Month: December 2009

Here’s a graphic video of a peaceful march in Tehran on December 27. Notice how restrained and calm the crowd is. Then watch to the end, as the regime’s thugs attack:

Is John Yoo saying he never met the former president? Money quote:

Were you close to George Bush? 

No, I’ve never met him. I don’t know Cheney either. I have not gone hunting with him, which is probably a good thing for me.

Weren’t you invited to the White House Christmas party during your two years at the Department of Justice?

I don’t think so.

But here's the kicker:

A psychiatrist might say you are in denial. 

I deny that I am in denial.

When is the OPR report going to be released, Mr Holder? When?

They have made the iPhone a joke if you actually want to make a call:

Let’s try to do this reasonably and with particularity: Every call I made yesterday on my iPhone dropped. A number of them were to my 84-year-old mother who has a hard time understanding why telephones no longer work. I have a hard time understanding this, too.

Is it mere success, as AT&T seems to suggest?

The iPhone is just too popular, straining its network. The fault, in other words, lies with consumer demand and great design, and not with AT&T and its resources and infrastructure. But how come for the last two years I go dead in the East Thirties, on 57th Street and Sixth, on 72nd and Madison, on Bleeker and Lafayette, on the Williamsburg Bridge, and about a hundred other specific locations I’m too irate to remember now?

Overload would be random (of course, iPhone calls drop randomly, too), but a plainly crummy system is one that can’t cover some of the most well-trafficked thoroughfares and intersections in the world.

As Netanyahu engages in yet another "go fuck-yourself" to the president of the United States, and continues his ethnic social engineering in East Jerusalem, an op-ed in Ha'aretz gives an insight into the forces he is coping with at home. Americans can be a little naive when it comes to many Israelis' view of the West Bank and the religious and tribal fundamentalism that courses through their discourse. But this op-ed in the liberal Ha'aretz highlights the kind of looking glass world many extreme Israelis and their Washington allies inhabit:

Once upon a time there was a black woman; her name was Rosa Parks. There were racially discriminating laws in the United States, but she continued to sit on the bus even when she was told to vacate her seat for a white person. She was arrested, which set off a process whose end saw the abolishment of racial segregation on American buses. How is it possible that one little black woman, a dressmaker by profession, could change history simply because she remained sitting? Her protest was stronger than any demonstration, op-ed piece or Knesset vote. She opted for the natural choice; that is why she was triumphant.

People get married and have children. The children need space. The children grow up and get married. The children need a house. That is known as life. No one has ever managed to stop it. But every time another evil person arises who plans to destroy us, he does not succeed. And he does not succeed in destroying life itself. 

Yes, the settler is analogizing the seizure of other people's land, slow expulsion of much of the population, erection of massive walls to contain and police them … as the equivalent of the fight against Jim Crow. But she's not done yet:

The freeze is an edict that the public cannot tolerate.

It is not democratic, nor is it humane. It hits hard at the pockets of law-abiding citizens and embitters their lives. But at its foundation, either intentionally or by accident, is pure and basic apartheid – it is forbidden for Jews to live in certain places. It is forbidden to build. It is forbidden to develop. And it doesn't matter what the reasons are…

Despite the fury and the insult, let's not turn to violence. There is a simple, natural solution that is full of life – continuing to build. That will perhaps embarrass the prime minister in front of U.S. President Barack Obama, but that's precisely the point. A person with a manual cement mixer in Samaria can change history. Sometimes the man in the field can be a lot stronger than the great leaders. Just like Rosa Parks. 

What I notice in this op-ed is no reference at all to the Palestinians and their claims and their rights. To these settlers, Arabs are non-persons; they do not exist in their narrative so they are utterly invisible. There is no one to compromise with – just land promised by divine diktat, against which there is no appeal. Any Israeli government beholden to these people will be incapable of making peace on its own. Increasingly, it seems to me, NATO or US troops will have to intervene on the border to enforce a separation and an end to these settlements for good and all.

(Photo: Right wing Israelis demonstrate in the city centre on December 9, 2009 in Jerusalem, Israel. The protests were held in response to last month's decision by the Israeli government to halt construction of new houses in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. A 10 month moratorium on new building permits for Jewish settlers was welcomed internationally but has been rejected by both Palestinians and Jewish settlers. By Uriel Sinai/Getty Images.)

… gets a divorce. To be fair, his long-running coordinated attempt to deny others the right to any civil marriage at all was only a means to an end – using fear to win elections. It wasn't about marriage as such, or gays as such. Rove isn't a homophobe in private by all accounts; he just knows how to exploit the fears of those who are.

[Update: Greenwald, forced into exile because his own partner cannot reside in the US, takes a tougher line on Rove's marriage cynicism here.]

There is ample evidence of how the Palins use law suits to further persecute troublesome, i.e. honest, family members. Remember the Wooten saga? From Newsweek:

An Anchorage judge three years ago warned Sarah Palin and members of her family to stop "disparaging" the reputation of Alaska State Trooper Michael Wooten, who at the time was undergoing a bitter separation and divorce from Palin's sister Molly.

Allegations that Palin, her husband Todd, and at least one top gubernatorial aide continued to vilify Wooten—after Palin became Alaska's governor and pressured state police officials to take action against him—are at the center of "Troopergate," a political and ethical controversy which has embroiled Palin's administration and is currently the subject of an official inquiry by a special investigator hired by the state legislature…

Court documents show that Judge Suddock was disturbed by the alleged attacks by Palin and her family members on Wooten's behavior and character. "Disparaging will not be tolerated—it is a form of child abuse," the judge told a settlement hearing in October 2005, according to typed notes of the proceedings. The judge added: "Relatives cannot disparage either. If occurs [sic] the parent needs to set boundaries for their relatives."

