Author: eodell

I’d like to think that our side — by which I mean Obama supporters, not the larger our side of the Democratic left — would be above saying the kind of stupid things that their side — the “their side” of our side, Clinton supporters — have a habit of saying. If I did think that, I’d be wrong.

Over at HuffPo, Flavia Colgan writes about the recent flap regarding Bill Clinton’s shady dealings on behalf of Colombia’s neo-fascist government.

I would expect, and even welcome, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton arguing about policy behind closed doors. It can only help the senator form a more informed, wise position on critical issues. […] At some point, when Sen. Clinton claims she was trying to defeat the Colombian free trade deal, Bill Clinton must have told her that he was planning on making some money to promote the deal, and helping the Colombian president deflect attention from his offensive record. What did Sen. Clinton tell the former president at that point?

Fair enough. It’s not a bad thing for the Clintons to disagree, but it is a bad thing if they really do agree and Hillary Clinton is deceiving us. But then Colgan goes off into la-la land.

Whatever the case, this is problematic. In this critical time, we cannot afford to have a president who says one thing, while the first spouse publicly works towards an opposite end. Sen. Clinton must better explain to voters why the former president goes off on his own like this, and how she will better control him if she should find herself in the Oval Office.

Excuse me? Despite popular belief — for which we have, ironically, the Clintons to blame — the role of first spouse is not a government office, and it has absolutely no official role or statutory recognition. Being married to the president carries with it some traditional expectations but no actual obligations. And we can safely assume that a First Gentleman pretty much does away with traditional expectations, can’t we?

Colgan’s concern about the honesty and candidness of Hillary Clinton is fully warranted in this case, but if elected president, Hillary has no more obligation — or right — to control Bill than, say, Jimmy Carter had any obligations with respect to his wacky brother Billy or any other relative. (We leave aside for the moment the question of whether Hillary can control Bill.) If Bill is involved in business that could be influenced by a hypothetical President Hillary Clinton, then we ought rightly to insist on some transparency, but Bill can do whatever the hell he wants. He would be no more constrained by his wife’s presidency than you are I would be.

Now I know that the three ring circus of Clinton family buffoonery is often an irresistable spectacle, but can we please rise to the occasion (and above the opposition) and focus on the issues? At the end of the day, it’s what Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama do and say that matters — not whatever their spouses are doing within the limits of the same laws that apply to everyone else.

I don’t often diary because I seldom have any topic that I want to rant about at length, at least not without provocation. (Today is actually an exception, but that topic is a guaranteed flamewar, so I’m letting it pass.) But I do often have some simple thing that’s bugging me, so I’m going to start posting the one that bugs me most every Sunday.
Primaries. There are a lot of problems with primaries, but the one that seems to be most topical right now is that states that hold their primaries early in the season have a disproportional influence on the process, while the states that have late primaries may as well not hold them at all. There are two obvious simple solutions to this problem:

1. Hold the primaries in all fifty states on the same day.
2. Randomize the order of the states.

Both solutions have some equally obvious drawbacks, #1 being that candidates with big war chests at the start of the season would have an even larger advantage than they do already, and #2 being that it doesn’t really solve the problem and might in fact make it worse.

But as Republican voters are always slow to grasp, if the problems are the world were simple, simpletons like them would have solved them already.

So how would you make the primary system fairer, more representative, and harder to game?

In the midst of the inherently heated internecine fighting that goes with primary season, I’d like to take a minute to get some honest and hopefully well-reasoned opinions from folks in the Clinton camp about why they support their candidate. Let me start by saying that I’m not looking for a debate nor am I encouraging one — we have plenty of that going on already. I’m just genuinely curious about the motivations of Clinton supporters.
First, the full disclosure: I’m an Obama supporter because a) I don’t trust the Clintons and they aren’t liberal enough for me, and b) the candidate I really wanted to win, John Edwards, just dropped out of the race. For me, it’s just a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils — Obama has no real appeal for me in and of himself, though I don’t notice any serious red flags in his record, either.

