that the neo-fascists who disguise themselves as Republicans and Libertarians have is their apparent inability to distinguish fact from fiction. The list of examples is long and runs the gamut from the absurd in Dan Quayle's inability to discern that Murphy Brown was a fictional character played by Candace Bergen to the horrifyingly serious in the "ticking bomb" scenario incessantly dragged out to justify the Bush Administration's torture policies despite the lack of any evidence that the scenario exists outside of the Fox (of course) series 24. Despite the genuine danger of the phrase "Republican principles" becoming a synonym for cognitive dissonance as well as an oxymoron the ultra-right wingers continue down this dead end path.
As one example there's the inability of Fox flacks like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck to make up their minds as to whether the Obama Administration is bringing socialism or fascism to America. That may not be the best example because it smacks more of a bunch on impotent, frustrated hacks flinging epithets at the Administration in the hope that one will stick and give them the focus that they currently, utterly lack. There is also the attempt to attack same-sex marriage by lumping the practices of some committed, loving couples with a catalogue of bizarre sexual practices and inclinations that only the neo-fascists themselves seem to know about. (We won't even consider the motives that have those "family valies"-types eagerly combing the literature of pervertions for new terms to get all breathless and sweaty over.)
But now we have proof that right wingers are unable to distinguish fact from fiction. A study by three researchers from Ohio State University titled The Irony of Satire has found that conservatives have convinced themselves that Stephen Colbert is one of their own. Yes. I am not making this up.
Colbert's personna is a satire of Bill O'Reilly in all his smug, self-satified, self-righteous, neo-fascist venality. According to the study conservatives find Colbert funny and know that he's satirizing some of their icons but they have convinced themselves that Colbert does this with a wink and a nod, that he's really one of them. Perhaps their limited self awareness entails a rationale of, "I think he's funny so he must think like me." Whatever the illogic involved it is simultaneously hilarious and disturbing. Colbert is anything but in sync with the ultra-right wing claptrap spouted by those he satirizes but clearly there is a core of neo-fascists who can convince themselves of anything. After all, Dubya still had a core of support in the range of 20 to 30 percent of the population as he left office. A similar percentage of the population were convinced that Richard Nixon had done nothing wrong while in office. At our peril we consider them idiots. They are not. They are something far more disturbing and dangerous. They are people who will pervert any reality contradictory to their ideology into something that reinforces their own bankrupt view. It is the same willful ignorance that fires the deniers of evolution, the Holocaust, that pursued collectivization in Stalinist Russia in the face of widespread famine, that massacred the Tutsis of Rwanda and littered the killing fields of Khmer Rouge Cambodia with bodies.
When the neo-fascists mistakenly adopt Stephen Colbert we laugh but that is the absurd and comic flip side of a dark and dangerous record that is playing itself out in a broken world and American economy, unnecessary and unwinnable wars and degradation of civil and human rights. The real reality is not a television show and it is not funny.
As one example there's the inability of Fox flacks like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck to make up their minds as to whether the Obama Administration is bringing socialism or fascism to America. That may not be the best example because it smacks more of a bunch on impotent, frustrated hacks flinging epithets at the Administration in the hope that one will stick and give them the focus that they currently, utterly lack. There is also the attempt to attack same-sex marriage by lumping the practices of some committed, loving couples with a catalogue of bizarre sexual practices and inclinations that only the neo-fascists themselves seem to know about. (We won't even consider the motives that have those "family valies"-types eagerly combing the literature of pervertions for new terms to get all breathless and sweaty over.)
But now we have proof that right wingers are unable to distinguish fact from fiction. A study by three researchers from Ohio State University titled The Irony of Satire has found that conservatives have convinced themselves that Stephen Colbert is one of their own. Yes. I am not making this up.
Colbert's personna is a satire of Bill O'Reilly in all his smug, self-satified, self-righteous, neo-fascist venality. According to the study conservatives find Colbert funny and know that he's satirizing some of their icons but they have convinced themselves that Colbert does this with a wink and a nod, that he's really one of them. Perhaps their limited self awareness entails a rationale of, "I think he's funny so he must think like me." Whatever the illogic involved it is simultaneously hilarious and disturbing. Colbert is anything but in sync with the ultra-right wing claptrap spouted by those he satirizes but clearly there is a core of neo-fascists who can convince themselves of anything. After all, Dubya still had a core of support in the range of 20 to 30 percent of the population as he left office. A similar percentage of the population were convinced that Richard Nixon had done nothing wrong while in office. At our peril we consider them idiots. They are not. They are something far more disturbing and dangerous. They are people who will pervert any reality contradictory to their ideology into something that reinforces their own bankrupt view. It is the same willful ignorance that fires the deniers of evolution, the Holocaust, that pursued collectivization in Stalinist Russia in the face of widespread famine, that massacred the Tutsis of Rwanda and littered the killing fields of Khmer Rouge Cambodia with bodies.
When the neo-fascists mistakenly adopt Stephen Colbert we laugh but that is the absurd and comic flip side of a dark and dangerous record that is playing itself out in a broken world and American economy, unnecessary and unwinnable wars and degradation of civil and human rights. The real reality is not a television show and it is not funny.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Backtracking Slightly
Maybe I'm just vacillating. But first, a digression.
There is a wonderful Terry Gilliam movie that appeared in 1981, Time Bandits. Suffice it to say that it's a film with which every child in the range of 7 to 14 years old will identify and in which parents will find much to love as well. Without spoiling anything in any significant way toward the end of the film Sir Ralph Richardson's Supreme Being intervenes to render David Warner's threat less serious with the result that the cast must collect all the bits of charred and glowing "pure evil" lest they infect the world further. But, of course, they miss a piece that young Craig Warnock's Kevin can't get to before he's transported back to his bedroom in the present. Kevin's house, you see, is filling with smoke because his hopeless, clueless parents have attempted to cook a roast in a microwave. The Fire Department appears and Sean Connery, whom we've previously seen as an heroic Agamemnon, in fire gear, gets the family out onto the lawn along with the smoking microwave. Kevin's parents open the microwave to find what they think is a spoiled Sunday roast but which Kevin recognizes as the unretrieved shard of pure evil. Despite Kevin's shouted warning, the parents reach for the evil and disappear in an explosion, no doubt to reappear as creatures in a Ramsey Campbell or Clive Barker novel. We know that Kevin will be all right because Sean Connery is there to take him under his wing and so the movie ends. (My apologies for the spolier but the ending is hardly the point of the movie.)
That unretrieved bit of pure evil is, of course, Dick Cheney (also an old supervisor of mine named Kathy Vadala) who embodies in every way the vilest, most despicable darkness in the American soul. I have previously written that we must have an open investigation of the crimes of the Bush Administration in order to purge our nation of the evil it represented. I based that conclusion on the recurring nightmare of Cheney's reappearances to croak about how the Obama Administration is destroying America. Yet now I'm not so sure.
I still think that a public airing of the Bush Administration's crimes will make it hard for the ne0-fascist Republicans to repeat them in the future but I am backtracking on the timing. Cheney's latest appearance - they are getting fairly regular by now - leads me to wonder about his motives. His motives are necessarily nefarious. That's beyond question. It's which nefarious motive that has me worried.
President Barak Obama (I just love that construction!) consistently says that he wants to look forward rather than back. I can't argue with that intention. As he's stated himself, Obama has two wars, the Middle East, a failing Pakistan, an insanely childish North Korea, a schizoid Iran, problematic relations with Latin America, a major economic crisis, properly funding Social Security, a crisis in health care and the dismemberment of government that's taken place over the last 40 years to worry about. And did I forget to mention the hysteria over the non-pandemic of N1H1 flu or the search for a new Supreme Court Justice? He obviously has enough crises to keep him off the streets and out of trouble for a week or two.
