Year: 2005

“[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.

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.

“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.

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.

Will Saletan predicts that the president will eventually move toward banning in vitro fertilization. Why?

Only two percent of leftover embryos have been put up for adoption. That’s less than the percentage donated to stem-cell research. So if you’re determined to rescue these embryos and stop the production of more, eventually you have to do what pro-lifers have done in the case of abortion: confront the parents.

Some of that is already happening, as Will shows. It seems to me that this should be directly asked of all those who oppose embryonic stem cell research. Do you believe IVF should be legal? Now watch the GOP splinter.

Thanks for your emails. Let me address three good counter-arguments. Many of you have argued that what passes for secularism today is not neutrality but active hostility to or disdain for religious faith. Here’s one formulation of the argument from an emailer:

There is unquestionably a brand of secularism that seeks to impose its own set of moral choices on all of society, e.g. the leftist hegemony that currently has a stranglehold on most universities. You yourself complained about this sort of thing in regards to Larry Summers’ lynching at the hands of the leftist establishment earlier this year.

Yes, indeed there is. One reason secularism is now threatened is because the left has abused it. I have no problem, for example, with public displays of Christian symbols in a secular society. I find the desire to root out such things as excessively persnickety. I’ve long been a defender of free speech and association for people with whom I disagree. (My conservative critics on the subject of homosexuality, for example, rarely point out that I oppose all hate crime laws, have opposed laws forbidding workplace discrimination, and supported the right of both the Boy Scouts and the St Patrick’s Day parade for discriminating against gays as private associations.) Moreover, when Christians form a majority, it’s understandable that much public symbolism will be redolent of Christian imagery and language. Secularists who want to stamp this stuff out seem to me to be lacking in the virtue of moderation – and they have helped spawn the intolerance that now flows back from the other side. At the same time, it’s silly for fundamentalists to say that they are being persecuted merely because others are treated equally in the public square. It is ludicrous for Rick Santorum to say, as he did recently, that my being allowed to marry my partner is somehow an attack on his marriage. A secular and tolerant society does not regard the rights of minorities as somehow only achievable at someone else’s expense. We are bigger than that. What is particularly remarkable is that when we are constructing a democracy abroad, say in Iraq, no one disputes the notion that it would be better for Iraq to have a secular constitution rather than a religious one. Yet these same people, when it comes to domestic politics and constitutionalism, want to insist that the American constitution is somehow a religious document. I prefer the perspective of this emailer:

I grew up in India and believed that secularism and multiculturalism were good things. This question was never even debated in my 24 years there. It is disconcerting to see that so many people in a supposedly much more enlightened country think that these are bad things.

Well, sadly, they do. And the people who believe these are bad things are the ruling faction in the dominant political party.

SECULARISM II: One other lesser point. There is obviously a distinction between the questions of same-sex marriage and abortion. With abortion, you can always claim that a life is at stake, and so neutrality, which would mean leaving the choice to individuals, is impermissible. But same-sex marriage involves no potential taking of human life and is an issue of far lesser moral import because of it. No one is tangibly hurt by someone’s public commitment to another human being. In such instances, government neutrality and secularism demand equal treatment, barring the kind of terrible social consequences no one has yet been able even to posit convincingly.

SECULARISM III: One final point. 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, 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. And it is the only value that can appeal to Christianists, Christians, atheists, Jews, gays, straights, Muslims and Mormons alike. It is a value that may as often be celebrated when it fails as when it succeeds. And in an increasingly multicultural society, where all religions seem to be gravtitating toward fundamentalism, it is more valuable today than ever. Abandoning it, as the theocons and the leftist intolerants want, is to abandon Western freedom. I believe in fighting for such freedom both abroad and at home. In equal measure.

Here’s another piece of evidence that sexual orientation is genetically hard-wired. For my part, I don’t really see the political or moral salience of this. The origins of sexual orientation will one day be better understood. But I know of no theory – even those of the “reparative therapists” – who believe that orientation is somehow “chosen.” I know of no theorists, including those on the religious right, who seriously argue that it isn’t largely fixed (whether through genes, environment or a combination of the two) by the age of three. The point is that, regardless of its origin, sexual orientation is experienced by the overwhelming majority of homosexuals as involuntary in every sense of the word. Those activists on the far right who claim otherwise are, at some level, accusing people like me of lying about a fundamental reality in our lives. We’re not. The only salient political question is: how do you integrate a small minority of people whose sexual orientation is fixed as the opposite of the norm? Stigmatize them for being different and write them out of constitutional protections? Or integrate them into the family and the society as equal citizens, and demand the same responsibilities from them as everyone else?

SMART JEWS: Eventually, the empirical links between intelligence and genetics will be unable to be denied. But sit back and watch people try.

Here’s an unusual instance of uniformed officers speaking directly to the press about the impossible task set for them by Rumsfeld:

From last October to the end of April, there were about 400 soldiers from the 25th Infantry Division patrolling the northwest region, which covers about 10,000 square miles. “Resources are everything in combat … there’s no way 400 people can cover that much ground,” said Maj. John Wilwerding, of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which is responsible for the northwest tract that includes Tal Afar. “Because there weren’t enough troops on the ground to do what you needed to do, the (insurgency) was able to get a toehold.” said Wilwerding, 37, of Chaska, Minn.
During the past two months, Army commanders, trying to pacify the area, have had to move in some 4,000 Iraqi soldiers; about 2,000 more are on the way. About 3,500 troops from the 3rd ACR took control of the area this month, but officers said they were still understaffed for the mission. “There’s simply not enough forces here,” said a high-ranking U.S. Army officer with knowledge of the 3rd ACR.

One word: duh. You have an insurgency replenished with money and men pouring in over the Syrian border. But you don’t have enough troops to stop it. Worse, your incompetent war-management has led to a deeper recruitment crisis for the military so that they’re reduced to these kinds of tactics just to stay in play. Worse still, the carnage from those enabled by our war strategy continues to mount. And the policy continues.

Harry Shearer has the goods.