Month: June 2005

BUSH, STATIST

An emailer puts it succinctly:

In this case, all the liberal judges (Stevens, Ginsburg, Souter, Breyer) voted for the ban on state laws regarding medical marjuana, and conservative judges (Thomas, Rehnquist, O’Connor) were the only ones to vote against the ban. (Moderately liberal Kennedy also voted for the ban, as did conservative Scalia, though he had different reasons, ultimately making a 6-3 decision). This case, of course, has less to do with marijuana itself as states vs. federal rights — true conservatives see this and similar arguments as states rights issues that should not be dictated by the federal government.
The main reason traditional conversatives and libertarians complain so much about Bush so much is that he’s NOT much of a conservative in the historical sense (only the social one), and on so many issues wants the federal government to set policies for all 50 states whether they have shared values/needs or not — in other words, the exact same thing conservatives hate about liberals. So you ultimately have a lot of conservatives agreeing with Bush’s ideals, but not how he’s going about them. And, conversely, you have situations like this, where Bush gets his supreme court victory not by conservative justices who agree with him on the morals, but by liberal justices who believe the federal government should always trump states rights. Strange bedfellows indeed.

Not so strange, actually, Statists – of right and left – have much in common: primarily, a low priority for individual liberty and federalism. Bush fits easily into this mold. But this was Thomas’ finest hour.

U.S. CHURCH ATTENDANCE: It may not be nearly as high as most of the media would have us believe. Here’s a very interesting analysis.

ELECTION TIME: It’s must be that time of year in Oxford. When you’re there, as I was, running for political office in the Union, it becomes completely absorbing. Gossip is crucial. One of my key advantages in running for president was that my room-mate was editing the college newspaper’s gossip column. I think I would have been toast without him. As it was, I only just pulled it out. (If memory serves, I won by 15 votes out of well over a thousand.) Now, with the web, there’s no filter for gossip at all. There’s even this web-page.

ANOTHER BLOW TO FEDERALISM

Regardless of how you feel about medical marijuana – I’m strongly for it – the Supreme Court case was really about the right to the federal government to tell states what to do. If the feds can forbid someone who grows pot in his own garden, sells none of it, uses it for his own medical use and is allowed to by his own state, it’s still covered by the Interstate commerce exemption. Yeah, right.

TWO LEADERS

“It’s a long, hard struggle and very gradually maybe we are making progress. There are tough times ahead.” – John McCain, telling the truth about Iraq.

“The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.” – vice-president Dick Cheney, spinning again.

JEWS WHO ROCK

Now here’s an under-studied subject. And when luminaries like Jeffrey Goldberg and David Segal are behind it, we have a genuine cultural event. Among the important inquiries of JewsRock.org:

Before he donned a ten-pound cod piece and high heels, Gene Simmons was known as Chaim Witz. And guess who started life as Ellen Cohen.

Must-read.

DEBUNKED: Remember Super-AIDS? Remember the five hysterical stories in the New York Times? My suspicions have been borne out:

No super-strain has emerged. The patient, whose name has been withheld, has responded to drug therapy. No one – not even the man’s known sexual partners – was found to be infected with the same HIV strain.

Here was my take back in February:

I’ll make a rash prediction: this guy will have a much improved immune system in a few months.

The credibility of New York City’s Health Department – and the NYT, for that matter – is damaged. This isn’t to say we don’t have a problem, especially with the crystal meth epidemic. But serious health officials and journalists have their work cut out to regain trust. I wonder if the NYT will run a front-page debunking as prominently as the original story they hyped.

AIRFORCE ACADEMY UPDATE: John Cole has the latest. Basically, the leadership has now admitted they have a huge problem of Christianist indoctrination in the Academy and the superintendant says it could take six years to fix it. Six years. That’s how deep the bias has become. Well, at least now it’s being addressed.

BRIT-BLOGS: Why haven’t they had the same impact as the American ones?

HILLARY ON TRACK

My assessment of the likeliest next Democratic nominee can be read here.

HOW TO HELP IRAN’S DEMOCRATS: Some suggestions here.

PERSPECTIVE: Yes, it’s important. The vast majority of coalition soldiers in Iraq and elsewhere are doing extremely tough jobs in unimaginably difficult circumstances. Photo essays like these and this are a vital part of the truth of our endeavor. Let’s get more of these images out there. Let’s not forget the great work we have done and are doing in reconstructing Afghanistan and Iraq. We owe these troops our deepest gratitude and support. But part of that support is also exposing what the civilian and military leadership has led many other troops into: a netherworld of sick, twisted detention policies that have shamed this country and undermined the war. The emphasis has been on what some have seen as a few bad apples, rather than on the real architects of this p.r. debacle and moral morass in the White House and Pentagon. The following is not, I think, true:

We know what went on at Abu Ghraib. We’ve seen the photos. We’ve heard the stories. We’ve punished the offenders.

Most Americans do not know what really went on at Abu Ghraib; and have little idea that the same kind of things have gone on in many other interrogation centers run by the U.S. The very carefully selected and released photos were brilliant news-management, designed to foster the idea that what happened there was more in the lines of “frat-house” humiliation, rather than rape, beating, humiliation and murder. We haven’t punished the real offenders, those who crafted new policies that enabled and facilitated the very abuse we have seen. In fact, those architects have been rewarded, while low-level grunts have been scapegoated. When the public gets a fuller grip on the extent of the abuse, and begins to understand that such practices have occurred throughout the U.S. detention system, they may rouse themselves out of their slumber and ask the hard questions of their political leaders. My view is that all of this – the very good and the appalling – should be disseminated in a free society. My view is that this administration has let our troops down by crafting policies that have enabled the kind of abuse that is now an indelible stain on the reputation of the United States. Supporting the troops also means holding those who have forced them into moral nightmares responsible.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: You wrote:

“Many claim that there is no such thing as neutrality, that law is always and everywhere the imposition of one set of values over another, and that the question is merely ‘whose values?’ Although this has a kind of late night college dorm plausibility, it essentially abandons the entire Western attempt to conceive of law as something that aims, in so far as it is possible, to provide neutral limits on human activity in order to protect the freedom of individuals to live as they see fit. Even if this will have cultural consequences, even if this may make some feel discriminated against (even if they aren’t), it is an essential goal of the liberal state to at least aspire to fairness, equal treatment of all citizens and tolerance of value-pluralism. In that sense, liberalism’s ‘value’ is fairness, consensus and equality.”

