Month: April 2012

Mormonism And Motherhood

McKay Coppins discusses the role Mormonism may have played in Ann Romney’s decision to stay home: 

[F]or many Latter-day Saint women, staying at home to raise children is less a lifestyle choice than religious one — a divinely-appreciated sacrifice that brings with it blessings, empowerment, and spiritual prestige. These doctrinally-defined gender roles aren’t entirely unique — they’ve been preached by various sects for centuries — but Mormons have proven uniquely unwilling to bend them to fit modern times. The Church took heat in the ’70s for waging a high-profile campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment; and even today, Mormon women remain twice as likely to be homemakers as non-Mormons, regardless of income levels.

Dreher is pleased: 

[G]ood on Mormon women and their husbands for walking the countercultural walk. My wife and I have never had to make a critical financial sacrifice to live out our professed values in this way, but I hope that if we are ever in that position, we will have the courage to do what the Mormons do.

Jennifer Rubin somehow sees a smear piece:

The BuzzFeed piece is misleadingly titled, “Why Ann stayed home.” In fact the reporter, McKay Coppins (who has identified himself as a Mormon), reveals nothing about her motivations. That, rather, appears to be the “hook” for a discourse asserting the Mormon faith is discriminatory and oppressive toward women. Ann wasn’t interviewed. The Romney campaign didn’t comment for his report. And the reporter doesn’t indicate he tried to reach either. The piece foreshadows, I fear, of what is to come — effort to portray Mormons as weirdly out of step and unmodern, and by implication, Romney as being unfit for the presidency.

Larison is puzzled by Rubin’s reaction: 

Rubin ignores the parts of the story that describe the LDS support structure available to mothers, and it is Rubin, not Coppins, who has concluded that report portrays “Mormons as condescending and backward thinking.” Rubin wants to appear very concerned that Romney’s religion is being used against him while simultaneously attacking the beliefs and practices of his co-religionists. All in all, it’s a very weird “defense” of Romney in response to an article that isn’t attacking him or his religion.

How Bush And Cheney Used A Stasi School For Torture

Kiejkuty-stare

Unlike the United States, some democracies take the international and domestic rule of law seriously. That's especially true of countries that once suffered under totalitarianism of various sorts, like communism in Poland. And so we are beginning to see glimmers of legal accountability from Europe for the war crimes perpetrated by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The EU long ago reported the existence of torture sites in Poland and Romania, and one of the EU investigators of these war crimes was former Solidarity member, Józef Pinior. He insists he saw something important:

Pinior has always claimed that, during his investigations, he was told about a document signed by Leszek Miller, Poland’s Prime Minister at the time the CIA prison was in operation, providing information regulating the operations of the prison – in a military intelligence training base in Stare Kiejkuty in north eastern Poland – including information about how, if necessary, to deal with corpses inside the facility.

My italics (but this isn't the only formal recognition of deaths in the torture archipelago). We know, because even the Pentagon has confirmed, that several prisoners held under the Bush-Cheney administration were tortured to death. That those running the program knew that the techniques were brutal enough to risk occasional deaths of the victims adds one extra layer of criminality and evil to the process. The case in Poland appears to have been slowed but not halted by the prosecutors, aware of where it might lead. But one nugget will surely strike home in Poland, as told by Adam Krzykowski, a journalist for Polish public TV, and the first reporter to provide proof of the landing in Poland of a specific rendition plane:

Off the record, Wojciech Czuchnowski and I also obtained information about the location where people suspected of terrorism and kidnapped by the CIA were detained, on the premises of the so-called spy school in Stare Kiejkuty in the Mazury region, about 20 km from the airport in Szymany, where planes landed which were used by the CIA. We were also informed about the existence of another relevant building, a two-storey villa — once named as “Marcus Wolf Villa” in honour of the founder of the East German intelligence service — which appeared to have been used as a back office, and may have included housing for the interrogators. It seems that both the villa and the presumed prison building were located in a specific section of the grounds occupied by the spy school, which was separate from the rest and even more heavily guarded.

Isn't there something grotesquely appropriate in that Bush and Cheney, in importing into the US the torture techniques of totalitarian regimes, used one building named in honor of the founder of the East German Stasi? They remain war criminals, and the rule of law in America remains unenforced by the Obama administration on the core issue of torture. But not all politicians are as craven as Obama on this. Here's the current conservative prime minister of Poland, Donald Tusk:

“Poland will not be a country anymore where politicians will arrange something under the table and it will not come to light, even if they do it hand-in-hand with the biggest empire in the world,” and “those in power must be able very effectively to safeguard the dignity of the Polish state; in other words, they must act only in accordance with their conscience, Polish law and international law.”

Good for Poland. There is far more accountability in that new democracy than is allowed to exist in this one.

(Photo: the exterior of the Polish spy school in Stare Kiejkuty, where prisoners were tortured under the order of president George W. Bush.)

What Empire Does

The sickening pictures speak for themselves. At what point will we recognize that inserting ourselves into places like Afghanistan and Iraq will change us, has changed us, and will change us. Mercifully, this latest inhuman excrescence is not government policy, as at Abu Ghraib. But it exposes even more deeply the inherent failure and moral corruption of occupying Afghanistan and the need to withdraw sooner rather than later.

