Author: Devilstower

When an unplanned event happens once, it can rightly be considered an accident.

56 Die in “Mistake” at Qana.

Mistake kills Four UN Observers.

Fleeing Civilians Hit by Mistake.

US Bomb Hits Wrong House by Mistake.

US Bombs Wedding Party by Mistake.

Bombing Mistake takes 14 lives.

US Bomb Kills Adghan Civilians by Mistake.

US Bombs Journalists by Mistake.

Canadian Soldiers Bombed by Mistake.

US Bombing Mistake Kills Afghan Civilians.

To paraphrase Ian Fleming, once is happenstance, twice is a coincidence, but when you kill the wrong people over, and over, and over, that’s depraved indifference.  And it’s time for it to end.
Let’s face it, we don’t know how to fight a modern asymmetrical war.  That’s been clear for more than forty years.   Just as the British were once baffled by a ragtag U.S. militia which refused to don colorful uniforms and form into neat lines, the tactics and weapons that won World War II have been befuddled by enemies that refuse to just “come out and fight.”

It’s a self-generating problem.  The more money we spend on having the best equipped, best trained, highest tech military in the world — the more we ensure that we have a massive disparity between our forces and those of any opposition — the less likely are we to find any opponent willing to face us in pitched battle.  Instead, at least since the time of Vietnam, we find enemies that seek to nullify our military prowess by using small units, hit and run tactics, and by secreting themselves among civilian populations.  And those enemies keep winning.

We have stubbornly refused to acknowledge such enemies as a serious threat, and continue to dedicate the vast bulk of our military resources toward development of weapons and tactics that would be effective only against an opponent who deployed in a manner similar to our own.  We have systems that lay waste to fast moving armored infantry.  Our fighter  jets are ready to spar at supersonic speeds with the best any other air force can field.  Our Navy can throw shells the size of a small car into the cities of our opponents from miles off shore.  Missiles guided by wire, by laser, or by satellite are at our command.

But there are no columns of tanks advancing on West Germany.  There is no squadron of Russian Foxbats ready to stir up the theme from Top Gun.  There are no stealthy attack subs to ferret out.  No millions of communist soldiers marching toward our lines.  

Instead there are men with tubes attached to the back of pickup trucks, and more men who have learned to turn a cell phone and an old tank shell into a mine, and still more who are willing to use their own bodies as “intelligent delivery systems” far more accurate that anything guided by electronics.

Every dollar we spend making our military better, has the perverse effect of making it more worthless.

In a modern war, civilian populations are held hostage, and while our “smart” weapons may be clever enough to backtrack the flight of a rocket or mortar shell, but they’re not smart enough to kill only those manning the launcher, and not the dozens of school kids next door.  Our orbiting spy satellites can pick out movement along critical roads, but they can’t tell if the people in those trucks are insurgents on their way to an ambush, or relatives on their way to celebrate a birth.  Every time we kill an enemy, odds are we generate a new one.  It’s as if we had gone to war with starfish, and decided the way to win was slice off their arms and toss them back into the ocean.

Since World War II, we’ve concentrated on weapons that can operate remotely and from great distances.  We’ve worked to win wars without subjecting our soldiers to dangers.

From one perspective, it’s an admirable goal.  However, from any perspective, that plan is an abject failure.  

In developing push button war, we’ve not only lowered the barriers that might once have kept us from initiating conflicts, we’ve also guaranteed that we can’t win.    The attitude that lauds smart weapons and dismisses civilian deaths as “collateral damage” is the biggest generator of new conflicts ever imagined, and a certain path to defeat.  Even from the standpoint of protecting our troops, this kind of tactic has proved counterproductive, as excess force against civilians has only served to prolong conflicts and unify even the people we’re supposedly there to help against us.

While we have proved time and time again that we don’t know how to win this sort of conflict, one thing has proven singularly ineffective: air war.  Even when guided to its target by a laser or aided by the infrared vision of a hovering drone — as was the Israeli bomb at Qana — these weapons have shown themselves both ineffective at reducing enemy forces and horribly wasteful of civilian lives.

Comparisons have often been made between the civilian losses due to bombing in the Middle East and the truly horrific losses at places like Dresden or Hiroshima, but these comparisons are less than useful.  Even if you believe the terrible price extracted in those cities were worthwhile, they represented the kind of war we are not fighting — direct conflict between sovereign nations with comparable military power.  And the civilian populations of those countries were fully engaged in the production of goods to service that war.  The involvement of civilians in a modern war is much less clear, but our actions are even more objectionable.

It’s as if when confronted by a bank robbery in which the robbers are holding hostages, our solution were to just blow up the bank and call it a day.  That’s an answer that would no be acceptable in an American city, and should not be acceptable on the battlefield.

Air war had — and may still have — a purpose on the battlefield, but it has no purpose among the cities and suburbs where the bombs are now falling.  It’s not enough to seek “better bombs” with even more accurate lasers.  It’s not enough to try and be more “selective” with targets.

An abundance of evidence shows that air war kills civilians.  In fact, it’s quite likely that in most recent conflicts bombing has killed far more civilians than participants in the fight.  It’s ineffective, brutal, and completely immoral.  

And it’s time for the United States to stand up and say that they will no longer employ such tactics.  It’s time for “shock and awe” to give way to recognition, grief, and new thinking.

Originally posted at Political Cortex.

Thirty-six years ago, Peter Arnett interviewed an anonymous US officer in Vietnam who provided the famous quote “we had to destroy the village in order to save it,” after an artillery barrage that laid waste to a tiny hamlet.  That quote served as another illustration of just how misguided American policy had become in Southeast Asia.

Now — three years after Arnett was fired from his positions at NBC, MSNBC, and even National Geographic for daring to give his honest opinion about the nascent war — the same America that was once shocked by the words of that anonymous soldier, has adopted those words as the core of our foreign policy.  We’ve accepted the idea that it’s perfectly fine to destroy a village, a city, a nation, or a region.  We’ve institutionalized the concept that peace can only be achieved through absolute obliteration of those who oppose us.

When Bush says “stay the course,” what he really means is “let it burn.”

While we see the growing chaos in Iraq, and the daily destruction between Israel and Lebanon as a sign of a policy gone badly astray, they see it as a good sign.    Things are happening.  Power is shifting.  The pot is boiling.  So what if a few children are – accidentally, mind you – lost in the gears.  You have have to break a few eggs to make an omlet.  You have to take down a mountain if you want to find the gold.  You have to be prepared to destroy the world if you want to save it.

When Condeleeza Rice says that

a cease-fire would be a false promise if it simply returns us to the status quo

she means we have to keep shooting till no one is shooting back.  The United States acted to block any call for cease fire, because any “premature peace” is anathema to the ideology that now rules America.  It’s like calling for the furnace to be cooled before all the dross has burned away.  Let it burn, says Condi, we need to destroy Lebanon in order to save it.

When right wing pundit Charles Krauthammer says

Only two questions remain: Israel’s will and America’s wisdom. Does Prime Minister Ehud Olmert have the courage to do what is so obviously necessary? And will Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s upcoming peace trip to the Middle East force a premature cease-fire…

He means will we have the guts to keep stoking that furnace night and day, and not be weakened by the sight of a little innocent blood.  In Krauthammer’s words, Israel only took advantage of a “golden opportunity” to do what needed to be done.  Europe is decadent.  Only the strong dare take action, and to stop them would be a crime.  Let it burn, says Charles, we need to destroy the Middle East in order to save it.