Now let me suggest to you that Cheney, whose ego is almost as enourmous and comprehensive as his evil, keeps coming out to croak his vileness in order to challenge Obama. I am sure that he believes that he can hand Obama his head in a debate and that a concerted attempt to silence him can only disrupt the new Administrations plans. Taking up Cheney's croaked challenges would only further polarize the Congress and the nation. It would also, in some more mindless circles, make Cheney the sympathetic victim of the great, implacable Obama Socialist Juggernaut ( a registered trademark of Fox News).
So I am going to backtrack. I still think that exposing the Bush Administration's crimes and removing from serious consideration from Federal Office all those who participated in those crimes is essential for the mental and political health of this nation. Yet for now I think it is also essential to ignore Cheney and the other strident neo-fascists. Marginalizing them is nearly as effective as prosecuting them and, at the moment, far more important.
President Obama needs to focus on undoing the damage that Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Poppy Bush, Gingrich and Dubya have done and the damage that Carter's impotence and Clinton's political cravenness allowed to continue. If he continues to demonstrate what effective government can do to relieve the burdens the neo-fascists have shifted from the wealthy onto the middle class, the Republicans, Libertarians and their ultra-right wing sponsors will remain out of power for at least the next 30 years. In that time we will have ample opportunity to consign the Alberto Gonzalezes, John Yoos, David Addingtons, Jay Bybees, Condoleeza Rices, Cheneys, Bushes and others who violated their oaths to uphold the Constitution to the hell that they so richly deserve. For now, ignore the bastards. They don't deserve the air time that Fox gives them let alone the exponential increase that prosecution would provide them.
There is a wonderful Terry Gilliam movie that appeared in 1981, Time Bandits. Suffice it to say that it's a film with which every child in the range of 7 to 14 years old will identify and in which parents will find much to love as well. Without spoiling anything in any significant way toward the end of the film Sir Ralph Richardson's Supreme Being intervenes to render David Warner's threat less serious with the result that the cast must collect all the bits of charred and glowing "pure evil" lest they infect the world further. But, of course, they miss a piece that young Craig Warnock's Kevin can't get to before he's transported back to his bedroom in the present. Kevin's house, you see, is filling with smoke because his hopeless, clueless parents have attempted to cook a roast in a microwave. The Fire Department appears and Sean Connery, whom we've previously seen as an heroic Agamemnon, in fire gear, gets the family out onto the lawn along with the smoking microwave. Kevin's parents open the microwave to find what they think is a spoiled Sunday roast but which Kevin recognizes as the unretrieved shard of pure evil. Despite Kevin's shouted warning, the parents reach for the evil and disappear in an explosion, no doubt to reappear as creatures in a Ramsey Campbell or Clive Barker novel. We know that Kevin will be all right because Sean Connery is there to take him under his wing and so the movie ends. (My apologies for the spolier but the ending is hardly the point of the movie.)
That unretrieved bit of pure evil is, of course, Dick Cheney (also an old supervisor of mine named Kathy Vadala) who embodies in every way the vilest, most despicable darkness in the American soul. I have previously written that we must have an open investigation of the crimes of the Bush Administration in order to purge our nation of the evil it represented. I based that conclusion on the recurring nightmare of Cheney's reappearances to croak about how the Obama Administration is destroying America. Yet now I'm not so sure.
I still think that a public airing of the Bush Administration's crimes will make it hard for the ne0-fascist Republicans to repeat them in the future but I am backtracking on the timing. Cheney's latest appearance - they are getting fairly regular by now - leads me to wonder about his motives. His motives are necessarily nefarious. That's beyond question. It's which nefarious motive that has me worried.
President Barak Obama (I just love that construction!) consistently says that he wants to look forward rather than back. I can't argue with that intention. As he's stated himself, Obama has two wars, the Middle East, a failing Pakistan, an insanely childish North Korea, a schizoid Iran, problematic relations with Latin America, a major economic crisis, properly funding Social Security, a crisis in health care and the dismemberment of government that's taken place over the last 40 years to worry about. And did I forget to mention the hysteria over the non-pandemic of N1H1 flu or the search for a new Supreme Court Justice? He obviously has enough crises to keep him off the streets and out of trouble for a week or two.
Now let me suggest to you that Cheney, whose ego is almost as enourmous and comprehensive as his evil, keeps coming out to croak his vileness in order to challenge Obama. I am sure that he believes that he can hand Obama his head in a debate and that a concerted attempt to silence him can only disrupt the new Administrations plans. Taking up Cheney's croaked challenges would only further polarize the Congress and the nation. It would also, in some more mindless circles, make Cheney the sympathetic victim of the great, implacable Obama Socialist Juggernaut ( a registered trademark of Fox News).
So I am going to backtrack. I still think that exposing the Bush Administration's crimes and removing from serious consideration from Federal Office all those who participated in those crimes is essential for the mental and political health of this nation. Yet for now I think it is also essential to ignore Cheney and the other strident neo-fascists. Marginalizing them is nearly as effective as prosecuting them and, at the moment, far more important.
President Obama needs to focus on undoing the damage that Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Poppy Bush, Gingrich and Dubya have done and the damage that Carter's impotence and Clinton's political cravenness allowed to continue. If he continues to demonstrate what effective government can do to relieve the burdens the neo-fascists have shifted from the wealthy onto the middle class, the Republicans, Libertarians and their ultra-right wing sponsors will remain out of power for at least the next 30 years. In that time we will have ample opportunity to consign the Alberto Gonzalezes, John Yoos, David Addingtons, Jay Bybees, Condoleeza Rices, Cheneys, Bushes and others who violated their oaths to uphold the Constitution to the hell that they so richly deserve. For now, ignore the bastards. They don't deserve the air time that Fox gives them let alone the exponential increase that prosecution would provide them.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Empathy Antipathy
It's so very Republican, isn't it? After all, if one understands the concept of empathy and actually has empathy for others one can't be a Republican much less a "Conservative" at least as defined in the last four or five decades.
Empathy is the ability to understand and feel the distress, pain, and the sting of injustice visited on others as if it were your own. Further, it is the ability to translate that understanding, that feeling into the will to prevent further distress for yourself and for the others with whom you empathize. Clearly that is a dangerous thing. If we have empathy we will want to do horrible things like improve treatment and conditions for whiny, special interest groups like wounded veterans. We might be moved to stop traditional practices like racial, ethnic and religious bigotry and even that great tradition of lynching. We might disrupt traditional families by insisting that women have a right to education, work outside the home and flee abuse by the men in their lives. No. Empathy is something that leads to the destruction of the world as it was meant to be.
But perhaps I'm being too harsh about Republicans, Conservatives and their thinly disguised cousins, Libertarians. They do have empathy. They have shown it when they've defended the six and seven figure bonuses to the financial whizzes who drove their companies into bankruptcy. They show it every day when they insist that we must remove onerous regulations that keep disease and poisons out of our food and drugs. They even show it when they seek to protect the populace from evil drugs like marajuana by insuring that those people whose pain and suffering it eases never get it. In short Republican, Conservative and Libertarian empathy knows on which side its proverbial bread is buttered. Right Wing empathy is always bought and paid for.
