The Dish

The candidate picks up and runs with the central thrust of this essay. Money quote from Obama:

"I think there’s no doubt that we represent the kind of change that Senator Clinton can’t deliver on and part of it is generational. Senator Clinton and others, they’ve been fighting some of the same fights since the ’60’s and it makes it very difficult for them to bring the country together to get things done."

From "Goodbye To All That":

A Giuliani-Clinton matchup, favored by the media elite, is a classic intragenerational struggle—with two deeply divisive and ruthless personalities ready to go to the brink. Giuliani represents that Nixonian disgust with anyone asking questions about, let alone actively protesting, a war. Clinton will always be, in the minds of so many, the young woman who gave the commencement address at Wellesley, who sat in on the Nixon implosion and who once disdained baking cookies. For some, her husband will always be the draft dodger who smoked pot and wouldn’t admit it. And however hard she tries, there is nothing Hillary Clinton can do about it. She and Giuliani are conscripts in their generation’s war. To their respective sides, they are war heroes…

The war today matters enormously. The war of the last generation? Not so much. If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today’s actual problems, Obama may be your man.

Know hope.

A reader writes:

I sometimes wonder what Reagan would have to say about where our country has careened since 9/11.  We openly debate torture as a policy, allow unprecedented access to personal information, and tolerate secret prisons devoid of oversight. I think Reagan would have led us very differently through this darkness. He once said, "Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today’s world do not have."

It was the first weapon Bush threw away after the spectacular attacks shocked us into a new understanding of the world.

That was our leader’s decision, and we went along.  But you have to really wonder, as a people, are we truly willing to exchange our moral courage for the visceral temptations of torture, in order to hopefully prevent some future calamity?  Would a chance of saving ten people be worth giving up our values? How about a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand, or even a million?

Over the years, we sacrificed no less than 1.3 million men and women defending our principles.  Seems to me, we owe it to them to have far more steadfastness in the face of fear. If I had been one of the 3,000 contemplating my death on 9/11, the last thing I would have wanted was to believe the real America would die with me that day.

Bush and Reagan are similar in far fewer ways than Bush would like us to believe.  But true enough, each were driven by their core beliefs. Unusually for an old-line protestant, Reagan believed that man was basically good inside.  He said: "I know in my heart that man is good. That what is right will always eventually triumph.  And there’s purpose and worth to each and every life."  Bush on the other had, as an evangelical fundamentalist, believes the heart of every man is "deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked."  He believes the world is spiraling down toward a total darkness which will be ended only by the second coming of Jesus.   It is what I grew up believing, and it limits, greatly, the faith you place in the America people.

That kind of apocalyptic vision makes it nearly impossible to believe in a people who simply won’t indulge in evil for the sake of some greater purpose.  Bush believes any good that America achieves is ultimately going to be snuffed out by the greater power of evil.  He doesn’t believe in anything like Reagan’s shinning city on a hill; for him, Reagan’s America is just a pause on the road to Armageddon.

Reagan said when he took office he was amazed to discover the number of people who accepted the idea that nuclear war with the Soviet Union was just a matter of time.  That sort of fatalism is at the very core of Bush and his inner-circle of doom. He simply can’t lead us out of fear and danger because he believes that no such place could ever exist.

The fall-out:

"9/11 is what Rudy’s campaign is fundamentally based on. This does beg the question — does Rudy agree with Robertson’s comments about 9/11?," – Charmaine Yoest, a vice president at Family Research Council Action.

And McCain is speechless. Aw, c’mon. Ross thinks it may help Rudy with pro-lifers. Kristol is underwhelmed. Larison thinks Brownback’s endorsement of McCain is a bigger deal. I stick with my Christo-authoritarian fears (and torture and unchecked executive power enthusiast, Andy McCarthy fits the rubric to a tee). McCain, Romney and Thompson all seem to me to be more appealing GOP candidates than the nutcase with the anti-Semite.

A new tool for anyone who cares about government spending, waste and corruption.

A reader writes:

I followed the link and read it.  I immediately identified with the astounded and befuddled actions of the man being admonished by the Amtrak employee. The reason is that in the early 1990s, I think it was the summer of ’93, I went on a trip to Sudan. In Sudan you are not allowed to take photos of airports, bridges, military installations, etc. They are strategic assets, you know. At the time it struck me as laughable – No photographing friends on the tarmac at Khartum International!  After all, the nation would certainly be in grave danger were a snapshot of the one hangar airport were to fall into hostile enemy hands.

I generally obeyed what I thought was a strange and paranoid custom, though I did so with a smirk and a disbelieving shake of the head.  In the end I chalked it up to experience, saying to myself "well, that’s what you get when you plop yourself down in a military-religious dictatorship".

