Category: Keepers

Ben Smith thinks I’ve glossed over a major difference between Obama’s birth certificate and Trig’s:

The Obama conspiracy theory had bearing on his eligibility for the White House. Palin, by contrast, isn’t running for anything, and if she were, the constitutional requirement bears on your own birth, not your kids’. If Obama hadn’t released his birth certificate, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to ask for it. Indeed, reporters are supposed to ask obnoxious questions. But Trig Palin isn’t running for president, and that makes this fixation a bit harder for me to get exercised about.

 Justin Elliott’s response to me makes the same point:

[I]n the case of Obama, his place of birth presented a potentially urgent constitutional problem. If Obama had been born abroad, there would have been questions about his eligibility to be president, hinging on the murky definition of the phrase “natural-born citizen.” Absurd as it all seemed, there was a reason in 2008 for a reporter to ask the Obama campaign for a copy of the birth certificate. (And remember: Obama wasn’t the only ’08 candidate who faced questions from the press about the circumstances of his birth.)

The parentage of Trig Palin presents no similarly urgent issue.

Agreed. But if the only basis for asking for documentary evidence of various biographical facts in a politician’s campaign is that they pertain to core legal eligibility for public office, then there would be no journalism at all. On what grounds did reporters uncover that Richard Blumenthal had lied about his war record? Surely not that it would have legally disbarred him from office. The man is still in office. But Blumenthal’s war record was only a minor theme in his biography and his mis-statements were few and far between. They were not an integral part of his campaign’s message or a central part of his appeal to his base. And there was no obvious reason to doubt him. The story was even ginned up by his political opponent in a campaign. And yet the New York Times rightly had no qualms about running a big story refuting his occasional untrue statements with empirical data. And Politico rightly had no qualms doing its own investigation. How does Justin defend this, given his current refusal to get on the phone and ask Palin for proof? Or talk to more than other journalists?

Palin, moreover, unlike Blumenthal, has reiterated her birth and pregnancy stories many many times. She has written a book detailing it all. She has been obsessed with rebutting it since it first emerged months before she hit the national spotlight – and yet has consistently refused to do so by what Frank Bailey called the “simple solution”. She held up her newborn child at the Republican national convention. She ran for vice-president of the US – not even the Senate. Her local newspaper tried to clear all this up – only to be stonewalled by Palin. Her doctor refused to take calls from the New York Times which ran a puff-piece on the whole thing. But Salon is uninterested. And Politico won’t go there.

The question before us is: why? Are they scared? Or squeamish? No journalist has any business being either. And simply stating the following is a cop-out:

We’re prepared to do that right here and now: Sarah Palin, we’d be happy to see and publish your medical records. But the point of our package is that Palin simply doesn’t need to do this — there is no credible evidence to suggest that anyone other than Sarah Palin is the mother of Trig.

Has Salon ever aired the countless questions so many have had about this bizarre pregnancy? Or the persistent disbelief around it? About the wild ride? By not even acknowledging the natural skepticism of people toward these strange narratives, by arguing there is nothing fishy here at all without even going into what people have found fishy, is also a cop-out. It’s basically an insult to the many people who remain genuinely puzzled by all this.

This blog, moreover, has diligently offered up evidence on both sides. Salon will not publish anything that might counter their a priori position. I mean: how many politicians in history have claimed that they gave a political speech while experiencing contractions? If that isn’t de facto curious and remarkable enough to be worth asking about, what is? And yet no one – even those supportive of her – will go near that question. Why on earth not? Here’s what counts for journalism today:

“She went into labor and got an airplane to go back to Alaska — that’s pretty cool!”

If that’s your standard of skepticism in today’s press corps, you get to host Meet The Press.

There is also the matter of consistency. When a politician has publicly claimed she has produced a birth certificate and hasn’t, is it illegitimate for the press to ask why she simply lied about this? Can any sane person misremember such a thing? And if she’s claimed she has released it, what on earth is the ethical reason for not asking her to do it along with medical records? When she publicly derides skeptics in speech after speech, is it not the press’s duty to see if her derision has empirical validity? Or are we skeptics supposed to just sit back and be mocked by a pathological liar putting her own credibility against ours?

