Year: 2005

Here’s an email that gladdened me:

I’m a gay farmer/rancher born and bred in Saskatchewan, Canada (or, as I prefer to call it, Paradise). I have been in a committed relationship with my partner for almost 8 years now. We live in an extremely rural part of an extremely rural province. From the time we moved in we were made to feel completely welcome and respected as any other family in the community. People here really don’t care what you do in bed with who. What does matter is being a productive, involved member of the community and a good neighbour.

Our neighbours continually pester us with questions about when we’re going to “make honest men of each other.” Just as with straight couples, it’s with mixed emotions that my partner and I move closer to tying the knot. After all, forever is a very long time! But when you love someone completely none of that scary bullshit really matters. As long as we have each other to share life’s good and bad and grow old together my life is complete. We are very lucky men to have found each other.

I only wish my many gay friends in the U.S. were able to have their relationships honoured and respected in the same way. A country that doesn’t allow its citizens to freely choose who they will spend the rest of their lives with can’t truly be called a free country.

Somehow I don’t believe this man is a threat to anyone or anything. But he understands the meaning of freedom.

The proof is here.

Jon Rauch, astute as ever, notices some interesting shifts in Republican rhetoric in the Senate debate over the nomination of Janice Rogers Brown. Yes, the days of small-government Republicanism are now largely a matter of history, I’m afraid.

The state of Tennessee is now investigating the unlicensed Christianist camps where children are sent to be “rescued” from their emotional and sexual orientation.

“It is really refreshing to read your objection to the HIV scare tactics. They have always made me uneasy. I am a heterosexual non-drug using woman, and HIV has never struck close to me, but the scary ‘you have sex you might die’ refrain is inhumane, to my ears. Maybe because I am a person who would have been better off with more sex in my life, not less.
It has occurred to me that for much of the history of the human race the mortality rate for childbirth was such that having sex, for a woman, was about as dangerous as what today would be considered ‘unsafe’ sex. Maybe a lot more dangerous. The entire human race is built upon the willingness of women to take greater risks than we now consider acceptable. But that was sex between a man and a woman.”

Some defenses of Karl Rove’s rolling out of the “stab-in-the-back” ploy to cover for possible future failure in Iraq have made an important semantic point. They say that the people I cited – Christopher Hitchens, Tom Friedman, Paul Berman, Joe Lieberman, The New Republic, and so on – are not “liberals”. They’re centrists or mavericks or oddballs like yours truly. What Rove was doing, they say, is citing hard-left types like Michael Moore and Moveon.org and Kucinich and the like. He doesn’t mean all mainstream liberals. But this is too clever by half. The rubric Rove used was the “conservative-liberal” rubric, in which the entire polity is bifurcated into one type or the other. All non-liberals are, in Rove’s rubric, conservatives; and all non-conservatives are liberals. This is in keeping with the very familiar electoral tactic of describing even moderate or centrist Democrats as “liberals” with as broad a brush as possible. Rove, in other words, cannot have it both ways. He cannot both use the word liberal to describe everyone who is not a Republican and then, in other contexts, say he means it only for the hard left. Rove is a smart guy. He picked his words carefully. A simple addition of the word “some” would have rendered his comments completely inoffensive. But he left that qualifier out. For a reason. I see no difference between his generalizations and Howard Dean’s unhinged rants about Republicans. Except that Rove is running an administration that is running a vital war. With that kind of power should come a tiny bit more responsibility.

A U.N. source has claimed that the Bush administration has acknowledged the use of torture at Guantanamo Bay, as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq:

The acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, said a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They are no longer trying to duck this, and have respected their obligation to inform the UN,” the Committee member told AFP. “They they will have to explain themselves (to the Committee). Nothing should be kept in the dark.”
UN sources said it was the first time the world body has received such a frank statement on torture from US authorities. The Committee, which monitors respect for the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, is gathering information from the US ahead of hearings in May 2006.
Signatories of the convention are expected to submit to scrutiny of their implementation of the 1984 convention and to provide information to the Committee. The document from Washington will not be formally made public until the hearings. “They haven’t avoided anything in their answers, whether concerning prisoners in Iraq, in Afghanistan or Guantanamo, and other accusations of mistreatment and of torture,” the Committee member said. “They said it was a question of isolated cases, that there was nothing systematic and that the guilty were in the process of being punished.”