Bingo. Paint it in gold-leaf and hang it on your wall. It is exactly right.
The major political battle of our time is between liberalism, which you so well describe above, and various fundamentalists who oppose it.
Now, here is the important thing: The attack on liberalism is now the core ideology of the GOP. It is precisely the idea of liberal society that they are attacking when they decry the separation of church and state, when they talk about family values, when they seek to inject more faith into governance, when they call for a belief in absolutes, when they turn every political issue into an opportunity for moralism, when they organize politically active pastors, when they castigate everyone from Clinton to Sagan for the dread sins of secularism and moral relativism. The GOP’s domestic agenda is no less than a full assault on liberalism. Our Constitutional democracy, born of the Enlightenment and strengthened during Reconstruction, is now threatened by the reactionaries who opposed both.
It seems to me that the most important task for Americans who believe in liberal democracy is to defeat the GOP. I would not have said that ten years ago, when Republicans more than Democrats got my vote. But the GOP is not just surgent, it has been remade. It is no longer the home of old-fashioned conservatism, but headed instead is headed by our own home-grown fundamentalists. And if they are not as scary as some of the fundamentalists abroad, they are closer, and because of that, more able to wreak dangerous changes in our own government.”

MALKIN AWARD NOMINEE

“[B]lood will tell, as the old saying goes: [Mark Felt’s] posterity is now dragging out his old body and putting it on display to make money. (Have you noticed how Mark Felt looks like one of those old Nazi war criminals they find in Bolivia or Paraguay? That same, haunted, hunted look combined with a glee at what he has managed to get away with so far?) And it gets worse: it’s been reported that Mark Felt is at least part Jewish. The reason this is worse is that at the same time that Mark Felt was betraying Richard Nixon, Nixon was saving Eretz Israel. It is a terrifying chapter in betrayal and ingratitude. If he even knows what shame is, I wonder if he felt a moment’s shame as he tortured the man who brought security and salvation to the land of so many of his and my fellow Jews. Somehow, as I look at his demented face, I doubt it.” – Ben Stein, completely losing it, American Spectator.

CONFIRMED

The fire behind at least some of the smoke:

The U.S. military for the first time on Friday detailed how jailers at Guantanamo mishandled the Koran, including a case in which a guard’s urine splashed through a vent onto the Islamic holy book and others in which it was kicked, stepped on and soaked in water.

The Abu Ghraib official’s reference to someone throwing down and stepping on a Koran as part of an interrogation “Pride and Ego Down” technique now makes much more sense. A few caveats about this Pentagon media push. It’s very odd that most of the incidents acknowledged occurred after new guidelines were given. I’m dubious that only one minor incident occurred before. It’s odd that only one individual was interviewed for this report. The “pissing down an air-vent” incident sounds just bizarre. Yeah, sure the wind caused your pee to drift into a prisoner’s air-vent. It sounds like something some schoolboy would come up with. The soldier whose pee drifted was later discharged. Lastly, the way this was released late on Friday evening suggests to me that it’s part of a strategy to deflect attention, minimize what occurred and urge the press to move on, rather than a genuine attempt to get to the bottom of this. Maybe we’ll never know the full truth. This minimal amount of information seems to me to be the perfect Pentagon solution: they haven’t outright denied anything; they’ve provided a handful of minor examples of abuse as a minimal concession; and the strategy now is to accuse the press of exaggeration and the detainees of lying.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY

“There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana. $7.7 billion is a lot of money, but that is one of the lesser evils. Our failure to successfully enforce these laws is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Colombia. I haven’t even included the harm to young people. It’s absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes.” – Milton Friedman, making eminent sense, as usual, on the insane, expensive, cruel and ineffective war on pot.

HEADS UP

I’ll be on Tucker Carlson’s PBS show tonight, discussing the changing world of HIV in America. An update on my own situation: two days ago, I gave blood to test for drug-resistant strains in my virus. I’ll do the same again in two weeks. Meanwhile, I’ve opted for a tough five-pill daily regimen. I took my first dose last night. So far: no side effects whatever. That’s new for me. But it’s still early.

MARRIAGE IN CALIFORNIA: A proposal to legalize marriage in the legislature just failed by four votes. But a majority of legislators backed it. A sign, I think, of the times – and the inevitability of equality in states where the religious right doesn’t hold sway.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: Here’s a point worth reiterating:

Interesting points on secularism. One thing worth considering is how to reconcile the modern state with the liberal desire for neutrality. It seems to me that the more the state does (which is another way of saying the more things we as a society decide to do collectively) the harder it is to be value-neutral.

Absolutely. That’s why a belief in neutral government is deeply linked to the idea of limited government – far more limited than the statist free-for-all that we have today. And that’s why George Bush has been so damaging to the principles of limited, neutral government. He has both massively expanded government’s reach and size, while making it far less value-neutral. He has deployed the old methods of the big government left for a religious agenda. His assault on classical conservatism is therefore perhaps more profound than those of the left – because he has also given it the imprimatur of conservatism.