Month: June 2005

Austin Bay argues that Iraq is now doing what the U.S. planned for all along: attracting every low-life terrorist in the region:

The Bush Administration ‘suggested’ this case but shied away from making it the center of its public diplomacy. In retrospect that was a political mistake. ‘The rats’ are attracted to Iraq, and the US and coalition are building an Iraqi Army that will fight them. The US strategy has brought the War on Terror home to the Middle East- the politically dysfunctional Middle East where Assads, Zarqawi, Saddam, and radical Wahhabs mix.

I wish I were so confident of the Iraqi army. I just taped Fareed Zakaria’s PBS show on foreign affairs. Chatting with him afterward, he says that from his own exprience over there, everything is explicable through one essential prism: we never sent enough troops. I sure hope we haven’t set up a royal fight without the necessary means to win it.

VIRUS UPDATE: Five days of the new meds. Nothing like the side-effects of the old ones. But still there’s a wave of fatigue and mild nausea that overcomes me most afternoons. And no, I haven’t been reading Eric Alterman.

“Does anyone in America doubt that Kerry has a higher IQ than Bush? I’m sure the candidates’ SATs and college transcripts would put Kerry far ahead.” – Howell Raines, former executive editor of the New York Times, last August. Heh.

QUOTE OF THE DAY II: “Texans have made a decision about marriage and if there is some other state that has a more lenient view than Texas then maybe that’s a better place for them (gay and lesbian families) to live.” – Texas governor, Rick Perry, last Sunday.

IRAN AND THE WORLD CUP: The Iranian team is very close to qualifying for the 2006 soccer World Cup. The outburst of popular enthusiasm could be very unsettling for the mullahs. Like these constant demonstrations.

EVEN FAILED ORGASMS …: … turn out to be genetically determined.

A VERY CATHOLIC JOKE: Leonardo Boff, Hans Kung and Benedict XVI all die on the same day. They arrive at the Pearly Gates and St Peter welcomes them and says that Jesus wants to see each of them individually. Boff is first to go in to see Jesus. After half an hour, Boff comes out, shaking his head, and muttering, “How could I have been so wrong?” Kung is next. Same deal. After a while, Kung too emerges, head in hands: “How could I have been so wrong?” Benedict is next. After half an hour, Jesus himself comes out and groans: “How can I have been so wrong?”

AN OBVIOUS POINT: My point? Well, I have two. In his most recent speech, Benedict spoke out against alleged threats to the family. He is adamant on forbidding birth control, gay unions, in vitro fertilization, masturbation, oral sex, and so on. Much of what he says, especially about the unique beauty and wonder of heterosexual marital union, is eloquent, even moving, as Amy Welborn points out. Money quote from B16:

“Even in generating children marriage reflects its divine model, the love of God for man. In man and woman, paternity and maternity, as the body and as love, do not let themselves be limited to the biological: life is given entirely only when, with birth, love and the sense that make it possible to say yes to this life are also given. Precisely in this way does it become clear how contrary to human love, to the profound vocation of a man and a women, it is when the union is closed to the gift of life, or worse yet, suppresses or manipulates unborn life … For this reason the building of every single Christian family is placed within the larger context of the great family of the Church, which sustains it and bears it within itself.”

Amy makes a good point that this is completely consistent with Church doctrine and I agree with her that I see no way that such doctrine could find a place for gay marriage within the Church. (If the Church ever does come around to seeing the God-given beauty of homosexual love, it will have to come up with some other kind of union.) I should add that I find his description of what marital sex can be in its deepest and fullest sense to be profound and exhilarating. But it doesn’t follow that every other form of sexual expression is therefore sinful or evil. And the Pope, of course, is not restricting himself to what the Church understands as marriage. He is insisting that the Church’s view of sacramental matrimony be replicated entirely in the civil and secular order, and that anything else is moral “anarchy.” That’s a big leap – especially since the Pope’s own definition of heterosexual marriage is ignored by the vast majority of even Catholics, let alone everyone else in a secular society.