What the neo-fascists really rail against is empathy for the great many people whose lives are made worse while they forcefully protect their rich friends. Those rich friends are the ones who fund their campaigns and, when out of office, pay for their fellowships at the American Enterprise, Cato and Manhattan Institutes, Heritage Foundation, Hoover Institution or for their chairs at neo-fascist incubators like Pepperdine University.
If we get involved in empathy we would be rejecting the greatest of the neo-fascist prophetesses, Ayn Rand. The alleged philosophy of "Objectivism" is nothing but the apotheosis of an utter rejection of empathy. No. We can't have that. Atlas Shrugged is second only to the exerpts of The Bible that fundamentalists prefer (no Matthew 25 in those Bibles) as holy writ.
Let's take a famous example, the recently corrected travesty of Lilly Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. Lilly Ledbetter went to work for Goodyear in its Gadsden , Alabama plant in 1979. When she started working there she was recieving pay comparable to the men doing the same job and who had similar experience but over the years and unbeknownst to Ms. Ledbetter, a gap began to open. In 1997, on the verge of retiring she found that she was making $3,727 per month. That's a very nice pay check that I would have happily receieved. But at the same point the men doing her job were receiving a minimum of $4,286 per month and as much as $5,236 per month. There was ample evidence that Ms. Ledbetter's sex was the sole factor in the difference of roughly $500 to $1,500 per month reduction in pay. Goodyear had not only discriminated in Ms. Ledbetter's pay but had kept the information about that discrepancy secret for most of two decades.
So I think that most people would see Ms. Ledbetter's treatment as unfair. You wouldn't want your mother, daughter, sister or wife treated like that. However, if you're reaching that conclusion you are falling in to the dangerous role of a "fellow traveler" of empathy. You should thank whatever god to which you pray that there are five Supreme Court "Justices" who are Republican and Conservative enough to be utterly unaffected by empathy. Writing for his fellow protectors of business over labor, wealth over poverty and crime over justice, Samuel Alito threaded a very fine needle and rejected Ms. Ledbetter's argument. Sure she'd been victimized by Goodyear and sure that victimization represented illegal discrimination but Lilly Ledbetter hadn't filed suit soon enough.
Say what?
You see, Ms. Ledbetter's lawyers had argued that every time Goodyear cut a pay check for Ms. Ledbetter the company committed a distinct act of pay discrimination. The law included a limitations clause requiring that the discrimination claim be filed within 180 days of the act of discrimination. Judge Alito along with Antonin Scalia, Scalia's Houseboy, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy decided that argument was wrong. Goodyear had decided to discriminate against Ms. Ledbetter way back in the 1980s and though Goodyear had kept the fact secret and Ms. Ledbetter's typical human clairvoyance was somehow impaired she hadn't filed suit soon enough. A judicial wag of the finger went to Goodyear with a stern admonition to behave and Lilly Ledbetter got a simple, "Sorry. Go fuck off."
Now if Alito, Scalia, Thomas (included soley for completeness; not seriously), Roberts or Kennedy had succumbed to that dangerous empathy for Lilly Ledbetter all manner of evil would have flowed from the decision. Ms. Ledbetter would have recovered the back pay unfairly withheld from her with interest and damages for discrimination and the cost of the settlement might have been so great that Goodyear and even other companies might have decided that they'd better not do the same to their employees. In short, Goodyear would have gotten a lesson in the "personal responsibility" that Republicans, Conservatives and Libertarians always insist is lacking in the poor who don't pay the bills for those Republicans, Conservatives and Libertarians.
In 2008 Congress attempted to remedy this situation albeit too late for Ms. Ledbetter. But the Republicans in the Senate, also unaffected by empathy, filibustered the bill to death. Had it made its way through the Senate there is no doubt that George Bush, whose sole claim to empathy was his desire to limit the persecution and suffering of the noble Lewis "Scooter" Libby, would have vetoed the bill that President Obama has since signed.
So as we look for a Supreme Court appointment worthy of the title "Justice", watch out for that code word "empathy" and the horrors that it could visit on our nation. If there were a majority on the Supreme Court with empathy we might find all manner of horrible decisions coming down as some empath "legislates" from the bench. We might see decisions that hold mortgage originators responsible for defaults by home buyers whose incomes the originators inflated, foreclosures might be stopped in cases where the lenders lied about the terms of the loans or withheld information from the borrowers. Food processors who allowed their plants to use unsafe and unsanitary practices or introduced poisons into their products to boost profits might be held responsible for those acts. Even companies that illegally evade taxes might be called on to pay their fair share. The consequences for the Republicans, Conservatives and Libertarians would be dire. Their sponsors might not have sufficient disposable income to finance their campaigns and the fellowships that keep them on the cable news networks in spite of their lack of anything relevant to say. William Kristol might disappear from view entirely.
So let us not fall into the trap of empathy. I certainly hope that the fundamentalist preachers will get on this anti-empathy bandwagon. Clearly it's an assault on Christianity whenever we get involved in something like empathy that boils down to an odious statement like, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my bretheren, ye have done it unto me."
Empathy is the ability to understand and feel the distress, pain, and the sting of injustice visited on others as if it were your own. Further, it is the ability to translate that understanding, that feeling into the will to prevent further distress for yourself and for the others with whom you empathize. Clearly that is a dangerous thing. If we have empathy we will want to do horrible things like improve treatment and conditions for whiny, special interest groups like wounded veterans. We might be moved to stop traditional practices like racial, ethnic and religious bigotry and even that great tradition of lynching. We might disrupt traditional families by insisting that women have a right to education, work outside the home and flee abuse by the men in their lives. No. Empathy is something that leads to the destruction of the world as it was meant to be.
But perhaps I'm being too harsh about Republicans, Conservatives and their thinly disguised cousins, Libertarians. They do have empathy. They have shown it when they've defended the six and seven figure bonuses to the financial whizzes who drove their companies into bankruptcy. They show it every day when they insist that we must remove onerous regulations that keep disease and poisons out of our food and drugs. They even show it when they seek to protect the populace from evil drugs like marajuana by insuring that those people whose pain and suffering it eases never get it. In short Republican, Conservative and Libertarian empathy knows on which side its proverbial bread is buttered. Right Wing empathy is always bought and paid for.
What the neo-fascists really rail against is empathy for the great many people whose lives are made worse while they forcefully protect their rich friends. Those rich friends are the ones who fund their campaigns and, when out of office, pay for their fellowships at the American Enterprise, Cato and Manhattan Institutes, Heritage Foundation, Hoover Institution or for their chairs at neo-fascist incubators like Pepperdine University.
If we get involved in empathy we would be rejecting the greatest of the neo-fascist prophetesses, Ayn Rand. The alleged philosophy of "Objectivism" is nothing but the apotheosis of an utter rejection of empathy. No. We can't have that. Atlas Shrugged is second only to the exerpts of The Bible that fundamentalists prefer (no Matthew 25 in those Bibles) as holy writ.
Let's take a famous example, the recently corrected travesty of Lilly Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. Lilly Ledbetter went to work for Goodyear in its Gadsden , Alabama plant in 1979. When she started working there she was recieving pay comparable to the men doing the same job and who had similar experience but over the years and unbeknownst to Ms. Ledbetter, a gap began to open. In 1997, on the verge of retiring she found that she was making $3,727 per month. That's a very nice pay check that I would have happily receieved. But at the same point the men doing her job were receiving a minimum of $4,286 per month and as much as $5,236 per month. There was ample evidence that Ms. Ledbetter's sex was the sole factor in the difference of roughly $500 to $1,500 per month reduction in pay. Goodyear had not only discriminated in Ms. Ledbetter's pay but had kept the information about that discrepancy secret for most of two decades.