When Mona Cheren (who, by the way, says – without presenting any evidence — that Arnett made up that original quote in Vietnam) says

If a premature ceasefire were imposed, [Iran, Syria, and Islamic radicals] would be the clear winners. Only if Israel is able to punish Hizbollah severely will those aggressors be thwarted. A ceasefire stops the guns for a week. A victory can stop them for years.

She means that the only good Arab, is a dead Arab.  Let it burn, says Mona, we need to destroy Lebanon, the Middle East, the free press, and anyone who gets in our way, in order to save them.

Do you think 6,000 deaths in Iraq is bothering those on the right?  Do you think they’re concerned with what’s going on in Lebanon?  They’re loving it.  To them, this smells like victory.

And for all the efforts of the BBC, Reuters, Western academics, and the horde of appeasers and apologists that usually bail these terrorist killers out when their rhetoric finally outruns their muscle, this time they can’t.  Instead, a disgusted world secretly wants these terrorists to get what they deserve. And who knows: This time they just might.

Nice that the NRO knows what we all “secretly want.”  Burn, says the NRO, we have to destroy the world in order to save it.

I’m at that age where I’m steadily losing members of my family.  It’s not a surprise; in fact, it’s something of a miracle that I’ve made it this far without being stripped of those people who stand between me and the shadowy boundaries of life.  Still, it’s a shock to realize that we’ll never again be gathered around that big table at Christmas or the fourth.  There won’t be any more of my grandmother’s coconut cake, bottle rockets in the back yard, or vast family games for which only some great aunt knows the rules.  Even the house where we all gathered is sold, and will be a part of some other family’s memories.

The only stories that remain are now mine to tell.  

While those loses of family are both sad and expected, I’d like to talk about another loss that came this year.  Someone who was not part of my family.  Someone who had only barely shaded from the role of colleague to friend in the last months that we worked together.  Someone whose courage and grace were, and continue to be, a lesson I hope never to forget.

She was a German immigrant.  A small, slender woman, with glasses of such power that they magnified her warm eyes till they filled half her face.  German has a reputation for being a harsh language, but she had the kind of accent that shaved all the burrs off my name, turning it into “Mach.”  

Hired for the unenviable task of supporting complex, home-grown software that was several years old, she soon proved herself both dogged in the pursuit of issues, and thoughtful in dealing with others.  As is usual with someone who proved herself so consistently competent in all areas, she gradually assumed more and more responsibility, until she was the focus of much activity within our group.  

While she was proving her competence, she was also gradually revealing herself as a progressive.  When I say “gradually,” I don’t mean that she was hiding her opinions.  On the contrary, I never once heard her back down from a principle.  It was just that she was so quiet, so thoughtful, that you sometimes failed to note the forcefulness behind her soft words.  In a company with an extremely conservative culture, where Rush Limbaugh blares from every other office, even the most ardent liberal can sometimes find retreat the better part of valor.  She never retreated.  She never yelled, never shook her first.  She just held her ground and stated her positions.

She was quietly passionate and painfully intelligent.  Her opinions showed the polish of years of careful thought and diligent study.  She was literate, kindhearted, and dedicated.  I had few occasions on which to meet her husband, a holocaust scholar, but I got enough of an impression to know that they were extremely well matched.

Then she was diagnosed with lung cancer.

The problem seemed to come from nowhere.  She had never smoked, always taken care of herself, ate carefully, avoided the elevator for the stairs.  It wasn’t unusual for people to think she was twenty years younger than what her birth certificate claimed.

The diagnosis was as bad as you can imagine.  The doctors gave her no hope, and told her she had only a few weeks to live.  But the way she handled it was the very definition of grace.  She visited each person in the office and told them what their friendship had meant.  She thanked us for the chance to work there.  In her last days on the job, she was extraordinarily generous as she took time to help those of us who were just starting to realize how large a gap her leaving would generate.  She gave away books and said her goodbyes.

Then she survived.

Part of a lung was removed.  Then a whole lung.  There was chemotherapy and an intensive course of radiation therapy.  And to the amazement of all, she lived past the few weeks the doctors had predicted.  Past a few months.  Past  a year.

In the communications and rare visits that happened in the period after her surgeries, she seemed much the same person — worn down by the rigors of her treatment, but just as kind and self-effacing.  However, there was something she wasn’t sharing with those of us her knew her only lightly: pain.  Her surgeries and treatment had left her with constant, debilitating pain.  

Then, a few weeks ago, she decided to end that pain.  

Even in this decision, she kept family and friends in mind, taking care that no one else would be blamed, and doing what she could to limit the desolation this decision would bring to those who loved her.  She had not forgotten the people who mattered to her.  Neither had she forgotten the causes that matter.  That’s why she made a request of those who missed her.

She asked that they donate to The Southern Poverty Law Center.  She understood the importance of what the SPLC had done for the displaced and the underprivileged.  She knew their work in fighting for civil rights, and in sticking up for immigrants.  She knew that the legal defense provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center was often the only brake placed on the rocketing train of injustice.

She made that last request, and now I’m making the same request.  I know that in this political season, there are a lot of demands on your pocketbook.  There are candidates and causes standing by that need your money.  I know that.  But please, if you can, find a little money you can donate to the Southern Poverty Law Center.  

And if you do, tell them it’s because of Adelheid.

Your life is being shaped by people you don’t know, making discoveries and decisions of which you’re mostly unaware, and those decisions have implications far more wide-ranging than any of the most controversial issues discussed in the halls of congress.  Sound frightening?  In a sense, it should.  These men and women don’t work for the NSA.  They’re not laboring in the depths of the Pentagon.  They might be super heroes, or super villains, but they don’t generally favor spandex and capes. However, some of them have been known to adopt an archetypical costume: a white lab coat.

The people in question are scientists, and more than any elected official, they will shape the world you live in for good… and for bad.

The Place of Science

In some countries, scientists are regarded as important public figures and given a level of attention that we Americans reserve for the truly significant (you know, movie stars and country singers).  It’s hard to even express the level of disappointment that swept across Korea when much of the cloning advances claimed by Hwang Woo-Suk turned out to be false.  In Japan, Shuji Nakamura, inventor of the blue LED, whose work holds promise to greatly reduce the world’s energy demands for lighting, is a national hero.    At the far end of the ideological spectrum, Abdul Kahn is revered in Pakistan for giving that country its first nuclear bomb.

It’s not surprising that those countries that esteem scientists also turn out a large number of scientists and engineers from their universities.  Where American parents often look at business as the best way to extract junior from the couch, families across Asia and Eastern Europe are just as likely to push their kids toward careers in the sciences.

It wasn’t always this way.  The place of scientists in modern American society is a measure of what we feel is important.  Most people can name not only dozens of entertainment celebrities and sports stars, but can also rattle off a good number of politicians and several corporate CEOs.  But scientists?  Chances are, you know more names of scientists from the past than you do of those working today.  If you’re old enough, you surely recall Linus Pauling and his polymath genius in everything from chemistry to political activism (drink your vitamin C, kids!).  Anyone who owns a television has surely run into Carl Sagan, who had the ability to be both challenging and charming — a rare trait in or out of science.

