Us Versus Them

David Neiwert seems to be taking some time off from blogging, so he hasn’t reacted to Cathy Young’s commentary on his Michelle Malkin series (first installment here) in yesterday’s Boston Globe.

After calling Michelle Malkin’s book Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild “accurate and disturbing,” Young acknowledges that righties can get a little unhinged sometimes, too. Then she mentions Dave:

Dave Neiwert, a Seattle-based author and award-winning freelance journalist, has posted a rebuttal to Malkin on his website at dneiwert.blogspot.com. Neiwert documents a lot of nastiness on the right, including physical as well as verbal assaults. For every left-wing ”Kill Bush” T-shirt, he notes, there’s a right-wing ”Liberal hunting permit” bumper sticker.

I’ve never seen a “Kill Bush” T-shirt. Per Dave, this claim comes from Malkin. I’ll take her word for it that somebody has such a T-shirt for sale, but we don’t know if anyone bought them. Impeach Bush, on the other hand …

But this anecdotes illustrates another point that Young misses: Righties demonize liberalism far more broadly, and generally, than lefties demonize conservatism; see this old post for discussion and this post for an illuminating comparison of rightie and leftie book titles. Briefly, I argue that righties define liberalism in more broad-brush, demonic terms than lefties define conservatism. Although there is copious and robust snarking going both ways, I find it’s easier to find condemnations for liberalism itself on the Right Blogosphere than it is to find condemnations for conservatism itself on the Left Blogosphere. As I wrote earlier, “when liberals attack conservatives, liberals tend to be person- or issue-specific, and give reasons — This guy is a jerk because he did thus-and-so. This policy stinks because it’s going to have such-and-such effect.”

Comparing “shoot liberals” to “shoot Bush” illustrates my point. But let’s go on …

Young continues,

Neiwert makes a lot of excellent points, but unfortunately he can’t resist the temptation of arguing that right-wing nastiness is worse than the left-wing kind.

For instance, Neiwert argues that a number of leading conservative figures have employed rhetoric about rounding up the opposition. (Here’s Limbaugh again: ”Wouldn’t it be great if anybody who speaks out against this country, to kick them out of the country? . . . We’d get rid of Michael Moore, we’d get rid of half the Democratic Party. . .”) Such talk, Neiwert claims, has no real counterpart on the left. But was it much better when Garrison Keillor, who has an audience of nearly 4 million on National Public Radio, suggested taking the vote away from born-again Christians shortly after the 2004 election? Yes, it’s all in jest, but this is joking of a very poisonous kind.

I got news for you, honey lamb; the righties ain’t jokin‘. And notice we’re comparing violence (“kick them out of the country”) to non-violence (“taking away the vote”). I mean, we’re comparing raving mad, foaming-at-the-mouth Limbaugh to the courtly and often soporific Keillor, for pity’s sake. Give me a break.

Now we have another example. The LGF’ers are calling for James Wolcott’s decapitation. Yeah, beheading jokes are always knee-slappers.

The catalyst for this impromptu rally was my clinical diagnosis of Daniel Pipes as “a patronizing little shit,” which seemed to displease the footballers, not that any of them bothered to acquaint themselves with the causus belli (Pipes’ pipsqueak character smear of Muhammed Ali). Then again, the poor dears don’t seem to know the difference between an ocelot and an ocicat, another indictment of the limitations of home schooling.

This one sentence amid all that writhing distemper leapt out at me:

“May he [i.e., me] be kidnapped by ‘insurgents’ in Iraq then appear on an ugly net broadcast. I wonder, if in the moment before the knife started sawing into his fleashy neck if he might rethink his opinions on the GWOT.”

He later corrected the spelling to “fleshy,” lest anyone think I possess a flashy neck.

Y’know, I have called a lot of people names on this blog. I call them weenies and idiots and whackjobs. I describe their mental and educational limitations in colorful terms. But I honestly do not believe I have ever wished physical harm on anyone. And this goes for the many other liberal bloggers whose work I follow.

Our James W. continues,

More and more the rightwing militant “anti-idiotarians” (as they deludedly think of themselves)have been relishing the prospect of antiwar figures undergoing the Daniel Pearl treatment. They keep bringing it up as the retribution that’ll deliver certain choice heads on a platter. In a sick irony, Daniel Pearl’s marytrdom has provided a negative inspiration to certain super patriots professing to fight for truth, justice, and the American way.

For example, Anna Benson, the bodacious wife of a Mets pitcher, recently burst her bodice giving full lusty cry to an aria painting the glorious prospect of Michael Moore’s neck being used as a log.

“You are a selfish, pathetic excuse for an American, and you can take your big fat ass over to Iraq and get your pig head cut off and stuck on a pig pole. Then, you can have your equally as fat wife make a documentary about how loudly you squealed while terrorists were cutting through all the blubber and chins to get that 40 pound head off of you.”

