Obsidian Wings

And Speaking Of Asylums...

by hilzoy

Via Juan Cole, an article I somehow missed:

"Voters should oust congressional Republican leaders because U.S. foreign policy is delaying the second coming of Jesus Christ, according to a evangelical preacher trying to influence closely contested political races.

K.A. Paul railed against the war in Iraq on Sunday before a crowd of 1,000 at the New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland Heights, his first stop on what he hopes is a 30-city campaign.

The Houston-based preacher said he believes that the Bush administration has delayed the second coming because U.S. foreign policy has blocked Christian missionaries from working in Iraq, Iran and Syria.

"Somebody needs to say enough is enough," he said to worshippers who stood, waved and called out in support."

Yet another reason to vote Democratic: to hasten the day when the heavens roll up as a scroll and the Lord descends in clouds of glory, and we shall behold the new Jerusalem, whose walls are of jasper and whose streets are of gold, and which is lightened by the glory of God, and whose light is the Lamb.

Speaking of Ohio:

"This doesn't happen every day: An incumbent member of Congress, in the middle of a re-election battle, says that storing nuclear waste shipments from around the world in her district may be a good idea.

U.S. Rep. Jean Schmidt does say that, and her support for studying the idea has become an issue in her re-election campaign, especially in rural Pike County, in the far eastern end of her sprawling Southern Ohio District, where the nuclear wastes would be stored.

"I'm not advocating for it one way or the other," Schmidt told The Enquirer. "I'm saying it is something we need to look at."

Schmidt said she sees potential to create "hundreds, maybe thousands of jobs" in an economically distressed part of the state, where double-digit unemployment rates are the norm. (...)

The idea of nuclear waste storage on a site that is still being cleaned up from its previous use has infuriated environmentalists and neighbors of the plant in Pike County and nearby Scioto County, prompting a communitywide petition drive and vows to fight the storage plan to the bitter end.

That and the fact that Schmidt's Democratic opponent, Victoria Wulsin of Indian Hill, has come out against the idea, mean that the issue could have an impact on Schmidt's re-election - meaning it could help determine who represents 650,000 constituents from Greater Cincinnati to Portsmouth.

"All I can tell you is that when it became known that she supports this, every Jean Schmidt yard sign in the county went down overnight," said Geoffrey Sea, a writer whose home abuts the Piketon plant."

Can you say Amen? I knew you could!

Speaking of elections: Remember my two longshot House races, ID-01 and WY-AL? The first is the one in which a decent Democrat, Larry Grant, is running against a Republican, Bill Sali, of whom the Republican Speaker of the Idaho House said: “That idiot is just an absolute idiot. He doesn’t have one ounce of empathy in his whole fricking body. And you can put that in the paper.” Another of his Republican colleagues once threatened to throw him out a window. Clearly the kind of person we need in the House of Representatives. The second race, WY-AL, pits Gary Trauner, the guy with the wonderful position papers on 'The Preamble to the United States Constitution' and 'Sunshine in Government', against Barbara Cubin, the person who recently said she would slap the Libertarian candidate if he weren't in a wheelchair.

Well both of them have really tightened up. The most recent poll has Grant just two points behind Sali. In Idaho. Meanwhile, Charlie Cook has just changed his rating of WY-AL to Toss Up. In Wyoming. (He still rates ID-01 'Leans Republican'. I think both started out as 'Safe Republican', as in any normal year they would be.)

Wow.

Excuse Me?

by hilzoy

The alleged party of limited government has come up with another fascinating use for my tax dollars: telling adults not to have sex!

"The federal government's "no sex without marriage" message isn't just for kids anymore.

Now the government is targeting unmarried adults up to age 29 as part of its abstinence-only programs, which include millions of dollars in federal money that will be available to the states under revised federal grant guidelines for 2007."

