John McSame has changed positions on a dizzying variety of public policy matters, and the list of reversals continues to enlarge as the presidential campaign progresses. Steve Benen is working to keep track of all of them here, and has even set up an RSS feed to facilitate the tracking.
Highly recommended.
I'm at the far end of the North American land mass, so I always get the New Yorkers a few days after they break news, stir controversies, or otherwise rivet the national discourse. And so it is with the edition featuring the surprisingly infamous Obama parody, which just arrived today. Gazing upon it as it sits in my very hands, I find I care about the Terrible Outrage it represents even less than I did a few days ago when the wave of collective nausea, hysteria, flatulence, and barking madness first began. Sigh.
I suspect it's probably a net gain for Obama since it gives him one more opportunity to tell people -- are you listening, West Virginia, I'm looking right at you -- that he is a Christian, not a Muslim. Obama was never a Muslim. He never attended a Muslim school. He swore in to the Senate with his hand on a Bible. He and his wife are as American as apple pie, baseball, fast food, terrible blockbuster movies, and chicken-fried [name your meat]. He recites the Pledge of Allegiance as often and as passionately as anyone.
The New Yorker cover is a parody. It could probably have been done better, but I've seen far worse. Again, sigh.
Now this is something else altogether:
Sadly, this is not a parody. It is an actual piece of campaign material used in a race in Oklahoma.
Sigh.
Disgrace number one, a large one, comes from former attorney general John Ashcroft, who testified to Congress today:
"The Department of Justice has on a consistent basis over the last half dozen years or so, over and over again in its evaluations, come to the conclusion that under the law in existence during my time as attorney general, waterboarding did not constitute torture."Isn't it precious how Ashcroft cites "the last half dozen years" of precedent on this question -- exactly the same half dozen years when depraved hacks like him have been issuing torture-supporting wide legal stances -- and not, say, the four-hundred years leading up to that, during which no one this side of Pol Pot or Hitler doubted that waterboarding is torture?
Waters asked Ashcroft if such techniques would be regarded as "totally unacceptable and even criminal" if they were used on American soldiers.
"Well, my subscription to these memos, and my belief that the law provides the basis for these memos persisted even in the presence of my son serving two tours of duty overseas in the Gulf area as a member of our armed forces," Ashcroft said. [emphasis mine]
This is too good not to link to: terrifying images of Iranian weapons test launches from The ZehnKatzen Times.
I don't know about you, but I would already have been wetting myself at the sight of one butt-rocket Godzilla, but they have at least two. And that's just a test firing!
Plus the Millenium Falcon!
Plus the James Kirk-era Enterprise!
We're doomed.
(Here's some more background in case you've been sequestered in Dick Cheney's hidey-hole.)
Though it has been used, in the present case, against 'my' candidate, I like this sort of thing -- a side-by-side comparison revealing recent changes to Barack Obama's web site. While both Andrew Sullivan and a piece in the New York Daily News have suggested that McSame supporters have reveled in highlighting contradictions between the two versions, especially on Obama's view of "the surge," I don't see them. Here's the old version:
The goal of the surge was to create space for Iraq's political leaders to reach an agreement to end Iraq's civil war. At great cost, our troops have helped reduce violence in some areas of Iraq, but even those reductions do not get us below the unsustainable levels of violence of mid-2006. Moreover, Iraq's political leaders have made no progress in resolving the political differences at the heart of their civil war.And here's the updated version:
Since the surge began, more than 1,000 American troops have died, and despite the improved security situation, the Iraqi government has not stepped forward to lead the Iraqi people and to reach the genuine political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge. Our troops have heroically helped reduce civilian casualties in Iraq to early 2006 levels. This is a testament to our military’s hard work, improved counterinsurgency tactics, and enormous sacrifice by our troops and military families. It is also a consequence of the decision of many Sunnis to turn against al Qaeda in Iraq, and a lull in Shia militia activity. But the absence of genuine political accommodation in Iraq is a direct result of President Bush’s failure to hold the Iraqi government accountable.While both versions deploy facts and figures a little tendentiously (this is politics), the thesis is unchanged: the stated goal of the surge, political reconciliation in Iraq on significant matters of Iraqi national interest, has not been achieved. This is true, and it was and remains Obama's view of "the surge."
