Month: May 2011

I disagree with Rick Santorum that there is no value in secularism. I do not believe that people in public life should cite religious teaching to resolve public policy disputes, even though such teaching may legitimately influence them. So my arguments against torture are not Catholic per se and my faith is mentioned in public arguments on this issue a tiny percentage of the time. I am not affirming my own faith in these posts; I am making secular arguments that are designed, however fallibly, for readers of any faith or none.

But Santorum famously believes that this is a fallacious distinction, and that the Church even has a duty to police Catholic politicians who differ deeply with the Vatican on questions of public morality – and even deny them Communion. By Santorum's logic, it seems to me that the Bishops should also deny Santorum Communion on the basis of his open and enthusiastic support for the torture of terror suspects who are prisoners. But Santorum needs at the very least to explain this apparent double standard.

Stripping detainees of their clothes, slamming them against hollow walls, freezing them into hypothermia, depriving them of light, sound and mobility, force-feeding them, shackling them in excruciating stress positions, aiming to remove from them all autonomy as free human beings: these are profound evils, under any name, according to the Church, for whom human dignity is non-negotiable. John Gehring elaborates:

Catholic bishops described torture as an assault on the dignity of human life and an "intrinsic evil" in their 2007 statement Faithful Citizenship. (For a more in depth look at intrinsic evil and political responsibility read this essay by Cathleen Kaveny of the University of Notre Dame in America magazine.) "The use of torture must be rejected as fundamentally incompatible with the dignity of the human person and ultimately counterproductive in the effort to combat terrorism," the bishops wrote in Faithful Citizenship. As Kyle R. Kupp points out over at Vox Nova, Pope Paul VI described such acts as "infamies" that "poison society," do "supreme dishonor to the Creator," and "do more harm to those who practice them than to those who suffer from injury."

I do no believe for a moment that Santorum's attempt to argue that the techniques described above are not torture can survive this standard. The standard is the dignity of the human person. And what he describes as a defense of "enhanced interrogation techniques" is, in fact, even more damning. To destroy an individual's will by physical and psychological terror in order to achieve "compliance" – rather than to seek information through torture – is an intrinsic evil. Nothing can justify it, under Catholic teaching. Moreover, the techniques used are an almost text-book definition of stripping human beings of dignitas.

Hooding people, stripping them, subjecting them to sexual humiliation, near-drowning them strapped on a board, robbing them of light and sound or bombarding them with intolerable noise for days and even weeks on end: if these are not an outright assault on human dignity, what is? And notice too that we are not talking about politicians permitting others in civil society to commit an intrinsic evil like abortion. We are talking about the politicians directly authorizing people under their own command to inflict torture.

The Catholic hierarchy has been so coopted and politicized by the Republican far right that I have given up even hoping for a clear and public denunciation of this evil. But if they find time to condemn gay couples and abortions in the civil and private realm, can they not do so for torture in the public? And challenge a leading Catholic politician who is attacking a core principle of Church doctrine and distorting it to advance his own political career?

(Photo: Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) arrives at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton on April 7, 2006. President George W. Bush spoke at the breakfast about his support of federal and state initiatives to limit abortion. He said, "the Catholic Church rejects such a pessimistic view of human nature and offers a vision of human freedom and dignity rooted in the same self-evident truths of America's founding." By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Not your typical Parisian mime:

An incisive post from Adam Serwer. Money quote:

There’s little chance for change in how Arabs and Muslims view the United States as long as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains unresolved, the U.S.’s military footprint in the Muslim world remains significant, and the U.S. does little more than wag its finger at allies engaged in brutal crackdowns against their own people.

In many ways this was a beautiful speech, particularly its emphasis on universal human rights and historical comparisons to America’s own movements for change. But the allusions to our own history, while meaningful to us, may not resonate much with the speech’s intended Mideast audience. Obama can give all the speeches he wants, but absent progress on those fronts, negative perceptions of the U.S. in the region are unlikely to change. America’s problems in the Middle East have never been about what it has said, but about what it has done.