And just this morning, the day after Christmas and the second day of Hannukah, blogdom’s zestiest Zionist party girl elevated the discourse by dismissing the concerns of legal scholars perturbed about Bush’s domestic spying thusly:

“Someone ought to tlell those legal scholars not to worry…….it’s smooth sailing once those Radical Islmonazis saw through their jugulars.”

(Her excitable italics.)

I assume her excitable spelling, too. But, for the record, I don’t find jokes about sawing through jugulars all that amusing.

I am not going to claim that no leftie ever wished physical harm, or death, or beheading, on a rightie. But it is a whole lot less common. And Mr. Wolcott knows why:

When rightwing bloggers and posters conjure that under Islam, Democrats–which they’ve come to call dhimmicrats–will get what’s coming to them (i.e., the business end of a butcher’s blade), it’s as if it’s a horrible fate that couldn’t possibly happen to them*–because it’s a death wish directed outward. The Islamic terrorists serve as proxies and stand-ins in this imaginary theater of cruelty, enacting what they (the warbloggers) would like to mete out to us (their domestic adversaries). …

…(*as another LGF poster put it: “Funny thing, the liberal mindset: expend all energy on phantom ‘enemys’, meanwhile the real enemy pounds at the fucking gate, ready to chop off their heads.” Note: “their,” not “our.” LGF’ers have a touching faith in the undetachablility of their own heads under the grisly Islamofascism they spend so many hours daydreaming about.)[emphasis added]

I think it’s often the case that the things people say they are afraid of are actually what they wish for. Survivalists are a good example; they are often people who feel marginalized or intimidated by the society they live in, so they hope for a day when that society is wiped out. Today’s Right Wing might be defined as a selective survivalist cult. They don’t want the entire society to be wiped out, just the liberal parts. And they aren’t joking.

Don’t Know Nothin’ ‘Bout History II

Following up last night’s post — I’ve done some Bush-Lincoln comparisons in the past, such as this one from October

I still can’t get over the fact that his staff had to perform a bleeping intervention days after the hurricane had struck to get him to pay attention to the crisis. Didn’t he care about what a hurricane might have done to New Orleans? I guess not, until someone whispered the dreaded words “political damage” in his ear.

I keep remembering that Abraham Lincoln used to hang out for hours around the White House telegraph, reading dispatches from the generals, sometimes sending questions and comments back. He didn’t sit around by the fire waiting for his aides to bring him reports. Some historians accuse Lincoln of being a micromanager, but at least he was fully engaged in doing his job. Unlike George W. Bush, he wasn’t just a figurehead or a ribbon-cutter.

I didn’t think Bush compared well to other presidents, either.

I keep thinking that another president–I usually imagine Harry Truman or FDR–in these circumstances would be all over these problems, kicking butt and busting heads. And I imagine them working hard on a solution to the shelter problem. But does Bush even know these problems exist?

One fascinating point about the current Lincoln v. Bush flap is that the righties are dumping on Robert Kuttner instead of Doris Kearns Goodwin, even though the Kuttner op ed is essentially a review of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s new book Team of Rivals, and Kuttner cites Goodwin for his facts. Yesterday I dumped on Kenneth Anderson’s tortured critique of the op ed, noting that Anderson failed to even mention Goodwin (he added Goodwin to a postscript later), leaving his readers the impression that Kuttner was just making shit up. From a psychological point of view, the sidestepping of Goodwin by John at Discriminations is even more interesting:

Kuttner’s article is a gloss on a new book by Doris Kearns Goodwin on Lincoln and his cabinet, Team of Rivals (or perhaps I should say, a new book that purports to be by Doris Kearns Goodwin). I haven’t read Goodwin’s book, and probably won’t, and so I have no comment about how much of the silliness here is Kuttner’s and how much is Goodwin’s (or her research assistants’). I should thank whoever is responsible, however, for providing some good laughs.

He doesn’t dare take on Goodwin on historical fact, so he kicks her out of the way by claiming she didn’t write her own book. As I said, fascinating.

John continues,

Here’s a representative howler:

    Goodwin’s unusual title, ”Team of Rivals,” refers to the fact that Lincoln deliberately included in his Cabinet the prominent leaders of different factions of his party who had opposed him for the 1860 nomination. Some, like his treasury secretary, Salmon Chase, a fierce abolitionist, wanted Lincoln to proceed much more aggressively.

Salmon Chase had been and was many things, but “fierce abolitionist” is definitely not one of them. He came out of the Free Soil Party, a movement that grew up in Ohio, Illinois, and the midwest dedicated to limiting the expansion of slavery, but this “anti-slavery” position was definitely not abolitionist. Indeed, it was motivated in large part by a racist desire to keep blacks, slave or free, out of their territories; it was also anti-slavery in large part out of a desire not to compete with slaveholders and slave labor.