That said, I’m not terribly interested in the opinions of people who support Clinton as the lesser of two evils, because that devolves pretty quickly into a discussion of Obama. I want to hear from people who support Clinton because they really want her to win. And I want to know why. What is it that you really like about Hillary Clinton, both as a person and in terms of her policies? What do you think that Clinton will do as president that you look forward to?

Let me reiterate that I’m not looking for a debate here. I just want to learn what you think.

All the recent talk of Republicans and the religious right and their sex crimes reminded me of something I wanted to do a long time ago and never got around to: create a blog devoted to that very subject.
God’s Perverts is my new blog, inspired by some particularly egregious cases that came across the newswire today. I’d like to cover everything in the arena of religious sex crimes, but there is literally too much news for me to summarize on a daily basis, so I am picking the worst of the worst for consideration.

My basic editorial policy is to just write straight news summaries, saving the snarking, if any, for the comments, and to focus exclusively on religious figures and politicians who have made a political issue out of morality.

I’d like to invite everyone to visit the blog and help shine a light on the plethora of predators who hide behind the facade of religion and religious politics.

I keep hoping things will change for the better. I keep voting for things to change for the better. Thing are not, however, changing for the better, and if I am going to be coldly rational about the situation here, I have to seriously consider emigration.
I am fluent in English, approaching fluency in German, and I’m working on Spanish. I never finished college, but I managed to become a highly experienced software engineer anyway, so I can reasonably expect to be employable in many places. I have no criminal record. Assuming I bring my linguistic self-education to fruition, in a few years I would be able to integrate into any of a dozen or so nations as a productive citizen.

There is all of Latin America outside of Brazil, and though some (though surprisingly few) of the governments are still dodgy, their potential for malice is limited by not having the vast resources of the US to act upon it. Of the so-called Anglosphere, there are the two non-insane English-speaking countries, New Zealand and Canada. Then there are Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Spain in Europe. (I suppose that, knowing English and German, learning Dutch would be no great stretch; I can already understand most of the written form of the language.)

So to our friends who live in the aforementioned countries, how hard would it be for someone like me to emigrate to your country and become a citizen? And would you recommend your country as a destination for a somewhat eccentric social democrat like myself?

In the latest episode of the ever-popular game of I’m-Not-Really-A-Racist-Asshole, the former chairman of the Roger Williams University, Ralph Papitto board admitted to and apologized for saying “nigger” during a board meeting. (I refuse to use the cutesy “N-word” expression; it’s an ugly thing to say, and shouldn’t be reported as if it was some kind of baby-talk euphemism.) Papitto stepped down after 40 years on the board, reportedly after being pressured off in response to the remark, which he made while discussing the difficulty of recruiting minorities for the board. Prior to that, several board members were forced out in response to their attempts to remove Papitto.
This episode calls to mind several recurrent themes in the ongoing struggle to eradicate racism. At the meeting, Papitto corrected himself, saying that he couldn’t use the word because of what happened to Don Imus. The implication here is that racist white guys are being persecuted for innocuous behavior. Had he pulled down his pants and urinated on the table, he would not have been surprised if he was ejected from the board; the connection he is failing to make is that open racism — and yes, referring to African Americans as niggers counts as open racism — is socially unacceptable behavior in the modern world.

Papitto is 80 years old. Although he implausibly claims that he never heard “nigger” until he watched rap videos — hip hop has a huge following among white octegenarians, of course — and had never used the word prior to that day, the reality is that he grew up in a time when the use of the word would not have raised an eyebrow. This fact is often raised as a defense for old racist white guys, as if it is impossible for them to correct their behavior, much less their delusional beliefs. One has to wonder if Ralph was still tapping Morse code into his telephone or trying to fit a saddle on his SUV. People are amazingly adaptable — if they want to be.

The worst part, though, is the tired assertion that “it just slipped out”. Everyone has had the experience of accidentally saying something that they never think — oh wait, no they haven’t. Here again, the point is being missed, and missed badly. It’s not saying racial slurs that makes one a liability to society; it’s the attitudes that lie behind them. We can sit around all day contemplating the historic or linguistic qualities of “nigger” without doing any harm. It’s when one internalizes the hatred and loathing for one’s fellow man that goes with the term that one becomes a liability. The problem is not that the chairman of the board of a university said “nigger”, it’s that he was thinking it, and it was undoubtedly coloring his judgment.