So I think that most people would see Ms. Ledbetter's treatment as unfair. You wouldn't want your mother, daughter, sister or wife treated like that. However, if you're reaching that conclusion you are falling in to the dangerous role of a "fellow traveler" of empathy. You should thank whatever god to which you pray that there are five Supreme Court "Justices" who are Republican and Conservative enough to be utterly unaffected by empathy. Writing for his fellow protectors of business over labor, wealth over poverty and crime over justice, Samuel Alito threaded a very fine needle and rejected Ms. Ledbetter's argument. Sure she'd been victimized by Goodyear and sure that victimization represented illegal discrimination but Lilly Ledbetter hadn't filed suit soon enough.
Say what?
You see, Ms. Ledbetter's lawyers had argued that every time Goodyear cut a pay check for Ms. Ledbetter the company committed a distinct act of pay discrimination. The law included a limitations clause requiring that the discrimination claim be filed within 180 days of the act of discrimination. Judge Alito along with Antonin Scalia, Scalia's Houseboy, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy decided that argument was wrong. Goodyear had decided to discriminate against Ms. Ledbetter way back in the 1980s and though Goodyear had kept the fact secret and Ms. Ledbetter's typical human clairvoyance was somehow impaired she hadn't filed suit soon enough. A judicial wag of the finger went to Goodyear with a stern admonition to behave and Lilly Ledbetter got a simple, "Sorry. Go fuck off."
Now if Alito, Scalia, Thomas (included soley for completeness; not seriously), Roberts or Kennedy had succumbed to that dangerous empathy for Lilly Ledbetter all manner of evil would have flowed from the decision. Ms. Ledbetter would have recovered the back pay unfairly withheld from her with interest and damages for discrimination and the cost of the settlement might have been so great that Goodyear and even other companies might have decided that they'd better not do the same to their employees. In short, Goodyear would have gotten a lesson in the "personal responsibility" that Republicans, Conservatives and Libertarians always insist is lacking in the poor who don't pay the bills for those Republicans, Conservatives and Libertarians.
In 2008 Congress attempted to remedy this situation albeit too late for Ms. Ledbetter. But the Republicans in the Senate, also unaffected by empathy, filibustered the bill to death. Had it made its way through the Senate there is no doubt that George Bush, whose sole claim to empathy was his desire to limit the persecution and suffering of the noble Lewis "Scooter" Libby, would have vetoed the bill that President Obama has since signed.
So as we look for a Supreme Court appointment worthy of the title "Justice", watch out for that code word "empathy" and the horrors that it could visit on our nation. If there were a majority on the Supreme Court with empathy we might find all manner of horrible decisions coming down as some empath "legislates" from the bench. We might see decisions that hold mortgage originators responsible for defaults by home buyers whose incomes the originators inflated, foreclosures might be stopped in cases where the lenders lied about the terms of the loans or withheld information from the borrowers. Food processors who allowed their plants to use unsafe and unsanitary practices or introduced poisons into their products to boost profits might be held responsible for those acts. Even companies that illegally evade taxes might be called on to pay their fair share. The consequences for the Republicans, Conservatives and Libertarians would be dire. Their sponsors might not have sufficient disposable income to finance their campaigns and the fellowships that keep them on the cable news networks in spite of their lack of anything relevant to say. William Kristol might disappear from view entirely.
So let us not fall into the trap of empathy. I certainly hope that the fundamentalist preachers will get on this anti-empathy bandwagon. Clearly it's an assault on Christianity whenever we get involved in something like empathy that boils down to an odious statement like, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my bretheren, ye have done it unto me."
Thursday, April 30, 2009
An Epidemic of Swine
We're all gonna DIE!!!!!!
At least that's what you'd think if don't think critically, watch 24-hour news channels on cable television, and can't get through a day without keeping up with the latest paralyzing fear being hawked to you much like fast food.
The current virus set to wipe out you, me and everyone we love has contracted the unfortunate (if you're a pig) name of swine flu. The ah...idiots, of whom there are appallingly many, and those with political and religious agendas (e.g. the government of Egypt) have leaped on the name and decided to slaughter every pig in sight or stay away from pork. Ball Park franks' sales down. Hebrew National all-beef hot dogs sales on the rise. There are always winners and losers. Never mind that it's impossible to contract the disease from eating pork, if what frightens us is called swine flu, we should kill something! And besides, there are a lot fewer laws against killing pigs than there are against killing the guy who just sneezed on you at work despite the fact that that jerk at work probably deserves it more.
But we should never, ever let a good, general hysteria go to waste so I have a proposal. Just bear with me a moment while I explain some facts.
It seems that this current, worrisome virus has, due to the peculiar nature of viruses, picked up genetic material from humans, pigs and birds. Viruses are like that. It's sort of like a person who might eat breakfast at Denny's, lunch at Domino's Pizza and have supper at an Asian restaurant we'll call Paisley Thais. The difference is that instead of doing as the human being does and converting the food to sugars and fats before excreting the rest, a virus becomes part Denny's pancakes, part pepperoni pizza and part Pad Thai and all future generations of that virus carry with them pancakes, pizza and Pad Thai. We know that the virus does this because we can look at the genetic material in the virus and actually see the parts that, in the case of our current worry, came from viruses that were originally unique to humans, pigs and birds.
Now here comes the shock to a good part of the populace of America. The swine flu virus evolved and in that process acquired the ability to infect, first birds, then pigs and finally, to the great pleasure of CNN, humans. We would not be facing this particular virus at all if it were not for evolution. Thus the virus that has you shunning family, friends and public places is positive proof that Darwinian evolution takes place.
Some uncritical..ah...people who wouldn't know cognitive dissonance if it came up and bit them on the ass will tell you that, sure, evolution works for viruses and bugs and mice but god created man and he's not a part of the evolution that effects every other living thing on this planet, which, by the way, is only about 6,000 to 10,000 years old.
It is those ah...people whom I now wish to address. The Mike Huckabees, John Hegges, Fred Phelpses and Pat Robertsons. I'm also addressing the graduates of such institutions of ah...learning as Bob Jones, Oral Roberts, Liberty Baptist, Regent and similar universities and Seattle's Discovery Institute as well as fundamentalist preachers across this nation. Please stand up for your principles and the "revealed truth" that you preach and refuse vaccinations, Tamiflu and all other treatments. Invite your students to stay in school, in class, your parishioners to come to church, pass the peace and stay for the coffee social after services. You are sure that evolution is a myth so you need to stand up for your principles, act on them and not be deterred by some foolishness about immanent death. There is no evolution. You know that. Therefore, if there's a virus that's going to wipe out the human race it exists solely by the will of your god and clearly, irrefutably, god wants you dead.
So, my fundamentalist ah...friends, I urge you to look at the swine flu as an opportunity. Think of it as The Rapture by Sneeze. Your god is calling you to witness for your faith and, if you believe the cable news networks, god's calling you home as well. Heed that call. With any luck he'll call Roger Ailes and the rest of Fox News as well leaving me and the rest of us poor sinners to suffer in a much improved world once you've left us all behind. Certainly we'll have fewer swine to deal with.
Bon voyage.
But...
Oops! You got vaccinated for something? You are laying in a supply of Tamiflu? Perhaps you should acknowledge creationism for the utter nonsense it is and send a card to the Charles Darwin Bicentennial Celebration because evolution not only is responsible for the virus that might make you ill; it's also responsible for all the actions that science (yes, that "alternative religion of the secular humanists", science) has taken to keep you and yours alive in the face of any epidemic.
