Month: September 2006

It’s there, all right, which makes Bush’s ultimate decisions all the more maddening. You can see it in the rational attempts of people like Gordon R. England, the acting deputy secretary of defense, and Philip D. Zelikow, the counselor of the State Department. You see it in Condi Rice who knows that the legacy of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib – both direct consequences of Bush’s decision to abandon Geneva rules – have severely damaged America’s reputation and made winning the war of ideas infinitely harder. But ee come back to the central issue: the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis of brutal incompetence. An attempt to deal rationally with detained terror suspects was proposed by some last year, but the unhinged Rumsfeld blew one of his famous gaskets:

When the paper first circulated in the upper reaches of the administration, two of those officials said, it so angered Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that his aides gathered up copies of the document and had at least some of them shredded.

"It was not in step with the secretary of defense or the president," said one Defense Department official who, like many others, would discuss the internal deliberations only on condition of anonymity. "It was clear that Rumsfeld was very unhappy."

Then there’s this astonishing quote from a senior Pentagon official, obviously worried about Captain Queeg:

"The problem fell for some period of time into the too-hard category," one senior administration official said. "It fell so far into the too-hard category that it was lost from view."

I guess the Iraq war also fell into that "too-hard" category. There’s more:

The element of the new legislation that raised the sharpest criticism among legal scholars and human rights advocates last week was the scaling back of the habeas corpus right of terrorism suspects to challenge their detention in the federal courts. But in dozens of high-level meetings on detention policy, officials said, that provision was scarcely even discussed.

Habeas Schmabeas. The more we know, the more we find out that this administration is deeply dysfunctional, its members at war with each other, and headed by a weak, brittle, overwhelmed president unable to rally them to a common cause. In normal times, this would be distressing. In today’s world, it’s alarming.

Princeton, New Jersey, 4.30 pm.

Here’s a depiction of a water-boarding by the SS, from the movie, Jacob the Liar. Remember that the Wall Street Journal editorial board has declared that what you are watching isn’t even "close to torture." The SS were just deploying "alternative interrogation techniques."

A reader adds:

I wept on September 11th. I felt as though the country had died. Now I weep because I may have been right.

Is this paranoia – or is there some truth to it?

For almost my entire adult life, I’ve been openly gay. Why? It was too humiliating and psychologically destructive to lie. I don’t think of this as a virtue, really. In some ways, I think it was my pride that forced me to be honest with myself and others; and a deep sense that obviously this was how God made me, and it behooved me to deal with it forthrightly. It was alo fueled by a conviction, as the 1980s darkened for so many gay men, that I had an actual responsibility to be out, and to advance the dignity of so many fighting literally for their lives. It was like being black in the 1950s. My own HIV diagnosis convinced me to fight harder, because I truly believed it might not be for much longer. And in those years and beyond, others chose to sit it out, to run for cover, even to distance themselves from who they were and from their fellows who so desperately needed their help.

Maybe we should feel anger at these people. I don’t. I feel sadness. Sadness at the compromises they made and the misery they fueled for themselves. In so far as someone like Jim McGreevey has, for whatever reason, overcome his shame, then I have no interest in judging him. I feel glad he has found some happiness at last, despite his past corruption, human flaws and past opposition to marriage equality. We are all human, and my own life has its own share of emotional and sexual mistakes. Equally, the news about Mark Foley has a kind of grim inevitability to it. I don’t know Foley, although, like any other gay man in D.C., I was told he was gay, closeted, afraid and therefore also screwed up. What the closet does to people – the hypocrisies it fosters, the pathologies it breeds – is brutal. There are many still-closeted gay men in D.C., many of them working for a Republican party that has sadly deeply hostile to gay dignity. How they live with themselves I do not fully understand. But I have learned you cannot judge someone’s soul from outside. That I leave to them and their God, and some I count as good friends and good people.

What I do know is that the closet corrupts. The lies it requires and the compartmentalization it demands can lead people to places they never truly wanted to go, and for which they have to take ultimate responsibility. From what I’ve read, Foley is another example of this destructive and self-destructive pattern for which the only cure is courage and honesty. While gays were fighting for thir basic equality, Foley voted for the "Defense of Marriage Act". If his resignation means the end of the closet for him, and if there is no more to this than we now know, then it may even be for the good. Better to find integrity and lose a Congressional seat than never live with integrity at all.

