Month: December 2008

A reader writes:

I have read your posts on Obama’s selection of Rick Warren and have a different perspective.  I share your hostility to the phenomenon you aptly call "Christianism" and your identification of Rick Warren with it.

At the same time, for better or worse, Rick Warren is the most prominent leader in contemporary evangelical Christianity.  I do not see Obama’s selection of him to give his invocation as an endorsement of Warren’s arguable bigotry and — more disturbing to me — his tolerance for the lawlessness of the Bush administration.  Obama is sending the signal that Warren’s views on these matters, however much he disagrees with them, do not make him an enemy.

And Warren’s agreement to do the invocation sends the signal to Christianists that Obama’s position on abortion does not make him their enemy. By including Warren in his inauguration, Obama is doing exactly what you wanted and expected him to do, striking a blow at the binary, culture-war mentality that is a toxic legacy of the sixties. I consider it a statesman-like move.

I take that point. And I understand where it’s coming from, as I wrote. The proof of it will lie in Obama’s actual acts on gay equality. If he manages to embrace Christianists while expanding, so far as he can, gay equality, good for him. My fear is that we will, once again, be wedged into second-class status.

Fighting back:

Area woman gets nominated for vice-presidency of the US.

Judah Grunstein compares post-WWI Germany with contemporary Russia:

"Given that Russia’s bellicose posturing of late has to do with domestic political concerns in addition to strategic ones, and given that the economic hardship ahead will only exacerbate those domestic political concerns, the possibility of an increasingly aggressive Russian leadership — and an eventual "Munich moment" — seems like a very real one."

I wasn’t the only one to get a shudder at the story from Iraq suggesting a plot for an internal Baath-party coup. I see it as the beginning of the next phase of the civil war, which could rage more wildly and savagely than anything we have seen so far – with US troops under SOFA rules unable to do anything but watch. This, I fear, is Bush’s Iraq legacy: a nightmare without end. Here’s hoping I’m being too gloomy as usual.

Dan Savage blasts the "but many of my friends are gay" cop out.

… the distortions multiply. Ken Silverstein points me to this Project on Government Oversight letter:

…we are concerned that some institutions are taking advantage of the law, assuming the trappings of failure in order to feed at the TARP trough. It has come to our attention that a number of insurance companies are attempting to qualify for TARP funds by purchasing banks.

Portland, Oregon, 9 am.

Alexandra Penney, a Madoff victim, tells her story:

I suddenly had a lot of money. I was in my late 40s, and I felt that I was just too old to have it in a plain old bank account.

(Hat tip: Salmon)

In his powerful post, my colleague Ross Douthat explores what torture means, and whether we can sustain a clear boundary between torture and "torture-lite." Here’s how I tackle that thorny question, after exploring it for many years. Focusing on techniques can be misleading. What it tends to do is make longer, less immediate forms of torture more acceptable than, say, pulling out the finger-nails or electrocuting testicles. But as I’ve been forced to discover over these past few gut-wrenching years, the torture created by freezing someone to near death or heating them to near-insanity or stretching their limbs day after day or depriving them of any real sleep for months on end is no less torture than the comic book Jack Bauer variety. In fact, if you read accounts of torture in the Soviet gulag or the Gestapo’s "Third Degree", you find that the torture that left no physical scars was in some ways worse. Raping an individual’s soul and mind through a war of attrition against their body and humanity can be achieved in many ways. Ask John McCain or Menachem Begin, two men who are neither liberal wimps nor pacifists.

Our enemies are human beings. They are never utterly evil; and we are never utterly good. Forgetting this truth is to dance with the devil in ways Americans very rarely have. Throwing out the rule of law or, worse, just rewriting it with hired legal guns to make a mockery of its plain meaning, is to throw out our own protection against the devil as well, when he comes to get us. And if we do not believe that the power to torture, to wield this kind of total power over other individuals, can warp a mind and destroy a soul, we are ignoring history.

Yes, as Ross argues, we live in a fallen world. If Americans want to continue to exercize the kind of hegemony they seem to want over the world, American hands will never be completely clean. We will have to deal with governments that do evil things and sometimes we will be forced to acquiesce to them. The American government has indeed dealt with torturing regimes in the past and has assessed "intelligence" from torture sessions conducted by allies (the Jordanians spring to mind). I follow Niebuhr in understanding that there is no pure path in a world where Jihadism lurks.

But to import the evil of torture into the American system itself is something else. It is to import a swiftly metastasizing cancer. It corrupts the rule of law from within, it destroys reliable evidence and intelligence, it is never fully accountable to anything but itself. People wonder why Dick Cheney seems to have changed in these years. How could someone who has authorized what he has authorized not have changed? The power to torture warps the torturer as much as the tortured. It belongs to the universe of power, not freedom, of dark, not light. We will not advance freedom if we enbrace it – and we have not advanced freedom by embracing it. We have in fact advanced what we are fighting.

An accounting for this cancer will not be pretty or easy. Chemotherapy never is. But without it, the American idea will die. That much I know.