Regardless of how you feel about medical marijuana – I’m strongly for it – the Supreme Court case was really about the right to the federal government to tell states what to do. If the feds can forbid someone who grows pot in his own garden, sells none of it, uses it for his own medical use and is allowed to by his own state, it’s still covered by the Interstate commerce exemption. Yeah, right.
TWO LEADERS
“It’s a long, hard struggle and very gradually maybe we are making progress. There are tough times ahead.” – John McCain, telling the truth about Iraq.
“The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.” – vice-president Dick Cheney, spinning again.
JEWS WHO ROCK
Now here’s an under-studied subject. And when luminaries like Jeffrey Goldberg and David Segal are behind it, we have a genuine cultural event. Among the important inquiries of JewsRock.org:
Before he donned a ten-pound cod piece and high heels, Gene Simmons was known as Chaim Witz. And guess who started life as Ellen Cohen.
Must-read.
DEBUNKED: Remember Super-AIDS? Remember the five hysterical stories in the New York Times? My suspicions have been borne out:
No super-strain has emerged. The patient, whose name has been withheld, has responded to drug therapy. No one – not even the man’s known sexual partners – was found to be infected with the same HIV strain.
Here was my take back in February:
I’ll make a rash prediction: this guy will have a much improved immune system in a few months.
The credibility of New York City’s Health Department – and the NYT, for that matter – is damaged. This isn’t to say we don’t have a problem, especially with the crystal meth epidemic. But serious health officials and journalists have their work cut out to regain trust. I wonder if the NYT will run a front-page debunking as prominently as the original story they hyped.
AIRFORCE ACADEMY UPDATE: John Cole has the latest. Basically, the leadership has now admitted they have a huge problem of Christianist indoctrination in the Academy and the superintendant says it could take six years to fix it. Six years. That’s how deep the bias has become. Well, at least now it’s being addressed.
BRIT-BLOGS: Why haven’t they had the same impact as the American ones?
HILLARY ON TRACK
My assessment of the likeliest next Democratic nominee can be read here.
HOW TO HELP IRAN’S DEMOCRATS: Some suggestions here.
PERSPECTIVE: Yes, it’s important. The vast majority of coalition soldiers in Iraq and elsewhere are doing extremely tough jobs in unimaginably difficult circumstances. Photo essays like these and this are a vital part of the truth of our endeavor. Let’s get more of these images out there. Let’s not forget the great work we have done and are doing in reconstructing Afghanistan and Iraq. We owe these troops our deepest gratitude and support. But part of that support is also exposing what the civilian and military leadership has led many other troops into: a netherworld of sick, twisted detention policies that have shamed this country and undermined the war. The emphasis has been on what some have seen as a few bad apples, rather than on the real architects of this p.r. debacle and moral morass in the White House and Pentagon. The following is not, I think, true:
We know what went on at Abu Ghraib. We’ve seen the photos. We’ve heard the stories. We’ve punished the offenders.
Most Americans do not know what really went on at Abu Ghraib; and have little idea that the same kind of things have gone on in many other interrogation centers run by the U.S. The very carefully selected and released photos were brilliant news-management, designed to foster the idea that what happened there was more in the lines of “frat-house” humiliation, rather than rape, beating, humiliation and murder. We haven’t punished the real offenders, those who crafted new policies that enabled and facilitated the very abuse we have seen. In fact, those architects have been rewarded, while low-level grunts have been scapegoated. When the public gets a fuller grip on the extent of the abuse, and begins to understand that such practices have occurred throughout the U.S. detention system, they may rouse themselves out of their slumber and ask the hard questions of their political leaders. My view is that all of this – the very good and the appalling – should be disseminated in a free society. My view is that this administration has let our troops down by crafting policies that have enabled the kind of abuse that is now an indelible stain on the reputation of the United States. Supporting the troops also means holding those who have forced them into moral nightmares responsible.
EMAIL OF THE DAY: You wrote:
“Many claim that there is no such thing as neutrality, that law is always and everywhere the imposition of one set of values over another, and that the question is merely ‘whose values?’ Although this has a kind of late night college dorm plausibility, it essentially abandons the entire Western attempt to conceive of law as something that aims, in so far as it is possible, to provide neutral limits on human activity in order to protect the freedom of individuals to live as they see fit. Even if this will have cultural consequences, even if this may make some feel discriminated against (even if they aren’t), it is an essential goal of the liberal state to at least aspire to fairness, equal treatment of all citizens and tolerance of value-pluralism. In that sense, liberalism’s ‘value’ is fairness, consensus and equality.”
Bingo. Paint it in gold-leaf and hang it on your wall. It is exactly right.