We all have cognitive biases. I have one – profound skepticism of anything Palin says – and may be judging evidence in ways that others wouldn’t. But so do Justin and Ben and Weigel who have an interest in dismissing the possibility that they may have missed uncovering the biggest hoax in American political history. That same cognitive bias question applies to Loy and Quinn. It does not mean they they may not be right. It just means that their cognitive bias is as real as my own.

It seems to me that when some simple, readily available medical records could end this excruciating debate in one easy swoop – and could have more than two years ago – it is professional negligence that the MSM won’t even ask for such proof, and devote far more energy to defending their own past than the facts at hand.

I'm going to respond to Justin Elliott's alleged "definitive debunking" of the questions surrounding Sarah Palin's maternity of Trig in due course. It deserves more than an instant reaction – and adds two new sources to the dozens that have now emerged to shed partial light on the story. In the end, there are two stories here: the actual story and the meta-media-story. I'm interested in both equally. And the visceral contempt and dimissal for me personally is sadly a part of the latter.

One aspect of the meta-media-story is media intimidation – from within and without. MSM reporters tackling anything to do with the Palin pregnancy have to overcome what they know will be the spin from the Palinite right: that they are just liberal maniacs bent on destroying this real and talented hope for conservatism, precisely because she is such a hope for conservatism. This dynamic is one MSM reporters have internalized, making what would be routine questions and investigations of a public figure in, say, reality TV or national politics into exceptional and career-risking gambles.

Imagine a huge media backlash and internal restraint about, say, Lindsey Lohan's drug use or Britney Spears' romantic and pharmaceutical forays. No, I can't imagine it. But when politics and tabloid truth combine – think of the John Edwards story – the MSM can suddenly find itself mute. Part of this is genuine: the desire not to pour salt onto the wounds of Elizabeth Edwards or to make the life of a new-born kid with Down Syndrome any more challenging than it might already be. Part of it is simply discomfort. Wouldn't it be less fraught to cover the budget negotiations? Part of it is about status: all of this is beneath me, and hurts my reputation as a Serious Journalist, respected by my peers.

But then there's this. What Wonkette published about a completely innocent little boy was, as I said as soon as I absorbed it, despicable. Whatever may be the truth behind all the Palin pregnancy stories, even if the zaniest theory is true, Sarah Palin is taking care of a child with Down Syndrome who deserves respect and privacy even if his own mother refuses to give them to him. To mock him, the most defenseless figure in this whole saga, is just foul. I've made my position on this question very very clear from the beginning. The only person who truly deserves protection from this media mayhem is Trig himself. I'll go further and repeat what I have written from the very start. I deeply admire and respect Palin for doing what she has done in giving this child a home and a life. It is more of a sacrifice than I will ever know. And more of a joy than I will ever know. We can be journalists but we can also be humane toward children and see the good that someone has done as well as the bad.

But the blowback has not just been rhetorical. It has been to bring the entire site to its knees. The  buycott of Wonkette's advertizers has led to almost all of them fleeing immediately:

Starting with Papa John’s Pizza, the companies began to run. It grew from there. As of Friday afternoon, the list was 30-some strong, and includes brands like Huggies, Vanguard Group, Nordstrom, Bob Evans, and StarKist Charlie—the tuna mascot. [See the list of Wonkette’s remaining advertisers.]

I feel as queasy about this flexing of Palinite muscle as I do about the original, disgusting, asinine story. In some ways, I see a legitimate come-uppance for a tacky site that published a simply inexcusable piece of mean-spirited dreck using a child who cannot defend himself, treating him as if he were subhuman, which he most definitely isn't. But I also recoil from mob action like this, for the impact it has on fearless free speech and the chilling effect it will have on an already cowed and defensive MSM when covering the truly tough stuff about Palin.

[Re-printed from earlier today]

David Brooks is at his customary acute in reviewing The Book Of Mormon. But he misses, in my view, a critical step. Here's his bottom line on religion:

The only problem with “The Book of Mormon” (you realize when thinking about it later) is that its theme is not quite true. Vague, uplifting, nondoctrinal religiosity doesn’t actually last. The religions that grow, succor and motivate people to perform heroic acts of service are usually theologically rigorous, arduous in practice and definite in their convictions about what is True and False.