This is partly true, and partly not. It’s true that the “free soil” position was about keeping slavery out of the territories, not about abolishing slavery. And it’s also true that the majority of free soilers were not abolitionists. The Republican Party also placed a “free soil” plank in its 1860 platform, and Lincoln ran on a promise to keep slavery out of the territories. Lincoln was, in fact, much more of a “free soiler” than he was an abolitionist.

Salmon Chase, on the other hand, was an abolitionist, much more than Lincoln was. This is a simple fact. He was also a free soiler because he believed that, if slavery could be contained in the slave states and not allowed to spread, eventually it would die (or, there would be enough “free” states to amend the Constitution). Like Lincoln, and unlike more radical abolitionists, he did not believe the federal government had the constitutional authority to abolish slavery in slave states, so more incremental measures were called for. The Free Soil Party founded by Chase was a fusion of other small parties, and members held a variety of opinions, but above all it was an anti-slavery party. As one congressman at the organizing convention said, “Our political conflicts must be in future between slavery and freedom.” (See discussion of Chase and the Free Soil Party convention in McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, pp. 61 ff.) After the war began, Chase pressured Lincoln to emancipate the slaves, a pressure Lincoln resisted for more than a year. Later, Chase would be a dedicated proponent for African American suffrage.

I don’t have time to go chasing around the Right Blogosphere and cleaning up rightie messes, so this will have to be representative. But in short we’ve got a whole lot of people given to overstuffed rhetoric who don’t know as much as they think they do.

As I said yesterday I haven’t read the Goodwin book, so I’m not comfortable giving it a blanket endorsement for factuality. And I have to assume Robert Kuttner’s op ed conveyed Goodwin’s work accurately. But IMO Kuttner’s basic point — that Lincoln was a uniter but Bush a divider — is exactly right.

Update: Glenn Greenwald writes a stirring defense of Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus. I would like to add that Lincoln was faced with an emergency situation (civilians shooting at soldiers in Maryland; civil authority totally breaking down in parts of Missouri and Kentucky) at a time when Congress was out of session, and it would have taken weeks to re-convene it. So he acted extraconstitutionally, but openly, and when Congress was back in session Lincoln took his case to the legislators and humbly asked them to sign off on what he had done. Unlike Bush he did not act in secret, nor did he assume an inherent authority to do whatever he pleased, Constitution be damned. He acknowledged that the authority to suspend habeas corpus rested ultimately with Congress (Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 2).

Don’t Know Nothin’ ‘Bout History

A couple of days ago I linked to “What Bush Could Learn from Lincoln” by Robert Kuttner in the Boston Globe. Today some rightie blogger found it and objected to the comparison of Dear Leader to the Great Emancipator. Kuttner’s column is based largely on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s recent book on Lincoln and his Cabinet, Team of Rivals. I have not read the Goodwin book and the rightie doesn’t refer to it (too cowardly to take on Goodwin, he implies, dishonestly, that Kuttner was just making shit up) so I take it he hasn’t, either. However, Civil War history is a particular interest of mine, and I know quite a lot about it. The rightie, apparantly, does not.

Kuttner wrote,

Lincoln’s priority, always, was to preserve the Union and to reduce the sectional and ideological bitterness. As Goodwin brilliantly shows, he did so by the force of his personality and the generosity of his spirit. Lincoln had an unerring sense of when public opinion was ready for partial, then full abolition of slavery, and he would not move until he felt he had the people behind him. He governed by listening and persuading.

The rightie says,

Let us leave aside Kuttner’s questionable historical readings. I do not think, for example, that the weight of serious contemporary scholarship would accept that Lincoln was waiting for the moment in public opinion when he could press for partial and then full emancipation, at least not in the way in which Kuttner means it for purposes of chastising Bush. Emancipation was forced as a public policy upon the president, irrespective of his personal views. Charitably, Kuttner is out of his intellectual depth.

The story of how Lincoln waited until after a Union victory to announce the Emancipation Proclamation is basic stuff; Civil War 101. As soon as the war began abolitionists pressured Lincoln to end slavery. He hesitated to do so for several reasons, but prominent among these reasons was the concern that such a move would inflame secessionist sentiments in the border states, especially Kentucky, and also would not sit well with pro-Union Democrats, hurting the war effort. “…[F]orcible abolition of slavery” must not be contemplated, General George McClellan advised Lincoln. “A declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our present armies.” This was a commonly held view. (McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 502)