I seem to recall someone saying, recently, that whenever there's a problem, liberals' first thought is: let's use the government to fix it! I protested at the time, pointing to things like: the apparent belief of many ranchers that they are entitled to graze on public lands at below market rates in perpetuity, and the idea that it's up to the government to divert water from endangered salmon to farmers in a desert whenever -- surprise! -- there isn't enough water. But this surely takes the cake: using the government to tell competent adults whether or not to have sex.

News flash: I do not want George W. Bush -- or, worse, Dick Cheney, or, even worse than that, Lynne Cheney -- telling me who to have sex with. If they want to literally tell me, for instance, by calling me on the phone and informing me of their views -- that would merely be rude. But spending tax dollars on this kind of idiocy, and coming up with an actual government position on the (alas not so burning) issue of my sex life -- that's just insane.

These people wouldn't know conservatism if it sat down next to them on the bus. They wouldn't recognize Burke or Hayek if they were participating in some weird necrophiliac group sexual encounter with them. They should just back away from the reins of government, slowly, wrap themselves up in those comfy padded suits, and let the nice young men in their nice white coats take them off to the lunatic asylum where they obviously belong.

Just A Note

by hilzoy

It's a week before the election. Things have been ugly, and they're probably going to get uglier. That means that I'm probably going to find myself writing more of the stories I've been writing recently: stories about this or that appalling new ad/statement/whatever coming out of the Republican party. That being the case, I just wanted to say one thing right now, to any rank and file Republicans who might be reading this:

None of this is directed at you.

As I see it, the Republican party has been hijacked by a group of corrupt and venal thugs. They have abused the trust of their supporters, and gone a fair way towards wrecking their party. They have maintained their hold on power by playing to people's fears, and they have used that power to give tax breaks and no-bid contracts to their friends and supporters, paying no attention at all to the actual business of governing. Now, with nothing but a very long fence and the gutting of our Constitution to show for their last Congressional session, they are trying anything to maintain control.

But this is all the political leadership of the Republican Party. It has nothing to do with ordinary rank and file Republicans, most of whom are, I assume, decent people with conservative opinions. So please: don't think that when I criticize, say, Rush Limbaugh for making fun of Michael J. Fox, or the RNC for its various mendacious and repellent ads, I am criticizing anyone other than the specific person named. In particular, don't think that I'm criticizing Republicans or conservatives more generally. I can't imagine what it must be like to see my party leadership (or: the leadership of the major party I would normally feel most at home in) doing this kind of stuff.

One more thing: I tend to view this particular period in our political life as one of those episodes, like the McCarthy era, that we will all look back on as a period in which the country went slightly mad, and did things we wish it had not done. I think it's really, really important to try not to make it any harder than it has to be for us to get over this. And that means: trying to treat one another with the kind of decency and concern and generosity that citizens ought to show one another as a matter of course. This doesn't mean not advocating our positions passionately, but it does mean not doing anything that needlessly contributes to the general level of hatred. It will be hard enough to get past this period as it is. (And I don't care who started it. Each of us gets to control the actions of one and only one person, and what other people do in no way relieves us of our obligation to do the best we can.)

This last point is something I'm writing mainly to myself; it wasn't provoked by anything anyone has said here.

I just hate this rancor. I think it's important to notice when people say or do things that are way out of line, and I don't think that the cure for rancor is to pretend that it doesn't exist. But I hate it.

Sebastian Mallaby And Trust

by hilzoy

Atrios points to an op ed by Sebastian Mallaby, about the importance of trust, and the consequences of abusing it:

"The boom of the 1990s boosted trust in business; the 2001 terrorist attacks boosted trust in government. But CEOs and politicians abused these gifts with scandals and incompetence. Such is the cost of corporate malfeasance and the Iraq war: Precious social capital is destroyed by leaders' avarice and hubris."

I completely agree with Mallaby on the importance of social trust. I also agree with Atrios, who has some fun with some of Mallaby's previous statements on the war: I think that Mallaby has yet to address the question whether he played some actual role in squandering precious social capital, and that this is an odd omission in an op ed that's largely about accountability.

