Month: September 2006

A reader writes:

In my childhood memory, the first two politicians I ever recognized were Nixon and Goldwater, and Nixon spooked me enough that I was one of only two in our 35-student first grade class who chose McGovern in our election day show-of-hands straw poll of 1972 – and I always thought that the girl who also raised her hand only did so because she liked me. I remember feeling as though Goldwater looked like the strictest principal I could envision, and now I come to find that he had the strictest principles one might envision.

I find it enlightening that your use of the idea of "conscience" in speaking of the senator dovetailed so closely with my reading of Christopher Hitchens’ illuminating language in his Ratzinger article that "the man who modestly considers himself the vicar of Christ on Earth maintains a steady attack on the idea that reason and the individual conscience can be preferred to faith." I feel as though a great deal of what ails this administration is that our leader, who undoubtedly considers himself a vessel of Christ on Earth, maintains that same, steady attack. And though we might like to find in our current political landscape a Goldwater-styled defender of principles, even McCain has caved to the broader faith-based puppeteers whose grip on our democracy MUST be loosened if we are to advance our shared Constitutional freedoms.

It is surprising to me that I never before joined the two words individual/conscience in my assessment of my own, non-faith/religion-based beliefs. I hold no book to be the word of God, and I presume no church to be the church of God, but I presume every individual to have developed an individual conscience that defines them more truly than any book that they might carry, or any religion that they may promote. Hypocrisy is the truest barometer of an eroded conscience, and our world strains against the raging current of it that washes over all of the earth’s shores.

I broadly agree. I would also note an important detail in the pope’s address. He puts the word "conscience" in quote-marks:

The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective "conscience" becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. [My italics.]

This is no typo. Ratzinger has long disowned the notion of an individual conscience as we have long understood it in the West, as I explain at greater length in my forthcoming book. His view is that if your conscience goes against anything that the Pope says at any time, then it isn’t really your conscience. It’s a false conscience in a mirror of the Communist idea of "false consciousness". Your real conscience, Benedict insists, is always in agreement with the Pope. It’s just that you are too befuddled by sin to recognize it. This Pope speaks eloquently of using reason in faith. And yet, no post-war Pope has waged a more ferocious war on the use of reason in the Catholic church than Ratzinger/Benedict. Maybe he should take the mote out of his own eye before he excoriates the beam in others’.

(Photo: Maurizio Brambatti/AP.)

A reader writes:

One of the standard passages in the "Prayers of the People" in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer asks for God’s blessings and guidance for "the President of the United States, the Governor of this State, and all others in positions of authority."  I see no particular difference between this and the sign in your illustration.  But this perfectly unobjectionable prayer, which used to be included in our ritual every Sunday without regard to who held any of the offices referred to, is no longer being used at my Episcopal church.  Maybe this apparent selectivity in deciding which President is deserving of God’s guidance and blessing is another species of "Christianism"?

Agreed. The overt partisan politicization of faith is obnoxious whatever side it’s coming from, left or right. It’s one thing to bring moral witness to the public square, rooted in faith. It’s another thing to align – or detach – God with one party or one candidate.

[Update: several readers email to say that their churches and synagogues routinely offer prayers for those in power, whatever their party. That’s certainly my experience. I would also think that this president especially needs our prayers. These are terribly trying times; and given his very limited abilities, he needs all the prayers we can send his way.]

The American Prospect hired Brendan Nyhan to blog for them. Good idea. Brendan has a sterling record as a non-partisan blogger who calls things as he sees them. So he criticized some left-wing blogs for hyperbole. This is what then happened:

Last Wednesday, controversy broke out when I slammed two liberal blogs for using an airline employee’s suicide after 9/11 to take a cheap shot at President Bush. My post, which initially contained a minor factual error, prompted one of the bloggers, Atrios (aka Duncan Black), to label me the "wanker of the day" and to call on TAP editors to "rethink things a bit." Hundreds of Atrios readers filled the Prospect’s comment boards with vitriol. In an email Friday morning, Sam Rosenfeld, the magazine’s online editor, asked that I focus my blogging on conservative targets. He specifically objected to two posts criticizing liberals (here and here) that I wrote after the Atrios controversy. I refused and terminated the relationship.

Why was I asked to slant my work to the liberal party line? In an email statement, TAP editor Michael Tomasky said that "[t]he Prospect is hardly averse to criticizing liberal verities" and that the magazine had no problem with my initial posts criticizing liberals, but "there were a few posts in succession that struck us as either inaccurate or an effort to draw equivalencies where none existed. The Prospect has always opposed a ‘pox on both houses’ posture, and that’s what we came to believe you were doing."

Sorry, Michael, but that’s pathetic. The blog partisanship on the right is often depressing – and boy would I have been fired long ago if I had ever been blogging on a "conservative" site. But the politburo on the left is no better. And to think we once believed the blogosphere could liberate independent thought. Yeah, right. You can now read Brendan, freed from the liberal thought police, at his own blog. Support free thought. They won’t.

"In fact, there has been plenty of politics, and not all that much religion, out of the Bush Administration and the Republican Party over the past six years. There are theocrats and theocrat-wannabes out there, but they’re really not much in evidence in the Bush Administration’s policies," – Glenn Reynolds, yesterday.

