Except for my occasional posts on reproductive rights, I try to stay out of current trends in feminist thought. I do this because I appreciate that young women today are living in a very different social and cultural context from the one I grew up in back in the 1950s and 1960s. Often their ideas about sexuality and childbearing in particular don’t square with my experiences. But I think part of emotional maturity is appreciating that other people are having a very different experience of life from the one you’re having, and their experiences are just as valid as yours.

That said, today I was so disturbed by this post at feministing that I’m going to break my own rule and write about it. Go read it and then come back here for commentary and discussion.

One of the wonderful things about our species is that there are a lot of us, and we don’t all have to be living the same life. It’s a fine thing to know one’s own mind and live accordingly, even in the face of cultural pressure to live some other way. When a man or woman makes a personal decision not to marry or have children, for example, that decision should be respected.

But that goes both ways. Whenever anyone wants to coerce others to conform to one life experience, I say that’s a problem.

I understand that marriage can be awful (believe me), but I have also known couples who still take delight in each other after many, many years of marriage. There are and always will be people who fall crazy in love with each other and want to stay together forever. Just because this doesn’t happen to you doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen to other people.

But why is there marriage? Why not just live together if you want to and split up if you want to? For one thing, I think some kind of legal mechanism that protects the most economically vulnerable partner in a dissolving pair-bond is necessary, particularly if there are children. It’s also useful to have a neutral authority, such as government, to see to it that battling, separating couples are making rational decisions about the upbringing of their children as well as the disposal of their assets. And there are other reasons. It may be that our society should make more room for serial monogamy as opposed to death-do-us-part exclusivity. But if you want to know why there ought to be marriage, talk to gay couples who have lived many years together without the legal status of marriage.

The author of the feministing piece writes, in his last paragraph,

Thus as I realized how the cultural imperative on starting a family was unfair to women and the poor, I felt an instinctive aversion to it. That is the emotionally conditioned response that could override our responses to needs and instincts that make us want to reproduce. And if we rule out the biological ‘instinct’, which is strictly only to have sex and not to reproduce, my case for saying no to reproduction becomes much stronger.

I think he’s saying that he has an instinctual aversion to starting a family, and because he has this instinctual aversion everyone else ought to have it also, and that this instinctual aversion ought to override the instinct to reproduce, which doesn’t exist anyway. And now that he has decided that everyone’s life should conform to his life experiences, he proposes imposing his own aversions on everyone else. If there’s another interpretation of that paragraph I’d like to hear it.

I also suggest that our likes and dislikes come from many places, and there is a difference between, for example, instinct and neurosis that the author ought to sort out.

I was still childless during the glory days of second-wave feminism, and I believed fervently that maternal extinct was a stupid myth. And then I had babies and learned otherwise.

We are animals, after all, albeit over-specialized in the brain department. My definition of an instinct is body-knowledge; something your body knows how to do even if your head doesn’t. Because we are over-specialized in the brain, humans tend to dismiss things outside of the limited scope of cognition and conceptualization, but this is a narrow way to understand yourself. Do not assume you have no instincts because you are not cognitively aware of them; it is because you are not cognitively aware of them that they are instincts.

For example, nursing mothers having warm, fuzzy feelings about their babies often find themselves leaking milk like Niagara Falls, even if baby is somewhere else. That’s instinct. It’s something your body does without involving intellectual brain functions.

For some of us — not necessarily all of us, of course — pregnancy and motherhood give us our first conscious experience of instinct beyond sexuality. In my first pregnancy and experience of motherhood I was often caught off guard by sensations, emotions, and body actions I did not expect. It was my first clue that my almighty intellect was not the captain of my fate that I thought it was. Perhaps it’s something one has to experience to appreciate. However, I urge people who have not had this experience not to dismiss parental instinct so cavalierly.