So Lincoln waited, and his policies toward slavery were calculated to be conciliatory toward pro-slavery but anti-secessionist factions. For example, in August 1861 John C. Fremont, commander of the Western Department, issued a proclamation emancipating the slaves of Confederate activists in Missouri. Lincoln countermanded the proclamation. This act would “alarm our Southern Union friends and turn them against us,” he wrote Fremont, “perhaps ruin our rather fair prospect for Kentucky.” (McPherson, pp. 352-353)

But in July 1862 Lincoln began to see that emancipation would aid the war effort. It would swing British public opinion against the Confederacy, for example, and discourage the British government from sending military aid to the secessionists. It would also allow for recruiting former slaves to serve in the Union Army. So the Proclamation, which would abolish slavery in the Confederate states only (Lincoln was still cautious about pissing off those border state slaveowners), was written and announced to the Cabinet, but was not announced to the public until after Antietam in September — a Union victory to sweeten the bitter pill.

As Kuttner said, although Lincoln was opposed to slavery, his purpose in the war was saving the Union. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued on behalf of the war effort, not primarily toward the end of ending slavery. Radical Republicans in the Senate wrote the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery while Lincoln was still alive, I believe, but I don’t believe Lincoln himself was involved with it. The war needed to be won first.

Again, this is Civil War 101. Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of CW history should know that Lincoln did, in fact, wait until public opinion was softened up a bit before he issued the Proclamation. But the rightie crashes ahead with some egregious examples of viewing the 19th-century world through a 21st-century prism. Here’s the worst:

As for religion, Kuttner et al. might be thought to resemble most closely the anti-war Democratic newspapers of the day – along with many of the sophisticated newspapers of Europe – who were appalled by the religiousity of the Second Inaugural Address and accused its author of offering “puritanical” theology in place of public policy, and who believed that Lincoln was invoking the mantle of the Almighty in order to shield his own policies from criticism – Lincoln was guilty, in their eyes, of being at once a believer and a hypocrite, which is not that different, so far as I can tell, from how Kuttner sees Bush.

In fact, the mid-19th century was steeped in religiosity, and in this paragraph the rightie demonstrates he hasn’t spent much time with the period. Americans of the time could not so much as brush their teeth without invoking the mantle of the Almighty; I suspect this was true of many Europeans also. But as Gary Wills wrote (Under God, p. 69) the Second Inaugural expresses an “awareness of national guilt,” and called for reconciliation and forgiveness. Some people were not ready for that. Even though I’m sure if you dig hard enough you can find a few negative opinions, however, in general the Second Inaugural was well received.

Kuttner wrote:

Bush, despite today’s ubiquity of media, doesn’t read newspapers, much less the Internet, and he settles for carefully filtered briefings. Lincoln was a voracious reader; he haunted the War Department’s telegraph office to get firsthand reports from the battlefield.

The rightie argues:

As for the belief that Lincoln acquainted himself with a wide range of opinion through his wide reading, whereas Bush lives apart from newspapers and criticism – well, ironically, both elite Radical New England opinion and elite New York Democratic anti-war opinion believed that the ill-educated Lincoln lived in a world shaped by Western frontier prejudices and that he was simply outside the mainstream of what American and European elites “knew” to be the real world, not so different from what Kuttner et al. in the “reality-based community” like to think of themselves and President Bush.

It’s true that much of the eastern intelligentsia looked down its collective nose at Lincoln, who was self-educated, clumsy, and had an outrageous backwoods accent. But, in fact, Lincoln was a voracious reader, and he did haunt the War Department’s telegraph office to get firsthand reports from the battlefield. I think Lincoln’s biggest flaw was a tendency to micromanage, in fact. This year I read Geoffrey Perret’s new book, Lincoln’s War: The Untold Story of America’s Great President as Commander in Chief, and was surprised at the amount of time Lincoln spent on small details, even to test new models of rifles and carbines by shooting them himself. Bush, on the other hand, can’t be bothered about the details even of his own policies — Social Security “reform” and No Child Left Behind come to mind. And it took an intervention to get him to pay attention to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Finally, the rightie says, it’s not fair to compare Lincoln to anybody.

Because Lincoln belongs to the ages – because we have accepted that he belongs to the ages – he is, and in the hands of intellects wiser than Kuttner’s, above the fray. You invoke him in support of your petty quarrels and interpretations and minor vendettas at the risk of weakening your own position or, worse, weakening Lincoln’s. And this is what Kuttner has done. Lincoln cannot, should not, be invoked ever in a partisan way in the moral discourse of the United States, because the whole point is that he belongs to all of us.

Oh, jeez, what crap. The Lincoln of “popular” history may be an icon, but he was a man, and the better historians (like Perret or Goodwin) have no problem humanizing him, warts and all. Lincoln could be crude. By our standards he was a racist. But as Kuttner wrote of Godwin’s book,

Goodwin’s unusual title, ”Team of Rivals,” refers to the fact that Lincoln deliberately included in his Cabinet the prominent leaders of different factions of his party who had opposed him for the 1860 nomination. Some, like his treasury secretary, Salmon Chase, a fierce abolitionist, wanted Lincoln to proceed much more aggressively. Others feared that Lincoln was moving too fast and alienating border states like Maryland and Kentucky that permitted slavery but had voted not to leave the Union.