The major political battle of our time is between liberalism, which you so well describe above, and various fundamentalists who oppose it.
Now, here is the important thing: The attack on liberalism is now the core ideology of the GOP. It is precisely the idea of liberal society that they are attacking when they decry the separation of church and state, when they talk about family values, when they seek to inject more faith into governance, when they call for a belief in absolutes, when they turn every political issue into an opportunity for moralism, when they organize politically active pastors, when they castigate everyone from Clinton to Sagan for the dread sins of secularism and moral relativism. The GOP’s domestic agenda is no less than a full assault on liberalism. Our Constitutional democracy, born of the Enlightenment and strengthened during Reconstruction, is now threatened by the reactionaries who opposed both.
It seems to me that the most important task for Americans who believe in liberal democracy is to defeat the GOP. I would not have said that ten years ago, when Republicans more than Democrats got my vote. But the GOP is not just surgent, it has been remade. It is no longer the home of old-fashioned conservatism, but headed instead is headed by our own home-grown fundamentalists. And if they are not as scary as some of the fundamentalists abroad, they are closer, and because of that, more able to wreak dangerous changes in our own government.”
MALKIN AWARD NOMINEE
“[B]lood will tell, as the old saying goes: [Mark Felt’s] posterity is now dragging out his old body and putting it on display to make money. (Have you noticed how Mark Felt looks like one of those old Nazi war criminals they find in Bolivia or Paraguay? That same, haunted, hunted look combined with a glee at what he has managed to get away with so far?) And it gets worse: it’s been reported that Mark Felt is at least part Jewish. The reason this is worse is that at the same time that Mark Felt was betraying Richard Nixon, Nixon was saving Eretz Israel. It is a terrifying chapter in betrayal and ingratitude. If he even knows what shame is, I wonder if he felt a moment’s shame as he tortured the man who brought security and salvation to the land of so many of his and my fellow Jews. Somehow, as I look at his demented face, I doubt it.” – Ben Stein, completely losing it, American Spectator.
CONFIRMED
The fire behind at least some of the smoke:
The U.S. military for the first time on Friday detailed how jailers at Guantanamo mishandled the Koran, including a case in which a guard’s urine splashed through a vent onto the Islamic holy book and others in which it was kicked, stepped on and soaked in water.
The Abu Ghraib official’s reference to someone throwing down and stepping on a Koran as part of an interrogation “Pride and Ego Down” technique now makes much more sense. A few caveats about this Pentagon media push. It’s very odd that most of the incidents acknowledged occurred after new guidelines were given. I’m dubious that only one minor incident occurred before. It’s odd that only one individual was interviewed for this report. The “pissing down an air-vent” incident sounds just bizarre. Yeah, sure the wind caused your pee to drift into a prisoner’s air-vent. It sounds like something some schoolboy would come up with. The soldier whose pee drifted was later discharged. Lastly, the way this was released late on Friday evening suggests to me that it’s part of a strategy to deflect attention, minimize what occurred and urge the press to move on, rather than a genuine attempt to get to the bottom of this. Maybe we’ll never know the full truth. This minimal amount of information seems to me to be the perfect Pentagon solution: they haven’t outright denied anything; they’ve provided a handful of minor examples of abuse as a minimal concession; and the strategy now is to accuse the press of exaggeration and the detainees of lying.
QUOTE FOR THE DAY
“There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana. $7.7 billion is a lot of money, but that is one of the lesser evils. Our failure to successfully enforce these laws is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Colombia. I haven’t even included the harm to young people. It’s absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes.” – Milton Friedman, making eminent sense, as usual, on the insane, expensive, cruel and ineffective war on pot.
HEADS UP
I’ll be on Tucker Carlson’s PBS show tonight, discussing the changing world of HIV in America. An update on my own situation: two days ago, I gave blood to test for drug-resistant strains in my virus. I’ll do the same again in two weeks. Meanwhile, I’ve opted for a tough five-pill daily regimen. I took my first dose last night. So far: no side effects whatever. That’s new for me. But it’s still early.
MARRIAGE IN CALIFORNIA: A proposal to legalize marriage in the legislature just failed by four votes. But a majority of legislators backed it. A sign, I think, of the times – and the inevitability of equality in states where the religious right doesn’t hold sway.
EMAIL OF THE DAY: Here’s a point worth reiterating:
Interesting points on secularism. One thing worth considering is how to reconcile the modern state with the liberal desire for neutrality. It seems to me that the more the state does (which is another way of saying the more things we as a society decide to do collectively) the harder it is to be value-neutral.