Sort of like the old saw about there being no atheists in foxholes, if you haven't gotten smallpox, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, or tetanus because of a little shot in your arm, you're not as much of a creationist as you pretend to be, are you?
There was some old guy...can't think of his name just now...some crazy, radical ranter...he had a word for people like that. I think he called then "scribes and pharisees". The word was hypocrites.
At least that's what you'd think if don't think critically, watch 24-hour news channels on cable television, and can't get through a day without keeping up with the latest paralyzing fear being hawked to you much like fast food.
The current virus set to wipe out you, me and everyone we love has contracted the unfortunate (if you're a pig) name of swine flu. The ah...idiots, of whom there are appallingly many, and those with political and religious agendas (e.g. the government of Egypt) have leaped on the name and decided to slaughter every pig in sight or stay away from pork. Ball Park franks' sales down. Hebrew National all-beef hot dogs sales on the rise. There are always winners and losers. Never mind that it's impossible to contract the disease from eating pork, if what frightens us is called swine flu, we should kill something! And besides, there are a lot fewer laws against killing pigs than there are against killing the guy who just sneezed on you at work despite the fact that that jerk at work probably deserves it more.
But we should never, ever let a good, general hysteria go to waste so I have a proposal. Just bear with me a moment while I explain some facts.
It seems that this current, worrisome virus has, due to the peculiar nature of viruses, picked up genetic material from humans, pigs and birds. Viruses are like that. It's sort of like a person who might eat breakfast at Denny's, lunch at Domino's Pizza and have supper at an Asian restaurant we'll call Paisley Thais. The difference is that instead of doing as the human being does and converting the food to sugars and fats before excreting the rest, a virus becomes part Denny's pancakes, part pepperoni pizza and part Pad Thai and all future generations of that virus carry with them pancakes, pizza and Pad Thai. We know that the virus does this because we can look at the genetic material in the virus and actually see the parts that, in the case of our current worry, came from viruses that were originally unique to humans, pigs and birds.
Now here comes the shock to a good part of the populace of America. The swine flu virus evolved and in that process acquired the ability to infect, first birds, then pigs and finally, to the great pleasure of CNN, humans. We would not be facing this particular virus at all if it were not for evolution. Thus the virus that has you shunning family, friends and public places is positive proof that Darwinian evolution takes place.
Some uncritical..ah...people who wouldn't know cognitive dissonance if it came up and bit them on the ass will tell you that, sure, evolution works for viruses and bugs and mice but god created man and he's not a part of the evolution that effects every other living thing on this planet, which, by the way, is only about 6,000 to 10,000 years old.
It is those ah...people whom I now wish to address. The Mike Huckabees, John Hegges, Fred Phelpses and Pat Robertsons. I'm also addressing the graduates of such institutions of ah...learning as Bob Jones, Oral Roberts, Liberty Baptist, Regent and similar universities and Seattle's Discovery Institute as well as fundamentalist preachers across this nation. Please stand up for your principles and the "revealed truth" that you preach and refuse vaccinations, Tamiflu and all other treatments. Invite your students to stay in school, in class, your parishioners to come to church, pass the peace and stay for the coffee social after services. You are sure that evolution is a myth so you need to stand up for your principles, act on them and not be deterred by some foolishness about immanent death. There is no evolution. You know that. Therefore, if there's a virus that's going to wipe out the human race it exists solely by the will of your god and clearly, irrefutably, god wants you dead.
So, my fundamentalist ah...friends, I urge you to look at the swine flu as an opportunity. Think of it as The Rapture by Sneeze. Your god is calling you to witness for your faith and, if you believe the cable news networks, god's calling you home as well. Heed that call. With any luck he'll call Roger Ailes and the rest of Fox News as well leaving me and the rest of us poor sinners to suffer in a much improved world once you've left us all behind. Certainly we'll have fewer swine to deal with.
Bon voyage.
But...
Oops! You got vaccinated for something? You are laying in a supply of Tamiflu? Perhaps you should acknowledge creationism for the utter nonsense it is and send a card to the Charles Darwin Bicentennial Celebration because evolution not only is responsible for the virus that might make you ill; it's also responsible for all the actions that science (yes, that "alternative religion of the secular humanists", science) has taken to keep you and yours alive in the face of any epidemic.
Sort of like the old saw about there being no atheists in foxholes, if you haven't gotten smallpox, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, or tetanus because of a little shot in your arm, you're not as much of a creationist as you pretend to be, are you?
There was some old guy...can't think of his name just now...some crazy, radical ranter...he had a word for people like that. I think he called then "scribes and pharisees". The word was hypocrites.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
The Newspeak of Freedom
We are all familiar with George Orwell's remarkably insightful focus in 1984 on how perversion of language controls thought and discourse. In Orwell's world the "Ministry of Truth" redefines freedom as slavery, war becomes peace and anyone who notes a discrepancy between reality and definition must be re-educated in Room 101. Unfortunately, we too often reassure ourselves with the lie that Newspeak is "just fiction" or simply a critique of Nazi and Stalinist propaganda. We don't like to believe that it is being practiced on us now, here in the United States of 2009.
The Orwellian perversions of language start with the titles of organizations. The Heritage Foundation is only interested in the heritage of fascism which it constantly promotes for the United States. The Manhattan Institute's name is meant to evoke the urgency of the World War II Manhattan Project when it's real focus is nuking American institutions, particularly free public education. The very term Conservative in politics has nothing to do with a conservation or deliberation that might have been recognizeable to Theodore Roosevelt, Everett Dirksen or even Barry Goldwater. It is an entirely different creature that is wholly owned by major corporate sponsors, a cadre of ultra-rich oligarchs and neo-fascist lunatics who have spent forty years attempting to destroy government with the deregulation and militant jingoism that has succeeded in destroying American power in the world and the world economy with it.
But there is a far more perverse and insidious use of Newspeak that seeks to murderously distort the very language of our human and civil rights for the purpose of destroying those very rights. I've noticed this for a long time but what has gotten me exercised at present is my listening to an alleged bastion of Liberal "bias". Recently a Seattle NPR affiliate spoke with a couple of practitioners of the current incarnation of Newspeak and largely let their perversions of language and ideas go unchallenged.
The first instance came in a discussion of same-sex marriage a Joseph Backholm of one of those Orwellian-named organizations, the Family Policy Institute, put forward the bald faced lie that legalizing same-sex marriage would infringe the "religious freedom" of "people of faith".
The first bit of nonsense in that assertion involves in defining "people of faith". By Mr. Backholm's construction same-sex couples are not and can never be "people of faith" and that no "person of faith" could believe that same-sex couples have the right to marry as do couples of mixed sexes. That implied assertion is nonsense on its face. He is actually saying that the people he represents, afflicted by a narrow, bigoted, shallow religiosity rather than anything resembling true religious feeling, oppose same-sex marriage. The fanatical people who fixate on a few select scriptural passages rather than a large overview of their religion's writings would be challenged by general availability and recognition of same-sex marriage.
In a sense Mr. Backholm is correct. The minority of religious fanatics who share his views will be offended by the general availability and recognition of same-sex marriage...just as Holocaust deniers are offended by the newsreel footage of the Nazi death camps. To which we should simply say, "Screw them!"
