Category: The Dish

The truth is that Christians have had a very mixed response to the AIDS epidemic. Some will have a great deal on their conscience; others have forged paths of compassion and commitment that are unequaled. It’s depressing to read about Mike Huckabee’s Southern Baptist hostility, ignorance and fear toward people with HIV as late as 1992. It’s heart-breaking to have watched the black church look the other way for two decades as so many of its members needed help, candor, and compassion. But not everyone has behaved like this. I was praying about this today and Mychal Judge came into my mind, as he sometimes does. I think history will see him as a saint at some point. If you doubt that, I recommend Netflixing "Saint of 9/11", a documentary that stays with you for a long time. And in that documentary, the part that understandably gripped me most was his early response to gay men with AIDS:

We forget how terrifying HIV was in the early and mid 1980s, how patients would be quarantined in dark rooms, abandoned by their families, with their meals rolled into their rooms on trolleys. From the beginning, Mychal did as Jesus did and walked right in and kissed these frightened souls on the lips. If they recoiled from the sight of a priest – gay men at that time saw the church as an alien, hostile entity – he would persist in silence. He would simply bring holy oils, take a chair to the bottom of their hospital beds, and massage their bony, cold, pain-racked feet. He seemed to express no anger, just a kind of suspended joy in the moment, a joy he found resuscitated by the fact of the resurrection and the intercession of Our Lady.

This is the calling of the Christian in the face of a plague: engagement, love, compassion, help. Some lived up to it; some failed. But everyone can grow.

This is depressing, if not actually surprising:

In a quick check of Republican reaction after the AP story broke, some conservatives said they viewed Huckabee’s answers as a blunt statement of views held by many in his Southern Baptist flock, and an antidote to the waffling that pervades politics.

So it may turn out that his more damaging answer was not the one about his view of homosexuality but rather his foray into federal policy – quarantining AIDS patients and cutting funding for research.

It’s refreshing, actually. I just listened to Charles say that the torture of terror suspects in 2002 was justified because the United States was flying blind and had no knowledge of what al Qaeda was planning. He won’t say "torture", of course, although the law is clear that it is torture. (He and Fox News keep referring to the notion of "harsh interrogation techniques". I think they realized that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" was a little too close to the Gestapo’s euphemism for comfort.) And he then said that destroying the tapes was justified because you don’t want them coming up on YouTube, do you? So there you have it: the government has a right to torture when it feels like it and the right to destroy the evidence because it would incriminate them and hurt the image of the United States. Again, I keep pinching myself that I am actually hearing these things on the television.

I realize, of course, that that’s the actual argument that Bush and Cheney make to themselves behind closed doors. I guess it’s refreshing, if a little chilling, to hear a proud defense of lawlessness and violence at the heart of a constitutional republic on national television. But there are several critical and revealing premises behind it. The first is that the United States has effectively withdrawn from the Geneva Conventions. To say that the president can waive them at any time if he sees fit is to say that the United States is not bound by its treaty obligations. The second is that the president is not bound by any law or treaty governing the laws of warfare. Bush and Cheney won’t say this because if they did, the jig would be up. The Constitution is extremely clear that the laws of warfare are determined by the Congress, not the president. So it’s up to the Beltway Boys to defend the suspension of the rule of law and the legalization of torture as executive prerogatives, in violation of the Constitution. Hey: we’re at war. The Constitution is now optional.

Notice also that this isn’t the ticking time bomb case that Charles has previously invoked to defend torture. There was no imminent threat to hundreds of thousands of people; we had no way of knowing for sure that Zubaydah had any knowledge of such a devastating threat; and we have no independent way of knowing whether the information he allegedly gave up under torture was factually accurate. And so in the initial cases of torture under this administration, we discover it was used simply because we had no good intelligence of future threats; and we decided to use torture for a fishing expedition. So much for the rare exception to the rule.

The defenders of torture are always saying that it can be used "judiciously" and in extremely limited circumstances, that it can be controlled within the executive branch; that it need not metastasize into a broader policy, and need not trickle down to others. But from all the facts we now know, this executive decision to rescind the Geneva Conventions began with cases that were already beneath the "ticking time bomb" scenario, and within months spread like wildfire across every theater of combat, including every major branch of the armed services, leading to scores of deaths in interrogation, almost casual if brutal torture of (often innocent) suspects in Afghanistan and Iraq, secret torture sites in Eastern Europe, God knows what in outsourced torture in the grim redoubts of Uzbek, Syrian, Jordanian and Egyptian police states, and, of course, the excrescence of Abu Ghraib, which Bush had the gall to say he had nothing to do with.

So when you look at what torture has done already to the United States, we see that every bad scenario that those of us who oppose torture feared has actually come about. And we have no independent evidence that it has solved anything, or saved any lives, except the self-serving statements of those who authorized it. And the truth is: we will probably never know. If they are cynical and brazen enough to destroy incriminating tapes, they are cynical and brazen enough to destroy any evidence within the executive branch that could prove that their torture policy has failed. If this isn’t a form of tyranny, annexed to torture, what is? And if the executive branch can simply get away with it, and have serious commentators defend the president’s trashing of the Constitution as necessary to fulfill his oath of office, we really have left the rule of law behind in the ditch.

"I am astonished. But am I surprised, no," – Senator John McCain upon hearing of the CIA’s decision to destroy tapes of the torture of two terror suspects.

The rather fetching craft of one Tuesday Cohen.

Let’s hear it for Brett Favre, the hottest Make-A-Wish-Foundation honoree in a long time. SI has just honored him as well. There are some asshole pro athletes out there; and some heroes. Favre is one of the latter.

An Iowa past state Democratic party chair writes:

National reporters have been calling and the most common question is ‘What is wrong with the Clinton campaign?’ I have offered an explanation that I believe is still valid. It is very hard for the Senator to connect to ordinary Iowans. This in part because of understandable security concerns but also because of the type of presentation she has chosen. To get Iowans to work for you they have to feel that their support is essential. You cannot do that at a rally of 5,000 of their closest friends.

However, I am starting to believe there may be a deeper and more underlying cause.

It is not the so-called Clinton fatigue, for the non-supporters a reluctance to embark on eight more years of a Clinton Presidency was there from the start.

But in one clear phrase please tell me this: why should we caucus for her?

For example, one word describes Obama’s effort:  Change. For Edwards, it is economic justice and for Dodd, restoring the rule of law. For Biden, foreign policy experience in an increasingly dangerous world. I can’t give you a one word or simple explanation as to what a Clinton Presidency would mean.  The reason we find this New Yorker moving from issue to issue is that she has yet to define it herself. We know she wants to be President, but we don’t know why.

"An article in Business Day on Friday about favorite gadgets of executives referred incorrectly to the video game Gran Turismo 5. It has not yet been released, and thus is not a best-selling game. The article also referred imprecisely to the game Halo 3. It is the first game in the Halo series designed for the Xbox 360; the earlier games, though playable on the Xbox 360, were designed for the original Xbox. The chip in the Xbox 360 also was misidentified. It has a Xenon chip, not a Cell processor. And the article also misstated the price of the Sony PlayStation 3. The PlayStation 3 starts at $399, not $299," – New York Times, December 4, 2007. Three cheers for the MSM. Hat tip: CJR.

Far worse than we originally thought, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch.

"Mike Huckabee promises us a foreign policy that will make sure that America repeatedly bursts into flame for all of eternity," – Daniel Larison.