Likewise, some people really, really want to have children, and others do not. The urge to have children is partly a matter of cultural conditioning, although I don’t think that’s the whole story. But wherever a deeply felt need comes from, it pains me when that need is not respected by others. If someone else’s urge is different from yours, you don’t have to relate to it or understand it, but I strongly suggest that you respect it.

Pay attention: Dismissing someone else’s needs as trivial because you don’t share that need is a form of oppression. It’s also damn arrogant.

Regarding family — it also was after I had babies that I came to appreciate family. Human mothers with newborns are incredibly vulnerable in many ways and need support, emotional and material, from somebody. It’s a survival thing.

Robert Frost said that “Home is the place, where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” My definition of family is that they are the people who keep that home for you. You may or may not share genes or even like each other very much. But people within a family do tend to bond and become, well, family. It’s human. Some families like to live in each other’s pockets, and some like to maintain a cool distance. Some families care for each other deeply, and others don’t. But I say the need for some kind of home or family is an innate quality of our species not easily denied.

Likewise, single mothers can raise children successfully — I have some personal experience with that — but raising children is so much easier if one has a supportive partner in the enterprise. For that reason, it is no bad thing if a society encourages parental couples to remain together to raise children. However, society should recognize that some couples are better off separated, and children don’t always benefit from a couple staying together “for the sake of the children.”

Yes, raising children can be very stressful. But, as the Buddha said, life is stressful. If avoiding things that look stressful is the star you steer your life by, I feel sorry for you.

For many humans, romantic relationships and the bearing of children are their most significant, and intense, life experiences. It is bad, and it is good; it is stressful, it is wonderful; it makes you crazy and keeps you strong. It’s the stuff life is made of. If it doesn’t interest you that’s fine, but don’t think for a minute that you are in any position to pass judgment on what other people are experiencing.

I take the quote in the title from an otherwise forgettable article by Jacob Weisberg on the failures of the Bush presidency. I’ll come back to it in a bit. First I want to skip to Frank Rich’s column, “Eight Years of Madoffs.”

THREE days after the world learned that $50 billion may have disappeared in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, The Times led its front page of Dec. 14 with the revelation of another $50 billion rip-off. This time the vanished loot belonged to American taxpayers. That was our collective contribution to the $117 billion spent (as of mid-2008) on Iraq reconstruction — a sinkhole of corruption, cronyism, incompetence and outright theft that epitomized Bush management at home and abroad.

Rich goes on from there to walk us through the outrages of the past eight years. As he says, after awhile there was no much outrage it rendered one catatonic. Then he writes,

While our new president indeed must move on and address the urgent crises that cannot wait, Bush administration malfeasance can’t be merely forgotten or finessed. A new Justice Department must enforce the law; Congress must press outstanding subpoenas to smoke out potential criminal activity; every legal effort must be made to stop what seems like a wholesale effort by the outgoing White House to withhold, hide and possibly destroy huge chunks of its electronic and paper trail. …

…But I would add that we need full disclosure of the more prosaic governmental corruption of the Bush years, too, for pragmatic domestic reasons. To make the policy decisions ahead of us in the economic meltdown, we must know what went wrong along the way in the executive and legislative branches alike.

Amen.

Jacob Weisberg wants to know what went wrong also, although his interest seems more theoretical than practical. And as Scott Lemieux says, wondering whether Bush himself was incompetent, or whether he surrounded himself with incompetent people and took their advice, is a distinction without a difference.

This paragraph made me want to smack Weisberg in the head:

Why, after governing as a successful moderate in Texas, did he adopt such an ideological and polarizing style as president? Why did he politicize the fight against terrorism? Why did he choose to permit the torture of American detainees? Why did he wait so long to revise a failing strategy in Iraq?

The truth is, there is plenty of evidence the “successful moderate” enabled plenty of corruption and mishandling of funds while he was governor of Texas. Back in 2002 I cataloged much of it, although what I wrote in this article was only the tip of the iceberg. After listing several ways in which Bush had looted Texas, I wrote (IN AUGUST 2002!) “we must not permit the Bush Regime to continue to loot the wealth of America to benefit Bush’s friends.”