At the start, America was a nation that played host to a number of gentlemen scientists.  Men like Ben Franklin (who retired as early as he could so he could spend more time on his experiments) and Thomas Jefferson were more than just hobbyists.  They were important scientists of their day, well respected in Europe as well as at home.  At other times in our history — particularly in times of war — scientists have again taken up more space on the public stage.  If you’re moderately conversant with the history of the 20th century, names from the Manhattan Project era will roll out, names like Edward Teller and Robert Oppenheimer, or immigrants like Enrico Fermi and, of course, Albert Einstein.  Even earlier, as America was transformed from a rural and agricultural state into one that was more technical and urban, men like Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison weren’t just inventing the new world, but also making the news.

I’m lucky enough to have met one of my personal heroes, Stephen Jay Gould, on a couple of occasions before his all too early death.  I’ve also been in the audience for a speech by E. O. Wilson.   I’ve talked with that most colorful of paleontologists, Robert Baker and his less outwardly quirky, but even more scientifically adventurous mentor, John Ostrom.  I had the good fortune to spend a decade working for M. E. Hopkins (there is no name to go with the initials), one of the preeminent stratigraphers and sedimentary geologists.

Still, I don’t know even a tiny faction of what I should about the scientists working in this country and around the world.  And I should.  You should, too.  Let me tell you, the intellectual ground under your feet is shaky stuff.  You don’t know what you know half as well as you think, half of that is wrong, and for the other half, you don’t know the why.  Everything you think you know about the physical world, including those facts of which you’re most certain (especially those), has likely already been proven to be a quaint bit of folklore in some lab.  

But this — all of this — is just the build up.  The under card.

I want to hurry on to the main event, a battle royale that illustrates exactly how men you’ve never heard of can rattle the world.

The Main Event: Patterson vs. Midgley

In the blue corner, the man from Iowa.  His parents named him “Clair” so you know he grew up tough, it’s geochemist Clair “I think your name is funny, too” Patterson!

In the red corner, hailing from Beaver Falls, PA, fictional home of Mr. Belvedere, it’s that rompin’ stompin’ engineer who may have had more effect on the planet than any single person in history, it’s Thomas “Mad Tom” Midgley, Jr!

Midgley came out of his corner first (but hey, he had a thirty year head start), taking a degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell and landing a job at General Motors.  At the time GM was frustrated by the problem of engine knock.  Knocking, caused by premature combustion, limits compression ratios and reduces an engine’s power and efficiency.  Pushed to find a solution to the problem, Midgley tinkered with mechanical answers, but soon segued into looking into chemistry.  That’s where he got interested in a little compound called Tetra Ethyl Lead.   Add this stuff to gasoline, and it drives up the octane rating.  Presto, no knock.  General Motors had the solution they were looking for.

There was only one problem — lead is poisonous.  It’s a neurotoxin, and over exposure can cause permanent loss of brain function, as well as any number of debilitating symptoms.  Though lead was still used in many consumer products at the time Midgley made his discovery, it was already controversial.  

In 1924, Midgley took a prolonged vacation to cure himself of lead poisoning — a fact he deliberately kept secret, holding a press conference to demonstrate the “safety” of contact with the substance. In this demonstration, he poured tetra-ethyl lead over his hands, then placed a bottle of the chemical over his nose and breathed it in for sixty seconds, declaring all the while that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems whatsoever.

Working together, Midgley, GM, and Standard Oil began to market the new additive to the nation, shortening the name to “Ethyl.”  If you’re old enough to remember Linus Pauling, you’re probably also old enough to have heard someone at a gas station ask “do you want regular, or Ethyl?”  Within a decade, Midgley’s discovery was pouring neurotoxin into the air at a rate of billions of pounds a year.

The American Chemical Society responded by giving Midgley the Priestley Award, the highest honor it can bestow.

But now Clair Patterson was coming off his stool and getting into the fight.  At first, it seems difficult to find any potential for overlap in Patterson’s interests and those of Midgley.  As a grad student in geochemistry at the University of Chicago, Patterson became fixated in determining the age of the Earth.  He conceived of an experiment, using newly discovered techniques, which would give a good number for the first time.  Patterson’s experiments involved looking at the amount of uranium in source rocks and comparing it to the products that result when uranium naturally decays over millions of years.

There was only one problem.  The end of the decay chain was lead, and no matter what sample he checked, Patterson was finding far, far, too much lead.

Patterson eventually got his date (the date still considered authoritative today) after fifteen years of long hours spent using meteoritic material, the newly invented mass spectrometer, and what was likely the world’s first “clean room” to eliminate the lead contamination.  No sooner did he solve this problem than he turned to another: finding the source of all that lead.  To do so, he came up with a technique still in use by those investigating the atmosphere today — he went to Greenland and took an ice core.  With that, it didn’t take long to discover the date at which lead had begun to enter the atmosphere and track down its source.

Clair Patterson began a tireless campaign to undue the work of Thomas Midgley and “get the lead out” of gasoline.

By this time, Midgley himself was no longer so enamored of his first big idea.  Though he still defended his pal Ethyl in public, it seems that he had regrets in private.  He’d taken time out to invent the first cruise missile, but now he wanted to do something to show that he could use chemicals in a way that would really help people.  He turned to the problem of compressible gases used for refrigeration and propellants.  At the time, ammonia was the most common, and problems with ammonia leaks were an all-too-frequent cause of worker death or injury.  On the propellant side, even asthma inhalers involved chemicals that were noxious enough to make their use almost as dangerous as the condition they addressed.  Midgley set out to come up with a gas that could solve both problems, something that had the admirable properties of ammonia in refrigeration, but which was chemically inert enough that leaks wouldn’t be dangerous.  Something so innocuous that it could be used in inhalers — and in aerosol cans.  After four years of work, he had his answer.  Midgley had invented CFCs.

Clair Patterson, despite his authoritative work on the age of the Earth — a question scientists had been trying to answer for centuries — did not receive great acclaim.  In fact, by taking on the Ethyl Corporation and its friends in congress, he found himself ostracized from many scientific panels and conferences.  Patterson soldiered on, giving speeches, writing books, and gradually gathering others to his cause.  Eventually, his efforts resulted in the Clean Air Act, which set the stage for not only the removal of lead from gasoline, but put in place the tools to deal with CFCs, acid rain, and other threats.

So there you have it.  An engineer turned chemist who, while trying to do good, introduced both leaded gas and CFCs, quite probably doing more damage to the environment than any other individual in history.  And a geochemist turned public crusader, who spent much of his career trying to clean up the mess.

If you’ve never heard of either man, don’t be embarrassed.  I was aware of Patterson only because of his work on dating the Earth (and because a man named “Clair” is hard to forget).  I wasn’t aware of his relation to the Clean Air Act, and wouldn’t have know Midgley at all if not for Bill Bryson’s marvelously dense and entangled work of science history, A Short History of Nearly Everything.

Some takeaways from today’s little snippet of history:

1. The women and men laboring in the depths of corporate and university labs are much more likely to have a lasting impact on your life than the CEOs and university presidents that get TV time.

2. No one ever thinks they are the villain of the story (even Dick Cheney thinks he is the good guy, believe it or not).

3. All those questions about “would the super villians be there if it wasn’t for the super-heroes” are stupid, because the villians think they are the heroes.

4. When corporations, politicians, and other “experts” start to explain about how some modern problem can’t be addressed, or would cause huge job losses, do not believe them.  Doing the right thing always turns out to be the best thing, not just for the environment, but for business.

Promoted by Steven D.

Dear Mr. Reed,

To quote from Abraham Lincoln, “I have never written to you in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you.”  

From the missives that keep getting launched from the DLC site and DLC operatives, I feel that you are laboring under a horrible misapprehension.  The Democratic blogs don’t have a problem with moderate Democrats.  In fact, we don’t even have a problem with very conservative Democrats.