Cheryl Thomas applauds the US legal system:

Recently, the United Nations reported that 102 countries still have no legal provisions addressing domestic violence. While sexual assault may technically be a crime in many countries, laws are weak, and effective prosecution of rapists is rare. Public prosecutors have no responsibility to pursue charges under these laws.

At the meeting in Istanbul, Russian women reported that 4,790 cases of rape and attempted rape were reported in 2009, but only 10 percent of rape victims ever report the crime. They know their allegations will not be investigated. Another report described the Turkish legal system’s alarming treatment of victims of violence. In one story, a young woman who had been raped and assaulted by her husband for years was advised by police to reconcile with him after she was hospitalized with a broken arm and skull.

Don Taylor has a three part interview (one, two, three) with Charles Blahous, "one of the two public trustees for Social Security & Medicare." On Medicare's financing problems:

Pre-2035, demography is the bigger factor.  Ultimately health cost inflation would become the larger factor.  This in my view is hugely misunderstood.  Yes, health cost inflation is a huge issue, but it’s a harder factor to predict, and it doesn’t actually become Medicare’s biggest problem for some time.  We first have to come to grips with the number of years for which individuals receive support under Medicare.

The right is jumping up and down about this part of Obama's speech:

[W]hile the core issues of the conflict must be negotiated, the basis of those negotiations is clear: a viable Palestine, and a secure Israel. The United States believes that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine. The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.

The graphic above is from Fox News. Here's Quin Hillyer at The American Spectator:

In other words, Obama is now ready to advocate the next step of his plan to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth.

Ace Of Spades:

Obama pretty much announced that he wants Israel to return to its 1967 borders– thus endorsing the terrorists' key demand without requiring any substantive concessions on their part.

Jim Hoft:

Obama killed Osama… He killed the US economy… Now he wants to kill Israel.

Other Republicans spreading this garbage: Jonathan Tobin, John Bolton, William A. Jacobson, and several others. As Jeffrey Goldberg says, the 1967 borders comment is not news:

This has been the basic idea for at least 12 years. This is what Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat were talking about at Camp David, and later, at Taba. This is what George W. Bush was talking about with Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert. So what's the huge deal here? Is there any non-delusional Israeli who doesn't think that the 1967 border won't serve as the rough outline of the new Palestinian state?

Walter Russell Mead notes that this mirrors Bush's Israel policy:

[Obama's] policy on Israel-Palestine is … looking Bushesque.  Like Bush, he wants a sovereign but demilitarized Palestinian state.  Like Bush, he believes that the 1967 lines with minor and mutually agreed changes should be the basis for the permanent boundaries between the two countries — and like Bush he set Jerusalem and the refugees to one side.

"I simply do not want to believe that this woman – any woman – shoved a square pillow under her shirt. I do not want to believe anyone could so smugly mug for the camera and thump a pillow. It’s abnormal beyond reason. It would be insane," – Laura Novak.

Copyranter WTFs:

Headline: "Allergies can attack at any time." So, both Sunflower Ghoul [above] and Pollen Gargoyle [here] are holding sticks? Which they will now use to—beat me to death? Tone's a bit on the heavy side maybe, Johnson & Johnson?

A reader writes:

Here's what you don't get about Palin. It's not just you either: this is making me crazy because it seems so blindingly obvious. Palin will run if she thinks Obama is vulnerable in 2012. It's not 2012 yet so she doesn't know. If she decides to run, she'll clean everyone else's clock. You can just put all those polls away.

If Obama looks like a shoo-in for reelection (as is likely), Palin will sit it out and let everyone talk about how she's "over" and then she'll keep a low but present profile for four years and then she'll jump in. She's not going to run and lose. That's not in her DNA.

The only problem with this scenario – apart from the idea that Palin has anything in her head that resembles strategy – is that the minute she says she's not running, the media klieg-lights whence she derives her political oxygen shut down. She becomes an embarrassment neither the GOP nor the MSM want to revisit. She really is over. And by 2016, if Obama is re-elected, I bet you the front-runners are going to be in the center, not the fringe. This is Palin's last and only chance. Somewhere, she senses it.