Absolutely. That’s why a belief in neutral government is deeply linked to the idea of limited government – far more limited than the statist free-for-all that we have today. And that’s why George Bush has been so damaging to the principles of limited, neutral government. He has both massively expanded government’s reach and size, while making it far less value-neutral. He has deployed the old methods of the big government left for a religious agenda. His assault on classical conservatism is therefore perhaps more profound than those of the left – because he has also given it the imprimatur of conservatism.
BUSH AND IVF
Will Saletan predicts that the president will eventually move toward banning in vitro fertilization. Why?
Only two percent of leftover embryos have been put up for adoption. That’s less than the percentage donated to stem-cell research. So if you’re determined to rescue these embryos and stop the production of more, eventually you have to do what pro-lifers have done in the case of abortion: confront the parents.
Some of that is already happening, as Will shows. It seems to me that this should be directly asked of all those who oppose embryonic stem cell research. Do you believe IVF should be legal? Now watch the GOP splinter.
SECULARISM I
Thanks for your emails. Let me address three good counter-arguments. Many of you have argued that what passes for secularism today is not neutrality but active hostility to or disdain for religious faith. Here’s one formulation of the argument from an emailer:
There is unquestionably a brand of secularism that seeks to impose its own set of moral choices on all of society, e.g. the leftist hegemony that currently has a stranglehold on most universities. You yourself complained about this sort of thing in regards to Larry Summers’ lynching at the hands of the leftist establishment earlier this year.
Yes, indeed there is. One reason secularism is now threatened is because the left has abused it. I have no problem, for example, with public displays of Christian symbols in a secular society. I find the desire to root out such things as excessively persnickety. I’ve long been a defender of free speech and association for people with whom I disagree. (My conservative critics on the subject of homosexuality, for example, rarely point out that I oppose all hate crime laws, have opposed laws forbidding workplace discrimination, and supported the right of both the Boy Scouts and the St Patrick’s Day parade for discriminating against gays as private associations.) Moreover, when Christians form a majority, it’s understandable that much public symbolism will be redolent of Christian imagery and language. Secularists who want to stamp this stuff out seem to me to be lacking in the virtue of moderation – and they have helped spawn the intolerance that now flows back from the other side. At the same time, it’s silly for fundamentalists to say that they are being persecuted merely because others are treated equally in the public square. It is ludicrous for Rick Santorum to say, as he did recently, that my being allowed to marry my partner is somehow an attack on his marriage. A secular and tolerant society does not regard the rights of minorities as somehow only achievable at someone else’s expense. We are bigger than that. What is particularly remarkable is that when we are constructing a democracy abroad, say in Iraq, no one disputes the notion that it would be better for Iraq to have a secular constitution rather than a religious one. Yet these same people, when it comes to domestic politics and constitutionalism, want to insist that the American constitution is somehow a religious document. I prefer the perspective of this emailer:
I grew up in India and believed that secularism and multiculturalism were good things. This question was never even debated in my 24 years there. It is disconcerting to see that so many people in a supposedly much more enlightened country think that these are bad things.
Well, sadly, they do. And the people who believe these are bad things are the ruling faction in the dominant political party.
SECULARISM II: One other lesser point. There is obviously a distinction between the questions of same-sex marriage and abortion. With abortion, you can always claim that a life is at stake, and so neutrality, which would mean leaving the choice to individuals, is impermissible. But same-sex marriage involves no potential taking of human life and is an issue of far lesser moral import because of it. No one is tangibly hurt by someone’s public commitment to another human being. In such instances, government neutrality and secularism demand equal treatment, barring the kind of terrible social consequences no one has yet been able even to posit convincingly.
SECULARISM III: One final point. Many claim that there is no such thing as neutrality, that law is always and everywhere the imposition of one set of values over another, and that the question is merely “whose values?” Although this has a kind of late night college dorm plausibility, it essentially abandons the entire Western attempt to conceive of law as something that aims, in so far as it is possible, to provide neutral limits on human activity in order to protect the freedom of individuals to live as they see fit. Even if this will have cultural consequences, even if this may make some feel discriminated against, it is an essential goal of the liberal state to at least aspire to fairness, equal treatment of all citizens and tolerance of value-pluralism. In that sense, liberalism’s “value” is fairness, consensus and equality. And it is the only value that can appeal to Christianists, Christians, atheists, Jews, gays, straights, Muslims and Mormons alike. It is a value that may as often be celebrated when it fails as when it succeeds. And in an increasingly multicultural society, where all religions seem to be gravtitating toward fundamentalism, it is more valuable today than ever. Abandoning it, as the theocons and the leftist intolerants want, is to abandon Western freedom. I believe in fighting for such freedom both abroad and at home. In equal measure.
The Dish 