It’s not about positions.  It’s never been about positions.

Sir, you’re fighting the wrong fight.

Why do the blogs express such distaste for the DLC?  It’s because the one thing we will not tolerate is Democrats who make it their business to snipe, assault, and bludgeon other Democrats.  Make no mistake, the blogs are not trying to enforce our own version of Reagen’s old “11th Commandment.”  No Democrat is above criticism.  

But if you make it your regular habit to attack other Democrats.  If your operatives go forth to call your fellow party members “jihadists” and “members of the tin-foil hat brigade.”  Well sir, no one should be expected to sit down for that.

Think for just a second.  What are you possibly trying to achieve with such language?  Do you really believe that belittling Democrats and calling them names is going to help?  Really?  Has that kind of strategy worked for you in the past?  Has it worked for anyone?  Do you think that being called “radical” and “fringe” is going to shame people into agreeing with you?  

Just so there can be no doubt, I’m going to go over it again.  Take a look through the blogs and find the articles that rail against the DLC.  Are they talking about positions?  Are they upset because you’re “too moderate” for the “leftist fringe?”  No.  The articles are there in response to verbal and written grenades that your organization seems to toss out like a trolley car puts off sparks.  

Of late, you seem very upset with the blogs’ fixation on the removal of Senator Lieberman, pointing to it as another example of how we’re “leftists” satisfied with nothing but ideological purity.  Look again, Mr. Reed.  The blogs support a lot of candidates far more conservative than Joe Lieberman.  If it was just a matter of Joe having moderate positions, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.  The blogs may not always like how Lieberman votes, but that’s not the core of the problem.

The real issue is that Joe always seems on hand to deflate any sense of Democratic unity.  He’s always ready to scurry off to Fox and toot his own “bipartisan” horn.  Only in Lieberman-speak, bipartisan seems to mean “attacking his own party and supporting the Republicans.”   Joe Lieberman could be pro-life, and still get the support of pro-choice Democrats.  Joe Lieberman could be pro-war, and still get the support of pro-peace Democrats.  What Joe Lieberman can’t do is be Anti-Democrat and expect the support of those who think there’s real value in the Democratic Party.

For Joe Lieberman, the ship of party unity has already sailed.  He’s shown himself far too willing, on far too many occasions, to sell out the Democratic leadership for a little more “face time” on Sunday mornings.  He’s already shown that he feels like the Democratic voters are worth nothing but contempt.  Joe’s only loyalty is to Joe, and that we will not tolerate.

So here’s the deal, Mr. Reed.  You can be as conservative as you want.  You can favor the trade policies that you like.  You can support the candidates that you like.  If you spend the time on positive messages that build up the Democratic Party, you’ll find the blogs right there with you, ready to help every step of the way.  

I’d advise you to do it.  Mend your fences.  Take advantage of this new instrument that’s right here, waiting to be used.  I’ll be first in line to toss some money in the coffers and cheer you on.

The alternative is to continue down the path you’ve been following, and the end of that road is rocky, dangerous, and perilously close.  Frankly sir, the only one trying to make this a test of ideological purity, is the DLC.  That’s not going to work.

To be honest, the blogs are still in their infancy.  We’re not as powerful as some of us might think, but folks inside the beltway shouldn’t take that as a sign that we won’t soon be there.  We’re still headed up, and we’re going up fast.  Come with us.

Otherwise… here, let me give you another quote, this one from a less historical source.

Before you answer, let me remind you that I can make your life a living hell.  Every single day.  Hell, hell, hell, and I mean it. — Kyra Sedgwick on The Closer

If you want to carry on attacking Democratic voters for not falling within the narrow confines of your ideological blinders, we’re going to take it to you every day.  24/7/365.  Your money is going to dry up.  You last support is going to fade.  You are going to be remembered as a wart that the party was all too glad to remove.  

Because in the end, you don’t just need a nice office inside the beltway and a few old party names attached to your roster.  You need the national leadership, the national and state Democratic organizations, the activists, the grassroots, the netroots, and the voters.  And sir, all those things are on our side, not yours.

Fondly,

Devilstower

I stuck this in a big orange diary earlier, but it zoomed off the edge of diary land, so it seemed a good time to bring it over here — not that I think of BT as lesser.  Just a little quieter (and that’s probably only for now).

If you haven’t noticed, NPR has revived the radio classic “This I Believe” in which people — some famous, some not so famous — present essays on the beliefs that shape their lives, including Penn Jillette’s “positive disbelief” in God, Deirdre Sullivan’s assertion that you should always go to the funeral, and Studs Terkel’s uplifting belief in the power of a community in action.

Still quoting Tom Paine: “He sees his species not with the inhuman idea of a natural enemy” — you’re either with us or against us.  No, he sees his species as kindred.” –(from Studs Terkel’s “This I Believe” essay)

I’m submitting an essay of my own, but since it’s unlikely they’ll ever pull my name out of the hat, I thought I’d share it with you.  And if you have some core belief of your own, I’d hope you’d share it in return.

This I Believe

I believe in doubt.  Or at least, I’m pretty sure I do.

People talk about doubt like it’s a bad thing, but doubt is not just good — it’s essential.  Every pilot who goes down the checklist a final time, every scientist who reruns an experiment, every pharmacist who stops to double check a prescription, and every policeman who bothers to investigate an alibi, is working in the service of doubt.  More lives were saved by doubters than ever were by people who were sure of themselves.

Doubt’s the father of curiosity.  Everyone knew that heavy objects fell faster than light ones.  Only Galileo doubted enough to climb that tower and check it out.

Doubt is the guardian of truth.  Without doubt, who would ever bother to follow up, drill down, or push aside the fog and find out what’s really going on?  When someone is playing you for a fool, the first thing they have to do is make you trust them.  Don’t want to be a fool?  Keep your doubt.

Doubt leads to thinking ahead.  If you’re planning for the future, the last thing you want is a room for of rosy optimists — people who just know it’s all going to turn out okay.  You think the people who built the Titanic did enough doubting?  What about the people who planned the war in Iraq?  

People who are certain always want to badmouth doubt.  “You have to have confidence,” they say.  “Hold fast, stay the course, never let a doubt enter your pretty little mind.”  People who are certain are dangerous.

It’s those certain, confident, non-doubters who cause all the trouble.  They already know they’re right, so damn the evidence, don’t bother to read that report, full speed ahead!  Certain people take risks without even knowing they’re at risk, and they’re happy to take the rest of us along for the ride.  Give certain people evidence that they’re wrong, and they’ll just dismiss it, because they already know the truth.  Certain people will throw the first punch, because they know they’re in the right.  Certain people don’t have a problem tromping on your rights, because they already know you’re a bad guy.  Certain people don’t have an issue with bombing you or shooting you or burning your house down, because they know their cause is just.

Certain people are just certain that if we keep doing it their way, eventually everything will be good, and we’ll see that they were always right.  And they know they’re right.

Being certain is right next door to being proud, and it there’s one thing I’m certain about, it’s that whoever put together the list of deadly sins had it right when he put pride at the front of that list.  Certain people are confident in their beliefs, secure in their own smugness, and blinded to anything that doesn’t fit their ideas.  That’s a certain case for diaster.  What’s needed is a good dose of humility — also known as doubt.   You know, you just might not be right all the time.  In fact, I’m pretty sure you’re not.

I’d like to think I’d convinced certain people to think again, to double check a few of their assumptions, and take one more look before they leap.  But I doubt it.