How Is Iran Different From Reports Of WMDs In Iraq? Ctd

A reader writes:

The latest "Ask Jennifer Rubin Anything" is a real doozy. She uses most of the two minutes making the sensible point that no, we can't know for sure that Iran has nuclear weapons. I expected her to explain why we should bomb anyway, but her last sentence was a real masterpiece. Here it is, transcribed:

I think the notion that we know all things at all times that are going on within a very closed, very secretive society is frankly wishful thinking on the part of some people who are simply looking for yet another excuse to not take decisive action against what I think and what many people think is the primary national security threat that our country is facing.

Wow. Somehow, and I can't understand how, she takes the reasonable skepticism about whether Iran is building nuclear weapons (not to mention what they'd do if they got them) and turns it into a point against those who don't want to bomb Iran! Critics of preemptive war are "looking for yet another excuse not to take decisive action." (I get the sense that she knows something's amiss from her facial expression at the end of the interview.) Can anyone explain this, or is it just intellectual thuggery?

Another is also incredulous:

Am I the only one who thinks that this is totally crazy? In what other areas of our life are we taught not to learn from past mistakes, and instead are actively encouraged to repeat them because to not do so would be a sign of excuse-making, or weakness, or … what, exactly? Honestly this way of thinking is so foreign to me that I can't begin to understand how a smart woman like Rubin could come to believe it. Is she so blinded by her hatred of Iran that she is willing to throw reason out with the trash? Or is this how she views decision making in her other parts of her life? Would she seriously encourage her child, if he or she had touched a hot plate and been hurt, to touch the hot plate again because to do otherwise is just "looking for yet another excuse" to not carry the plate?

Not having much familiarity with Rubin's other political positions, I have to believe it's the former and that Iran is a special case. But if she bases her political philosophy on such faulty reasoning, how can she ever be trusted?

When Deficits Really Don’t Matter

Frum makes the case for moving our rhetorical focus away from "deficits" simpliciter:

The United States does not have a "deficit problem." It has an immediate economic underperformance problem (which depresses revenues) and it has a chronic healthcare overpayment problem (healthcare is the most important driver—at this point you could fairly say the only driver—of U.S. federal spending). Address those two concerns, and you are well on your way to a solution.

Yglesias sees some evidence that Obamacare is helping on that front. Matt O'Brien applies similar thinking to the euro crisis, focusing on Spain:

[J]ust today, the Bundesbank — Germany's national central bank, and the real power behind the ECB — came out and told countries not to worry about growth. Telling a country in a debt crisis like Spain not to worry about growth is like telling man in debt to not worry about finding a job. The most polite way to characterize this advice is "delusional."

And, in the end, it might foster deeper division and resentment in Europe than we have seen in decades.

Quote For The Day

"People ask me, “Why don’t you guys get together?” And I say, “Exactly how much would you expect me to cooperate with Michele Bachmann?” And they say, “Are you saying they’re all Michele Bachmann?” And my answer is no, they’re not all Michele Bachmann. Half of them are Michele Bachmann. The other half are afraid of losing a primary to Michele Bachmann. So, no, there are maybe three Republicans I can work with, on a couple of issues, out of the thirtysomething on the committee," – Barney Frank.

Hewitt Award Nominee

"In the late 19th century, Bismark [sic] waged his “Kulturkamf,” [sic], a culture war against the Roman Catholic Church, closing down every Catholic school and hospital, convent and monastery in Imperial Germany. Clemenceau, nicknamed “the priest eater,” tried the same thing in France in the first decade of the 20th Century. Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments, would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open, but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social services, and health care. In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama – with his radical, pro abortion and extreme secularist agenda, now seems intent on following a similar path," – Bishop Daniel Jenky. 

Words fail. It is not encouraging when a reference to nineteenth century Germany cannot get the spelling of Bismarck or Kulturkampf right. But this is the current hierarchy. They weren't selected for their intelligence, which, after all, could be a liability. They were selected for their subservience to their superiors.

And the good, if intellectually challenged, Bishop is comparing a deliberate policy of minority Catholic persecution in Germany in the nineteenth century, when thousands of Catholics were thrown in jail, with a tiny provision in the first universal healthcare law in America (a longstanding Catholic goal) that would include contraception in health insurance paid for by the insurance company. No woman would be forced to use it. And yet 98 percent of Catholic women still consult their consciences and do. The Vatican's own commission on the subject came to the same conclusion as these Catholic women – only to be vetoed by one celibate man, Pope Paul VI. If this is a totalitarian attack on religious freedom, then I am a proud heterosexual.

What it actually is is a dyspeptic eruption from an all-male "celibate" hierarchy about the loss of its power over its employees, Catholic and non-Catholic. And it is a terribly depressing sign that the Catholic hierarchy, like much of the evangelical leadership, is now in danger of becoming a front for one political party.

What’s Herman Cain Up To?

Cain-rally

He's creating insane ads and cashing in – even if he can't draw a crowd:

[Cain's life] compares awfully well to the no-end-in-sight tragedy that is Newt 2012. When he left Congress, Gingrich started founding think tanks and holding conferences that people actually showed up to—the strategy that Cain is Xeroxing. Those think tanks, now Newt-less, are shutting down. Running for president doesn’t give Gingrich space in the media to share his grand ideas. It gets him headlines about being bit by penguins. The life of the professional has-been is sweeter than the life of the has-been candidate.

(Photo of the dismal showing for Cain's "Revolution on the Hill," a 9-9-9 rally held on Monday, by Dave Weigel)