Month: August 2008

John Edwards denies that he’s the father of Rielle Hunter’s baby girl. But he’s now been shown to be a bald-faced liar:

When the National Enquirer first reported the alleged Edwards-Hunter affair last October 11, Edwards, his campaign staff and Hunter vociferously denounced the report. "The story is false, it’s completely untrue, it’s ridiculous," Edwards told reporters then. He repeated his denials just two weeks ago.

Elizabeth was told in 2006, apparently. But the child was conceived last year. He better not be the father, or we have another set of lies.

A reflection on the first serious uprising against military rule – on an even more auspicious date than today: 8/8/88.

Michael Joseph Gross has a really intelligent essay in the new Out. It will earn him ire, but the profound impact that the web is having on gay life and gay culture is undeniable and well worth talking about. I have lived it myself, got a lot out of it, but agree with Michael that, in the end, the social isolation and human objectification it rewards can have some pretty grim consequences for one’s self-esteem as a gay man. Read the whole thing. Money quote:

[P]erpetually settling for Mr. Right Now becomes a failure of hope. When you came out, you did it because you wanted something. Part of what you wanted was sex, but part of what you hoped for was the possibility of being loved as your true self. And when, as often happens while cruising online, we diminish the hopes that drew us out of the closet, we reduce sexy to a purely physical act.

When we do these things we lie to ourselves — and worse, we tell the same lies that our enemies tell about us. The fundamentalist canard about loving the sinner but hating the sin draws a nonsensical distinction between person and act. Cruising online, by encouraging us to separate sex from the rest of our lives, does exactly the same thing. These are falsehoods about human nature and about the place of love in our lives, and they undermine the belief that sex can be anything more than a pastime.

Larry Kramer had a point, didn’t he?

The new one truly is painful. Note how a negative ad is constructed. There is a cover: in this case an argument about Obama’s pledge to raise taxes. That argument is dishonest as Ambers explains:

It claims that Barack Obama voted to raise taxes on folks earning more than $42,000 a year. Technically, the claim stands up– Obama voted for a budget resolution that  would have restored the 25% tax bracket to 28%, which, in theory, might mean more taxes paid by those earning as little as $42,000.  But Budget resolutions aren’t bills; they’re broad targets… so the McCain folks are having a little fun here.

A little fun? Obama isn’t proposing to raise taxes on people earning $42,000 a year, as the ad insinuates. The ad is substantively sleazy. But the tax issue is not what this ad is about. The ad is designed to perpetuate the notion that Obama is a wealthy, pampered socialist elitist, while "we" are not. When you look at McCain’s bio and Obama’s, you begin to appreciate the chutzpah.

McCain was a child of immense privilege, a son and grandson of admirals, given a prized education at the Naval Academy which he threw away – a performance he now touts in his favor. He dumped his first wife in favor of a fantastically wealthy heiress. He has had more money for a longer time than Obama has ever dreamed of. Obama, meanwhile, grew up on food stamps, was reared by a single mother and grandparents and by dint of sheer talent and hard work got to be the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. He was given very little and made the most of it; McCain was given so much and began his life, as he concedes, by taking it all for granted.

This ad alone – its dishonesty on so many levels, its appeal to class resentment and envy, its use of fear and personal demonization – is one reason the McCain campaign, like McCain himself, is now more Rove than Weaver. If he keeps running ads like this one, he richly deserves to lose.

Let’s hear it for Michael Phelps’ mom.

A reader writes:

I remember some time in the 1960’s Life magazine published a series about Auschwitz. It was a pull out section, I seem to remember it being printed on manila paper. I cried when I read about standup coffins in the camp.

I have tears, again.

Another writes:

Just when I think I can’t get any more upset, something new comes along. I am truly ashamed of my country. When I toured Auschwitz a few years ago, my guide, whose uncles had died there, showed us similar cells that the Nazis used to torture inmates. I never thought the United States would lower itself to Nazi methods. If the curtrent administration is not tried for war crimes, no one should be.

And yet somehow I suspect that the neocons will be silent. There is no evidence, so far as I know, that anyone has actually died in any of these interrogation coffins (although the Bush-Cheney administration has presided over scores of deaths in interrogation, as the Pentagon itself has conceded). They were merely used for torturing prisoners and now, we’re told, for restraining them. The proof of direct Bush-Cheney copying of actual Gestapo interrogation techniques – techniques the US once executed the perpetrators for – can be read here. Sometimes readers think I’m engaged in hyperbole. I wish I were.

The latest in "conservative" leisure-wear, now advertizing on the Drudge Report:

And some wonder why some of us have come to see the conservative movement as, at its base, disgusting.

This is not an atypical email:

Andrew; I’ll be 74 this coming December. Aside from a cane needed to walk, I’m in good shape. One of the sorry parts of aging is to suddenly realize that a friend is ‘losing it’ to age. Slowly comes this feeling that Charlie isn’t doing too well. You intuitively know why he’s not ok. You begin to worry about him, and wonder if you have the same symptoms. After all, you’re not healthy enough to be the last one standing. But Charlie – god, the guy’s on the down slope and the poor bastard doesn’t even recognize it!

I was proud to be a McCain supporter in 2000, but you can switch ‘John’ for ‘Charlie.’ And, God help you, your time will also come, Andrew. So keep the faith.

You will get the gist from two very different posts in the blogosphere – Scott Horton’s careful and enraged account of the case is here (he posted it before the sentencing), and Andy McCarthy’s even angrier splutter is here. What does it tell you about the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation policies that they have managed to appall those who care about this country’s reputation for justice and madden those who want to see all al Qaeda operatives, even very low-level functionaries like Hamdan, kept behind bars? I can’t help thinking of Dick Cheney on television, asserting mastery in his gravelly unflappable voice, oozing competence and assurance, even as his pig-headed arrogance and ideological extremism have revealed his vice-presidency as a farrago of cockamamie, incompetent, know-nothing machoism. Just because you have the anal-retentive David Addington running your office doesn’t mean you have anything under control.

Five and a half years (with time served), moreover, is not a crazy verdict when you examine the case. Even that judgment may well be overturned, as Scott explains. Hamdan is only still in jail at all because the government introduced new charges – inapplicable to a military commission – after the original, appropriate ones collapsed:

The military commissions exist to try war crimes. Conspiracy is a war crime. Indeed, Robert Jackson himself labored to make that point at Nuremberg and he succeeded. The conspiracy charges were therefore plainly within the competence of the commissions. And he was acquitted on these charges. But in the second round, “material support” charges were added—a crime invented after the fact, in violation of basic legal and constitutional norms. Notwithstanding vacuous Congressional pronouncements, “material support” is not a war crime. For obvious reasons—if it were a war crime, then the laws of war would be criminalizing entire populations that are enlisted in the support of the criminal regimes which not infrequently in human history have come to power.

If the administration had stuck to the Geneva Conventions, given all captives POW status (not full, but basic), constructed the kind of trials that the US did at Nuremberg, we would not only have been able to use the prosecution of many of these terrorists to broadcast the difference between them and us, we could have kept the guilty from ever being released – at least until Osama bin Laden surrendered. Instead, we have detained and tortured countless innocents, made a mockery of Western standards of justice, pulled the rug from under the Geneva Conventions – one of the greatest achievements of the civilized world – and allowed terrorists and their enablers to run free after a few months.

Could they have ballsed this up any more thoroughly?