That’s because people are not gods. No matter how special some individuals may think they are, they don’t have the ability to understand the world on their own, establish rules of good conduct on their own, impose the highest standards of conduct on their own, or avoid the temptations of laziness on their own.

The religions that thrive have exactly what “The Book of Mormon” ridicules: communal theologies, doctrines and codes of conduct rooted in claims of absolute truth.

So David uses the limits of human reason and self-restraint to make a pragmatic case for fundamentalism. And this is, indeed, a core problem – perhaps the core problem – for organized religion in modernity. Mark Lilla pursues this theme in his under-appreciated book, The Still-Born God, which, in a gripping narrative, exposes the failure of liberal Christianity in modern Germany – a failure that led, in part, to Nazism. Since the godless totalisms of the 20th Century have now collapsed under the weight of their own lies, new totalisms – literal, fundamentalist, anti-enlightenment versions of religion – have taken their place.

And this is in part the argument of The Book Of Mormon, which was written and composed by atheists. It is that religion, even if obviously based on a massive scam, is nonetheless useful and even admirable in its encouragement of moral life. That's what I meant by describing the musical's message as "religion is both insane and necessary."

But the ultimate test of religion for a non-atheist is not: is this or that religion useful? Or even: is it necessary?

It is, rather: is it true?

And The Book Of Mormon rather deftly shows that, by any rational perspective, the literal doctrines of Mormonism are manifestly untrue – perhaps because they are more easily exposed because they are so recently concocted. And that's why, to my mind, it is insufficient or condescending to argue that the literal truth claims of fundamentalist religion are irrelevant, as long as they reliably lead to happiness of morality. On this, I side with the new atheists who do literalist believers a service by taking them at their word.

My own view is that if Christianity is a useful lie then it should be abandoned by thinking people. If being a Christian requires one to believe literally that the world was created de novo 6,000 years ago, or that our species literally emerged one day from an actual garden of Eden, then I am not a Christian. It's my view that if something is not true, it cannot be countermanded by a God who is Truth itself. And so a sincere modern believer has no choice but to make distinctions between kinds of truths – metaphorical, spiritual ones and empirical, literal ones.

We cannot deny Darwin without also denying God, to put it provocatively, since God cannot be in contravention of Truth. And sincere Christianity is a faith, it seems to me, that can embrace the deepest truths about human existence and salvation as revealed by Jesus without also embracing every empirical nugget in the flawed, mis-copied, mis-written, second generation oral accounts of the life of Jesus, let alone the even older myths and stories the Jewish people told about themselves through the millennia.

And so, on Good Friday, we cannot know what actually happened in those last minutes on the Cross. Did Jesus cry out in despair, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me"? Or did he utter in completion the words "It is accomplished"? This is the literal choice we have between the Gospels of Matthew and John. They cannot both be empirically right. And they are not signs merely of the confusion that often comes from individuals' last words and moments. They indicate radically different ideas of Jesus' moment of truth: was he so human that even then, he still did not know for sure that his self-sacrifice was for something – or so divine he knew in advance the itinerary he tried not to choose in Gethsemane?

To my mind, the truth is both at a deeper spiritual level; even if both is literally an impossible position to take on empirical grounds. Ditto the Resurrection. Was it a literal, take my shroud off and walk out experience? Or was it something more mysterious? Again the Bible tells us all sorts of contradictory things: Jesus is tangibly physically resurrected; he is strangely altered; those close to him can see him after his death and yet not recognize him at all on the road to Emmaus. These cannot all be literally true and yet they all point to a mystery at the core of our faith: He is risen.

My difference with David, I think, is that I still believe; and I refuse to believe in something that has been disproven, however socially useful or salutary or admirable its social or personal effects may be. Fundamentalism, in this sense, is not a rigorous theology. It is rigid resistance to a rigorous theology. It's a form of denial and despair. It is rigorous only within a theological structure that does not account for the growth and expansion of human knowledge. It is therefore, to my mind, an expression of a lack of faith rather than an excess of it. And the use of fundamentalism by those who do not even believe in it – for whatever purposes, good, bad or indifferent – is the real blasphemy.