Goodwin, improbably finding something wholly new to illuminate this most heavily researched of historic figures, relies partly on the diaries of his contemporaries to reveal Lincoln’s sheer genius at winning the trust and affection of rivals.

Can you imagine Bush including in his inner Cabinet such Republicans as John McCain, who opposes Bush on torture of prisoners, or Chuck Hagel, who challenges the Iraq war, or Lincoln Chafee, who resists stacking the courts with ultra-right-wingers? Not to mention Democrats, a group Lincoln also included among his top appointees.

Sure, most of our president fall a bit short when compared to Lincoln. But only a few were as far off the mark as our Dubya. Dear Leader is challenging the likes of Buchanan, Pierce, and Andrew Johnson for last place.

Indigestion 2005

I did a Technorati search, and it seems Jazz is right — as of now the Right Blogosphere is ignoring the unfortunate post-election turmoil in Iraq. After whining at us that we ignored the glorious election, now they’re ignoring the inglorious side-effects of an apparent religious Shiite victory.

Reuters reports renewed violence in Iraq, along with Sunni demands for a do-over election and a boycott of parliament.

On the other hand, some Sunnis are still negotiating for more seats in the new parliament. Not successfully, but they haven’t given up.

I remain skeptical that Iraq or any other non-democratic nation can be forcibly retrofitted with a workable democratic government by outside forces. The argument is that the U.S. turned Japan into a democratic country after World War II; therefore, it should work with Iraq as well. This argument ignores the fact that there are ENORMOUS cultural, sociological, historical, and political differences between post-WWII Japan and current day-Iraq. And (warning: I’m no expert) I understand that the government that emerged in Japan was not as wildly different from what the Japanese were accustomed to as Americans might believe. For centuries under the Shogunate the country was ruled through rigid hierarchy and bureaucratic control, and the emperor was little more than a figurehead. Some argue that’s sorta kinda the way General MacArthur left it in 1949. And Japan had been moving toward democracy on its own in the 1920s before economic and social upheaval shoved it toward militarism. For a time after World War I the nation had a two-party political system and was governed mostly by a prime minister, not the Emperor. Americans have a hazy notion that Japan’s pre-war government was something like a European monarchy and that elections were utterly alien to the Japanese, but this is not so.

So if we eliminate Japan as an example of a new Little Democracy That Could, are there other examples? I can’t think of any.

Also: More on why the “tough on terror” Right is really a pack of weeniebabies. It’s us liberals, not the lefties, who demonstrate real resolve against terrorists.

Happy Holy Day

Today is the observance of the annual cease fire on the war on Christmas. Christmas wins, again. In celebration, people wallow waist deep in shredded gift wrap and prepare the armistice feast.

Once proper tribute is paid to the default holy day we take a moment to acknowledge the alternate choices on the menu, such as Hanukkah — a minor Jewish observance that got caught up in the Christmas gravitational pull — and Kwanzaa. Some Buddhist sects observe “Bodhi Day” — the anniversary of the enlightenment of the Buddha — in December also. But this is a day dedicated to silent meditation on the ephemeral nature of all physical things, so those who observe it like to get it out of the way early in the month.

A less rigorous way to observe Bodhi Day is to rent a copy of “Little Buddha” and watch Keanu Reaves re-enact the enlightenment of Prince Siddhartha. Although some Buddhists really hated this film, I was charmed by Reaves’s portrayal of the World-Honored One. Especially the part where the Prince gets flustered when his Dad says no, he can not go off into the woods and become a wandering holy man like all the other guys. Like, dude.

Some people knock Kwanzaa as a “made up” holiday, but then, so is Christmas. By now you’ve probably heard that the date, not provided in Scripture, was chosen to compete with the Roman Saturnalia and the pagan Yule. Recognition of December 25 as the day of Jesus’ birth dates from the fourth century or so, however, so it was made up a long time ago.

Then there’s the question of how much of the traditional Birth of Jesus story is true, and indeed, how much of the Jesus Is God story is true. This is a matter that needs to be taken on faith, since historians tend to be skeptical. Some scholars like to point out that the virgin birth-in-a-manger story was left out of the earliest gospel, Mark, indicating that when Mark was written (ca. 70 AD) the story wasn’t in circulation yet. The gospel of Luke, which contains the most complete virgin birth story, was written several years later, possibly as late as 130-150 AD. The process of the deification of Jesus was by then well under way.