In the beginning, God created man in his own image.  Sound familiar?  That idea has been circulating for at least four thousand years.

How about this one: in the beginning, man created God in his own image.  Not quite as old, but popular enough.  The exact formulation is essentially modern, but some Greeks and Romans were saying something very like it about their gods better than 2,000 years back.

So, option A or option B?  One or the other is almost certainly right, but it’s unlikely that any of us will know the answers in our lifetimes (Warning: this statement void in case of rapture).  Does it matter which idea is right?  In a personal sense, there’s little that could be more important.  In a political sense… maybe not as much as you think.

But even if you’re B all the way, it would pay for you to have some understanding of the people in the A camp, who this God character is, and how he became such a pain in the keester.

Some weeks ago, before every blog turned into the Fitzgerald Alert System, there was a flurry of God diaries.  That’s good, because theological questions have been at the heart of societal and political movements since there were politics to move.  Unfortunately, the tenor of many of the diaries came down to theological equivalent of “I know you are, but what am I?”

The trouble with statements such as “there is no God, and you know it,” is that it leaves the professed believer only three outs.  

1)    The believer is a liar, claiming a faith not really held

2)    The believer is a simpleton, unable to give up superstition for reason

3)    The believer is self-deluded, avoiding the unpleasanteries of reality (such as our own temporary nature) with an imaginary friend in the sky.  

When you start your argument from such a position, is it any wonder you win few converts?  Of course, the atheist who proselytizes in this way isn’t really interested in making converts.  Like the fire and brimstone variety of Christian, this sort of argument is all about making yourself feel good by belittling someone else.  

From the other side, professing that you need merely have “faith” is equally unlikely to gain points.  First, because it’s often taken as tantamount to calling the non-believer a heartless bastard.  Second, because it doesn’t mean anything to someone who is not already playing on the believer’s team.  

Atheists and believers have a tendency to talk past each other, to the great frustration of both sides.  That’s because they’re coming from different reference frames — and don’t go thinking it’s as simple as “yeah, one of them believes in logic and the other doesn’t.”  Religious people have, and always have had, a great interest in applying logic to their beliefs.  Many of the arguments of today are just shadows of fights that went on inside the religious communities hundreds, or thousands of years back (which is part of what can make it so frustrating when someone shows up one of the hoariest old chestnuts of argument and imparts it with a great dollop of “take that, idiot”).  However, in discussing religion, even words you’ve used all your life become treacherous.  What does it mean for something to be “true?”  What is “real?”  What constitutes “proof?”  To paraphrase the immortal words of Edie Brickell, better get back into the shallow water before this gets too deep.

One point that’s raised over and over by critics of traditional religion is the cruelty, pettiness, and selfishness reflected in many religious texts, particularly the texts which follow that god worshiped by old Abram.  To understand why believers and atheists see the same text in such a radically different way, it’s worth making a little time trip along the events of the Bible.

If you’ve got you’re life preserver buckled, let’s wind up the Way Back Machine, and set it for way the heck B.C.  (or BCE.  Your choice.)  

In the beginning…

Before there were metal tools, before there was agriculture, even before Strom Thurmond, human beings conceived of a god who was the ruler of all things.  This god hung the stars, caused the wind to blow, and created every creature.  However, this god was completely beyond both human reach and understanding.  There were no ceremonies to placate this god, no temples in which to offer sacrifices, no stories of this god’s coming or going or any fights against icky monsters.

And so, this almighty, all powerful god was forgotten.

That’s the origin of the God concept as postulated by theologian Father Wilhelm Schmidt.  Father Schmidt studied “primitive” societies, and concluded that religion begins with a sort of vague monotheism, and only then moves toward “spirit worship,” and from there to polytheism.  That sounds counter to the history we all learned in school (Sunday and otherwise).  Isn’t it sort of a retrograde view of religion?  It’s supposed to be spirits first, polytheism second, monotheism last, not the other way around.

Schmidt’s thesis is that a pure monotheism is unsatisfying.  This all powerful “sky god” is so remote, so inaccessible, that he’s of little interest.  Like Aristotle’s ideal “unmoved mover,” this is God reduced to a nearly mathematical concept.  This God makes less impact on people’s lives than the value of the fourth digit in pi.

To replace this concept, societies all over the world developed a set of gods to split up some of the roles of the original absentee landlord.  You know the drill.  God of war.  Goddess of the harvest.  Demigod of hairy moles.  While almost all of them retained a God in Chief at the top of the heap, they dialed this guy down a few notches from absolute omnipotence.  It’s a lot more comfortable that way.

Enter Abram.

The way we all learned this story in Sunday School (or Hebrew School, or Madrasa) is that Abram wanders about in the desert, makes a deal to throw all his chips behind one god, gets a new name, and becomes the world’s first monotheist.  But we have a great tendency to read these guys from our own perspective.  Abram was no monotheist, and he didn’t become one when he changed his letterhead to say Abraham.  In his wandering before and after hitting the city of Ur, Abraham readily threw over whatever gods he had worshipped before and adopted the pantheon in control over his new home.  Then he gave up the city life and headed out into the Canaanite wilderness.  Like most other cultures in the area, Abraham’s new neighbors had a council of gods overseen by one really sharp guy.  It was this god that Abraham backed, a god named El Shaddai.  The name has been translated as both “God of the Mountains,” “God of the Untilled Fields,” and “Mighty God.”  Likely the meaning was something close to “God of the Everything Outside the City.”  The Canaanites assigned the day-to-day duties of most god-man interaction to lesser characters like Baal, Anat, and Dagon (Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!).  El Shaddai got what’s left.  El’s what you remains of the old sky god once a few more human accessible companions had been assembled.

In pitching his lot with El, Abraham didn’t cease to believe in other gods.  He did, however, cease to worship them.  While it’s not monotheism as we think of it today, it was an important step down the road.  Similarly, Isaac and Jacob also made commitments to worship a single god no matter the situation — though it’s none too clear that they were backing the same horse as Abraham.  

What made the semi-monotheism of the patriarchs more tolerable, more appealing, than the old sky god cult?  Personal involvement.  Abraham shares a meal when God stops by his tent to chat with a pair of companions (these days, we think of these other two folks as angels, but no doubt when the story was first being recorded, they were intended to be other members of the Canaanite pantheon).  Jacob actually spends a night in a wrestling match with El.  

Though they still believe in a variety of gods (all lumped under the name “elohim”), the patriarchs have already begun to attribute great power to El, while at the same time holding a direct, face to face relationship.  El asks of these men the devotion they would normally split among all the elohim.  In exchange, he promises them that they will be better protected and cared for than those who change their allegiance depending on the circumstance.  Pretty good deal all around.

It wasn’t going to last.

The God Spiral

If a distant, impersonal God makes people lose interest, a direct, personally-involved God makes them extremely uncomfortable.  It’s like having your mom along on all your dates.  Each succeeding generation that followed Jacob had less direct contact with their ancestor’s God.  By the time the Hebrews headed down to Egypt, there’s every reason to believe that they were functional polytheists again, spending as much time on sacrifices to Baal as to stubborn old El.

When we take the next big step, Moses meets a God very unlike the fellow who shared bread with Abraham.  This God is not human, not even vaguely.  This is the burning bush God, the pillar of fire God, the God who you can’t even look on without dying.  God’s got a new name, too.  He tells Moses to call him “Yahweh” (though he goes through some pains to claim that he’s still the same God who knew Abraham and Jacob).  