"Sides are being chosen, and the future of man hangs in the balance! The enemies of virtue may be on the march, but they have not won, and if we put our trust in Christ, they never will … It is for us then to do as our heroes have always done and put our faith in the perfect redeeming love of Jesus Christ," Tom DeLay, legislative architect of Republican policies for much of the last decade, in March of this year.

Michelle Malkin has come out in favor of fair trials for convicted terrorists, argues for their right to see evidence used against them at trial, and hopes the International Criminal Court hears their case. Of course, these standards do not apply to the United States government, in which case she supports indefinite detention of a journalist without charges, and accuses him of being a terrorist on the word of the military. This really is the new moral standard for conservatives: the whole world must abide by the principles of Anglo-Saxon justice, except the United States. No other country may torture, but we can. It is, as Glenn Greenwald explains, "beyond satire."

The theocons’ favorite nominee is firmly in favor of torturing terror suspects in interrogation – and has clearly positioned himself as McCain’s opponent on the issue. I presume he thinks it will win him votes among Christian, Republican base voters.

"On the one hand, we are faced with a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, nuclear blackmail and terrorist chaos at the heart of the world’s Persian Gulf oil supply, and terrorist-planted nuclear weapons in America’s cities. On the other hand, we can choose an economically disruptive war with Iran that will alienate us from the world, push us to and beyond our military limits, and that even then may not even succeed. The by now stock phrase, "there are no good options" doesn’t quite do justice to the awful choice we face," – Stanley Kurtz, pretty accurately summing up the place we find ourselves in.

I wondered yesterday if Dean Barnett thought being Jewish was a liability in the South. He replies, rather oddly, here. To continue the debate, the Kazakh celebrity, Borat, performed a social science experiment in a country and western bar in Arizona. It contributes, well, something to the question we were debating, although I confess I’m not sure what.

If you haven’t had a chance to see the HBO documentary on Barry Goldwater by his grand-daughter, you might want to take the time. It didn’t have enough politics for this junkie, but it certainly brought to life the spirit of a conservatism now almost entirely eclipsed in the Republican party. Goldwater had no truck for government spending, and raged at the fiscal excesses of his time. By today’s Republican standards, the spending he was fulminating against was peanuts. Goldwater was an adamant defender of states’ rights, a principle he stuck with even though it meant being smeared as a bigot and a racist. Bush’s GOP has no principled interest in federalism, from its education policies to its attacks on states that violate religious doctrines on such issues as marriage, end-of-life matters and even medical marijuana. From the 1970s, Goldwater recognized Falwell and the religious right for what they are: charlatans who have as much concern for traditional conservatism as big government liberals do. What Goldwater would have said about the Schiavo case would not be broadcastable on network television. He also adhered to the old conservative notion of live-and-let-live. He never had a problem with gays, and although he clearly found abortion an awful thing, he wasn’t about to remove a female citizen’s right in the early stages of pregnancy to control her own body. He was, in other words, a conservative. Or as his great book put it: a conservative with a conscience. And if he was a conservative, then the current Republican party and the current president simply aren’t. More and more observers recognize this, especially those who do not have a vested or financial interest in sustaining the charade that this is a conservative administration in any meaningful sense.

The documentary makes much of Goldwater’s stance on the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Johnson’s astonishingly courageous move to back it. The irony of Goldwater’s career is that this decision, made on a principled stance of federalism and limited government, became something else on the ground. It shifted the Republican Party base away from California and the sun-belt into the Deep South. Goldwater was a Western conservative, not a Southern one. And whichever party the South controls will have a hard time reflecting the kind of skeptical, libertarian, tolerant principles Goldwater believed in. So he both created American conservatism and laid the grounds for its eventual implosion. All these years later, the end-result is a Texan president who hasn’t seen a civil liberty he wouldn’t junk at a second’s notice, who bases campaigns on subtle appeals to prejudice and fear of minorities, who has doubled the debt of the next generation, expanded government at a pace not seen since FDR, engaged in two reckless wars without the preparation or manpower to succeed, presided over a government riddled with incompetence and cronyism, and who has nominated candidates to the Supreme Court using their religious faith as a criterion. Whatever else Bush is, he is not merely not Goldwater. He is, in many ways, his nemesis. Which is why conservatism as we have known it has been strangled – by the Republicans. And why the fight to resurrect it must start from almost the same parched earth on which Goldwater confidently took his stand.

Seeing him today, one remembers what courage is. And it’s long past time conservatives summoned some up.

What follows below is a dramatization of a "waterboarding". It’s taken from the USA network award-winning show, "The 4400" on YouTube. Since I have only read descriptions, I cannot verify its accuracy in detail – but it certainly captures the essence of this technique directly authorized by the president, and used by the CIA at the behest of the president and vice-president. The clip lasts around 30 seconds. Most victims apparently do not last that long. If you believe that what you are watching is "severe mental or physical pain or suffering," then it is torture under U.S. law, and the U.N. Treaty. It is undeniably a violation of the Geneva Convention. If it is torture, according to the president himself, then it should stopped. At this moment in history, let us at least look at what is being done by the government; and call it by its proper name.