Does a force exist that is behind everything we are and see and know? Is that force benign? Does that force love us? Was the only way that truth could be revealed was by God becoming man and sacrificing himself to show us the only way to save ourselves? Today, in the darkness of the Cross, I say yes to these questions, which go to depths that literal parsing of parables or Gospels misses entirely. Which is why Scorsese's version of the Passion is so much deeper and truer than Gibson's.

Perhaps this is too much for us. We are not gods, as David says. But in the face of this difficult task of faith, we have God to fall back on. Precisely because we are human. And we were given reason for a reason.

In the beginning was reason. And reason was with God. And reason was God.

This beginning of John's Gospel – I'm translating logos as reason – is my faith. And it is why fundamentalism is not my faith. You cannot set truth aside, even if you cannot fully see it. And you must not use truth, as if its truth did not finally matter; it must stand alone. As we must. Till the hour of our death as well.

Salon's Justin Elliott says he has definitively resolved all conceivable doubts about Sarah Palin's biological maternity of Trig. I have to say my first instinct is to thank and congratulate him for doing what should have been done a long, long time ago. Before I go into the details, let me first, however, address the following canard:

Sullivan's refrain on this issue is that he does not endorse any conspiracy theory, he is merely asking questions. He simply wants Palin "to debunk this for once and for all, with simple, readily available medical records." He has proposed, for example, the release of "amniocentesis results with Sarah Palin's name on them."

It's worth noting that this posture is identical to the rhetoric used by Obama birthers (for instance, WorldNetDaily Birther czar Joseph Farah employs the "just asking for definitive piece of proof x" line here).

This is absurd. Obama has produced the most relevant, clear, unimpeachable, if humiliating, piece of empirical evidence that he is indeed a native-born US citizen. In fact, he produced it a long time ago. (I think he was right to do so, and the press was easily within bounds to ask. That's how these things should work.)

And there is a huge difference between someone asking for exactly that kind of proof, however distasteful, and someone continuing to ask for it after that proof has already been produced.

To equate my simple request for proof – a request first made in September 2008 – with a request for evidence even after it has been produced is not "worth noting." It's a smear.

And I have not shifted this position since the very beginning. In my view, a journalist doesn't have to engage in any consipracy theories in order to ask a public figure to verify a story that they tell as a core plank of their political candidacy – especially when verifying it should be easy. When the figure has publicly said she has already released the birth certificate – and she hasn't – and when she demands further digging into the Obama birth certificate after it has been produced, and when she once demanded that her opponent for the mayoralty of Wasilla provide his actual marriage license to prove his wife was his wife (and he did), I see no reason whatever to apologize or regret asking her to put her medical records where her mouth is. She still hasn't.

Did Elliott ask Palin to do so himself? If you want an end to this, that is what you would do. It appears he hasn't. He has asked fellow journalists what they saw and believed. I'm not sure why a reporter decides to ask fellow reporters for eye-witness accounts when he could simply ask Palin for proof. Well, I do see why – which I'll tackle in a forthcoming post.

(Photo: Sarah Palin on March 26, 2008, three weeks before giving birth to a six-pound baby).

A blogger occasionally majority of Americans don't qualify either. Obviously, I don't consider this a negative. Obama is also bi-racial, instantly putting him in a relatively (if decreasingly) rare cultural position. And I think it's overly defensive to insist that Obama is in no way different than most Americans. He is. His formative years were spent shuttling between Indonesia and Hawaii, missing his Kenyan father. You cannot read "Dreams From My Father" without intuiting a very distinctive man in the history of the American presidency. I think it's a big advantage especially in foreign policy. And I think it's a transformative moment in the evolution of America – a multicultural, multiracial experiment in democracy that has a president that reflects its future.

And then you read a beautifully crafted piece like Janny Scott's profile of Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, and you see again how Obama is a human kaleidoscope. Look at him from a variety of angles, and it's almost as much a Rorschach test for you as for Obama himself. Here's one take on the president's extraordinary composure while being subjected to some of the more enraging racial (and often racist) scrutiny one can imagine. I know at some point, in a similar situation, I would have snapped. He never has. How has he done this? Well, this helps:

After lunch, the group took a walk, with [nine-year-old] Barry running ahead. A flock of Indonesian children began lobbing rocks in his direction. They ducked behind a wall and shouted racial epithets. He seemed unfazed, dancing around as though playing dodge ball “with unseen players,” [American ex-pat Elizabeth] Bryant said. Ann did not react. Assuming she must not have understood the words, Bryant offered to intervene. “No, he’s O.K.,” Ann said. “He’s used to it.”