Somebody read this and tell me that movement conservatism in the United States is anything other than a big screaming "fuck you!" to decency and compassion:
Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) has introduced “an amendment to name an HIV/AIDS relief bill after the recently deceased Jesse Helms ... Helms was notorious for his ignorant comments regarding HIV/AIDS. In 1987 he described “AIDS prevention literature as ‘so obscene, so revolting, I may throw up‘” and in 1995 Helms argued that “that the government should spend less on people with AIDS because they got sick due to their ‘deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct.’”
Tom Friedman finds it "self-indulgent, knee-jerk and borderline silly" that so many of the world's people should dislike the United States, even in light of Russia's and China's shameful veto of a US-led UN resolution that would have imposed sanctions on Robert Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe. Friedman sniffs:
Perfect we are not, but America still has some moral backbone. There are travesties we will not tolerate. The U.N. vote on Zimbabwe demonstrates that this is not true for these “popular” countries — called Russia or China or South Africa — that have no problem siding with a man who is pulverizing his own people.I certainly agree with Friedman that there is "something truly filthy" about the vetoes issued by Russia and China, and that something, which Friedman can't quite bring himself to specify, is the callous abandonment of human rights.
So, yes, we’re not so popular in Europe and Asia anymore. I guess they would prefer a world in which America was weaker, where leaders with the values of Vladimir Putin and Thabo Mbeki had a greater say, and where the desperate voices for change in Zimbabwe would, well, just shut up.
At Obsidian Wings, publius chooses an interesting way to frame the cluelessness of the John McSame presidential campaign:
Greater scrutiny would not only have exposed his weaknesses, but it would have forced him to adapt and become a more disciplined candidate ... [I]t was the GOP’s winner-take-all rules that allowed McCain to close rapidly and wrap it up early. Imagine how things might have been different if the GOP had instead adopted proportional delegate rules. McCain and Romney and Huckabee would have slogged it out month after month. It wouldn’t have been pretty, but it would have forced McCain to become a better, more disciplined candidate. [emphases mine]But to extend the evolution metaphor, no amount of survival pressure can force an organism to exhibit novel traits. The traits need to be present in the first place, whereas John McSame may not be capable of a more disciplined campaign, whatever the forces to which he is subject. While he's been a bit player on the stage of American politics for as long as I've been watching it, this is my first prolonged exposure to him, and I've been surprised at how dotty he is, even by the low everyday standards of the Wide Stance party. Publius:
Watching the GOP debates ... was like watching some scene out of Idiocracy. There was no demand for serious policy development ... Instead, the GOP primary focused on the relative degree of one’s surrender monkey-ness and Latino-hatred -- with Ron Paul thrown in as a Shakespearian jester, drawing attention to the whole thing’s utter absurdity.McSame's principle trait -- the thing that keeps his political survival a going prospect -- is the love and affection he consistently inspires among Beltway journalists. Without that, he's a dodo.
Wow. Frame-master Nisbet has really outdone himself with this post on The Great Wafer Crisis of 2008; let me count the ways:
Even fellow atheists and free speech advocates are troubled. Here's what Andrew Sullivan has to say:Kudos to you if you identified multiple errors in this. The first error is in the implication that Andrew Sullivan is an atheist. He is not an atheist. He is a Catholic. And this gets to the larger flaw, namely, the fact that Sullivan has been called out very effectively for this criticism of Myers (e.g., here and here, without even leaving scienceblogs). Several critics have noted that Sullivan's cracker-defending comments represent a complete reversal of Sullivan's take on the Danish Cartoon Controversy, another case in which religious fanatics got overheated about symbols and responded with very non-symbolic, real-world actions.It is one thing to engage in free, if disrespectful, debate. It is another to repeatedly assault and ridicule and abuse something that is deeply sacred to a great many people. Calling the Holy Eucharist a "goddamned cracker" isn't about free speech; it's really about some baseline civility. Myers' rant is the rant of an anti-Catholic bigot. And atheists and agnostics can be bigots too.What alarms me the most about the incident, however ...
This whimsically trenchant celebration of a torture once made infamous by the Nazis and Kmher Rouge is for sale at a right-wing t-shirt site.