For my money, though, there's one sentence in Mallaby's op ed that deserves a bit more scrutiny, namely:

"Holding people accountable is a good thing: This season's negative campaigning can be seen (admittedly, with many despicable exceptions) as a healthy reaction to poor congressional performance."

Let's think about that. It would be easy to see how this season's negative ads were a reaction to poor congressional performance if they were, for the most part, ads supporting challengers against incumbents. But they are not: the worst ads are overwhelmingly Republican, either supporting incumbents against strong challengers or supporting members of the party that has presided over the "poor congressional performance" against members of the party that would like to replace them. It's pretty easy to see how these ads -- the one National Republican Congressional Committee ran that accused a Democratic challenger of dialing a sex line when it was in fact a wrong number, or the RNC's bimbo ad against Harold Ford, etc., etc., etc. -- are a response to poor Congressional performance. The Republicans in Congress have done a dreadful job; they have no actual achievements to point do; they don't want to lose their jobs; therefore, they run a smear campaign.

But it's a lot harder to see how this could possibly be what Mallaby says it is: a healthy response to poor Congressional performance. So why did Mallaby write that they were? Let's run through the possibilities.

1 Mallaby thinks that lying to the electorate to keep one's job is "healthy". This is, shall we say, in tension with his point in the op ed as a whole; in any case, let's charitably assume that he does not believe this.

2 Maybe there's some long and complicated story that explains why the Republicans' negative ads really are a healthy response to poor congressional performance. Maybe, for instance, the Democrats discovered how to mix polyjuice potion, and all the things we think were done by Republicans were actually done by Democrats in disguise. Just add some contrived reason why the Republicans cannot disclose this without enabling Voldemort to conquer the world, and voila! a story that makes Mallaby's claim plausible.

Somehow, I don't think this is the real explanation either.

3 Mallaby didn't think hard enough about what he was writing to notice that it only made sense on the assumption that challengers were running the negative ads, and that that assumption was false. He had a storyline in his head, and he didn't bother to check and see whether reality matched it.

I think that this is the only explanation that makes sense. But notice what it implies:

Mallaby is writing a piece about the importance of trust, and the consequences of people betraying it. A large betrayal is happening as we speak: Republicans, counting on the idea that people will trust political ads enough that their votes can be affected by them, are saying things that are flatly false in order to keep their hold on power. This is deeply and directly undemocratic: elections are supposed to register citizens' choices about who they want to represent them, and when politicians flat-out lie about things, they are trying to get people to vote in ways they wouldn't if they were not being lied to. But Mallaby neither notices this fact nor remarks on it, even when he's writing about trust and its betrayal.

Moreover, politicans aren't the only ones who enjoy a public trust that can be abused. Mallaby and other columnists in major newspapers have their own public role, and it has its own responsibilities. One of them, I would have thought, is to think about what one is saying: to ask oneself, before submitting a piece, whether what one has written is, in fact, true, rather than just making stuff up because it fits the storyline in one's head, and never entertaining the idea that it might be a good idea to check its accuracy.

By saying what he did, Mallaby betrayed his own public trust, and he did so in a way that obscures the fact that the Republican political establishment is betraying the public trust even as we speak. It's a perfect illustration of the hubris he writes about. Too bad it was unintentional.

Project Valour IT

by Andrew

I know this isn't what readers come here for, so I'll be brief and ask your indulgence on this one. Project Valour IT is a fund drive intended to raise money for troops injured in Iraq and Afghanistan, purchasing voice-operated laptops for troops with hand and arm injuries or amputations. If anyone has a few dollars to spare and is looking for someplace to spend it, I think it's a pretty good cause. More details can be found at the link above and at my site. Thanks.

Update: If you go straight to the site, please click on the Army's donation button. Not that I'm competitive, but...