Most of the really bad corruption and incompetence hadn’t happened yet. I saw it in 2002. Weisberg hasn’t yet caught on.

Torture? You want to talk about Bush’s eagerness to execute people? His childhood delight in putting lighted firecrackers in frogs? I still get cold chills when I remember how he giggled when someone — I think it was Wolf Blitzer — asked him a question about executions during the 2000 campaign.

Weisberg still hasn’t caught on. He still hasn’t admitted to the fact that the American political system somehow put a sociopath into the Oval Office.

Now some movement conservatives are angry with their former champion, Rick Santorum, because he said of Sarah Palin, “She doesn’t have a well-informed worldview.” The tribe is eating its own.

Writing about Palin’s most recent interview, David Frum said,

However nastily and treacherously Palin’s media handlers may have behaved after the election, their only error during the election was to offer too much access to Palin, not too little. Those handlers faced a daunting problem: Their party’s nominee for vice president could not respond to questions without embarrassing herself. The handlers who kept Pain under wraps knew what they were doing. Had Palin refused all interviews during the campaign, there would have been some criticism, but it would have been forgotten by now – and the Gibson and Couric interviews would not be filling YouTube, ready to be rebroadcast in 2012.

Frum was criticizing Palin’s media handlers, not the McCain campaign itself, but what does it say when the veep candidate has to be kept out of sight because she’s too much of a dolt to be let out in public? And, frankly, I don’t think the McCain campaign would have done any better if they’d kept Moosewoman in a closet.

Frum continues,

She tells us she was a victim of sexism. She tells us she was a victim of class prejudice. She complains about her media treatment – then insists she never watched any of it. She deplores the unpleasant personal comments directed against herself, while offering up some equally unpleasant personal comments of her own. She repeatedly shades the truth in order to escape blame for her own mistakes. (She won’t for example let go of our claim that there was some insult to Alaska embedded in Katie Couric’s simple question: “What do you read?”)

Frum says Palin needs to learn to let go of her grievances if she’s going to be a viable presidential candidate in the future. But Frum misunderstands his own people. Righties love her because she embodies grievance, because she gives voice to their Inner Victim. If she ever started to sound unselfish and mature, her fans would lose interest.

Maybe it was different in your elementary school, but as I remember it, after every recess softball game, the losers stomped off the playground yelling “They cheated!” But by the time we were in middle school, the same kids could accept loss in a more mature way.

Today we have more evidence that “movement conservatism” is less a political philosophy than a form of arrested emotional development. Joe Conason writes in Salon that the usual hatemongers — O’Reilly, Limbaugh, Coulter — are screaming that Al Franken somehow stole the Minnesota Senate election from Norm Coleman. They have no evidence whatsoever, mind you. They are just stomping around yelling “he cheated!”

A right-winger’s ideas about morality aren’t just arrested. They’re stuck in the Bronze Age. The absolute basis of morality for them is tribal loyalty. The world is sorted into good guys and bad guys. Our side is inherently good, no matter what we do. Their side is inherently bad, which justifies our doing whatever we do. In other words, whether an action is moral or not is not determined by what is done, but by who is doing it.

The other day I quoted Cernig:

Even if the IDF were correct, something the Right accepts unquestioningly because the IDF never, ever lies like their enemies do, then Israel would only be responding to Hamas’ war crime by committing another war crime. You can’t get to the moral high ground – let alone win a COIN operation – by allowing the rules of war to be set by barbarians, something that the intellectually and morally bankrupt Right never seems to acknowledge.

Whereupon some commenters linked to an article about the principal of a UN school being bombed by Israel being a Hamas operative. The point Cernig made went right over their heads.

(Note: If any righties are reading this, a clue to “the point” can be found in the words “responding to Hamas’ war crime by committing another war crime.”)

In fact, the world’s great philosophers have not considered “Jimmy did it first” to be a legitimate basis of moral action since about 500 BCE. I guess the Right missed the memo.