PRIORITIES, PRIORITIES: My second point is simply one of priorities. Perhaps the most insistent teaching of the Catholic church today is a conception of family life. Apart from priests, nuns and homosexuals, the call to procreative marriage has been put at the very center of what it means to be a faithful Catholic. As you see in that passage above, the very Incarnation is deployed to defend marriage and procreation as a central human goal. And yet, when you read the Gospels, you find something very strange. Jesus barely mentions marriage. He never married. He demanded of all his disciples that they abandon their own families and wives, without even saying goodbye. He was openly contemptuous toward his own mother and father in adolescence and early adulthood. His fundamental response to adultery was forgiveness of the adulterer and suspicion of the morally superior. His contemporaries must have regarded him as illegitimate, since he was conceived out of wedlock. So this illegitimate, single man who broke up family after family, whose closest female friend was a childless former prostitute, who scandalously stayed alone in the home of two unmarried women, who offended every family value of the time … has been turned into the chief architect of “family values!” I’m not saying that building families is something alien to Christianity. We are not all called to wander through the fields preaching salvation and telling people to abandon their spouses and children. I’m not saying that procreative marriage isn’t a glorious thing. What I am saying is that the over-powering fixation on marriage, family life and procreation has overwhelmed the deeper and more unsettling priorities that Jesus obviously stood for and proclaimed. The gulf between the priorities of the Gospels and those of the hierarchy of the Church on this score is both wide and deep. To coin a phrase: How can they have gone so wrong?

“Now that the Pope has spoken, let only those Catholics who are without similar sin cast stones on gay marriage. If you wish to rely on the Pope’s decree with regard to gay marriage, you MUST also support what ELSE the Pope said in the same speech. In addition to condemning gay marriage, the Pope also condemned DIVORCE, ARTIFICIAL BIRTH CONTROL and TRIAL MARRIAGES. If you’re Catholic and relying on the Pope’s condemnation of gay marriages to support your own opposition to same-sex nuptials, you had better not be … divorced, have ever used condoms or birth control pills and never have “shacked up” with a lover who was not your spouse. If you have, you have NO moral authority, at least based upon your Catholicism, to attack gay marriage without being considered a complete hypocrite. Pretty tough pill to swallow, huh?” – Chuck Muth, in his newsletter. He has an important point, made by Dan Savage as well. The headlines were all about gay marriage, but the Pope condemned in equal fashion the choices of the vast majority of Americans, from masturbation to IVF. The issue is not homosexuality as such for the Pope. It is any expression of sexuality that isn’t always marital and procreative. But somehow, only the gays get the brunt. Why?

Yes, I preferred him to Bush last November. I’ve never believed that low Ivy grades are somehow an impediment to high office. But then you find out that Kerry’s refusal to release his military records prevented him from disseminating lots of glowing tributes from the Swift Boat maniacs. Dumb and dumber. Kevin Drum rightly sighs.

The crackdown continues.

Jonathan Turley makes a powerful case for some more accountability for the detention mess. He points out the following:

True to tradition, promotion rather than punishment has been the fate of most torture-tainted officers in the Abu Ghraib scandal:

• Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller has been implicated in the abuses at both Guantanamo Bay and Iraq. He actually ordered Abu Ghraib personnel to “soften up” the prisoners. He was made an assistant chief of staff.

• Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast had knowledge of the abuses in 2003 as the head of military intelligence in Iraq and was accused of pressuring the interrogators. She was given a new position as the commander at the Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., where U.S. and foreign troops are taught interrogation techniques.

• Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez was the ranking officer in Iraq and approved many of the interrogation techniques now deemed abusive. He was returned to his command in Germany of the prestigious Army V Corps.

• The officer who oversaw interrogation at Abu Ghraib, Col. Thomas Pappas, was given a light administrative punishment.

If we cannot yet hold Rumsfeld, Bush and Gonzales responsible, we can surely do better than jailing a few low-level grunts in this scandal.

A very encouraging development in Britain: a coalition of conservatives demanding more local democracy and decision-making. Yes, imagine that: a conservatism trying to reduce the power of the central government.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “hello everyone! i was in Rome on vacation. It was a cruise. i hope you didn’t miss me too much! i’m tan EVERYWHERE! anyway, I paid 200 euros for a henna tattoo, and now i think i have crabs. can someone please help?” – Greg Gutfield, with another scintillating addition to the Huffington Post. Gutfield, by the way, is “a Virgo, loves long walks in the woods, knitting booties for his three cats, and hates mean people.”

BLAIR AND HAMAS: The Brits lead the U.S. toward greater acceptance of the terror-group.

SID GOT THERE FIRST: The moral idiocy of Amnesty International comparing the serious issues in Guantanamo with Stalin’s monstrous crimes didn’t come out of thin air. To the best of my knowledge, the first use of this metaphor was by … Sid Blumenthal. Here’s the piece. The whole thing is infuriating because it allows the Bushies and their boosters to avoid the real subject. The truth is: you can have a real grasp of Stalin’s Gulag and still be appalled by what this administration has been doing in its secret jails and torture chambers. Exhibit A in this moral universe is Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer-prize author of “Gulag,” who has not mercifully given in to moral complacency.

DOLPHIN GLOVES: Pliny wouldn’t have been surprised.