Agendas -- With Feet!

by hilzoy

Pam at Pandagon linked to this bizarre article from WorldNetDaily, published at Free Republic. After describing the New Jersey decision on gay marriage, the author gives this amazing explanation for it:

"But why? What's the real goal of the activists, the judges and the radicals who seek to subvert a moral worldview?

The answer is simple: No longer satisfied with practicing the unspeakable perverse sexual pleasures that their hearts seek in private bedrooms, they wish to be able to do so in public. They are also suffering from such immense guilt over their sexual behaviors, because they know inherently that the actions they perform are in fact unhealthy, that they will go to any means necessary to try and shut down the voices in their heads that tell them it is wrong.

They wrongfully believe that the guilty voice within them is an echo of a prudish state that seeks to limit their freedoms. They wrongfully believe that the judgment they feel is emanating from "Bible thumpers." And what they fail to admit is that the voice that condemns them the loudest is never a human voice – but in fact the voice of their own conscience informed by the truth of the God who created them."

It had never occurred to me that the real reason the justices of the New Jersey Supreme Court decided the case as they did was that they wanted to practice "unspeakable perverse sexual pleasures" in public. Live and learn.

However, the real reason I posted this -- it's really an open thread -- was this comment:

"The homosexual agenda has shot themselves in the foot with gay marriage."

Think about it. An agenda, intermittently singular and plural, with feet! Since it can shoot itself, it probably has (have?) hands too. And what does it shoot itself with? Why: gay marriage, of course!

Still, the article's author would probably say: better for an agenda to be shooting itself in the foot than to be "depositing the seed of life in, shall we say, non-life-giving cavities". (For someone who finds this sort of thing "unspeakable", he certainly spends a lot of time describing it.)

***

For some reason, I am entranced by the idea of an agenda with feet. (I'm easily pleased.) I can't make up my mind what it reminds me of most: Coleridge's "Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs/ Upon the slimy sea", or this from Sir John Suckling:

Her feet beneath her petticoat
Like little mice stole in and out

or Herrick:

"Her pretty feet, like snails, did creep
A little out, and then,
As if they played at bo-peep,
Did soon draw in again."

***

Consider this an open thread. In some sense, it already is.

Galacticablogging Live

That's right, I'll be working without a net this evening and liveblogging tonight's episode of BSG, "Collaborators." Naturally, to prevent any spoilers from escaping, I will perform in the hermetically-sealed environs of the extended post. Other BSG fans are invited to jump in via the comments.

Limbaugh

by hilzoy

You've probably already heard that Rush Limbaugh said that Michael J. Fox was faking his symptoms in the ad he shot for Claire McCaskill:

"Now, this is Michael J. Fox. He's got Parkinson's disease. And in this commercial, he is exaggerating the effects of the disease. He is moving all around and shaking. And it's purely an act. This is the only time I have ever seen Michael J. Fox portray any of the symptoms of the disease he has. I know he's got it and he's raising money for it, but when I've seen him in public, I've never seen him betray any of the symptoms. But this commercial, he -- he's just all over the place. He can barely control himself. He can control himself enough to stay in the frame of the picture, and he can control himself enough to keep his eyes right on the lens, the teleprompter. But his head and shoulders are moving all over the place, and he is acting like his disease is deteriorating because Jim Talent opposes research that would help him, Michael J. Fox, get cured. (...)

So this is really shameless, folks, this is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn't take his medication or he's acting, one of the two."

And you've probably also heard that Fox's tremors aren't the result of not taking the medication but a side effect of taking it. In other words: Limbaugh is, as usual, full of it, and a jerk to boot.

But if you haven't yet seen the video of Limbaugh saying these things, you really should. He's flailing around, doing what I imagine is supposed to be an imitation of Michael J. Fox, but in fact looks more like an octopus having a seizure. It's really jawdroppingly appalling.

