Category: Old Dish

“No religious agency should be forced to act against its principles in the name of charity.” – Catholic Action League of Massachusetts Executive Director C.J. Doyle. A Catholic group acting on the basis of “charity”? What kind of Christian concept is that? There are far higher principles for Catholics than what St Paul called “caritas” or “agape.” Homophobia, for one. At least under this Pope.

Brian Riedl crunches the numbers on the Republican party’s continuing destruction of the fiscal health of the United States. It’s a grim picture.

BUSH VERSUS CHRISTMAS: So here’s a great test for Bill O’Reilly. Will he now include the president on his hilariously relentless campaign to “save” Christmas from all those evil secular, liberal, humanist, ACLU-type, anti-American traitors? Or will he decide to beat up on Wal-Mart instead? The Bush family’s liberal secularism seems genuine, by the way. The Washington Post has the following item today:

Laura Bush, ducking into the Georgetown Pottery Barn yesterday for barely five minutes, wearing a bright blue suit and wishing shoppers “Happy Holidays” in a very perky way. Didn’t buy anything — maybe just making her wish list?

She’s a heathen, I tell you. A disgusting liberal heathen.

A reader notices something:

I’m currently reading Willard Sterne Randall’s biography of Thomas Jefferson. In it, he quotes a letter to Patrick Henry from Jefferson in early 1779 regarding the treatment of English prisoners during the Revolution:

“I would not endeavor to show that their lives are valuable to us, because it would suppose a possibility that humanity was kicked out of doors in America and interest only attended to … But is an enemy so execrable that, though in captivity, his wishes and comforts are to be disregarded and even crossed? I think not. It is for the benefit of mankind to mitigate the horrors of war as much as possible. The practice, therefore, of modern nations of treating captive enemies with politeness and generosity is not only delightful in contemplation but really interesting to all the world, friends, foes, and neutrals.”

Considering how much conservatives like to fawn over the States’ Rights supported by Jefferson, what do they do with this enlightened view? Or is it aiding the enemy to even ask?

It’s aiding the enemy. Our duty is to shut up. At least, that’s what the vice-president appears to believe.

The best news for the U.S. in a long time in Europe was the defeat of Gerhard Schroder in the recent German elections. Finally, the U.S. had a new Chencellor in a critical country in central Europe, eager to repair relations. And on the first trip to greet her, what does the U.S. secretary of state have to do? She has to spend almost her entire time dealing with suspicion, even among pro-American Europeans, that the U.S. lies and covers up detainee abuses usually found in dodgy autocracies. Here’s a pro-American British Tory:

“It’s clear that the text of the speech was drafted by lawyers with the intention of misleading an audience,” Andrew Tyrie, a Conservative member of Parliament, said … Parsing through the speech, Mr. Tyrie pointed out example after example where, he said, Ms. Rice was using surgically precise language to obfuscate and distract. By asserting, for instance, that the United States does not send suspects to countries where they “will be” tortured, Ms. Rice is protecting herself, Mr. Tyrie said, leaving open the possibility that they “may be” tortured in those countries.

Read the European press. If this is the view of the pro-Americans, you can imagine the field day the anti-American left is having with this stuff. What this administration is succeeding in doing is deepening an already profound gulf between European democracies – especially their electorates – and the U.S. We cannot win the war on terror without their full cooperation and trust. We are throwing both away by our torture policies. Pass the McCain Amendment. No deals. No retroactive immunity for the criminals who sanctioned torture or those who carried it out. Just a return to American honor – and a process of accountability for every official who helped make torture U.S. policy.

The great premise of a free press is that if you keep at it long enough, you really can expose a simple lie, repeated endlessly by government officials, including the president. The biggest lie – and the most appalling use of newspeak in a generation – is the mantra of Condi Rice and president Bush: “We do not torture.” It is hard to think of a graver issue on which a president should brazenly and consciously lie to his own people and to the world. But that is what he is still doing and what the secretary of state has been doing in Europe. Big news: no one in Europe believes her. The NYT elegantly unpacked the lie in a story today. Money quote:

As Europeans continue to investigate whether torture or detention of terrorism suspects took place on European soil, Ms. Rice assured Mrs. Merkel that “the United States does not condone torture.”

“It is against U.S. law to be involved in torture or conspiracy to commit torture,” Ms. Rice said. “And it is also against U.S. international obligations.”

But the American definition of torture is in some cases at variance with international conventions, and the administration has maintained in recent years that American law does not apply to prisoners held abroad.

In defending the practice of rendition, American officials have said that they obtain assurances from the third countries that prisoners will not be tortured, but that the United States is limited in its ability to enforce the promises.

The Central Intelligence Agency’s inspector general found last year that the some aspects of the agency’s treatment of terrorism detainees might constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, as the international Convention Against Torture defines it. The United States is a signer of that convention, though with some reservations.