But the truly appalling bit of Newspeak in Mr. Backholm's specious argument is that legalizing and recognizing same-sex marriage is an assault on freedom of religion. I am tempted to assert that only the Prince of Lies could put forward a perversion of the concept of freedom - let alone religion - as extreme and horrible as that. In fact, what Mr. Backholm is asserting is that his narrow, bigoted religiosity is threatened with suppression by the free expression of a differing view of religion. I do not think that it is news to Mr. Backholm that his one, specious assertion of "freedom" should not, should never suppress the the freedom of others. In point of fact, Mr Backholm's argument amounts to an assertion that the practice of any religion at variance with the one he espouses should not be permitted. The whole point of creating the United States as a secular state in which religious freedom is guaranteed was to prevent fanatics and bigots such as Mr. Backholm from suppressing the religious expression of others.
But Mr. Backholm has no shame. He claims that a religious organization, for example, Catholic Charities, that refused to place children for adoption with same-sex couples would have its freedom of religion infringed. He asserts that this very thing has already happened in Massachusetts. But lets examine that a little closer.
Faced with potential discrimination complaints for refusing to place children with same-sex couples, the Archdiocese of Boston - the very organization where the scandals of church subornation of child abuse by priests originated - decided to withdraw from the state sponsored program and contracts under which it had placed adoptees for many years. Please note that it was the choice of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese, not an order by the state. Massachustts correctly determined that placing a child with a stable, loving couple, regardless of the sexes of the members of that couple, was a boon to the child. Just as it had determined that refusing to place children with families based on race, religion or ethnicity was prohibited discrimination, Massachusetts rightly included sexual orientation in that list of prohibited discriminatory practices. Having done so, the representatives of the Roman Catholic Church in Massachusetts, who had no visible moral compunctions or firm principles when it came to protecting a minority of abusive priests, suddenly grew a sense of morality and a set of unyielding principles and withdrew from the state sponsored, paid and contracted adoption system.
Note that Massachusetts officials expressed their regret at the withdrawal of Catholic Charities from the adoption system but no one tried to force Catholic Charities to place adoptees with same-sex couples. They simply shook their heads and waved goodbye. The Roman Catholic Church's freedom to practice its selective version of morality remains intact. The Archdiocese of Boston, if it is threatened at all, is under no threat except that of its own behavior in suborning child abuse. And, more to the point, a very questionable allocation of taxpayer funds to a religious organization has ended. No bands of torch-bearing same-sex couples have roamed through Boston burning Catholic Churches and Convents as the Protestant Know-Nothings did in the 1850s. Freedom of religion remains intact in Massachusetts and, happily, the separation of church and state so dear to the framers of the Constitution has been strengthened.
In a similar propagation of Newspeak the same radio station gave a forum to a con-artist from the ultra-rightist, labor-rights suppression group called the Evergreen "Freedom" Foundation. The subject was a bill, killed in this legislative session thanks to a stupid and ill-considered e-mail from a supporter, that would have given employees the right not to attend employer mandated meetings that have the purpose of expressing the employers views on politics, religion or union organizing. That doesn't seem so terrible, does it? Employers have held meetings in which they have implied that employees would lose their jobs if they did not vote the way the employer approved, joined a union or even did not accept the same religious dogma that the employer espouses. That seems like a clear violation of individual and civil rights.
But the Evergreen spokesperson Scott Dilley made the Orwellian assertion that this legislation to protect workers' freedoms is an infringement of the employer's freedom of speech. It's utter nonsense of course but for neo-fascist cultists like Scott Dilley it is an effective way of perverting the dialogue. What Mr. Dilley refuses to acknowledge is that we all have a freedom to speak or withhold our opinions and we have a concomitant freedom to listen or not. No one has to read this blog. In fact, were someone to attempt to force it on anyone, I would fight for that person's right to not read it. Not so Mr. Dilley.
What Mr. Dilley wants to sweep under the rug is the vast power gulf between employer and employee. A fanatic who owns a company can rant to his employees at will on any subject but employees exercise their freedom to ignore those rantings at the peril of their jobs. In an economy destroyed by the excesses of the very employers Mr. Dilley represents, no employee can take the whims of his or her employer lightly. In this era when workers need union protections more than at any time since the 1930s it is perfectly reasonable to rein in employers' excesses. But Mr. Dilley obfuscates by introducing the language of freedom and civil rights in service of enslavement to employers' whims.
Mr. Dilley's argument on behalf of employers is exactly the same as arguing that arresting and jailing a rapist or child molester is an infringement of his freedom of expression. It is an argument that deserves no credit and no unchallenged hearing. But George Orwell has been dead for over half a century and no one likes to think that a neo-fascist propaganda machine as effective and as vile as Josef Goebbels' is operating in 21st Century America.
After all, isn't Fox News "fair and balanced"?
[Note: In the many years I spent working in social services in the Boston Area I knew many Roman Catholic priests and nuns as well as Salvation Army officers and other people of faith whose religion was strong and broad and decent. All of whom were appalled at the minority of their fellows who abused their positions to abuse parishioners and even more so at the church structures that hid those abuses and allowed them to continue. The Archdiocese of Boston may have behaved appallingly but many individuals within it behaved responsibly, morally and in keeping with the expressed principles of their faith. It is their church heirarchy that has tarred them, not I.]
The Orwellian perversions of language start with the titles of organizations. The Heritage Foundation is only interested in the heritage of fascism which it constantly promotes for the United States. The Manhattan Institute's name is meant to evoke the urgency of the World War II Manhattan Project when it's real focus is nuking American institutions, particularly free public education. The very term Conservative in politics has nothing to do with a conservation or deliberation that might have been recognizeable to Theodore Roosevelt, Everett Dirksen or even Barry Goldwater. It is an entirely different creature that is wholly owned by major corporate sponsors, a cadre of ultra-rich oligarchs and neo-fascist lunatics who have spent forty years attempting to destroy government with the deregulation and militant jingoism that has succeeded in destroying American power in the world and the world economy with it.
But there is a far more perverse and insidious use of Newspeak that seeks to murderously distort the very language of our human and civil rights for the purpose of destroying those very rights. I've noticed this for a long time but what has gotten me exercised at present is my listening to an alleged bastion of Liberal "bias". Recently a Seattle NPR affiliate spoke with a couple of practitioners of the current incarnation of Newspeak and largely let their perversions of language and ideas go unchallenged.
The first instance came in a discussion of same-sex marriage a Joseph Backholm of one of those Orwellian-named organizations, the Family Policy Institute, put forward the bald faced lie that legalizing same-sex marriage would infringe the "religious freedom" of "people of faith".
The first bit of nonsense in that assertion involves in defining "people of faith". By Mr. Backholm's construction same-sex couples are not and can never be "people of faith" and that no "person of faith" could believe that same-sex couples have the right to marry as do couples of mixed sexes. That implied assertion is nonsense on its face. He is actually saying that the people he represents, afflicted by a narrow, bigoted, shallow religiosity rather than anything resembling true religious feeling, oppose same-sex marriage. The fanatical people who fixate on a few select scriptural passages rather than a large overview of their religion's writings would be challenged by general availability and recognition of same-sex marriage.
In a sense Mr. Backholm is correct. The minority of religious fanatics who share his views will be offended by the general availability and recognition of same-sex marriage...just as Holocaust deniers are offended by the newsreel footage of the Nazi death camps. To which we should simply say, "Screw them!"