The portly torture enthusiast will be delighted to learn that sizes 2x and 3x are available, albeit at a $2 premium.
There is no floor of decency below which "conservatives" will refuse to drop in the name of their politics.
(H/T Matthew Yglesias)
Ostensibly addressing Islam, Benjamin Barber has a very odd way of making his case for the compatibility of religion and democracy:
If democracy means anything it means the right for people to make their own mistakes. To practice their own religion. To pursue their own forms of self-government. I know, I know. That takes time. It can compromise rights. It sometimes allows patriarchy to persist and affords religion the chance to subvert as well as support democracy. But that’s how it is, and history suggests the alternatives, however well intended, are usually far worse.If by democracy, you refer to "people" -- not sure which people, but Barber's assurances of a persisting patriarchy suggest that these people will all have guy names -- following a religion that sanctions and imposes the abridgement of human rights and encourages other unnamed "mistakes," then the answer is yes.
It is not Islam per se, but religion tout court that stands in some tension with secularism and with democracy – a tension that is healthy rather than unhealthy in a free society. Augustine’s Two Cities and Pope Gelasius’s two swords speak to a world of the body and a world of the spirit, of the temporal and the eternal, the worldly and the ecclesiastic. These dualisms do not arise out of theology but inform theology with the deep logic of duality that defines our being. The opposition of morality and politics, and of divine or natural and positive law, is transferred to the opposition of church and state that produces troublesome but healthy tensions for societies everywhere.Would examples of such "troublesome but healthy tensions" include forced marriages involving child brides? Ritual removals of children's sex parts? Women being forced out of schools, cars, and voting booths? Detonating a belt packed with explosives in a crowded public place? Bombing family planning clinics? Institutions that deal with child rapists by shuffling them down the road to the next parish? These perverse injustices and deranged priorities arise directly from theology, and they're quite a bit worse than troublesome.
Portland is probably typical of American cities in that it is currently undergoing a flare-up of conflict between bikers and drivers as gas prices force more bikes and angry drivers into public thoroughfares. Much of the chatter revolves around a recent scuffle between a driver and a biker in our fair city, as helpfully re-re-enacted by the Portland Mercury:
Will Wilkinson admits he can't be bothered to follow all the vehicular traffic rules when he is on a bike:
People complain about bikers breaking traffic laws. Well, I’m guilty, and I’m damn well going to keep doing it. A lot of traffic regulations make sense for cars, but just don’t for bikes. For example, I ride home almost every day the wrong way up a one way street, and nobody coming the other way gives a damn. Why should they? ... I like biking because it’s faster than driving — because I blow through stop signs, go the wrong way on one-ways, etc. Were I suddenly to become fastidious about heeding traffic laws intended to regulate cars, one of the main advantages of biking over driving would evaporate.Andrew Sullivan seconds Wilkinson on this, and I agree with some qualifications. If there is a collision or other accident resulting from one or another party's failure to follow the rules, the rule-bending party needs to own up to the responsibility. Even so if the accident resulted from the infringement of a rule that the party had violated a thousand times before without incident, and that others violate frequently. That is, I do not want to see the rules drift to some nebulous state -- "Yes, the law says X, but everybody knows that Y is the way it's done"-- as if they're merely customary. If the rules of the road need to adjust to the realities of newly-emerging uses, then that's fine, but it should happen according to the normal, democratic rule-making process.
I wish I could tell you that the postings gathered in this edition of the Humanist Symposium give definitive answers to all of life's enduring questions. I wish I could tell you a lot of things. What I can say instead is that the posts affirm both the importance of the questions and humanists' enduring engagement with them. Enjoy!
The importance of questions and questioning:
Does Gramps McSame realize that the presidency involves more than just gathering with generals and pushing troop figurines around a big world map? At best, the man seems to want to be someone's Secretary of War, and would prefer all these other matters to be someone else's problem.
If we're supposed to be in such awe of McSame's decades and decades of experience in the Congress, then shouldn't we be put off when he can't recall how he has voted or the reasoning behind the votes? To say this is a small issue is not only false but it begs the question: it is not a small matter for a great many people, it is a matter that the next president will need to address one way or another, and incidentally, it is important to advocates who differ sharply with each other. Whose side is he on? Is there any indication that he actually takes a side? Or even knows what the sides are?