With the new attitude and the new name, more changes are coming.  God promised to help Abraham have a stack of descendents, but his deal with Abraham at first seems very personal.  Now Yahweh makes this “covenant” a group experience, explicitly extending his coverage to all the Hebrews.  In exchange, he extracts some new requirements as the Hebrews march out of Egypt toward a new home.

Here’s another thing they always get wrong in Sunday School: when the impatient Aaron helps to create the Golden Calf it wasn’t because they were forgetting the God of their ancestors and traipsing off after some Egyptian pretender.  Nope.  The Golden Calf was the symbol of El.  Aaron even says it, “here’s the God that freed you from Egypt.”  The Israelites were trying to get back to the God of Abraham.  Only God doesn’t want them to go back.

When Yahweh orders the calf smashed up and the people punished, it’s the announcement of a new phase.  God is going mystical.  Abraham sat across a lunch from God. Jacob wrestled him in the dark.  Moses sat in the mists of God’s presence.  From now on, no one will get that close.

For the next several hundred years, God will remain a remote, enigmatic figure who speaks to prophets in dreams or in Elisha’s still small voice.  He’ll be worshipped through elaborate ritual, guarded by an arcane hierarchy of priests.  Having been uncomfortably close to God, God is now slipping away.

That’s the cycle that repeats through history and through cultures.  A close, human-centric God is gradually replaced by more remote, unknowable deity.  To address this, cultures erect ladders of priests stretching up to heaven, and create tiers of lesser spiritual beings to form a bridge to Earth.  Bishops and cardinals.  Cherubim and seraphim.  No matter how elaborate this attempt to ford the gap becomes, eventually the structures fall, and God and man have to come face to face again.

As the World Turns

The Hebrew School students can turn off here (though I hope they won’t).  This next phase could be about the embodiment of Krishna, Mohamed wrestling with Gabriel, or even Sidhartha and his time under the tree, but I’m going to talk about that peculiar man from Galilee, Jesus.

Jesus appears at one of those times when all the structures are falling.  The temple cult is in disarray and disrespect.  God has not kept Israel from being swallowed up in the Roman Empire, the temple leaders are drowning in legalisms and procedures, and Yahweh seems very distant.  The world has passed through the philosophical storms of the Axial Age, and there is a terrific yearning on many parts of the planet for something new.  

This wandering Galilean (who was probably not a carpenter, darn it), offers just the right medicine.  He’s one of several itinerant rabbis shouting from the hilltops around Jerusalem, and has apparently spent considerable time hanging around with another firebrand of the time, John.  However, when Jesus gets his message tuned up, he suffuses John’s “get your act together before God gets you” proto-brimstone, with an incredible message of social relevance and reversal.  When asked, Jesus sums up the law as loving God and loving other people.  If Jesus’ own message was to be summed up, it’s this: the first shall be last.

Jesus is all about overturning social conventions and knocking down barriers.  Occupation, sex, age, race, class, wealth — all the things that divide the people of his age (and ours) — are sent reeling.  Being rich is bad.  Being important is bad.  Jesus is the guy who shows up at a black tie event in jeans.  Then he invites the catering staff to sit down and eat.  There are few books you could read more radical than the Gospel of Matthew.

The message of the gospels is an incredibly progressive message.  It’s not who you are that counts, it’s what you do.  Jesus goes even further, calling on people not just to act, but to think about why they act.  He never asks for brainless, rote imitation.  He calls on people to make a huge, disquieting shift, to give up their lives and follow him.  Not follow him to death, but follow him into the idea that a life spent in service to others is better than a life acquiring wealth.  It’s such a wrenching, difficult idea, that people still work hard to convince themselves that Jesus must have meant something else.  Surely.

After Jesus’ death, many of his followers will come to believe that he is an actual manifestation of God, that God has given them a chance to sit face to face with him and share a meal, just as he did with Abraham.  That idea will persist.  Unfortunately, it will sometimes come to overshadow what Jesus actually said.

The Moving Unmoved

All this may seem like a huge aside from the initial point about atheists and believers, and in a way, it is.  But having illustrated the enormous changes that God has gone through over the course of history, let me say this: God is unchanging.

Huh?  How can El Shaddai and his traveling partners be the same as Yahweh on the mountain?  How can that guy be Yahweh Sabboath, lord of the armies, who leads Israel in all that middle of the book “smiting?”  How can any of these violent old bozos be conflated with the Loving Father of Christ and with social radical Jesus?  Even if they are all the same guy, how could anyone maintain that God hadn’t changed?

That’s not how believers see it.  God hasn’t changed, people have.  Much as some might maintain otherwise, neither religious ideas nor morals are fixed points.  Slavery once seemed okay to a lot of folks (Jesus included).  Whipping an animal to death in the streets wouldn’t have raised eyebrows not so long ago.  The idea of a God who offered personal gain for personal commitment seemed good to nomads living at the edge of a wilderness.  The idea of a God who was fiercely partisan, and who ordered the death of enemies seemed normal enough to people who were surrounded by other cults, many of them just as violent (when some of your neighbors are still involved with child sacrifice, your own little peccadilloes don’t seem quite so bad).  

Instead of reading the story the way I put it down the first time, try it this way.  

People from the beginning of time have had a sense of the numinous, the idea that there is something more.  Something not only beyond our current understanding, but beyond any understanding.  When people have sought this something — in meditation, in prayer, in ritual — many have found it profoundly moving.  Many have sensed this other as a being, as something that both notices and responds to our presence.  As God.

As people began to develop civilization, they built rules around all aspects of their lives.  That’s what allowed more people to live together, to trade together, to fight together.  It took rules to develop standard weights, coinage, and all the trappings of civilized life.  These rules also extended into that sense of God, framing this experience in words and shared concepts that served to bind together communities.  Some of those frames worked (hey, don’t think of a burning bush!), some didn’t.

At times, human beings found this God to be so close they could touch him.  Could deal with him on an extremely intimate scale.  At times, this concept of God was harnessed to the power of the state, using the glue that the shared “frame” provided as a means of holding the community together in the face of crisis.  At times, this shared idea of God was used as a savage tool of destruction.

As morality changed, God’s fit into the social frame also changed.  When society was about survival, God was about bringing the rain.  When society was about fighting the neighbors, God was about armies.  When society developed a concern for fairness, God became the champion of these new concerns.

If reading this sounds like a confirmation that man created God, that God is nothing but a big mirror in the sky, reflecting our own attitudes… well, you’re half right.  We’ve often read into God what we wanted to see.  On the other hand, people have received messages from God — like those of Jesus — that were profoundly upsetting and downright dangerous to their health.

If you try to read the Bible as if it’s the history of God, you’ll think it chaotic, inconsistent, filled with meaningless violence, and weighted by nonsense.  It’s not that book.  The Bible is the history of men and women.  Of people trying to come to grips with the concept of God.  Sometimes they caught a glimpse.  Just as often they struggled on in the dark.

Through all this, God was unchanged.  The name he gave Moses, the name he uttered from the burning bush, was Yahweh.  Yahweh simply means “I am.”  God is.  What we do with him, is up to us.

As for truth, it’s all true.  The garden.  The flood.  Job on his pile of rubble.  Did it happen?  No.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.  Not real.  Not as integral to many people’s lives as their first kiss or the color of their baby’s eyes.