But the truly appalling bit of Newspeak in Mr. Backholm's specious argument is that legalizing and recognizing same-sex marriage is an assault on freedom of religion. I am tempted to assert that only the Prince of Lies could put forward a perversion of the concept of freedom - let alone religion - as extreme and horrible as that. In fact, what Mr. Backholm is asserting is that his narrow, bigoted religiosity is threatened with suppression by the free expression of a differing view of religion. I do not think that it is news to Mr. Backholm that his one, specious assertion of "freedom" should not, should never suppress the the freedom of others. In point of fact, Mr Backholm's argument amounts to an assertion that the practice of any religion at variance with the one he espouses should not be permitted. The whole point of creating the United States as a secular state in which religious freedom is guaranteed was to prevent fanatics and bigots such as Mr. Backholm from suppressing the religious expression of others.
But Mr. Backholm has no shame. He claims that a religious organization, for example, Catholic Charities, that refused to place children for adoption with same-sex couples would have its freedom of religion infringed. He asserts that this very thing has already happened in Massachusetts. But lets examine that a little closer.
Faced with potential discrimination complaints for refusing to place children with same-sex couples, the Archdiocese of Boston - the very organization where the scandals of church subornation of child abuse by priests originated - decided to withdraw from the state sponsored program and contracts under which it had placed adoptees for many years. Please note that it was the choice of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese, not an order by the state. Massachustts correctly determined that placing a child with a stable, loving couple, regardless of the sexes of the members of that couple, was a boon to the child. Just as it had determined that refusing to place children with families based on race, religion or ethnicity was prohibited discrimination, Massachusetts rightly included sexual orientation in that list of prohibited discriminatory practices. Having done so, the representatives of the Roman Catholic Church in Massachusetts, who had no visible moral compunctions or firm principles when it came to protecting a minority of abusive priests, suddenly grew a sense of morality and a set of unyielding principles and withdrew from the state sponsored, paid and contracted adoption system.
Note that Massachusetts officials expressed their regret at the withdrawal of Catholic Charities from the adoption system but no one tried to force Catholic Charities to place adoptees with same-sex couples. They simply shook their heads and waved goodbye. The Roman Catholic Church's freedom to practice its selective version of morality remains intact. The Archdiocese of Boston, if it is threatened at all, is under no threat except that of its own behavior in suborning child abuse. And, more to the point, a very questionable allocation of taxpayer funds to a religious organization has ended. No bands of torch-bearing same-sex couples have roamed through Boston burning Catholic Churches and Convents as the Protestant Know-Nothings did in the 1850s. Freedom of religion remains intact in Massachusetts and, happily, the separation of church and state so dear to the framers of the Constitution has been strengthened.
In a similar propagation of Newspeak the same radio station gave a forum to a con-artist from the ultra-rightist, labor-rights suppression group called the Evergreen "Freedom" Foundation. The subject was a bill, killed in this legislative session thanks to a stupid and ill-considered e-mail from a supporter, that would have given employees the right not to attend employer mandated meetings that have the purpose of expressing the employers views on politics, religion or union organizing. That doesn't seem so terrible, does it? Employers have held meetings in which they have implied that employees would lose their jobs if they did not vote the way the employer approved, joined a union or even did not accept the same religious dogma that the employer espouses. That seems like a clear violation of individual and civil rights.
But the Evergreen spokesperson Scott Dilley made the Orwellian assertion that this legislation to protect workers' freedoms is an infringement of the employer's freedom of speech. It's utter nonsense of course but for neo-fascist cultists like Scott Dilley it is an effective way of perverting the dialogue. What Mr. Dilley refuses to acknowledge is that we all have a freedom to speak or withhold our opinions and we have a concomitant freedom to listen or not. No one has to read this blog. In fact, were someone to attempt to force it on anyone, I would fight for that person's right to not read it. Not so Mr. Dilley.
What Mr. Dilley wants to sweep under the rug is the vast power gulf between employer and employee. A fanatic who owns a company can rant to his employees at will on any subject but employees exercise their freedom to ignore those rantings at the peril of their jobs. In an economy destroyed by the excesses of the very employers Mr. Dilley represents, no employee can take the whims of his or her employer lightly. In this era when workers need union protections more than at any time since the 1930s it is perfectly reasonable to rein in employers' excesses. But Mr. Dilley obfuscates by introducing the language of freedom and civil rights in service of enslavement to employers' whims.
Mr. Dilley's argument on behalf of employers is exactly the same as arguing that arresting and jailing a rapist or child molester is an infringement of his freedom of expression. It is an argument that deserves no credit and no unchallenged hearing. But George Orwell has been dead for over half a century and no one likes to think that a neo-fascist propaganda machine as effective and as vile as Josef Goebbels' is operating in 21st Century America.
After all, isn't Fox News "fair and balanced"?
[Note: In the many years I spent working in social services in the Boston Area I knew many Roman Catholic priests and nuns as well as Salvation Army officers and other people of faith whose religion was strong and broad and decent. All of whom were appalled at the minority of their fellows who abused their positions to abuse parishioners and even more so at the church structures that hid those abuses and allowed them to continue. The Archdiocese of Boston may have behaved appallingly but many individuals within it behaved responsibly, morally and in keeping with the expressed principles of their faith. It is their church heirarchy that has tarred them, not I.]
Monday, January 19, 2009
Georgie, We'll Hardly Miss You
In the couple of months between Election and Inauguration Days we were treated to reviews and tweaking of what has been referred to as "the Bush Legacy". The main problem with that phrase is that we no more want Dubya's legacy than we want Dubya himself.
We've heard the utterly meaningless mantras of "I've made the hard decisions" and "history will decide" and "protected America" repeated in the typically Republican magical thinking that insists that repeating a nonsense phrase enough times makes it so. Bush apologists have trotted out people who, largely with straight faces, claim that Dubya is "intelligent", a "nice man", "pleasant" and "engaged".
My parents' generation knew such propaganda for what it truly is: "The Big Lie". "The Big Lie" was the shorthand applied to Nazi and Soviet propaganda that painted monsters like Hitler and Stalin as benign patriots and benefactors to the world at large when in fact they were dangerous, totalitarian, psychopathic dictators. Dubya and his Svengalis, Poppy Bush and Dick Cheney, may not sink to the level of monstrousness of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. They may not even sink to the slightly less appalling level of Pol Pot, Idi Amin or Slobodan Milosovic but that doesn't mean that they are not denizens of some level of the same hellish pit that houses those refutations of the term "humanity".
I began writing this as the inaugural ceremonies for Barak Obama were under way. The pomp and circumstance of that day are now a bright, warm memory. Now that the presidency of George W. Bush is well and truly over we can say with some certainty that it was a presidency begun in fraud, pursued through crime and lies and concluded in unmitigated disaster for the United States and the whole world. Dubya has descended into an occasional run to a convention of congenial oil men sufficiently foolish, fascist or clueless to pay for a few inept words from him and a bit of glad handing. He's traveled as far as the plains of western Canada being careful not to venture into any country that might arrest him for his many and manifest war crimes. Cheney too emerges once or twice a month from the evil darkness that he carries within himself to croak warnings that restoration of the U. S. Constitution is an lure for terrorist attacks on Americans. However, Cheney's demeanor of hatred makes one wonder if his friends at Halliburton and the "re-branded" Blackwater are not arranging for the attack he predicts as inevitable.
Obama and his Administration have repeatedly and strongly expressed the desire to put the last eight years behind them even as they root about in the back-up of sewage that the Bush Administration left in its wake. In a pragmatic sense they are correct. Once the neo-cons turned the American ship of state into a Titanic, courts martial for the captain, designers, navigator and engineers would only get in the way of evacuating the ship and saving as many as possible. In the larger scheme of American politics, both parties understand that the vengeful Republicans would bide their time and hone their skills at hiding their criminal acts until they could again destroy a Democratic president out of sheer revenge for Nixon's impeachment and exposure of the Iran-Contra Affair as they did with the noisome prosecutorial misconduct known as "Whitewater". Never mind that the Republican wrong doing was criminal at best, traitorous at worst while the Democratic wrong doing amounts to some raunchy heterosexual diddling.
Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, to his credit, has proposed investigating the criminality of the executive branch from January 20, 2001 through January 19, 2009 but his proposed investigation is limited and entirely toothless. I have come reluctantly to believe that we need a full exposure of the criminal acts of the Bush Administration regardless of the distraction it might be. What has decided me on this point is the repeated croakings of Dick Cheney.
Cheney's allegations that Obama's policy of treating prisoners lawfully poses a threat to America needs to be challenged. We desperately need a wide declassification of documents to debunk the canard that the Bush Administration's disregard for human and civil rights, Constitutional and International Law and treaties did anything but make America and Americans less safe, less secure and more vulnerable.
I understand that I should "be careful what I wish for." The possibility that even one of those tortured in secret, foreign prisons may have provided some pertinent and useful intelligence could blow the whole process up in the Democrats' faces and make credible the Republicans who have so effectively discredited themselves. Still, I am confident enough that all the illegal, draconian acts of the Bush Administration were completely ineffectual that I'm willing to risk it. After all, would they have been so excessively secretive about the information they received if the least little mote of it had been of value? You might pose that question to Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson. The only way they can claim that their descent into fascism was justified is by the absence of results remaining a secret.
Also, we hardly need worry that the demagogues like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rash Lamebrain and Ann Cun...er...Coulter will come up with a rational critique of the policy. They are already off the deep end, flailing about in search of some epithet that will arrest the attention of and re-mobilize the lazy and thoughtless who filled out their core audience of knuckle-walking idiots.
No, we need an investigation, out in public. We need evidence of malfeasance and misfeasance and names, not just of the prime movers but of the quiet, minor bureaucrats insinuated into the government. We need the dismissals and resignations that root out the Monica Goodlings, Kyle Sampsons, the graduates of the "Law Schools" of Regent and Liberty Universities, the Bob Jones-ites and similar pseudo-scholars and shyster lawyers. In short, we need the kind of purge that the neo-fascists worked from 1946 through 1956 through HUAC and Joe McCarthy only this time for actual cause.
But then, we're Democrats and Liberals and unlikely to be so effective or decisive. Yet were we to act outside our nature this once we might finally, actually know the real Georgie, Dickie and their appalling attempt to destroy our nation. We might even go a long way to avoiding a repeat in the foreseeable future.
We've heard the utterly meaningless mantras of "I've made the hard decisions" and "history will decide" and "protected America" repeated in the typically Republican magical thinking that insists that repeating a nonsense phrase enough times makes it so. Bush apologists have trotted out people who, largely with straight faces, claim that Dubya is "intelligent", a "nice man", "pleasant" and "engaged".
My parents' generation knew such propaganda for what it truly is: "The Big Lie". "The Big Lie" was the shorthand applied to Nazi and Soviet propaganda that painted monsters like Hitler and Stalin as benign patriots and benefactors to the world at large when in fact they were dangerous, totalitarian, psychopathic dictators. Dubya and his Svengalis, Poppy Bush and Dick Cheney, may not sink to the level of monstrousness of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. They may not even sink to the slightly less appalling level of Pol Pot, Idi Amin or Slobodan Milosovic but that doesn't mean that they are not denizens of some level of the same hellish pit that houses those refutations of the term "humanity".
I began writing this as the inaugural ceremonies for Barak Obama were under way. The pomp and circumstance of that day are now a bright, warm memory. Now that the presidency of George W. Bush is well and truly over we can say with some certainty that it was a presidency begun in fraud, pursued through crime and lies and concluded in unmitigated disaster for the United States and the whole world. Dubya has descended into an occasional run to a convention of congenial oil men sufficiently foolish, fascist or clueless to pay for a few inept words from him and a bit of glad handing. He's traveled as far as the plains of western Canada being careful not to venture into any country that might arrest him for his many and manifest war crimes. Cheney too emerges once or twice a month from the evil darkness that he carries within himself to croak warnings that restoration of the U. S. Constitution is an lure for terrorist attacks on Americans. However, Cheney's demeanor of hatred makes one wonder if his friends at Halliburton and the "re-branded" Blackwater are not arranging for the attack he predicts as inevitable.
Obama and his Administration have repeatedly and strongly expressed the desire to put the last eight years behind them even as they root about in the back-up of sewage that the Bush Administration left in its wake. In a pragmatic sense they are correct. Once the neo-cons turned the American ship of state into a Titanic, courts martial for the captain, designers, navigator and engineers would only get in the way of evacuating the ship and saving as many as possible. In the larger scheme of American politics, both parties understand that the vengeful Republicans would bide their time and hone their skills at hiding their criminal acts until they could again destroy a Democratic president out of sheer revenge for Nixon's impeachment and exposure of the Iran-Contra Affair as they did with the noisome prosecutorial misconduct known as "Whitewater". Never mind that the Republican wrong doing was criminal at best, traitorous at worst while the Democratic wrong doing amounts to some raunchy heterosexual diddling.
Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, to his credit, has proposed investigating the criminality of the executive branch from January 20, 2001 through January 19, 2009 but his proposed investigation is limited and entirely toothless. I have come reluctantly to believe that we need a full exposure of the criminal acts of the Bush Administration regardless of the distraction it might be. What has decided me on this point is the repeated croakings of Dick Cheney.
Cheney's allegations that Obama's policy of treating prisoners lawfully poses a threat to America needs to be challenged. We desperately need a wide declassification of documents to debunk the canard that the Bush Administration's disregard for human and civil rights, Constitutional and International Law and treaties did anything but make America and Americans less safe, less secure and more vulnerable.
I understand that I should "be careful what I wish for." The possibility that even one of those tortured in secret, foreign prisons may have provided some pertinent and useful intelligence could blow the whole process up in the Democrats' faces and make credible the Republicans who have so effectively discredited themselves. Still, I am confident enough that all the illegal, draconian acts of the Bush Administration were completely ineffectual that I'm willing to risk it. After all, would they have been so excessively secretive about the information they received if the least little mote of it had been of value? You might pose that question to Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson. The only way they can claim that their descent into fascism was justified is by the absence of results remaining a secret.
Also, we hardly need worry that the demagogues like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rash Lamebrain and Ann Cun...er...Coulter will come up with a rational critique of the policy. They are already off the deep end, flailing about in search of some epithet that will arrest the attention of and re-mobilize the lazy and thoughtless who filled out their core audience of knuckle-walking idiots.
No, we need an investigation, out in public. We need evidence of malfeasance and misfeasance and names, not just of the prime movers but of the quiet, minor bureaucrats insinuated into the government. We need the dismissals and resignations that root out the Monica Goodlings, Kyle Sampsons, the graduates of the "Law Schools" of Regent and Liberty Universities, the Bob Jones-ites and similar pseudo-scholars and shyster lawyers. In short, we need the kind of purge that the neo-fascists worked from 1946 through 1956 through HUAC and Joe McCarthy only this time for actual cause.
But then, we're Democrats and Liberals and unlikely to be so effective or decisive. Yet were we to act outside our nature this once we might finally, actually know the real Georgie, Dickie and their appalling attempt to destroy our nation. We might even go a long way to avoiding a repeat in the foreseeable future.
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