There’s a connection between their constituencies, I think. A reader writes:

I was happy to read the article on the Evangelical Outpost condemning the practice of torture. But I was disturbed at many of the comments below the original post. Not silence on the topic of torture, but enthusiastic support of torture. Some even arguing that the government has a mandate to torture in order to keep us safe:

"I think the government is biblically empowered, and even mandated, to cause fear and discomfort to those who conspire to perform evil acts upon innocents. While waterboarding may cause severe discomfort and anxiety, I don’t believe it crosses the threshold of "severe pain or suffering" cited in the definition above."

And this one, going so far as to argue that the bible justifies torture:

"Look at Luke 12:42-46:

And the Lord replied, "A faithful, sensible servant is one to whom the master can give the responsibility of managing his other household servants and feeding them. If the master returns and finds that the servant has done a good job, there will be a reward. I tell you the truth, the master will put that servant in charge of all he owns. But what if the servant thinks, ‘My master won’t be back for a while,’ and he begins beating the other servants, partying, and getting drunk? The master will return unannounced and unexpected, and he will cut the servant in pieces and banish him with the unfaithful."

Cutting someone in pieces seems a bit more harsh than waterboarding, but here is Jesus describing what will he will do to unfaithful servants upon his return. Now, I am not arguing in favor or against torture; what I am saying is that there is strong Biblical justification for supporting the government’s use of torture as a tool in the War on Terror."

Another Biblical defense of torture here. Who would Jesus torture indeed? This is the true voice of the Republican base right now:

I think waterboarding should be a reward for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: OK, you’ve been good, Mohammed, we’re only going to waterboard you today. Let’s get you out of those cold electrodes and onto a nice, warm waterboard, OK?

This is instructive because it shows the real motive behind the technique: not to get actionable intelligence, since we know that the evidence procured by torture is always riddled with inaccuracy and untruth – but to exact revenge and to get false confessions for political purposes. And indeed the president has used such confessions for political purposes. And we have no way of knowing if the evidence he cites fully supports the claims he makes. Yes, I’ll admit it: I do not believe this president when he tells me he has solid intelligence for something. Fool me once …

These things start as a joke. But we have learned they are not a joke at all. Christianism – as opposed to Christianity – is quite comfortable with torture, as long as it is wielded by a Master to protect his Servants, and as long as it is used for revenge against what Robertson calls Islamic "bloodlust." When you fuse Christianity with power, it isn’t long before Christians start imposing the cross on others rather than taking it up for themselves. God is on their side, remember? And so they can do no wrong. You’re either with them or against them, for torture or against America. Get it?

The astonishing speed with which gay equality and visibility have transformed public attitudes is a function of many things: the AIDS epidemic, marriage and military activism, popular culture’s evolution, religious reform in non-fundamentalist Christianity and Judaism. But it is also something that Burke would have understood and that real conservatives  – unlike the authoritarian Christianists who now control the GOP – intuitively grasp. Our new politics reflects a simple organic social change that transcends the red-blue divide. You see it in Michigan where an openly gay mayor was just elected and evinced this kind of comment:

"He represents the overall interests of everyone in the city," said Leah Closson, a resident of Ferndale for 16 years. "We’re a heterosexual family with two kids and we own our own home. I feel he represents us."

Then this:

Utah is the poster state. Between 1990 and 2006, for example, it went from having the 38th-highest concentration of same-sex couples in the country to 14th highest. In that same time period, the percentage of gay couples who lived in large cities declined from 45% to 23%. Even more counterintuitive, from 2000 to 2006, states that banned same-sex marriage had above-average increases in the number of gay couples. And places where voter referendums went against same-sex marriages saw even larger increases.

This is the tide that makes gay equality inevitable. The question remains how best to channel this movement in constructive directions. Civil marriage is the answer today, as it was over a decade ago.

A reader reminds me of Rudy Giuliani’s utter disgust at the notion proffered by Ron Paul in a Republican debate that 9/11 may have had some explanatory roots in the foreign policy of the US for the past fifty years. So how does Giuliani stand and proudly accept the endorsement of a man who said that Americans were actually responsible for 9/11 – because of their alleged immorality? If you were appalled by Ron Paul’s explicatory analysis, wouldn’t you be even more enraged by Robertson’s causal analysis? Especially since that would also apply to Giuliani himself? Does Rudy believe that he helped cause 9/11? If he doesn’t, why did he just accept the endorsement of a man who does?

One possible silver lining: those American Jews leaning toward Giuliani may be a little more leery now that he has been endorsed by an anti-Semite like Robertson.

Her lead over Obama is shrinking:

At 34%, Clinton’s current level of support is the lowest measured in any Rasmussen Reports poll this year. Four previous polls in New Hampshire found her consistently in the 37% to 40% range.