America The Unfriendly

It is by far the biggest change I have experienced in my quarter century living in America: the experience of coming and going. While the illegal border is still chaotic, the legal border seems to be getting more and more onerous, unwelcoming, bureaucratic and sometimes terrifying. Getting any kind of visa can be a nightmare of bureaucracy; being finger-printed and treated like a criminal is the first actual experience many foreigners have of entering the US, and the process of getting through customs and immigration can be, even in completely incident-free circumstances, frightening. My elderly mother arrived for my wedding and started sobbing in my arms after the rough treatment she had received from airport security. The reputation of the US under Bush is in the toilet. But the experience of actually entering America may be affecting far more. These little anecdotes spread. And, in the end, Americans pay the price – in lost tourism revenue, less trade, forgone taxes, and so on. When Bush goes, the country’s reputation will instantly soar (unless he’s succeeded by Giuliani, in which case, we’re headed for pariah status). But unless we get a grip on the police state atmosphere at the legal border, the opinion of mankind with respect to America will only continue to worsen.

TR On “Inhuman Conduct” Against Military Prisoners

"The president desires to know in the fullest and most circumstantial manner all the facts, … for the very reason that the president intends to back up the Army in the heartiest fashion in every lawful and legitimate method of doing its work; he also intends to see that the most vigorous care is exercised to detect and prevent any cruelty or brutality and that men who are guilty thereof are punished. Great as the provocation has been in dealing with foes who habitually resort to treachery, murder and torture against our men, nothing can justify or will be held to justify the use of torture or inhuman conduct of any kind on the part of the American Army,” – Teddy Roosevelt, upholding the American tradition that Bush and Cheney have unforgivably and indelibly trashed.

He was specifically referring to "waterboarding." There is no doubt whatsoever about the illegality of the practice.

HIV Update

A reader emailed me wondering if my failure to provide any health updates was some kind of bad sign. Nah. My latest bloodwork was among the strongest I’ve had in fourteen years of being HIV-positive: undetectable viral load and my CD4 cells near an all-time high. I’m grateful for having employer-based insurance, private and public sector research, good doctors whom I had the right to choose, the pharmaceutical companies and lucky genes. I cannot forget those I left behind, or the terror – and I mean terror – of the past. But I figure the best way to remember the unlucky ones is to live well until I die. And one day, maybe, this country will stop discriminating against people with HIV and repeal the Jesse Helms provision that keeps me and many others from becoming a citizen of the country we love. But gay HIV-positive immigrants are not exactly popular right now, are they?

Is This Obama’s Moment?

Joe Klein channels my own thoughts:

A few days before the debate, I spent a day with Obama in Iowa, and the most striking thing to me about the Senator’s performances was the scrupulous honesty of his answers, his insistence on delivering bad news when necessary. A woman asked if he believed that stay-at-home moms should be eligible for Social Security. There is a way most politicians answer such questions: a moving tribute to the virtues of child-rearing, then on to the next question without ever making the commitment. Obama did the moving tribute — with a joke about his ineptitude as a parent — but then he told the woman no. "We can’t extend those benefits without huge financial implications," he said.

The very next question was about global warming. Obama laid out his rigorous cap-and-trade plan for reducing carbon emissions, but then he said, "One of the themes of this campaign is to tell voters what they need to hear, not just what they want to hear … So I’ve got to tell you there will be a cost to this — and the utility companies will pass it along to consumers. You can expect a spike in electricity prices," although, he added, the new technology should ultimately bring those prices back down.

I don’t know if this sort of quiet, unsolicited honesty can work in our rude, noisy politics, but it certainly is far more presidential than the dodging and fudging that you get from most candidates…He assumes a maturity in his audiences, and in the press, that simply may not exist. But given the stakes in 2008, perhaps it’s time for all of us to grow up and meet the challenge of a difficult moment for our country.

That’s what some of us sense in a "transformational" candidate.

Race and IQ II

[M]ight it be fair also to say that the champions of ‘no difference’ in race or sex, or intelligence … are the guardians of a greater ‘untruth’ that allows people to live together in mutual harmony, implying that these critics really deserve to be praised as our protectors even when they are factually wrong? … it is roughly how the self-appointed guardians choose to present themselves – leaving aside, usually, the step of frankly admitting that they are promoting factual untruths when they know that they are," – W.D. Hamilton, Narrow Roads of Gene Land. Vol. II: The Evolution of Sex.

Read the entire post.