(This post came out of me in a rush, prompted by one particularly depressed afternoon in the office.

I guess one thing I have been forced to learn this past year is a little more equanimity, a deeper understanding that all earthly things decay, and all human institutions flawed and that these facts are only truly depressing if they admit of no possible reform or renewal. And the greatness of the Western system is that it allows enough air for reform and renewal to take hold – as it has, fitfully, in America this past year.

My faith teaches me that solipsistic dismay is a sin, because it does not allow for the possibility of grace, of God's transformation of the world through our souls opening up to his eternal and unconditional love. Reading a lot of Merton this year – that gruff, ornery but profound Trappist – has lifted me up – and taught me more clearly to follow what I constantly preach to others: know hope. – Andrew)

Blogging takes you into the ever instant-present, and the world's rapidly changing scene can prompt shifts in your outlook you never truly expected and don't yet quite understand. I realize that my passionate dismay at the Freeman affair, for example, was surprising to some, and even to me. I'm a passionate believer in Israel's right to exist and care about her security. But the changing world requires adjusting to new realities and past experiences. And sometimes events bring ruptures to the surface that reflect tectonic shifts underneath. And that requires some context. By its nature this post is therefore somewhat solipsistic. Please skip this post if my own internal angst is of understandably minimal interest to you. But I'm a believer in expressing conflicts, not inhibiting them. I don't work on background.

In the last decade, I realize that many of my most cherished institutions have failed – and failed in ways that are not trivial. Perhaps the institution dearest to me, the Catholic church, greeted the emergence of gay people in a way that never truly reflected the compassion of Jesus or the good faith arguments many of us offered as a way forward. This was sad to me, but not life-changing. I know the Holy Spirit takes time, as James Allison reminds us. But then came the sex abuse crisis. Like many others, the truth about the evil in the heart of the church, and the cooptation and enabling of that evil, and the refusal to take real responsibility for the evil, simply left me gasping for air. I realize now that my Catholic identity never recovered, even if my faith endures in a far more modest and difficult way.

Then my adopted country. Again, the frustrations nag, in my case the still-unresolved matter of how an immigrant who became HIV-positive a decade after arriving here can have a secure home and future. I still cannot, although I am hopeful the Obama administration will soon enact what the Congress last year voted for overwhelmingly and the Bush administration intended to change before it ended.  [Update: The ban is formally lifted next January 4]. And the fact that this country also treats my legal civil marriage as if it didn't exist, as if our love and family and commitment were worth nothing, wounds every day.

But again, I understand these things take time. I'm lucky to be here at all and have seen enormous progress in my lifetime. The real sucker-punch to my faith in American government was the embrace of torture against terror suspects. Since it came as part of a response to Islamist evil that I had supported, in a war I had aggressively mongered for, shock was intermixed with guilt, and guilt ceded to a kind of patriotic grief. It is the flipside of love – this kind of grief. It has not abated because there has been no real accounting and no real responsibility taken – just as in the church. The people who really held power, who really should have taken the fall: they are still unrepentant and defiant, even contemptuous of their critics.

The conservative movement is another institution of a sort that has come undone before my eyes. It really was a formative part of my identity as a young man, and yet, for all the reasons I spelled out in my last book, it is not a movement that I feel comfortable in any longer. It actually appalls me daily.

What I could once dismiss as minor flaws – supply-side nuttiness, near-idolatrous American exceptionalism, religious zeal – are now its core, defining features. The way it has responded to the economic crisis – a form of ideological autism – reflects a deep malaise. But, although Obama's pragmatic progressivism has many attractive qualities, I cannot be a liberal. I do not have liberalism's confidence in government activism, I do not share its collectivist instincts, I find its interest groups unappealing. I do not and never will belong. 

Maybe this is adulthood finally arriving a little late: the knowledge that everything is flawed and you just need to get on with it. But a church perpetrating the rape and abuse of children through the power of its moral authority is not a flaw; it's a self-refutation. A movement betraying its core principles in office and then parading as a parody of purists is a form of anti-conservatism as I understand it. And a democratic country using torture to procure intelligence it can use to justify more torture, and prosecuting a war that never ends against an enemy that can never surrender: this, whatever else it is, is not America as its founders saw it. Again, it is a kind of self-refutation.

Where to go? What to do? You read me flounder every day; and you can find many less conflicted bloggers to read. Maybe I should take a break and live a less examined life for a while. Or maybe I should do what I am still doing: trying to make sense of where I belong, stay praying in a church that has sealed itself off from modernity, cling to a conservatism that begins to feel like a form of solipsism, hang on in the hope that America can reform itself and repair the world a little. I think, in fact, that this is obviously the right and only serious choice. Life is always a temporary and losing battle, an engagement with the deadliness of doing. It just feels deadlier than usual in these past few years of brutally unsentimental education.

Or maybe I should laugh more.

Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.

Pat Buchanan wants to deny the Detroit would-be bomber pain medicine for his burns. This clearly violates American domestic law and the Geneva Conventions. But what does Buchanan care about human decency and the rule of law? And, we have been told, the dude with the tighty-whities is talking like a canary. And probably with a very posh British accent.

"Guy Ritchie is the worst screenwriter in the world, but, to be fair, he is not the worst director. He is only the worst director of the people who actually get to make movies. As we speak, there are human beings walking the Earth – perhaps as many as a half dozen of them – with less directorial talent, but they've been safely diverted into other activities," – Mick Lasalle, Hearst Newspapers.