Seeking Compromise

The gulf between atheists and believers may be the most intractable gulf imaginable — wide enough to make the split over abortion rights look like a sidewalk crack.  When I look back over this little essay, it’s clear enough to me that I haven’t even managed to drop a pebble into that void.  Try as I might, I stand irrevocably on the believer’s side of the divide, and my best attempts to explain why come off like an arthritic man making shadow puppets.

I can only offer this to those who are really irritated by all the “God talk.”  Remember the saying “God is love?”  Take it seriously.  Call it the “Charlie Brown Approach” to religious talk, only where Charlie and pals always hear wa-wa-wa from the adults, whenever you hear “God” or “Jesus,” just substitute the word “love.”

Think Love.

One nation, under Love.

 Love Saves.  

Does that sound so bad?  I know there are many who will be quick to point out that many of our political opponents use God as a bettering ram to try and force through ideas that have little to nothing to do with love.  All those things I said in the last section, about how people could use a shared concept of God for destructive purposes, apply now as well as in the past.  There are certainly plenty of confessed believers who don’t act from love, who don’t practice what they preach, and who seem just as bad (or worse) than any jerk you’ve ever met.

You shouldn’t be surprised by that.  There is no human being who makes any claim to morality who is not frequently found in breach of their own moral code.  The only people who are not hypocrites, are monsters.

Think of this as an olive branch from the other side of the thought war.  God is not your enemy.  Neither are believers.  Instead, the shared experience and references of those who believe can be a tremendous tool.  Like Archimedes lever, this is an instrument that can move the world.  It can server the progressive cause as well as the people trying to push us backwards.

Now, let’s roll up our sleeves, put our heads together, and go smite those guys on the other side (metaphorically speaking, of course).

My church has not been flooded, or struck by high winds,  It’s faced no fire, flood, or other disaster.  But it is being battered — by the same moral questions that are ringing through politics and churches nationwide.  

My church is a United Church of Christ church.  As many people are aware, the national body of the UCC voted earlier this year that member churches should not only allow gay unions, but sanction them as marriages no different from traditional marriages.  However, just because the UCC national board says something, members (and member churches) do not always agree.

There’s nothing wrong with disagreement, even in a church — at least, I don’t believe there is — but this time, the ripples are still growing larger, and threaten to become waves that could overwhelm our small church.
Last Tuesday night, there was a meeting of the church to consider the issue.  I regret to say that a funeral took me out of town, and I wasn’t there to speak in the meeting.  However, I was very disheartened to hear, in reports of this meeting, not only that the discussion became very heated, but that it was very one sided.  Despite being a UCC church, the majority of those present not only opposed the idea of sanctioning gay marriage, I think it’s safe to say they were openly hostile to the idea.  More than one person went so far as to say that if our local church did not oppose this idea, they would leave the church.  Others proposed that the church itself should leave the UCC and align itself with another church body.

All of the above makes my church sound very backwards, but that’s not really true.  This is a very small church.  We’re lucky to have 100 people in the two Sunday services combined.   It’s an old church, populated mainly by old German families that have lived in this valley for nearly 200 years — the last generation of dairy farmers and rural workers, who are now finding themselves pushed out by the ever expanding radius of suburban commuters.  The average age in the church is on the high side of 50.  

However, this church has also been very good at taking in “religious refugees.”  My family, and another of the Sunday school teachers, are both former Southern Baptists who left that church after the right-wing staged a takeover of the convention (a model for how the neocons came to control the Republican party).  Two other couples in my adult class are former Catholics, looking to escape teachings there that they find ever more rigid.  It’s a church that runs its own “meals on wheels” program, taking food to elderly and the disabled.  We have a food pantry for the poor.  It’s a church whose common prayer just this morning included:

In a couple of weeks, we are to have another meeting of the church and face those decisions.  Will the church decide to follow the instructions of the national body?  Will it stay in the UCC, but not follow these teachings (UCC churches have a lot of power to set their own beliefs), or will those most upset by the idea of gay marriage drive the church to leave the UCC?

As usual, it is the people who are most upset by the idea who are driving the agenda.  I need words.  I need words that are going to not only be effective in convincing the church that we should accept gay marriage, but do so without further ripping open the wounds this issue is causing.

I intend to say something like:

We should all remember, Jesus thought this issue was so important that he spoke on it… not at all.  As we discuss it tonight, let us remember what is really important.  Jesus taught us that all law came down to one statement: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  Everything else should only be an echo of that one law.

What we’re doing here tonight will be remembered.  We look back now on those people caught up in the debates over slavery, over the rights of women, and over interracial marriage and we wonder “how could they ever have doubted the answer?”  It all looks so clear to us now.   But they were caught in the tumult.  They prayed for guidance, just as we do.  They looked to the Bible, just as we do.  And good people with good hearts, sometimes reached conclusions that now seem terribly wrong.

A generation from now, this issue will also seem clear to our children.  They may think we’ve made the right decision tonight, or they may think we’ve made an error.  But if we err, please let them think that we erred on the side of acceptance.  That we erred on the side of understanding.   Let them think we were too generous with our love.  I believe they will forgive us for that.

That’s what I want to say, but it’s not enough.  If someone else has been through this, I’d appreciate some insight.  If someone has notes or comments form people who fought in those previous battles, I’d love some good quotes.  If someone just has an idea what I can say to soften some hearts, I’m all ears.

Thanks.

There’s one thing that should really concern you about Bush’s speech.  No, it’s not that the president of the United States cannot be trusted to button his own shirt.  No, it’s not even the faint background music of Dixie when Bush declared that the Gulf Coast would “rise again.”

While the news concentrates on the enormous cost of Bush’s proposals, and the wingnuts vibrate into another dimension demanding sacrifices they would never had thought to ask in funding Iraq, both have missed the important point.

Near the end of the speech is the nugget of truth among the warmed over LBJ impersonation.  
Believe it or not, the most frightening thing in Bush’s speech was not the way he could stand in the middle of an evacuated city and smirk.  It was hidden way down there, in the middle of one of the whining segments of the speech.  Remember the part that opened with:

The purpose of that part is clear enough.  This was not his fault!  No one could have foreseen a storm that had both wind and rain.  A couple of seconds later comes the kicker:

There.  Catch that last sentence?  It summarizes everything Bush really has to say about the situation.

1. It repeats the “I was hampered by legalities” excuse, implying that he didn’t act because (insert your favorite latin legal phrase) restrained him.

2. It spreads the blame to state and local governments that knew they were out of their depth and had already begged for federal assistance.

3. The power grab.  This is the real heart of the thing — “requires greater federal authority.”  Bush will now use the Katrina disaster as a means to gather still more power to his administration.

To see how this will work, you have only to look at the response to 9/11.  Everyone directly involved agreed that the government had not been hampered by law or institutional barriers, but had only failed through plain old government inertia and because the Bush administration was not paying enough attention to the problem.  Even so, the immediate response of the Bush administration was to use 9/11 as an opportunity to grab more power to themselves, and to erode civil liberties.

Now that pattern is repeating itself.  The situation in New Orleans had nothing to do with legal restrictions which kept the federal government out.  However, Bush will now use Katrina as an excuse to gather more powers to himself.

• Expect new legislation that makes it the decision of the president, not the governor, when to send in the troops.  

• Expect new legislation that makes it easier for the president to declare martial law.  

• Expect new legislation that makes it easier for the president to take control of national guard troops, including units within their home state.

• Expect this new legislation to be used much more broadly than in the case of nation disasters.

In effect, expect Bush to use this excuse to overturn Posse Comitatus as it now stands, and to rework the National Guard as an extension of the federal executive.  For everyone on the right who ever used the “well, the federal government doesn’t have a national police force” meme — Bush is about to solve that problem for you.