(For a rollicking good read on how the process ended — including riots in the streets, political intrigue, and the alleged murder of one Church Father at the hands of another — I recommend When Jesus Became God: The Struggle to Define Christianity during the Last Days of Rome by Richard Rubenstein. If you liked I, Claudius, you’ll love WJBG.)

But in her book Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews : A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity, Professor Paula Fredriksen of Boston U depicts the historical Y’shuah as a devout Jew who would have been appalled at the notion that he was God. Frederiksen and other scholars argue that Jesus was really about purifying Judaism, not starting a whole ‘nother religion to compete with it, and certainly not claiming to be a world redeemer or messiah. First-generation Christianity was considered to be a Jewish sect. I believe it wasn’t until after the destruction of the Temple (70 AD), when being Jewish was a tad, um, dangerous, that Christians drew a bright line between them and those other people. By then many of the members were Greek-speaking gentiles, and non-Jewish notions about who Jesus was and what he had been about were taking hold.

Then as now, people who feel the pain of life seek comfort in the sheltering arms of religion. But, once comforted, the religious have an unfortunate tendency to make others miserable for the sake of the faith. Human history is a long tale of sacrifice, oppression, inquisitions, war, and martyrdom in the name of religion. Religions themselves tend to follow the same trajectory — Once the Founder is gone, his original vision and teachings are quickly watered down by lesser followers. Sects form and begin to squabble with each other. Religious institutions and their leaders are corrupted, then reformed, then corrupted again.

So, it is not at all surprising that many grow hostile to religion. There is so much obvious hypocrisy and humbuggery in most religious institutions one might wonder why anyone with two brain cells to rub together gets taken in. But then there’s that pain of life thing, and the urge to look for someone or something more powerful than oneself to take the pain away.

And the fact is that religion can be redemptive. Yes, it has given us such loathesome creatures as Torquemada and James Dobson, but it’s also inspired Albert Schweitzer, Ghandi, and Aung San Suu Kyi. It may be that most of the popular beliefs of the major monotheistic religions — God, Lucifer, angels — can be traced back to ancient Persian folk tales, and much religious faith amounts to an emotional crutch. Yet an instant of pure experience — grace, epiphany, kensho — can be genuinely transformative. And I believe that beneath much of the fruitless hamster-wheel existance of modern life there is a deeply buried longing for a true spiritual path, a longing that modern Christianity rarely addresses. This same longing likely was felt by a Jewish fellow named Y’shuah who lived 2,000 years ago, and a king’s son named Siddhartha, who lived about five centuries earlier.

Instead of living the lives they’d been expected to live — one as a carpenter, and one as a king — both Y’shuah-Jesus and Siddhartha took off on their own difficult paths. Both struggled through a dark night of the soul (Jesus in the Wilderness, Siddhartha under the Bodhi Tree). And both seem to have found Something.

Jesus urged his followers to seek the Kingdom of Heaven. It was, he said, like a treasure hidden in a field; one who finds such a treasure will sell everything else he has to buy that field. Institutional Christianity, on the other hand, tries to replace the challenge of the spiritual path with easily digestible dogmas, comforting totems, and tribal identity. It’s spiritual distraction, not spiritual direction. And if there’s a better way to trivialize the life of Jesus than by whining that clerks in Target don’t say “Merry Christmas,” I can’t think of it.

But now it’s Christmas. We’ve got a day set aside to give each other presents and enjoy one another’s company, and there’s nothing wrong with that. And let’s remember Y’shuah, whoever he was, and honor his struggles, whatever they were. And if you ever feel an urge to do some spiritual seeking, I say heed the call and go for it.

May all beings find a true path.

Ready for Democracy?

Although I’d rather be playing with the Meme of Fours, there’s serious stuff going on out there.

Nancy A. Youssef and Huda Ahmed report for Knight Ridder
that “An Iraqi court has ruled that some of the most prominent Sunni Muslims who were elected to parliament last week won’t be allowed to serve because officials suspect that they were high-ranking members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.”

Following a week in which several hundred thousand Sunni Iraqis demonstrated against the election results, this move seems somewhat less than conciliatory. Shoving former Baathists out of the government will not, I think, placate former Baathists into accepting the new government.

If I had more time I could probably work up a comparison with the United States after the Civil War. Former Confederates were disenfranchised for a short time but regained power and influence fairly quickly, partly through violent means — race riots and the Klan, for example — and partly through political corruption — e.g., the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876, which was settled by an agreement that Reconstruction would end — leading to the Jim Crow era. So those who were eventually “punished” for the rebellion were the former slaves, not their masters. Funny how that worked out.

