Month: September 2006

Three cheers for Matt Lauer. He’s the first mainstream journalist I know of to directly confront the president over what exactly he has authorized in terms of detainee treatment and torture. Watch the president’s body-language. Watch his early aggression. And repeat after me the obvious: We Torture.

The former theocratic dictator of Iran defended the execution of gay people in Iran:

As an expert of Islamic sciences I tell you that capital punishment is accepted in Islam, but it has conditions that are so stringent that executions should almost never happen. If in fact they are happening in Islamic countries it is because, if it happens excessively in Islamic countries it is a problem of bringing those religious rulings into practice …

In regards to the issue of gay people as well as the issue of adultery, the conditions that are required for capital punishment are so strict that it is virtually impossible to meet … Of course this is my opinion and a lot of people don’t accept my opinion, but I was asked for my opinion so this is what I believe … In many Islamic countries homosexual relationships as well as non-consensual heterosexual relationships have been punishable … There are also others, there are others in the world that have similar views namely important sects of Christianity … So yes you are correct homosexual activity is a crime in Islam … And crimes are punishable … The fact that could crimes be punished by execution is debatable … And that we must differentiate between punishment and violence."

Just so we know who we’re dealing with. I graduated from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. I’m appalled they would give a platform to an Islamist theocrat like Khatami.

"I know Iraq is a mess and we have screwed up seven ways from Sunday. We underestimated how hard it would be. But the fundamental idea behind Iraq is still correct. If we back out of this fight … your children and grandchildren will never know peace," – Republican Senator, Lindsey Graham, on Sunday.

There are few messages more obvious in the Gospels than a disregard for the biological family and a rejection of earthly wealth. Jesus says nothing about abortion or homosexuality, but he is quite clear about abandoning your spouse, parents and children and divesting yourself of all worldly goods. These are terribly difficult doctrines; and few of us who call ourselves Christians are able to live by them. But most Christians have at least not deceived themselves into thinking that the Gospels are actually about family life above everything and wealth as a critical element of Christian life. Until now. The Prosperity Gospel is one of the greatest blasphemies against the message of Jesus – but it is increasingly a part of the American "Christian" landscape. After all, why lambaste the wealth your congregants crave when you can demonize the minorities outside? This Time cover-story is chilling about what has happened to Christianity in some parts of the country. Just dont expect the religious right to criticize it.

(Photo illustration: Michael Elins.)

Security in Baghdad continues to deteriorate. A Sadrite brags here that he can easily get weapons into the Green Zone. And Anbar province seems to have become a new haven for terror, because of Rumsfeld’s war-management:

The chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq recently filed an unusual secret report concluding that the prospects for securing that country’s western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there, said several military officers and intelligence officials familiar with its contents.

The officials described Col. Pete Devlin’s classified assessment of the dire state of Anbar as the first time that a senior U.S. military officer has filed so negative a report from Iraq.

One Army officer summarized it as arguing that in Anbar province, "We haven’t been defeated militarily but we have been defeated politically — and that’s where wars are won and lost."

A reader writes:

Re: your comparison of Bush’s and Clinton’s lies. While you very appropriately pointed out the similarities between the two equivocators, the differences are just as instructive.

Clinton is the more intelligent, calculating, and verbally acrobatic of the two presidents, and he knew damn well that he was splitting hairs when he denied having sex with Monica Lewinsky.  Somehow, I don’t see Bush’s remarks about torture in quite the same light.  They are just as disconnected from the facts as Clinton’s were, and probably have far more serious, long-term consequences than Clinton’s sleazy evasions.  But Bush does not have a black belt in semantics like Clinton did ; he isn’t fudging facts, calculating consequences, chopping logic, or coolly hedging his bets based on the probability of having to defend his statement in court at some future date.  I wish that were all he was doing.  Instead, the man actually believes his own lies.  He  is seriously deluded and appears to be suffering from a god complex that allows him to shout things into and out of existence, ignore or violate existing laws, and ultimately be accountable only to himself.

A shrewd liar or someone in complete denial? In a president, I think I prefer the former.

This year, I almost decided this would be my last summer in Ptown. I’ve been coming here for seventeen years; every year it gets a little harder to transplant two adults and two beagles for two months or so to the end of a wharf at the last curve of a peninsular question-mark. If Al Gore’s right, my property won’t outlast me; a rise in sea-levels of a few inches would put my place under-water. And then I get here, and slowly, the real world flakes off, and the harbor seduces again; and I realize that my attachment to this place is some kind of gift I have no right to refuse. If I have a home, it is somewhere out here. It’s where I want my ashes spread when I die, out in the farthest moors where the first Englishmen first encountered America, and where they rightly decided to move on in search of more permanent ground.

So we’ll pack up today, and drive home for ten hours and leave the tides and skies and dunes and freaks behind again. How not to feel sad? This place has a safe transience to it: a sand-bar created by thousands of years of mere tides, on which a crew of us hang out each summer, a gaggle of different equals, with dirty feet and faded clothes and the occasional tattered boa. It couldn’t be more different than Washington, D.C.. Which is the point, I guess. It’s an elsewhere that makes somewhere endurable: a little, translucent heaven on a darkening, serious earth.

A reader writes:

I don’t have a link, youtube or picture for you, just a personal anecdote.

I was on London’s Oxford Street this lunchtime. Coming out of the tube station was a group of men, maybe half a dozen in total, carrying placards that proclaimed "9/11 was an inside job!" and things of that nature.

My initial reaction was mild annoyance, but then I thought about the possiblity of men walking down the busiest shopping street of Riyadh, Tehran or Saddam-era Baghdad accusing their governments of such massive atrocities.

There will be many tributes this day, and rightly so. But the fact that a group of people are allowed to walk down a London street saying the most hateful and offensive things, without violent reaction by the people, without imprisonment by the state, speaks volumes of the moral superiority of Western values over the barabarity of Islamism.

And it’s a real-life reminder of how freedom is the best tribute of all.

Hence my celebration today. Because we still can say what we think. Because freedom is still ours’ – if we do no succumb to the temptation to surrender it for a false sense of security.

A reader writes:

I am a black American woman, born into a family of Democrat civil rights activists.
On this fifth anniversary of 9/11. I am filled with many mixed emotions. That day was our worst, and our best in many ways. We were a nation united for a shining moment. But it seems it was fleeting. I am moved when I hear our anthem. And yes, hearing the Buckingham Palace band stirred in me fierce feelings of love for my country and our British allies.
The last time I felt such strong flutters in my chest … was the student protest in Tiannamen Square. As they linked arms, they were singing. When I realized what they were singing, I wept. The song? ‘We Shall Overcome’.

And we shall.