What has always amazed me about Limbaugh, and some other similar commentators, is how they manage to convince their audiences that they are on the side of morality and decency, when if one thought for a moment about what they actually do, as opposed to the alleged dreadfulness of the people they are describing, it would be pretty clear that morality has nothing to do with them. It's the same paradox you find in any hate-filled demagogue: as long as people listen only to what he is saying about others, and focus on those others and their sins, he is popular in a way that he would never be if people just stopped and asked: what does the fact that he spends all day whipping up hatred and spreading calumny say about him? And why would I listen to someone whose idea of morality seems to involve nothing but anger, contempt, venom and self-righteousness?

Often, it's illuminating to watch someone like that with the sound turned off. But this video could do the trick as well. It's really awful.

And Michael J. Fox's response, which is also on the video I linked to, is a complete contrast: gracious, generous, and somewhat self-effacing. (I didn't think much of Sam Seder, though -- he comes on about halfway through the clip, and as far as I'm concerned I might have stopped watching then.)

Another minor point: suppose, for the moment, that Limbaugh had been right to think that Fox's twitchings were caused by Parkinson's, not by the medication, and that his going off meds would have exacerbated them. I think it's fascinating that Limbaugh believes that for Michael J. Fox to stop taking his medication, to show the effects of his disease unfiltered, would be in some way dishonest. As far as I can tell, that's a lot like saying that people with disabilities ought to hide them from the rest of us; that showing themselves as they are, with their disabilities in plain view, is automatically manipulative, or an attempt to play the victim. I would have thought that someone with a serious and disabling disease like Parkinson's had enough on his plate without having to satisfy Rush Limbaugh's requirements on how the disabled should comport themselves. Shows how much I know.

False Evenhandedness: The Reductio Ad Absurdum

by hilzoy

Via Media Matters: This is incredibly funny. It's a story from ABC News, called 'Politicians Get Nasty', about ugly political ads. It cites some of the obvious ones -- the bimbo ad directed against Harold Ford, the NRCC ad alleging that Michael Arcuri, a Democratic candidate for Congress, had called a fantasy hot line (in fact, it was a wrong number dialed by an aide; the right number -- same seven digit number, different area code -- was dialed right afterwards), Rush Limbaugh's comments about Michael J. Fox.

But, I hear you ask, what about the Democrats? Well, ABC has that one covered too:

"Democrats aren't necessarily running clean campaigns, though.

As the races tighten in the next couple of weeks, the left will likely unleash its garbage as well.

When the going gets tough, the politicians get ugly."

Yep: actual malfeasance balanced by purely hypothetical future badness -- badness that, at the moment, exists solely in the fevered imagination of ABC writers. Would it have been so hard either to come up with an actual mendacious Democratic ad or, if one could not be found, to run an article about how Republican politicians -- not politicians in general -- are running despicable ads? Apparently. But then, this is the same ABC News whose political director just told Bill O'Reilly that " I think we’ve got a chance in these last two weeks to prove to conservatives that we understand their grievances."

Coming next week on ABC: "Heads of State Get Nasty", which describes the actual atrocities perpetrated by the likes of Presidents al-Bashir of Sudan, Mugabe of Zimbabwe, and Karimov of Uzbekistan, and then notes that the Prime Minister of Norway will undoubtedly do something awful at some unspecified time. Likewise, "TV Characters Get Nasty", about the appalling things that have been done by Beavis and Butthead and some of the less sympathetic characters in The Sopranos, and the possible future horrors that are, no doubt, about to be perpetrated by Big Bird. Or, just to be bipartisan about this, "Politicians Who Shouldn't Have Left Things In Their Freezers!", in which we learn about William Jefferson and -- and -- and, well, um, maybe next week some lobbyist will leave something in a Republican Congressperson's freezer. Probably something really, really bad. Maybe a severed head.

Making stuff up: it's all just part of reporting the news.

Time To Leave

by hilzoy

Yesterday, I read a horrifying story about four days of mass killings in the Iraqi city of Balad. I've been trying to write a post about Iraq for ages, but every time I try, this horrible leaden feeling comes over me, and I can't. When I read that article, I just felt numb and appalled.