And Roger Ailes thought he could race-bait him by running round-the-clock videos of a snippet from Jeremiah Wright! Then this:

“We were floored that she’d bring a half-black child to Indonesia, knowing the disrespect they have for blacks,” Bryant said. At the same time, she admired Ann for teaching her boy to be fearless. A child in Indonesia needed to be raised that way — for self-preservation, Bryant decided. Ann also seemed to be teaching Barry respect. He had all the politeness that Indonesian children displayed toward their parents. He seemed to be learning Indonesian ways.

“I think this is one reason he’s so halus,” Bryant said of the pres­ident, using the Indonesian adjective that means “polite, refined, or courteous,” referring to qualities some see as distinctively Javanese. “He has the manners of Asians and the ways of Americans — being halus, being patient, calm, a good listener. If you’re not a good listener in Indonesia, you’d better leave.”

I understand him a little better. This context matters in assessing this president. Especially when you see it as an asset rather than a marker of otherness.

(Photo: from the NYT courtesy of Ann Dunham's friends and family.)

This popped into my mind last night, after reading Gregg Easterbrook's somewhat glib piece about why wealthy liberals should just voluntarily pay more to the government than the law requires them to. The more you try to figure out ways to square the healthcare costs circle – fiscally and morally – the harder it gets. But this option is easily grasped and needs no government action.

If everyone aged 40 or over simply made sure we appointed someone to be our power-of-attorney and instructed that person not to prolong our lives by extraordinary measures if we lost consciousness in a long, fatal illness or simply old age, then we'd immediately make a dent in some way on future healthcare costs. A remarkable proportion of healthcare costs go to the very last days or hours of our lives.

This seems to me particularly apposite for the boomers who, even if Paul Ryan got his way, would still be grandfathered into the most generous combination of personal prosperity and government support of any generation in history. Wouldn't a few fewer unconscious hours or days be a sacrifice worth making?

Of course, this would be entirely voluntary – and not even nudged (although, frankly, I see no reason why the government shouldn't nudge you to make arrangements ahead of time given that others will be forced to pay the costs). "Death panels!" Christianists would scream, revealing exactly how un-Christian they are. Christians, of all people, it seems to me, have nothing to fear from death, and a great deal to gain from giving a few of their own unconscious final days to make it feasible for others to have a few more conscious and healthy ones.

How about an easily reached website that makes such a legal process easier to accomplish?

Pamela S. Karlan uses the example of Loving v. Virginia, on interracial marriage, to argue that marriage equality won't necessarily be decided in the Supreme Court:

Loving was the end point of a sustained assault on racial discrimination, and most of the troops in that campaign were not Supreme Court justices. … By the time the Court decided Loving, the vast majority of states had already repealed laws forbidding interracial marriage. Loving was decided a generation after the California Supreme Court, in Perez v. Sharpe, had used the Fourteenth Amendment to strike down California’s ban on interracial marriage. (In contrast to the California Court, the U.S. Supreme Court disingenuously dodged the marriage issue for a decade, apparently because it feared that a decision striking down bans on interracial marriage would imperil support for Brown.)

Rather than anticipating progressive social change, the Supreme Court most often reflects it.

This seems to me particularly true when the premise of certain arrangements genuinely shifts in the public consciousness. Once homosexuals became defined as people with a certain core identity rather than as people with a propensity for certain acts, a whole series of logical steps followed. My own view is that the law has largely followed this shift in underlying attitudes, and these attitudes have primarily changed simply because more straight people know more gay people. And unlike racial minorities, many of these gay people were those already known and embedded in existing families, communities and churches. How, one wonders, do fundamentalists really keep insisting that gay kids in their own churches and colleges are less aware of who they actually are than their preachers and politicians?

In one of the most tragic ironies in recent social history, this greater knowledge of gay people was accelerated by the AIDS epidemic. Our deaths remade our lives. I wonder if, without such a catastrophe – three times as many young Americans died of AIDS than died in Vietnam over a similar period of time – we would still be decades behind where we are.