It will inevitably be argued — generally by people who feel strongly about their right to be closet racists — that such considerations amount to criminalizing thought. They in fact do not, and no one has seriously recommended making racist thoughts a crime. We are all of us perfectly free to stew in the mental sewage of our own choosing. The same people, however, might be less sanguine about being told that their child’s teacher had frequent sexual fantasies about children. So long as those fantasies are not acted upon, the teacher has committed no crime, but there are few who would say that such a person has any business working with children.

Ralph Papitto is not being persecuted. He has every damn right in the world to say and think all kinds of hateful trash. The board of Roger Williams University is, however, quite correct in concluding that a person with his attitudes is not temperamentally suited to oversee an institution whose mission is the education of young people, some of whom may be the target of Mr. Papitto’s “slips”.

As everyone knows by now, Harriet Miers, acting under orders from the President, has refused to appear before Congress in defiance of a subpoena. In so doing, she has placed herself completely at the mercy of the House Judiciary committee — if John Conyers is on the ball, anyway.
No one disputes the power of the President to issue orders to employees of the executive branch and, in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the military, to military personnel. Whether he really has the power to order executive branch employees to defy a congressional subpoena is something that would have to be settled by the courts, but there is one thing that is absolutely and completely beyond dispute: the president has no authority whatsoever to give orders to civilians not under the employ of the executive branch.

Harriet Miers has not been employed by the executive branch since the end of January. Ergo, Bush’s instructions to her are rendered moot, and she is therefore defying the Judiciary Committee on her own initiative.

There is absolutely nothing standing in the way of the Committee ordering her arrest, and nothing standing in the way of the Committee insisting on her incarceration until such time as she agrees to comply with the law. Her only defense at that point would be a presidential pardon.

And of course, if Bush does that, he is plainly obstructing justice, and that is grounds for impeachment.

In today’s news:

Fielding on Thursday explained Bush’s position on executive privilege this way: “For the president to perform his constitutional duties, it is imperative that he receive candid and unfettered advice and that free and open discussions and deliberations occur among his advisers and between those advisers and others within and outside the Executive Branch.”

Really?
What are the possible reasons the President could refuse to reveal the content of conversations with his advisors? There are only four I can think of:

1. The conversation involved classified matters, in which case redacted documents could still be released to Congress and to the public. The full documents, however, can be made available to Congressional committees whose members have the appropriate security clearances, such as the Intelligence Committee. None of this applies to the US Attorneys scandal, however.
2. The conversation involved operational details and plans for ongoing military action. This is probably the strongest argument in the bunch, except that again, there are Congressional committees that should have access to this material on request. And again, none of this applies to the hiring and firing of US Attorneys.
3. The conversation would be embarrassing to the administration. Of course, this is a non-starter; there is no presidential privilege to avoid embarrassment. I find it hard to believe that even this president would risk opening himself to an impeachment battle over mere embarrassment. It’s not like this guy has any shame to begin with.
4. The conversation involved conspiracy to commit a crime. Again, the President is subject to much the same laws as anyone else, and refusing to cooperate with a Congressional subpoena is simple obstruction of justice.

In light of these considerations, the only reasonable conclusion is that Number 4 is at work. It cannot just be that the firings were politically motivated. That would indeed be embarrassing and unethical, but it is not, strictly speaking, illegal. As the talking meatsticks have been fond of noting, US Attorneys serve at the President’s pleasure. It must be the case that actual crimes were committed — and we can safely assume that the crimes in question were either the illegal manipulation of elections or obstruction of justice, or both.

Given that most of Congress consists of former attorneys, it’s safe to bet that they know very clearly what is going on, on both sides of the aisle. We are in for a very interesting summer, less from the Democrat side than the Republican side, as the rats place their bets on whether to abandon the sinking ship of the Bush-Cheney junta or to bail faster.