A legal opinion by the Justice Department, issued in August 2002, said interrogation methods just short of those that might cause pain comparable to “organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death” could be allowable without being considered torture.

The administration disavowed that classified legal opinion in the summer of 2004, after it was publicly disclosed. But a second legal opinion issued in December 2004, which defined torture more broadly, did not repudiate interrogation techniques that had been previously authorized. It remains unclear how many of those techniques are still in use by the C.I.A.

Just re-read those paragraphs. Your president is a repeated and unrepentant liar on the gravest moral issues now facing the country.

A fascinating, detailed, insider account of the rise and rise of the new leader of the British Tory party, David Cameron.

Here’s an interesting case. In the Iraq court-room yesterday, a woman described being tortured by Saddam’s thugs in Abu Ghraib, back when he controlled it. Her account of torture is as follows:

“They forced me to take off my clothes,” said the woman, referred to only as Witness A by the court. “They kept my legs up. They handcuffed me and started beating me with cables. It wasn’t just one guard, it was many guards.” …
“I agree that things in Abu Ghraib were, until recently, bad, but did they use dogs on you? Did they take photographs?” asked one defense attorney, attempting to raise the issue of U.S. prisoner abuse at the prison.
“No,” she replied.

According to the Wall Street Journal’s definition of torture, this woman wasn’t subjected to “anything close” to torture. Repeated beatings are specifically not torture, as argued by AEI legal scholar, John Yoo, who helped craft Bush administration policies. The woman was not water-boarded, she was not shackled in stress positions, she was not subjected to hypothermia, she was not sexually abused and she was not threatened by dogs. She did not, in other words, come even close to being tortured, according to the Wall Street Journal. Do they still abide by their position? Does vice-president Cheney agree that she was merely subjected to “coercive interrogation techniques”?

By the way, my response to Charles Krauthammer’s argument for legalizing torture by the United States will appear in this week’s New Republic. I’ll link as soon as it’s posted.

Rick Perlstein, the excellent historian of the Goldwater campaign, talks about the difference between conservatives and Republicans. He quotes liberal blogger, Digby, with the following remark: “‘Conservative’ is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives’ good graces. Until they aren’t. At which point they are liberals.” I think that just about sums up our current situation. The party of Goldwater has become the party of Watergate. Money quote:

[C]onsider a group called the House Republican Caucus. They hold their controversial votes in the middle of the night: 2:54 am, 1:56 am, 2:39 am, 5:55 am on a Saturday morning. Or, for a vote on school vouchers in the D.C. public school system during primary season, during an out-of-town presidential debate.
Is this allergy to transparency a constitutive part of conservatism? A friend of mine suggests an answer, imagining Hillary Clinton reading conservative con law professor John Yoo’s assertion that “in the exercise of his plenary power to use military force, the President’s decisions are for him alone and are unreviewable”: ‘President Hillary thanks you.'”

And when these ‘conservatives’ have removed all checks from public spending, when they have validated detention of American citizens without trial, when they have endorsed torturing military detainees, when they have tried to write discrimination into the Constitution, and passed laws to govern individual right-to-death cases, where will they turn when their opponents regain power? When you have forsaken almost every principle you once had, what will protect you from the full force of government power in the hands of your enemies? Ah, then, there will be a reckoning. But not until. They’re enjoying power far too much right now to change anything.

To see the image of two men saying “I Do” projected onto the House of Commons is a pretty exhilarating moment for me, as you might imagine. When I left Britain twenty-one years ago, there was no question that America led the way in equal rights for gays. No longer. What’s remarkable about the British approach is their complete pragmatism. Legally, the relationships are called “civil partnerships.” Colloquially, everyone calls them what they are: civil marriages. I love the symbolism of Elton John marrying in the same civic space and by the same civil authority as the Prince of Wales. Here’s more on a remarkable day in my homeland. I’m particularly moved that the first man to marry his beloved will be someone terminally ill. “We are extremely happy and feel a great sense of achievement,” the man said at his hospice after the ceremony. That’s how much it matters to be accorded basic human dignity. I remember my attendance at a commitment ceremony (with no legal force) over a decade ago for an ex-boyfriend of mine in the advanced stages of AIDS. It meant so much to assert his humanity before he lost his life. In Britain, where “Virtually Normal” was published a decade ago, I faced derision from some in the gay community at the time for arguing that marriage was the central front in the battle for gay equality. It never occurred to me to believe that within ten years, we would have won. If I had stayed there, I’d be a fully equal citizen by now. Which prompts an interesting question: how many American immigrants in the past have actually had to give up liberty in order to come to this country? Welcome to the future.

“You don’t talk about torture in the morning and then say in the afternoon: ‘Democratise yourself’,” – a “senior European diplomat,” commenting to the Financial Times on Condi Rice’s visit to Europe.