THE LEFT TAKES ON MOORE: Finally, a bona fide lefty tackles the ethics-free grandstanding of Michael Moore. Pity it’s in Britain.

MIDWESTERN COMMON SENSE: A conservative Minnesotan tackles the unconservative arguments against allowing gay couples to marry.

LEFT, RIGHT, AND POT: An email illuminates the deeper political factions in America:

I’m sure you are familiar with the idea that political alignment can be seen not just as polar (left/right) but as four quadrants based on left/right and order/freedom. This has always made a lot of sense to me. For example, libertarians can be found on the left and the right, and it doesn’t take two much imagination to see kinship between Joan Claybrook and John Ashcroft; they are both control freak meddlers.
You clearly belong in the right/freedom quadrant, and that is why you get a lot of left readership. Left/freedom folks like myself can find a lot of common ground in our thinking. Bush is pretty much a right/order type, as is the evangelical right, and their ascent is alienating right/freedom types like yourself. It threatens the unity of the Republican Party, to the delight of Democrats like myself. Americans like religion, but a lot of us have never liked holy rollers.
The biggest advantage the Republicans have is that most Americans trust them more when it comes to kicking a little ass on the battlefield. I personally think this is braindead, caused by associating the pacifist blather of the Democratic core with the quite reasonable Democrats who get nominated (Clinton/Gore/Kerry). But it is what it is. Sheer incompetence by our Republican Commander-in-chief may go a long way toward clearing up that misperception. It is amazing that grown adults have to be reminded that macho and passion are not enough, you also have to dispassionately analyze facts to prevail on the ground.
Back to medicinal marijuana, I am happy to be united with you and all other freedom-loving conservatives in decrying the unconstitutional affirmation of raw Federal power expressed in that decision.

Amen. It seems to me that the fundamental problem in today’s politics is that those who generally support freedom at home and a tough foreign policy abroad have nowhere to go any more. We have to choose between an incompetent and morally suspect war party that has little time for civil liberties at home and a mush-headed, left-leaning, reactionary party that inspires little trust on the national security front.

Worth recalling:

This country’s views and policies about marijuana are truly appalling. I have inherited problems with high eye pressure that possibly could be relieved by medical marijuana, according to anecdotal evidence, but the government refuses even to allow decent testing of that hypothesis. We permit folks to use and abuse Oxycontin without nearly the uproar that attaches to the San Francisco grandmother who makes pot brownies for AIDS patients. And I’m scared to consume marijuana in even limited quantities for even a good reason for fear of on-the-job drug testing.
When I was managing editor of The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, we published an article based on a thorough longitudinal study of a good number of Americans from their pot-using college years to early middle age. Nearly all of the subjects eventually stopped using pot, none had any injuries or serious problems arising from pot, scarcely any used any harder drugs, and all of them did far better on the measures of success used (job progression, stable relationships, home ownership) than did similarly situated individuals who had never used pot. The article was published during the “just-say-no” years, and the authors not only were surprised at the results, but hesitated to seek publication for fear of being blackballed from any government grants for future research. I should check up on the authors and see if those fears were justified.

I have to say that if there’s ever a good reason for civil disobedience it’s in defense of your own health. The idea that people dealing with chemo or other serious issues cannot avail themselves of a plant that grows on God’s green earth is so preposterous it beggars belief. Voters in many states grasp this truth, and yet their deliberations are over-ruled by the federal government. The Clintonites were no better. But the current situation is yet another indication of how far Washington conservatism has drifted from its roots in human liberty and empirical science. Maybe this latest insult will fuel a real revolt from the grass-roots, if you’ll pardon the expression. It’s about frigging time.

I’m waiting to read the full context of the Pope’s remarks decrying the possibility of a gay couple committing to each other as “anarchy.” But at first blush, I would think that “anarchy” would better describe a world in which gay people have no context for their relationships, no social support for connecting sex with love, no chance of being fully a part of their own families. But I’m hardly surprised by the inflammatory rhetoric or the contempt for modernity and for human freedom voiced by this Pope. We knew what we were getting. Is he persuasive? Well, for that he would need an argument, an engagement with the social forces that have propelled gay relationships to the forefront of contemporary debate. Easier to pontificate and condemn. And he sure knows how to do both of those. Meanwhile, Europe continues to ignore him. Close to 60 percent of the Swiss just voted to allow gay couples to have most of the rights and responsibilities of civil marriage. If I’d stayed in Britain, I’d only have to wait a few months for full legal marriage rights. Maybe if the Pope voiced a little more charity and listened a tiny bit more, more people would listen back.

A great term for the Rehnquist court’s jurisprudence.

MORE ON SECULARISM: An interesting elaboration from Revolutionary America over at Jon Rowe’s blog.