I understand Iraq less well than I understand the postbellum U.S. South, but I assume that the former Baathists retain wealth and property out of proportion to their numbers in the population. The world being the way it is, I wouldn’t be surprised if they eventually gain political power out of proportion to their numbers in the population, as well. We’ll see. They’ll be competing with the influence of Iran, which is formidible. But in the short run, unfortunately, we may see increasing violence in Iraq just as the U.S. plans a troop “drawdown.

For more learned and detailed analysis, see Juan Cole, who points out “The Bush administration’s fear of Iran and of its reigning Iraqi allies in Baghdad may be destabilizing Iraq by giving ammunition to disgruntled Sunni Arabs. How many feet does the Bush administration have left to shoot itself in??”

Update: Speaking of the Civil War, don’t miss “What Bush Could Learn from Lincoln” by Robert Kuttner in today’s Boston Globe. Then read “Bush’s False Choices” by Ellen Goodman from yesterday’s Boston Globe.

Meme of Fours

From Roy, to Kevin, to Digby, to Peter D., now to moi — doing this list meme made me realize I haven’t vacationed enough —

Four jobs you’ve had in your life: Editor, production manager, reporter, mother

Four movies you could watch over and over:
Last of the Mohicans (1992), The Godfather, The Lord of the Rings trilogy (counts as 1 or 3?), Amadeus

Four places you’ve lived: Flat River, Missouri, since renamed Park Hills; Cincinnati, Ohio; Bergenfield, New Jersey; current undisclosed location somewhere in New York

Four TV shows you love to watch: The Daily Show, Countdown, Animal Precinct, Law & Order

Four places you’ve been on vacation: Wales, Washington DC, San Francisco, various Ozark Mountain locations

Four websites you visit daily: Eschaton, The Sideshow, Whiskey Bar, Hullabaloo, many more

Four of your favorite foods: chocolate, cheese, scallops, pasta

Four places you’d rather be:
Snowdonia (Wales), London, any good Italian restaurant, a pretty mountain cabin near a lake with good friends and lots of beer and snacks

Passing the ball to … my buddy Bob Geiger of Yellow Dog Blog!

Update: Bob posted here, then punted to Jane at firedoglake. Feel free to add your own lists to the comments!

No Answers

Glenn Greenwald asked Bush defenders to “explain how there can be any limits at all on his power under the theories of Executive Power which they are advocating to argue that Bush had the right to violate Congressional law.”

In response, there are two posts from Leon at Red State.org and two posts from Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom, one of which largely relied on what Jeff reverently calls “a long and meticulously argued post” from John Hinderaker at Powerline. Leon also alerted me by e-mail to the issuance yesterday of a Memorandum from the Department of Justice (.pdf) which sets forth the Administration’s legal defense of its behavior.

The “long and meticulously argued post” includes these representative paragraphs:

The starting point, of course, is the Constitution. Article II of the Constitution sets out the powers and duties of the President. Some people do not seem to realize that the executive branch is coequal with the legislative and judicial branches. The President has certain powers under the Constitution, and they cannot be taken away or limited by Congressional legislation any more than the President can limit the powers of Congress by executive order. …

… This brings us back where we started, i.e., the Constitution. The only constitutional limitation on the President’s power to intercept communications by Americans for national security purposes is that such intercepts be “reasonable.” Is it reasonable for the administration to do all it can to identify the people who are communicating with known terrorists overseas, via the terrorists’ cell phones and computers, and to learn what terrorist plots are being hatched by those persons? Is it reasonable to do so even when—rather, especially when–some portion of those communications come from people inside the United States? I don’t find it difficult to answer those questions; nor, if called upon to do so, would the Supreme Court.

In other words, the President is not bound to follow laws passed by Congress if (in his discretion) he believes they infringe on his powers, and he can engage in warrantless searches that he (in his discretion) deems “reasonable.” And these decisions may be made in secret.

That’s pretty much absolute power, is it not? So the answer must be, no; there are no limits to the President’s powers.

The rest of the blog posts boil down to “you lefties don’t understand that we’re at war.” And Judd at Think Progress addresses the DoJ memo here. Be sure to read the rest of Glenn Greenwald’s post; it is outstanding.

The righties continue to churn out turgid screeds of legalosity to defend Bush’s warrantless search policy. And they continue to use the straw man argument that we lefties are opposed to surveillance of potential terrorists. (Once again, no one is arguing against surveillance, just that it be conducted within the law.) But after all this time the righties have yet to provide satisfactory answers two simple questions: Why not comply with FISA? And if FISA is cumbersome, why not ask Congress for changes in the regulations?

Hello? Righties? Anybody ….. ?

“That’s How Richard Nixon Got in Trouble”

Crypto Man” by Michael Scherer in Salon (and Truthout) focuses on James Bambord, a respected journalist who has covered the National Security Agency for 25 years.