Again, the notion that the administration did nothing to encourage or allow such practices. Then why did the CIA demand memos providing legal cover for their violation of US law? And why did the president create a loop-hole for “military necessity”? I have no way of independently confirming this U.N. source, so the news story has to be treated with some skepticism. But the evidence for serious violations of basic moral codes and U.S. law is mounting.

Bull Moose figured out the Bush administration sooner than the rest of us.

“Yes, Karl Rove is an ass. But you didn’t need me to tell you that. This liberal wasn’t calling for therapy. This liberal was calling for bombs.” – Jeff Jarvis, another pro-war liberal this administration just pissed off for a quick political fix. What a way to win a war.

EMAIL OF THE MORNING: Last night I stumbled across something intriguing. I was reading a fairly obscure Kant essay called “Misperceptions of Morals and Politics” (appended to Towards a Perpetual Peace.) In it, Kant distinguishes between the “clever” but ultimately immoral politician who views everything in terms of political expedience and manipulates a superficial or false morality for political gain and that rarest of creatures, the moral politician, who recognizes the ultimate harmony between morality and good government.
Kant then cites the three tests which can be applied to discern the immoral from the moral politician. Under three Latin rubrics, as follows: (1) Fac et excusa – does he use thin pretexts to seize power in his own country, or, after coming to power, to invade and conquer another nation? (2) Si fecisti, nega. When his policies bring about ruin or failure, does he blame his own subjects for the failures, or place the blame on other nations? Or does he admit mistakes and change course to reflect this recognition? (3) Divide et impera. Does he maintain his position of power by sowing domestic hatred and discord; through the demonization of a portion of his own citizenry? (Immanuel Kant, “Sämtliche Werke vol. 5, pp. 695-97.”) I’m scoring the Bush administration a perfect 3 for 3 on Kant’s test. One can accept or reject the war, but it seems clear (increasingly after the Downing Street memo documents) that the label of “thin pretexts” is fair. The president’s refusal to assume responsibility is legendary. And Rove’s remarks on which you reflect is a perfect example of the “divide et impera” approach.”

It seems to me that Karl Rove’s sickening generalization about “liberals” in the war on terror is revealing in ways not obviously apparent. Sure, there were some on the hard left who really did jump to blame America for the evil perpetrated by the monsters of 9/11. I took names at the time. But all “liberals”? The New Republic? Joe Lieberman? Hitch? Paul Berman? The Washington Post editorial page? Tom Friedman? Almost every Democrat in the Congress who endorsed the war in Afghanistan? You expect that kind of moronic extremism from a Michelle Malkin, but from the most influential figure in an administration leading a country in wartime? Ok, ok, I’m not surprised. Rove is a brutal operator. But to my mind, the hysterical attacks on Durbin and now this outburst (and the White House’s subsequent endorsement of it) are an indication of some level of panic. We face at least three more grueling years of warfare in Iraq with our current troop level, and it’s not at all clear that the public is prepared to go along with it, given the incremental progress we are making. Rove knows this. He also knows that the haphazard way in which the White House prepared for the war, its chronic under-manning of the occupation, its failure, as Abizaid conceded yesterday, to make any progress against the insurgency over the past six months despite the enormous psychological boost of the January election: all these have made the administration unable to really shift the blame. Rove’s strategic decision to make social security reform the center-piece of the second term has also, shall we say, not gone according to plan. So what to do? You do what you always do. You create a scenario in which you cannot be out-demagogued. You deflect from the awful fall-out from the decision to exempt terror suspects from bans on cruel and inhumane treatment to a senator’s analogy to the Gulag. And instead of leveling with the country about the real difficulty of the war we’re in, acknowledging error and sketching a unifying vision for winning, you divide the country into good folk and “liberals” and hope it works as well as it always has. If you want to know how well the administration really believes the war is going, listen to their rhetoric. And start worrying.