Poor Joe Klein, who has been somewhat more awake these past few months than he used to be, writes about President Bush’s authorization of torture, “his single most callous and despicable act. It stands at the heart of the national embarrassment that was his presidency.”

Is, Joe. He’s still POTUS, for a few more days. But we’re at the same place on the torture question. You absolutely cannot find a right-winger with half a clue why the rest of us are upset about torture. They just assume the rest of us are soft on terrorism, or we’re al-Qaeda lovers, or something.

There’s a story in the Guardian that the Obama foreign policy team is planning to talk to Hamas. I don’t have to tell you how the Right is taking that. The ghost of Neville Chamberlain continues to walk among us. And, you know, the Bush policy of not talking to people we don’t like, or even letting them sit at our table in the lunchroom, has worked so well.

Truly, if you want to understand the rightie brain, just study five-year-olds.

President Jimmy Carter has an op ed in today’s Washington Post that calls the current military actions in Gaza “an unnecessary war.” As you might imagine, this provoked much hooting of derision from the Right Blogosphere. In right-wing iconography, President Carter is the Ghost of Liberal Wussiness Past, and he can have nothing to say that they will hear.

Elsewhere, however, Andrew Bacevich writes,

THE ISRAELI military action in Gaza raises both moral questions and strategic ones. The moral issues are more complex than partisans on either side are prepared to admit. Not so the strategic issues: here the verdict is clear. Israel’s return to Gaza constitutes a tacit admission of strategic failure now stretching back four decades.

How is that not true? Whatever you think of the moral issues surrounding Gaza, the Israeli policy toward the Palestinians has failed. The actions of Israel over the past several days is an admission of failure.

No matter what this particular round of fighting may achieve, the conflict will continue. Indeed, the punishment inflicted on the residents of Gaza all but ensures its perpetuation.

Again, this is the plain truth many of us have been saying. In the collective adolescent brain of the Right, because there is Palestinian terrorism and because there are people who hate Jews because they are Jews, anything Israel does is justified. And if you criticize Israel, you must be for Hamas.

But I think for most of us it’s not about being for or against anything. Indeed, if I could will the nation of Israel to stay right where it is and enjoy many centuries of security and prosperity, I would do so. If I would will Hamas to dissolve, I would do so. The plain truth that the Right refuses to acknowledge is that Israel’s policy has failed. It has been failing for a long time, and there’s no earthly reason to think it will not continue to fail.

As always, Professor Bacevich’s op ed is worth reading all the way through. But now I want to switch gears a bit and take up an article Juan Cole wrote for Salon: “Neoconservatism dies in Gaza.”

For years the neoconservative fantasy was that if Saddam Hussein were taken out, all the problems of the Middle East would somehow unravel. That this theory made no sense whatsoever never deterred them. No end of overeducated and overpaid dweebs in the American Enterprise Institute, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Hudson Institute, and of course the Project for a New American Century, etc. etc., pushed this magical thinking as holy writ. And, finally, it became Bush Administration policy.

However, I think Professor Cole is a fool if he think neoconservatism will shrivel up and die just because it has been shown to be colossally wrong. Magical thinkers are magical thinkers. They will take up some new and equally nonsensical idea and run with it, eventually.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said yesterday that the Senate doesn’t work for Barack Obama.

Reid, who lambasted the GOP-led Congress for being a rubber stamp for President Bush, indicated that he will not bow to the Obama administration.

Reid stated, “I don’t believe in the executive power trumping everything… I believe in our Constitution, three separate but equal branches of government.”

“If Obama steps over the bounds, I will tell him. … I do not work for Barack Obama. I work with him,” he said.

In December, Vice President Dick Cheney said President-elect Obama will “appreciate” the expansion of the executive branch’s power over the last eight years. During an interview on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, Cheney predicted that Obama will not cede that authority back to Congress.