… President Bush has admitted to ordering warrantless NSA wiretaps of American citizens, an admission that blindsided Bamford just as it shocked many in Congress. While politicians bicker over legal shades of gray, Bamford believes the president clearly broke the law, and he has called for a special prosecutor to investigate. “What you have here is the administration going around the only protection the public has from the NSA, and doing it on their own,” Bamford told CNN during a marathon of interviews for MSNBC, NPR, C-SPAN, CBS News and NBC News. “That’s how Richard Nixon got in trouble, and one of the reasons he left office.”

For Bamford, there is only black and white when it comes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a 1978 law that specifically requires warrants for any NSA wiretapping of U.S. citizens. “If you want to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens, you go to court. If you don’t, you go to jail,” Bamford says. “If you want to change the law, you go to Congress.”

You might also be interested in Bamford’s comments on MSNBC’s “The Abrams Report” on December 21.

ABRAMS: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales today again saying that President Bush has the authority to order the super secret National Security Agency to eavesdrop on foreigners and Americans without getting a warrant from a court. NBC News has confirmed that a federal judge who serves on the court that‘s supposed to approve requests to spy has quit over the warrantless program.

The remaining judges on the panel will meet and discuss the Bush spy program in the next two weeks. But now claims on numerous conservative Web sites that Bill Clinton did the same thing when he was president. They cite a 2000 “60 Minutes” report where a Canadian intelligence analyst said the NSA routinely monitored innocent civilians.

So, is it true that it‘s been going on for a long time? James Bamford is an expert on the National Security Agency, his latest book is “Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency from the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century”. Thank you for coming on the program.

And so I ask you, is it true?

JAMES BAMFORD, AUTHOR, “BODY OF SECRETS”: No, I‘ve written two books on NSA and looked very closely at the NSA spying on Americans and I haven‘t found any evidence of NSA doing that since the Nixon administration. Once the Nixon administration was discovered that they were doing massive illegal eavesdropping, they created this new court, this Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and until the Bush administration, every president as far as I could see, had been following the law.

ABRAMS: Well this was—this is one of the quotes that‘s being cited from that “60 Minutes” report. This Canadian intelligence analyst Mike Frost telling Steve Kroft how an innocent civilian winds up in a terrorist database. This is under the Clinton administration.

A lady‘s son had been in a school play. Next morning she said to her friend, oh Danny really bombed last night. The computer spit that conversation out and an analyst listed that lady as a possible terrorist.

I mean if that‘s true, it sure sounds like they are listening to everybody.

BAMFORD: I have read a lot of Mike Frost material and I don‘t give a lot of it credibility, so I think I‘ll stick with my own analysis of the agency.

ABRAMS: So the bottom line being, though, that you know that report, and that is—again I think that is the one that is being cited most, is the “60 Minutes” report which suggested that back then the NSA was listening to everyone. You‘re saying it‘s just not credible?

BAMFORD: No. Listen, the way it works is NSA pulls all those communications from satellites. International communications coming off of communication satellites and filters it through this huge, basically a big net. But most of that goes through without being listened to or read, about probably 99 percent of it.

The few items that are picked out, actually more than a few, but those are the items that are actually the subject of warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, so it‘s a very complex procedure how it‘s done.

ABRAMS: But just so we‘re clear…

(CROSSTALK)

BAMFORD: Believe me, if I had seen any illegality on the part of Clinton or Carter or anybody else, I certainly would have written about it.

ABRAMS: The ones they—just so we understand the logistics of it. So you‘re saying that the ones that they listen to are the ones that they have gotten a warrant to listen to. Meaning, they get all this information in, but that information is basically thrown away unless they have a warrant?

BAMFORD: That‘s right. It‘s just like a big fishing net with certain size holes there. And the only—virtually all of it goes through those holes except for the fish that are too big for those holes. So are the ones where they actually get the warrant for.

There‘s millions and millions and millions of communications coming and going from the United States every hour. And they can‘t possibly listen to all of that. So most of it goes through without ever—anybody ever reading the e-mails or listening to the phone calls. But the ones that are picked up…

ABRAMS: Right.

BAMFORD: … at least domestically are the ones that are the subject of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrants.

ABRAMS: And that‘s different than what the administration is doing now?

BAMFORD: Yes. This is the first time since basically the ‘60‘s or early ‘70‘s when the Nixon administration illegally did a lot of domestic spying with the NSA and again, that was why they created the FISA Court. What the Bush administration is doing is flaunting the law. The law clearly says if you want to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens, you only have one choice. That choice is to go to the court and get a warrant or don‘t do it.

ABRAMS: We will continue to debate the law on this program. But James Bamford, thank you very much. We appreciate you coming on.

BAMFORD: My pleasure. Thank you.

I also want to say that Abrams is wasted on celebrity trial news. When he gets an opportunity to focus on serious issues he can be sharper than most of the other bobbleheads on cable television.