Sure, the curtain has been ripped down and the Great and Mighty Resolute Leader of Oz has been revealed as a vacillating little weasel.  Sure, tens of thousands of people are dead because of his breathtaking, all-encompassing incompetence.  So what else is new?  Couldn’t we have run that headline any day in the last two years?  

From the day Bush entered office; many of us were stunned by what we saw as a combination of obvious lies and blinding lack of common sense.  Now that everyone can see it, the temptation is to deliver a few swift kicks to tender parts of his anatomy.  Maybe more than a few.  I can understand how you might want to smack him around a little.  Maybe slap him until he stops that freakish, idiotic little half-chuckle at the end of every single sentence.  Okay, I can understand the temptation to strip him naked, soak him five days in a mix of petrochemicals and raw sewage, and leave him floating along Canal Street with a Purina Rat Chow sign strung around his neck.

But don’t give into temptation.  Forget him.

The Dead Man

Why forget Bush?  Because Bush is history, figuratively and literally.  He’s yesterday’s enemy.  

Not only can the man never be elected again, he’s about to go down in history as the worst president ever.  James Buchanan aficionados, who’ve squirmed over little things like how their man sat on his thumb while the nation tumbled toward Civil War, can finally breathe a sign of relief.  Compared to Bush, Buchanan comes up smelling like a rose.

Don’t worry about Bush, because there’s not enough left to worry about.  When you’ve got reliable Republican lap dogs like Joe Scarborough chewing his legs off.  When you’ve got Newt Gingrich attacking him, well…  He’s done.  I would say “stick a fork in him” but this is one roast that no one wants to share.  Just slide him straight into the garbage, thanks.

Oh sure, for recreational purposes, it might be fun to remind people that they should never be fooled again by someone who has a smirk for all occasions.  That maybe, just maybe, they shouldn’t vote for leader of the free world based on the “who would I rather gnaw on pickled pig’s feet and slurp Lone Star with” factor.

For purely fun reasons — and for the reason that, like the main character of yet another Dawn of the Dead remake, he will continue to lurch from his political grave over the next few years, making nonsense noises and biting at the flesh of the nation – kicking Bush is not necessarily a bad thing.  If you want to toss a few anchors onto his sinking boat, there’s a plentiful supply.  Choose from nice, shiny new models like Bush playing air guitar while New Orleans sinks.  Or Bush shooting a round of 18 while the Gulf Coast crumbles.  Or Bush’s fake levee farce.  Or his showboating while the rescue choppers set grounded at a time when 8-10 people an hour were dying (and that according to Bill Frist).  Bush did so many stupid things this week alone, that it’s hard to know where to start.  

The temptation to put a Big Bertha Titanium Special Edition next to his skull and say “now watch this drive, Mr. President” is very strong.

Aww, heck, go ahead.  But don’t get distracted.  Bush is not important.

The Great Uniter

After September 11th, the nation was united as it has not been since World War II.  Seen that sentence before?  Thing is, it’s true.  For a good stretch there, Americans had their sleeves up, ready to engage in shared sacrifice.  Bush squandered the political unity of that moment, a moment in which he might have done anything, with the foolishness of Iraq.  The only sacrifice asked of most of us, was slaughtering our common sense at the altar of trickled on economics.

Now we have another of those extremely rare moments of perfect national clarity.  Only this time the theme of the day is they screwed up big time.  Four years in which they’ve done nothing but talk about being prepared for an emergency.  Four years in which they’ve spent huge amounts of money, reshaped the government, eroded rights, suspended laws, broken treaties, and expended blood like it was free, and what do we have to show for it? Rats eating old women in the street, that’s what we have.

When it comes to being prepared as a nation, we are worse off now than we were before September 11th, and everyone, everyone, can see it.

In this new moment, in which we are united by a collective disgust for the current state, comes another of those opportunities to change things.  If we seize it, this moment can really be (to steal one of the most overused phrases of the last four years) a turning point.  Not only can we recover from the disasters of this week, but also the disasters that have been coming our way since 1994.

The Party of Competence

Reread those last four words again.  Again.   Okay, that’s what we’re selling in 2006.  That’s the ticket in 2008.  That’s the Democratic theme song, the party pledge, the one permanent litmus test.  We will be competent.

We will be sensible, not ideologues.  We will work hard, and not complain about “hard work”.  We will put the people first, lobbyists last, and put real thought into everything we do.  We will recognize that we are in government to do the people’s work, and we will do it well.

Those sentences are not only a good idea to get Democrats elected, they’re a good idea.  Period.

Seven Steps to 2006Uniter

1. We will end the war.  I’m not talking about the war in Iraq.  I’m talking about the biggest, best-funded war that the Republicans have been waging for more than a decade: the war on reason.  We will be the party that supports facts, not fantasy.  We will deal with the truth as we find it, not as we want it to be.  We will not only call for education, but respect the fruits of education.  We will not attack those who are learned as elite, we will celebrate them, turn to them, use them to solve our nation’s problems.  We will put scientists into roles where they can advance science and protect the environment and the nation’s future.

2. We will be the pro-education party.  By that, we don’t mean the “pro-whatever makes the NEA happy” party, and neither will we be the “screw the NEA at every opportunity party.”  Sometimes the teaching unions have great ideas, sometimes they’re defenders of the status quo, even where that status quo is inimical to actually cramming facts into the heads of kids.  That’s okay.  Their job is to support their union members.  The government’s job is to educate the public.  We should recognize that on some occasions those two things will be at odds.  As with everything else, we will move forward with those ideas we know to work: small class sizes, good teacher to student ratios, sound administrative practices.  When we see that some other nation is beating us in some area of education, we will not gnash our teeth.  Instead, we will look at how they beat us.  And then we’ll do it better.

3. We will be the party of real economics.  We will not forget the past and reinvent economics on every third Tuesday.  We will not pretend that there once existed some perfect free market utopia, or pretend that government control would solve everything.  We will not try to foist theories that have failed again and again, just because they line the pockets of those willing to toss some change our way.  We will protect the interests of American corporations, but we will not put the interests of any corporation, even the largest, above the rights of a single American citizen.

4. We will celebrate religion as a vital part of the social fabric of this nation.  We will zealously defend the barriers that protect both state, and church, from the damage that occurs when to two become intertwined.  We will rejoice in the family, the individual, and the community — and we will recognize that all three have both rights and responsibilities.  

5. We will put in place an energy policy that looks to the future, not the past, and which actually helps to free our nation from the chains of blood and oil that keep us from acting with justice.  We will make steps both reasonable and radical to change the way energy is made and used in America, because no other issue is so connected to everything else we do.

6. We will not treat the world like a giant ant farm on which we are free to conduct experiments like sadistic five year olds with magnifying lenses.  We’ll conduct foreign policy to the best interest of the nation by acting the way we’ve always pretended we act: with honor, dignity, consistency, and respect for human rights.

7. We will grateful for the trust of the people, and never forget that we have to earn that trust anew every single day.

One last thing:  We will be the party that puts someone with disaster experience in charge of federal disaster planning, instead of giving the office to some discredited horse lawyer whose sole qualification was being a loyal toady.  Yeah.

How about it folks?  Let’s bring back the idea that knowledge is a good thing, not something to be scorned.  Let’s bring back the idea that cracking a book that doesn’t feature a political jab on the front is worthwhile.

Let’s forget about Bush, and go make some history of our own.