Month: October 2005

“In their unseemly eagerness to assure Miers’s conservative detractors that she will reach the “right” results, her advocates betray complete incomprehension of this: Thoughtful conservatives’ highest aim is not to achieve this or that particular outcome concerning this or that controversy. Rather, their aim for the Supreme Court is to replace semi-legislative reasoning with genuine constitutional reasoning about the Constitution’s meaning as derived from close consideration of its text and structure. Such conservatives understand that how you get to a result is as important as the result. Indeed, in an important sense, the path that the Supreme Court takes to the result often is the result.” – George F. Will, today. He’s been resplendent recently.

Why did Fitzgerald very quickly ensure that he could investigate obstruction of justice and perjury in his inquiry? Maybe one of his first witnesses provided an authoritative, over-arching story that was immediately contradicted by subsequent witnesses. Maybe contradictions began appearing almost immediately. Here endeth today’s piece of informed speculation.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “[O]ddly enough, the scriptures seem to be telling us, this is part of God’s gift to us. God intentionally chooses to be mysterious – for our sakes. If God were to be fully and completely revealed, if we were to see God beyond all hiddenness and mystery, our freedom would disappear. We would be forced to believe, forced to be obedient. No, this hiddenness is God’s blessing.
Certitude is a spiritual danger. If we claim to know God’s ways without question, we limit God to the shape of our own minds. As St. Augustine put it 1700 years ago, ‘If you think you understand, it isn’t God.’
One of the troubling currents of our time is the tendency of religious people to speak as if we have seen God’s face. A lot of what is being said in religious circles can suggest that some people claim to have God figured out, under control, in their pockets.” – The Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III, Dean of Washington National Cathedral. Without doubt, faith is not faith.

SONG FOR THE DAY: An unorthodox recording of “Oh, Holy Night.” No, it’s not Cartman.

MENSTRUAL BLOOD AND TARANTO: I think we have a new low in defenses of government-sanctioned abuse of prisoners. On Friday, WSJ blogger, James Taranto, tried to dismiss my ethical concerns about U.S. interrogators in Gitmo smearing fake menstrual blood on the faces of Muslim detainees. Taranto regards such techniques as “excellent.” My concern, along with that of many others within the military and CIA, is that this technique deliberately targets Islamic religious taboos, shocks the conscience and undermines the war by making us as religiously intolerant as the enemy. This story explains the rationale behind the technique:

Islam forbids physical contact with women other than a man’s wife or family, and with any menstruating women, who are considered unclean. “The concept was to make the detainee feel that after talking to [the interrogator who smeared fake menstrual blood on his face], he was unclean and was unable to go before his God in prayer and gain strength,” says the draft, stamped “Secret.”

Taranto endorses the use of a detainee’s religious faith against them, but then appears to dismiss that angle as unimportant. The only people who would find this tactic abhorrent, he argues, are

adult men who remain strangers to the female body. Among them are homosexual men who identify as gay at a young age and thus do not have heterosexual experiences. Also among them are single men from sexually repressed cultures, such as fundamentalist Islamic ones, in which contact between the sexes is rigidly policed.

So my own concern with religious abuse is dismissed as a function of my sexual orientation! I have to say that of all the sad attempts to dismiss or belittle abuse and torture of detainees, this has to be about the lowest and lamest yet. For the record, my objection is because we should not transform this war into one against all Islam. Abusing Islam in military prisons or on the battlefield is both immoral and deeply counter-productive. Using people’s religious conscience against them is a mark of totalitarian countries, not one where religious freedom is paramount. Taranto’s exclusion of gay men from the categories of adulthood and masculinity is also, shall we say, revealing. Has the pro-torture right really been reduced to this kind of irrelevant bigotry? Is this all they have left?

I find it impressively honest and appropriately self-critical. I see no reason to doubt Keller’s sincerity, but he also clearly screwed up. We’ll hear more tomorrow from Calame. The two best commenters on all this so far are the peerless Jack Shafer and the shameless but, in this case, inimitable Arianna.

“I’m a straight guy who is rather left-wing, and loves the recent convergence between independent conservatives and kossacks on topical issues such as torture, Miers, fiscal sanity, pork, and gay marriage. Both sides can use the dose of the other.

I live with a buddy and I’ll be the happiest drunk in the crowd when he marries his long-term boyfriend. Tonight I was out for Friday drinks with 4 beautiful girls (2 couples) and only laughed at my “minority” status, loving the open frankness of discussion.

While I understand the “creativity” concerns to an extent, progressives (and their allies) know better. Spontaneity, inspiration, shared, lasting values – the key factors in generating “culture” do not require oppression. The flourishing, mainstream introduction of my (youngish) friends’ perspective is as wonderful as it is radical. The end of gay culture? Hardly. Cultures can develop as well in the open as in secret. So long as truth is at its root.”

… to the beagle behind the curtain.