Kevin Drum has a beaut.

A reader says it better than I could:

You mention Glenn Reynolds’ concern about applying the new torture law to citizens, but there’s a bigger point to be made here. One of the many problems with this law is the way it was forced through Congress. Until Thursday, nobody even knew what the language said. They held no committee hearings. They just wrote it up, forced it through, and passed it before the Congressional session ended, because Bush wanted to ensure he could muck up the definition of a war crime before the Democrats took over Congress and made it difficult to pass a bill, and because Karl Rove thought this would be a great issue to run on in the 2006 elections.

The point is, conservatives and right-leaning libertarians like Reynolds who express concern over this or that provision in the bill (even if they are much more amenable to the major goals of the legislation) really have no standing to say a thing about it, because I saw no protests from any of those websites regarding the process by which this bill was being shepherded through the Congress, which anyone with any intelligence should have realized was going to result in a bill with a bunch of bad provisions in it.

All they would have had to say is "let’s think about this a bit, hold some hearings, write a good bill". But the problem is, doing that would have kicked it past the election. Ergo, no issue for the Republicans to run on, and possibly no Republican Congress after the election to attempt to immunize Bush and his subordinates from war crimes liability.

These folks, by their silence, cared more about the political aspects of this than they did about the legislative process. And then they have the gall to say that they think that some of the provisions of the bill went too far.

On issues as grave as habeas corpus and torture, these people couldn’t even call for a delay to make sure we knew what we were doing. That’s how deferent they are to politics before principle.

A reader writes:

The right wing has quite a gig. Bush divides the nation after 9/11, bull-rushes into and botches a war in Mesopotamia, spends my grandchildren’s taxes like a Bizarro-world LBJ, and tramples on civil liberties. Then, when the left (and center) get furious, they label them as "angry." Or "Bush-bashers." Rove then says something about Democrats wallowing in "swamp gas."

The best word for torture is "torture." The best word for a liar is "liar." When Bush’s actions are infuriating, it is OK to be furious.

Please keep calling it as you see it.

A reader writes:

I’m feeling enough dread these days to trot out the words of the 19th Century Slovak poet Jan Kollar, translated by Josef Skvorecky, from his essay in the famous Winter 1990 issue of Dedalus, the one dedicated to the rebirth of freedom in Central Europe…

Do not give the holy name of homeland
To the country where we live.
The true homeland we carry in our hearts,
And that cannot be oppressed or stolen from us.

A reader writes:

It would seem that all political discourse is now deteriorating into taking sides – not in the context of a particular issue, but in the Manichean sense of are you a supporter of the administration or you are against it. It is increasingly difficult to take a nuanced stance on any topic. For the record:

I do not support the war in Iraq but I fully supported the effort to topple the Taliban and rebuild Afghanistan. I oppose a federal constitutional amendment to define marriage as between a man and a woman but fully support states’ rights to amend their own. I fully support the need for the West to stand up to Islamic religious extremism and forcefully espouse the virtues of the Western Enlightenment, but oppose the contorted lengths that the administration will go to justify torture, suspend Habeas Corpus for legal aliens and ignore the checks and balances of the founding fathers.

I do believe in moral values such as honesty, forgiveness, trust and tolerance but oppose the religious extremist’s (of whatever faith) right to define morality for me. I do believe in the capitalist system of competition but oppose the corrupt cronyism that passes for an entrepreneurial culture in the current times. I do not believe in the phrase "if it feels good, do it" but oppose the government deciding what is moral.

I do believe in the fourth estate, but I am frustrated that the press wants to present every side of a debate as if it carries equal weight. I do believe that Western countries should have a strong military but do not believe that diplomacy is a weak option. I do believe that the UN has become a bloated body incapable of making hard decisions but do not believe that the UN is an evil conspiracy out to destroy the USA. I do believe that society, via Government has a duty to help ameliorate poverty but do not believe in massive entitlement programs.

What label should I self apply? I no longer know.

Me neither. We’re in the same party, it seems. Pity it doesn’t exist.