I’m going to run against the conventional wisdom on this one. Iraq is not in the midst of a civil war. “Sectarian violence” doesn’t describe it well, either. I’m not sure that there is a good term for it, to tell the truth.
Iraq would be in the midst of a civil war were it not for the presence of foreign troops. US air superiority makes it impossible for the warring factions to mass troops into conventional military units. Even were that not the case, the destruction of Iraqi armor and artillery during the invasion and the concentration of the population in urban centers lends itself to small units of irregulars. Our presence also prevents the direct involvement of neighboring countries and keeps the flow of men and materiel to a trickle. Moreover, having to sneak around the American presence makes it possible for small factions to survive, when otherwise they would be destroyed by their enemies or absorbed into larger factions.

The end result of all this is a novel form of modern warfare, the guerilla civil war.

None of this is an argument for staying. The simmering conflict in Iraq, and the general dislike of the occupiers by Iraqis of all stripes means that we will not be able to restore civil order or basic services or to rebuild the Iraqi economy — all of which are prerequisites to a peace that is now unattainable. They will bleed us (and each other) until we leave, and then a more conventional civil war will not only be possible but inevitable.

The best we can hope for, I suspect, is that we can get the hell out and that Iraq will end up partitioned into Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish states, with Iran as the major regional power and renewed unrest in the Kurdish regions of Turkey and Iran. For a variety of reasons, I don’t think we’ll get that lucky, if you can call that luck.

But a civil war it is not. Not yet.

It occurred to me, while I was chatting with some of the GOP operatives who work in my office building during a smoke break that this is ultimately not an interparty issue. Forget Hastert’s nattering about the liberal media and George Soros (read: Jewish investment bankers, a nod to his Klan base). Democrats really don’t have a whole lot of actual interest in this issue. We think it’s hysterically funny to watch the GOP implode, but I really doubt this will have much effect on either registered Democrats or independent voters.
This is all about the Republican base. They’re not influenced by ABC News or Democratic schadenfreude or anything we (meaning the left) might have to say on the matter for the simple reason that they get their news from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. It’s these people whose opinions matter, and they simply don’t listen to what the “liberal media” says unless Rush quotes it out of context to them. To them, sexual impropriety is a first-order concern, orders of magnitude more important than, say, bombing the hell out of a bunch of non-Christian brown people. They dig the massacre of innocents; what they don’t care for is anyone having fun with their penis, especially orally or anally. They don’t like the underage aspect, either, but considering the blind eye that most churchgoers turn to the sexual abuse of women and children in their own communities, it’s probably not their main concern. They’re a lot more worried about their children being “converted” by the “lavender lobby” than they are worried about good, clean heterosexual rape. You can see that much in the attempts by some on the GOP side to suggest that Foley was “lured” by these kids, or the performance of conservative talk shows when popular sports figures are accused of rape. There really isn’t much rape in their worldview, just lying bitches who don’t know their place out to trap men.

And that is, ultimately, why the GOP can’t stop the bleeding with the base. (It’s also why the left is wasting its time talking about child molestation to an audience that doesn’t actually care much about the subject.) Foley was caught trying to arrange GAY SEX (with kids), and practically the entire GOP leadership, the same people who showed up for neo-fascist events like Justice Sunday, knew about all this GAY SEX and covered it up. The frothing religious fanatics who form the Bush-Rove base have every right to be pissed off because they have, in fact, been betrayed. It’s the base calling for Hastert’s resignation, and if the Washington Times is any indication, they were calling for it well before opportunists on the left jumped on the bandwagon.

Don’t expect them to vote for Democrats. There are too many openly GAY Dems in Congress (having consensual sex with people their own age, but that’s beside the point). Do expect some to stay home, or spend their votes on regional neofascist parties like the Constitution Party. It won’t take many, either, because the whole GOP (read: Rovian) strategy over the last umpteen years is to simply maintain a slim majority in the 51-52% range instead of the Clintonian (and in its own way, equally nauseating) centrist approach, which for all of its flaws left a sizeable margin for error and defections.