While Cheney has been a regular at the Senate GOP policy lunches over the past eight years, Reid recently said Vice President-elect Biden will not be allowed to sit in while Democrats discuss legislative strategies over lunch. The move is part of Reid’s attempt to separate the executive and legislative branches, which moved in unison between 2001 and 2006.

This is as it should be, and I hope Reid means it. That said, he and Nancy Pelosi are not the strongest leaders Congress ever had, and I don’t expect them to rebel all that much. My greatest hope is that Barack Obama appreciates the separation of power also and doesn’t try to trample all over them the way the Bushies did.

Meanwhile, demonstrating an “utterly cavalier lack of knowledge about the actual principles on which the country was founded” (Michael Tomasky’s description of Sarah Palin), MacRanger jeers at Reid for “pissing Obama off.” Stupid is as stupid blogs.

You regulars may talk among yourselves, unmolested, I hope.

Some of you will appreciate Gary Kamiya’s essay “The Israel Rules” in Salon.

You probably heard that the Israeli Defense Force shelled a UN school in the Gaza strip, killing 30 people and injuring 55. The UN says all the casualties were civilians, not Hamas. The IDF says mortars were being fired from the school. The UN says the schools were sheltering civilians. According to Little Green Footballs, terrorists were using the schools as a weapons dump. Juan Cole has a video of a young Palestinian woman confronting Israeli troops who were firing on children.

Cernig:

Even if the IDF were correct, something the Right accepts unquestioningly because the IDF never, ever lies like their enemies do, then Israel would only be responding to Hamas’ war crime by committing another war crime. You can’t get to the moral high ground – let alone win a COIN operation – by allowing the rules of war to be set by barbarians, something that the intellectually and morally bankrupt Right never seems to acknowledge.

The Right’s argument is that Hamas started the violence, so everything Israel does is justified. Basically, it’s the “Jimmy did it first” level of morality; bankrupt, indeed. We’re also way past the point that “who started what” means anything. We’re in chicken and egg territory. Hamas and the IDF are feeding off each other, partners in the same dance.

Don’t miss Juan Cole.

Simon Tisdall writes at The Guardian that Barack Obama is making a big mistake by not being more assertive about Gaza.

Obama has remained wholly silent during the Gaza crisis. His aides say he is following established protocol that the US has only one president at a time. Hillary Clinton, his designated secretary of state, and Joe Biden, the vice-president-elect and foreign policy expert, have also been uncharacteristically taciturn on the subject.

But evidence is mounting that Obama is already losing ground among key Arab and Muslim audiences that cannot understand why, given his promise of change, he has not spoken out. Arab commentators and editorialists say there is growing disappointment at Obama’s detachment – and that his failure to distance himself from George Bush’s strongly pro-Israeli stance is encouraging the belief that he either shares Bush’s bias or simply does not care.

I sincerely understand that the world’s hair is on fire, and it is dashing about frantically wanting someone to take charge of things, and where the bleep is the POTUS?

But, in effect, there is no POTUS. Or, rather, there is the aggregate of protoplasm known as “George W. Bush” taking up space where there ought to be a POTUS, and that’s how it’s going to be for a few more days. As eager as everyone is for Obama to get on with things, there are arguments to be made for his staying out of the way until he gets the actual power of office in his hands.

First, like it or not, it really would not do to have two administrations going on at the same time. If (Buddha forbid) something might happen that would require the current Administration to act, there can be no confusion as to who is in charge. Well, OK, at the moment no one is in charge. But, legally, Obama cannot step into that vacuum, as tempting as it might be to have him do so. That is a precedent that should not be set, or else it could cause genuine havoc in the future.

We’ve had quite enough of ignoring the rule of law in the Bush Administration. One of the things we all hope President Obama will do is restore proper Constitutional checks and balances.

As fluid and combustible as the Mideast situation is, I think it would be unwise for Obama to issue statements about what he will do as soon as he takes office, because by the time he takes office the situation might be drastically changed. Again, I don’t see the point.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. What do you think?