Month: January 2007

If you want an exhibit in how today’s "conservatives" can say black is white with a straight face, read this.

The entire "I have a dream" speech on YouTube. Where else?

A reader responds to the war-poem published earlier today:

You ask of your wrenching poem, "Does it make sense to you? Do you understand?"

No, it doesn’t, and I don’t, and I can’t.

I’m safely at home, working and raising my daughter and watching football – and though I’ve read accounts of what is happening in this sham of a war, and have heard stories of the sacrifices of men and women who are fighting on, as hard as they can, despite the stupidity of their civilian leadership, I can never know what it is like to see a friend die in a flash, never know what it’s like to have to decide whether to help that man on the side of the road or kill him before he kills you, to drive over children because the alternative is to keep your friends out in the open to be slaughtered.

I can’t know what you know, and I will never know what you know, and I’m sorry for that. I wish you could stay home, marry your girlfriend, raise a family, and watch football, and never think of this war again. I don’t know what can be done, but I do know that I’ll do the pitifully small amount I can, shouting as loudly as I can that this war has failed, and that we do our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines no service by sending in a handful more to save face. I’ll do that, knowing full well that in the end, it will not be enough; I only hope someday that you can forgive your fellow Americans for demanding sacrifice of you beyond what we were willing to give, trading your very safety for the illusion of safety for us.

I hope you can forgive us, but I understand if you cannot.

A reader writes:

I’m in the Marine Corps. I just returned home from seven months in Anbar Province. I’m deploying again in April. There’s a girl I want to marry, but I can’t. Out of 18 months, I will have spent a mere 6 at home. I can’t marry her, because I’m never here. She’ll probably leave me because of this surge, and it’s not her fault.

I’m not unique. What I mean to say is this – the nation at large has no idea what we’re going through. I go surfing in the mornings, and I see all these teenagers with shrapnel scars and grim faces. We’re all damaged.

So I wrote a poem this morning. Because I’m angry and I want it to be real to people who argue about it but have no idea what it’s all about. Read this. Does it make sense to you? Do you understand?

Fucker

They heard it twice; bombs do that when they crack
across the dunes, a groan chasing a clap
In the desert, where blue eyed boys in armor
listen, pink faced, to the wind and know
It’s the sound of someone dying when they
see the truck all mangled on the roadside
The thin man all blown to pieces inside
and, for a heartbeat, feel, because maybe
He was just an old man, driving home but
they see the next bomb with him meant for some
Pot-hole, dead goat, trash pile, old car, young man –
deadly, they know, like their dead friends, and now
They don’t shrink from saying to him, "Fucker,"
they say, "The first rule is, fucker, be sure
Where you put the last one, fucker." Laughing
without pity for him who is scattered
Bloody around the boys who die now too
because they aren’t repulsed by the sight of
This thing, anymore, that they’ll take home, thinking
of the day when they scolded a corpse

I read you everyday, Andrew. Thanks.

(Photo: Hadim Izban/AP.)

"I am sure that most of you have read that arresting little story from the pen of Washington Irving, entitled ‘Rip Van Winkle.’ The one thing that we usually remember about the story is that Rip Van Winkle slept twenty years. But there is another point … that is almost completely overlooked. It was the sign in the end, from which Rip went up in to the mountain for his long sleep. When Rip Van Winkle went up into the mountain, the sign has a picture of King George III of England. When he came down twenty years later, the sign had a picture of George Washington, the first president of the United States … The most striking thing about the story of Rip Van Winkle is not merely that Rip slept twenty years, but that he slept through a revolution …

There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in the world today. In a sense it is a triple revolution: that is a technological revolution, with the impact of automation and cybernation; then there is a revolution in weaponry, with the emergence of atomic and nuclear weapons of warfare. Then there is a human rights revolution, with the freedom explosion that is taking place all over the world. Yes, we do live in a period where changes are taking place and there is still the voice crying through the vista of time saying, ‘Behold, I make all things new, former things are passed by’…

"God grant that we will be participants in this newness and this magnificent development. If we will but do it, we will bring about a new day of justice and brotherhood and peace. And that day the morning stars will sing together and the sons of God will shout for joy," – Rev Martin Luther King Jr., sermon delivered on Passion Sunday (Mar. 31, 1968) at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC (from: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr.).

Scott Horton meditates on its meaning for today here.

(Photo: National Archives and Records Administration.)

Dahlia Lithwick maintains her admirable and relentless dissection of the terrible abuse of power and the constitution in the Padilla case, one of the most important cases in the history of American liberty. Money quote:

This is why the White House yanked Padilla from the brig to the high court to the federal courts and back to a Florida trial court: They were only forum shopping for the best place to enshrine the right to detain him indefinitely. Their claims about Padilla’s dirty bomb, known to be false, were a means of advancing their larger claims about executive power. And when confronted with the possibility of losing on those claims, they yanked him back to the criminal courts as a way to avoid losing powers they’d already won.

The right to detain him indefinitely. It’s as good a definition of creeping tyranny as any we have.

"In the American Conservative piece I wanted to offer some resistance to the assumption of conservative religious unanimity. I tried to point out that conservatism has no necessary relation to religious belief, and that rational thought, not revelation, is all that is required to arrive at the fundamental conservative principles of personal responsibility and the rule of law. I find it depressing that every organ of conservative opinion reflexively cheers on creationism and intelligent design, while delivering snide pot shots at the Enlightenment. Which of the astounding fruits of empiricism would these Enlightenment-bashers dispense with: the conquest of cholera and other infectious diseases, emergency room medicine, jet travel, or the internet, to name just a handful of the millions of human triumphs that we take for granted?" – Heather Mac Donald, part of the conservative solution, rather than part of the conservative problem.

The Onion has a dream.

You knew some crackpot would come up with it (apart from Jerry Falwell and Robert Knight). In his new book, Dinesh D’Souza does more to prove the parallels between Islamism and Christianism than I ever could. I’ll hold my peace because I’m reviewing the book for The New Republic. But Eric Scheie has a lot of sensible things to say. Money quote:

Like many bloggers, I’ve struggled over the definition of "conservative." If D’Souza’s conservatism includes a cultural alliance with declared enemies of America who stone women and execute gays, I guess I’m on the other "side" – even if I’d rather not be.

There’s an alternative alliance out there: pluralists and freedom-lovers against theocrats of all stripes. It comes in conservative and liberal varieties.

"What is it you expected from the beginning? That we’d have this thing done in two hours, so you could run to the fridge and grab a coke? That’s not a failing of President Bush, Mr. Dreher, it’s a failure in the depth of your thought.

And, now, your judgment, to record what, albeit it in monotone, is no less than an anti-war, anti-Bush screed for NPR, empowering them to pimp you out as this day’s useful idiot suggests that if you had anything to do with decision making in Iraq, things would be worse.

Fine, Mr. Dreher … you’ve jumped the warship, you’re out on your own. Please have the sense, the courtesy, the human decency to go sink to the bottom alone somewhere. While brave Americans are still fighting and dying for a necessary cause, those of us out here in the real world with experience and stamina have just that much more rowing to do, now – and still miles to go before we rest.

Go read or write a book, or something. You certainly don’t have what it takes to fight, or even help fight a difficult war. With benefit of hindsight, I’m forced to assume you never really did," – Dan Riehl, discussing Rod Dreher’s recent essay.

The post is almost a clinical exhibit in the hard right’s lamentable disposition to attack viciously anyone who dares question Bush administration orthodoxy.