Spencer Ackerman, however, noticed something I missed:

"Several things stand out here, but let's focus on the most important. The U.S. learns about the sectarian rampage a day after Sunni death-squadders murder 17 Shiites. Balad, it should be said, is the site of a huge and probably permanent U.S. military base. The U.S. puts together what Knickmeyer calls a "quick-reaction" platoon to respond to what's now a mass killing. But the Shiite officials in Balad say, essentially, hang back and let us finish what we started here.

Remember this every time you hear that U.S. troops are the only thing standing between Iraq and total sectarian chaos. The Shiites in Balad say let us finish this and the U.S. says yessir. Maybe a different account will emerge in the coming days, but consider this to be the wages of pretending that Iraq has a "national unity" government instead of competing centers of sectarian power: when the "Iraqi officials" say stop the U.S., under pains of inconsistency, must stop, even when that means the revenge killings will go unrestrained. This is the necessary consequence of the fiction that Iraq is a sovereign country; the fiction that Iraqi forces are standing up; and the fiction that Iraq's rulers are more interested in stopping the sectarian violence than in instigating it.

The obvious objection to this point: Well, Ackerman, are you saying the U.S. should have defied the orders of the Balad officials and reinvaded the town? No, I'm saying U.S. troops should get the hell out lest they be drawn into that nightmare, and no amount of force will represent a prophylactic to such a nightmare when the will to fight among Iraqis is there, particularly among the leaders that the U.S. believes it needs to answer to in order to avoid the charge of imperialism. And speaking of willpower, consider the will of the U.S. commander here: he dispatched a "platoon-sized quick-reaction force. " A platoon! For a city of thousands! Clearly, the U.S. Army and MNF-I does not want to get drawn in to their civil war. I sang a different tune for the Balkans, but the Balkans was a different situation. Here, let's give the Army what it wants."

***

Those of you who have been reading for a while know that I have never called for our troops to be withdrawn from Iraq. Partly that was because, at a certain point, all the options seemed bad, and given that whichever we chose would be implemented not by someone competent but by George W. Bush, and that my opinions would have no effect whatsoever, I didn't see any compelling reason to choose one. The other reason, though, was that I have always thought that the results of our pulling out would be really, really bad. Back in 2005, when people asked 'how much worse could it be?', I'd always think: a lot. It could be a lot worse. It could make what's going on now seem like the Golden Age. And it seemed to me that while we obviously weren't winning, we were preventing things from getting as bad as they could be.

That line of thought has gotten less and less convincing as one horrifying story after another comes out of Iraq, and as days when forty or fifty or sixty bodies turn up in the streets of Baghdad with drill holes all over them stop seeming extraordinary. But, reading Spencer Ackerman's piece, I think: right. If we cannot stop ongoing mass murder when our troops are right next door, then it is time to leave. The possibility that we were, to some extent, keeping a lid on it was all there was to be said for staying, and if it's gone, it's gone. Withdraw over the border, stay nearby in case of disaster; I'd definitely follow Richard Holbrooke's advice and stay in Kurdistan to deter a Turkish invasion; but get out of the rest of Iraq in whatever way will allow for a quick but orderly exit. Because if we're reduced to standing by while one group kills another, we have no reason whatsoever to be there.

Von once said: 'losing is not an option'. He was criticized here for not seeming to be willing to entertain the thought that option or no, it was a very real possibility. But much of what he had to say concerned the stakes in Iraq, and here I agreed with him: they are very, very great. But there are some mistakes you just can't put right, and we have made altogether too many of them. If Bush wasn't willing to play to win, he shouldn't have gone to war in the first place. But he did, and we lost; and an enormous number of people have suffered and died because he couldn't be bothered to do a minimally competent job.

This is such a catastrophe, and we entered into it so frivolously. I find that hard to forgive. I can't imagine how hard it would be if I were Iraqi.