We really, really, really don't need another under-engaged, under-informed, lackadaisical president. I would actually prefer a hardliner with whom I disagree on this matter -- say, Mike Huckabee or Gary Bauer, men who, for all their faults, at least understand the issue -- to what we see here, which is someone who plainly doesn't want to deal with it, and who just wants someone to supply him with a phrase, any phrase, to repeat that will make the reporter move on to a different topic.
solicited anonymous gay sex from an undercover cop took a wholesome Christian dump.
Call it a koan; let it be your inroad to meditation.
I never have any trouble sleeping, but I find this too delicious not to ponder.
(H/T Ed Brayton)
No wonder John McSame needs a hug:
[O]ne of his top economic advisers was quoted Thursday as saying that the United States was only in a “mental recession” and that it had become a “nation of whiners.”Uh, yea. That stuff about "some of the nation's leaders" might be believeable if Phil Gramm didn't have such a pronounced track record of hectoring the poor and fawning over the wealthy. Gramm spent years in the Senate building up a distinguished record of lying and cheating, rarely missing an opportunity to flap his Texas-sized jowls about all the wasteful government spending going to non-Texas states.
The adviser, former Senator Phil Gramm, Republican of Texas, sought to clarify his remarks Thursday by saying he had been referring only to some of the nation’s leaders.
Under the law -- admittedly a quaint way to frame the matter -- Karl Rove is a criminal:
Former White House political director Karl Rove, defying a subpoena, failed to appear before a U.S. House panel investigating whether the Justice Department prosecuted people for political reasons.It shouldn't be long before the Democrats come up with the brilliant idea of immunizing Rove's illegal conduct and declaring it a "compromise."
Rove's action today prompted the House Judiciary subcommittee to rule that his reasons for skipping the appearance weren't valid, setting up a possible contempt of Congress vote next week.
My thanks to Andrew Sullivan for bringing the utter shallowness of both Libertarianism and Christianity to sharp relief in the course of a single post:
...the cooptation of Christianity for various forms of socialism and redistributionism - Obama's tendency - is worrying to me. Because it isn't about encouraging charity; it is about the enforcement of "charity" by the strong hand of the state. And in so far as it forcibly takes people's property from them, it also diminishes their capacity for real charity.Libertarians can't repeat this slapdash bit of ethical cant frequently enough -- surely it is their ideological crystal meth.
... In the world as it is, there should be some mandatory public provision for the poor, the sick and the indigent. But it should be a safety-net to avoid specific social evils, not a system of redistribution to construct some notion of "social justice" ...There should be some mandatory public provision for the poor, the sick, and the indigent, Sullivan says, suddenly unconcerned about the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad prospect of depriving taxpayers of the capacity to do good of their own accord under the crippling scheme of "mandatory public provision."
In the end, the social Gospel can make Christianity less, rather than more, likely. The state cannot experience faith; and it cannot express charity. Only individuals can. One by one.And there it is: money extracted by taxation and given to the needy doesn't count as giving from our innermost hearts. Mandatory giving is not giving at all. (It's still just a pallid imitation of True Giving if we collectively vote it into place, I gather.)
The US Senate will be abetting some of the president's more brazen lawlessness today, and in the process all but repealing the fourth amendment to the Constitution:
The Senate finally is expected to pass a bill overhauling rules on secret government eavesdropping, completing a lengthy and bitter debate that pitted privacy and civil liberties concerns against the desire to prevent terrorist attacks.Another quaint notion exploded: that the US political system has multiple political parties. Much too much, on matters of real substance, it has one political party.
The vote, planned for Wednesday, would end almost a year of wrangling between the House and Senate, Democrats and Republicans, and Congress and the White House over the president's warrantless wiretapping program that was initiated after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The fight over the bill has centered on one provision: shielding from civil lawsuits telecommunications companies that helped the government eavesdrop on American phone and computer lines, without the permission or knowledge of a secret court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
John McSame combines the least appealing qualities of Dick Cheney and Hans Moleman.
And he embraces Bush.
