Month: April 2006

"I’m about as pro-US as they come, but I have to say I’m beginning to run out of patience – and hope," – Clive Davis, on his blog.

Unmissable.

I’m not claiming this. The Army is. Marty Lederman explains:

Today’s Army charge under UCMJ Article 93 against Lt. Col Steven L. Jordan, [a military intelligence officer who was second-in-command of interrogation operations at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq] – for conduct that the SecDef actually authorized as to some detainees – demonstrates that Rumsfeld approved of, and encouraged, violations of the criminal law…
If the conduct at issue is so clearly unlawful, why did Haynes and Rumsfeld think that it could be approved? The answer to this question lies, I think, in the final DoD Working Group Report of April 4, 2003, which acknowledges that assault, cruelty, and maltreatment are offenses under the UCMJ, but which ominously adds, in a subsection heading, that there are "legal doctrines [that] could render specific conduct, otherwise criminal, not unlawful." The text refers to a "discussion of Commander-in-Chief authority, supra."

Don’t you love that phrase: "legal doctrines [that] could render specific conduct, otherwise criminal, not unlawful"? If president Clinton had used such terminology abut sex, can you imagine how the Republicans would have torn him apart? And yet George W. Bush has used it about criminal abuse of military detainees.

Some have been saying that the president doesn’t get enough credit for the strength in the economy. Since we’re running unsustainable trade and budget deficits in order to keep the whole thing afloat, I’d say that’s debatable. But doesn’t the reasoning go the other way as well? If the economy is this strong and Bush still has only 32 percent support, what could happen if we hit the skids? I wonder how low he could go?

So far, it’s around 17 percent in Massachusetts, which may be distorted upward because of pent-up demand. Only time will give us more solid data. My own view is that we will only be able to guage the true rate once an entire generation of gay kids has grown up in the knowledge that one day, they too can get married like their parents. Only then will the psychological wounds inflicted on gay youth’s self-esteem be healed enough to compare them with their heterosexual peers. Dale Carpenter speculates on what all this might mean, if anything, here. And he has some useful additional reporting on the end of gay culture here.

Sometimes, I think Aaron Sorkin is writing the news these days. I missed this story on the road the last couple of days, but it’s a rich one:

Federal investigators are trying to determine whether [former Republican congressman Randy ‘Duke’] Cunningham and other legislators brought prostitutes to the hotels or prostitutes were provided for them there, according to a report in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal  and confirmed by the Union-Tribune.

The alleged practices were funded by a defense contractor. I doubt the other legislators are Democrats. The story is getting longer and stronger legs. DeLay is gone; Limbaugh has struck a plea bargain in return for mandatory drug treatment; Cunningham may have been given escorts as a bribe … in the Watergate hotel! Who needs a miniseries?

"Less than 24 hours after I testified before a grand jury investigating those murders (and the church burning that preceded them), the Klan initiated a campaign to ‘ruin’ me, a WASP lady with eight great-grandparents buried in Neshoba County, [Mississippi]" – Florence Latimer Mars, a Southern white woman who took great risks in the civil rights movement, when others in her place and class looked away. She died last Sunday.

They’re grim. 100,000 families have so far been forced to flee their homes; U.S. fatalities were sharply up in April; 8,300 civilian Iraqis were murdered by terrorist insurgents in 2005. In terms of civilian deaths, adjusted for population size, Iraq endured something like twenty-five 9/11s last year. Let’s put it another way: a territory controlled by U.S. forces accounted for 50 percent of deaths caused by terrorists on the planet last year. If that is a successful military occupation, then I’m not sure what failure would be. I guess I should ask Powerline.

(Photo: Thaier al Sudani/Reuters.)

Henry Miller hauls out the old "inhaling smoke is bad for you" line against medical marijuana. Has he ever heard of this?

Ross Douthat thinks it’s legitimate for people to decide to vote for or against a candidate because of their religious denomination. Money quote:

[L]et’s suppose that Mormonism hadn’t dropped the whole polygamy thing, and that Mitt Romney’s jokes about "a man, and a woman, and a woman . . ." actually reflected current Latter-Day dogma. Would Sullivan and Novak still object to voters taking Romney’s religion into account? Would Reilly still write that Mormonism only seems strange "because it’s new, which makes the human agency behind it especially palpable"?
Again, I’d vote for Romney. But Mormonism is different from most American faiths, even if it’s not as different as it used to be – and voters should be allowed to consider those differences when deciding how to vote, without being accused of rolling back religious freedom.

He has a point. I wonder if anyone will bring up Mormonism’s relatively recent history of racial discrimination as well. The trouble is that once we have acquiesced to the notion that you don’t need and shouldn’t want a bright line between political life and religious life, these kinds of questions are inevitable. This one really is a slippery slope. Once you have accepted that large numbers of people voted for W solely on the basis of his evangelical protestantism, then how can you argue against people voting against him or anyone else on similar, purely sectarian grounds? Ross is right that the constitutional issue is separate: there’s no legal bar on someone of any faith from becoming president. But there is a growing social consensus that religion matters in politics. The theocons have helped bring this about; the Christianists have pioneered it; the Catholic hierarchy in Rome is abetting it. Once public policy issues become religious and doctrinal issues, all this is on the table. But it is a dangerous and divisive world we are creating. It would be ironic if Romney, the theocon candidate for 2008, were a primary victim. Stupid poetic justice, as Homer would say.