In the circular firing squad that is now the conservative movement, Brent Scowcroft will soon fire off a few rounds of ammo. I heard rumors last week. Steve Clemons has more.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “And I’ll finish just by bringing it down screechingly to the ground and tell you that the detainee abuse issue is just such a concrete example of what I’ve just described to you, that 10 years from now or so when it’s really, really put to the acid test, ironed out and people have looked at it from every angle, we are going to be ashamed of what we allowed to happen. I don’t know how many people saw the “Frontline” documentary last night – very well done, I thought, but didn’t get anywhere near the specifics that need to be shown, that need to come out, that need to say to the American people, this is not us, this is not the way we do business in the world. Of course we have criminals, of course we have people who violate the law of war, of course we had My Lai, of course we had problems in the Korean War and in World War II. My father-in-law was involved in the Malme?dy massacre and the retaliation of U.S. troops in Belgium. He told me some stories before he died that made my blood curdle about American troops killing Germans.

But these are not — I won’t say isolated incidents; these are incidents that are understandable and that ultimately, at one time or another, we came to deal with. I don’t think, in our history, we’ve ever had a presidential involvement, a secretarial involvement, a vice-presidential involvement, an attorney general involvement in telling our troops essentially carte blanche is the way you should feel. You should not have any qualms because this is a different kind of conflict. Well, I’ll admit that. I’ll admit that. I don’t want to see any of these people ever released from prison if they’re truly terrorists. I don’t want to see them released because I know what they’ll do. I’m a former military man, 31 years in the Army. They will go out and they will try to kill me and my buddies, again and again, and some of you people, too.

So I understand the radical change in the nature of our enemy, but that doesn’t mean we make a radical change in the nature of America. But that’s what we did, and we did it in private. We did it in such privacy that the secretary of State had to open the door into my office one day – we had adjoining offices and he liked to do that, and I never objected – he came through the door and he said, Larry, Larry, get everything, get all the paperwork, get the ICRC reports, get everything; I think this is going to be a real mess. And Will Taft, his lawyer, got the same instruction from a legal point of view. And Will and I worked together for almost a year as the ICRC reports began to build and come in, and Kellenberger even came in and visited with the secretary of State. And we knew that things weren’t the way they should be, and as former soldiers, we knew that you don’t have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you’ve condoned it – unless you’ve condoned it. And whether you did it explicitly or not is irrelevant. If you did it at all, indirectly, implicitly, tacitly – you pick the word – you’re in trouble because that slippery slope is truly slippery, and it will take years to reverse the situation, and we’ll probably have to grow a new military.” – Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, recounting the profound, irreparable damage president Bush has done to the honor and integrity of the U.S. military – and to the meaning of America itself.

An interesting digest of what the GOP now represents:

Number of Pork Projects in Federal Spending Bills

2005 – 13,997
2004 – 10,656
2003 – 9,362
2002 – 8,341
2001 – 6,333
2000 – 4,326
1999 – 2,838
1998 – 2100
1997 – 1,596
1996 – 958
1995 – 1439

Notice the doubling under Bush and his big-spending cronies and allies. You think these people will respond to “PorkBusters” campaigns? Puh-lease. They’ll respond only when they are thrown out of office.

An emailer from an unlikely place comments on my essay (which is free for as.com readers after a quick registration process):

Thanks for your thoughtful essay. I’m a straight, 39 year-old guy who learned a lot from it. An interesting parallel struck me: I’m a Russian-speaker and studied at a Soviet literary institute in 1986, before Gorbachev’s reforms had taken hold, and was exposed through friends to the vibrant samizdat culture of the time. Marvelous works that could never have passed the official sensors for publication, such as Venedikt Yerofeyev’s Moskva-Petushki, passed from hand to hand and were copied in pen or typed. An elderly lady I met held informal art showings in her apartment, including modernist religious paintings. Young people would head with a few hours’ notice to the woods outside the outer ring of Moscow to hear impromptu acoustic concerts by underground bands. There was a stratum of Soviet bohemenians who were far more cultured and literate than their counterparts in the West, who survived through menial day jobs in archives or museums, and lived semi-secret lives of creativity and expression. In the late 1980s, this subculture very temporarily exploded into the mainstream, as glasnost allowed publication of long-banned works and everyone on the subway would be simultaneously reading the most recently released, previously unavailable work of Bulgakov or Solzhenitsyn.

In the (relative) freedom of the Yeltsin and Putin era, that subculture died, and indeed Russian culture seems to have temporarily gone sterile (with a few bright exceptions, such as the novelist Viktor Pelevin). No sane person would want a return of the Soviets, but there is no denying that something moving and beautiful has been lost. I even wonder if a certain kind of creativity flowers best in captivity, like a plant that can only grow in a confined space. And here’s a question for you: As gay people suffer less from isolation and oppression, will they lead less often in creative expression?

I don’t know the anwer to that. What we will find out soon is which aspects of gay culture were entirely a response to oppression and which were genuine and free expressions of a complicated identity. I’m a firm believer that we are about to see a flourishing of gay cultures, plural. Many of them will interact with straight cultures. Our best days, in other words, are yet to come. Even the theocons will be unable to stop that. Freedom is a mighty thing. You can read my essay – and previous ones over the years – here.

Well, it’s a website. Just up. Not exactly a sign of his being about to pack up and go home.

WaPo’s primer on the key players in Plamegate. With the underbrush getting thicker, it’s helpful to have a chart.