Author: eodell

As a regular reader of The Guardian, for which you may thank Steve Bell, I am often perplexed by British politics. Some things I understand, like parliamentary democracy, which I wish we had here. Other things, like the unwritten constitution, frankly baffle me. And some times, the slow but sure divergence between British English and American English leaves me flummoxed, as when a headline proclaimed, “Tories angered by yobs’ defiance of Asbos,” which required me to corner an English friend to explain what “yobs” and “Asbos” were.

Perhaps our British friends are similarly confused by features of American politics, so I thought I would try starting a weekly transatlantic Q&A session so we can satisfy our curiosity about each other. So let’s begin with the first installment of WTF: US-UK.
To start off with my own question, I have been following the story of Prince Charles and his court battle to keep his journals private. There seems to be a great deal of consternation that the prince expressed political opinions, and in particular, that he expressed political opinions in letters to government ministers.

So WTF? Why does anyone care that Charles writes letters to ministers? Hasn’t the monarchy essentially been reduced to a powerless tourist attraction, albeit one with strong tendencies to embarrassing behavior? From over here, it seems as if Charles writing to one minister or another is about as significant as Richard Gere writing letters to the President on behalf of Tibet. Obviously, it is a bigger deal than that from the British point-of-view, so I was hoping someone could clue me in on this one.

In Tony Blair’s England, there is a serious effort to criminalize criticism of religion. In theory, the object of this is to prevent, for example, Muslim clerics from calling for the extermination of Jews. In practice, however, the UK already has laws against the incitement of hatred and violence. The real, effective purpose of the new initiative is to make it impossible for secular critics to attack religion. New Labour, after all, is the UK’s answer to the DLC, cynically snuggling up to their own wingnuts.

The UK, however, is not alone. In the religious hothouse of the United States, similar forces are at work.
Over at dKos right now, there is an extended, far-ranging debate that essentially concerns whether non-religious people ought to be able to express their disagreement with and — heaven forfend! — contempt for religion.

I want to cut through the bullshit here and expose the hidden argument of the respect-for-religion crowd. What they imply, but seldom actually say, is that being religious is inherently superior than being non-religious, and that all of the blessings of moral society flow from religious belief.

I’ve even seen agnostics taken in by this nonsense. So have you, most likely. Is there anyone reading this who has not seen some non-religious person express admiration for religious people who can maintain the faith that they cannot, as if not being able to believe the unbelievable is some kind of personal shortcoming?

As it happens, I am religious in the sense that I believe in a supernatural or spiritual state of being. I am absolutely committed to people being able to choose their own beliefs based on whatever criteria they like, no matter how absurd I think they are. The only limitation I would like to impose on religion — aside from getting the freeloaders to pay taxes like any other business — is the common sense limitation that you ought not to be able to hurt or harrass people no matter what you think God is telling you to do.

In return, I expect that I should remain free to criticize religious beliefs like any other kind of ideology. I reserve the right to say that the Book of Genesis, read literally, is simply, factually, not true. I reserve the right to say that decent personal behavior is perfectly possible without religious morality, and as proof of that point to the vast population of non-religious people who are no more likely to murder or steal than religious people — and, let’s be really honest here, probably less likely to commit marital rape and child abuse than people whose religions tell them it’s okay to do so.

My experience is that organizations that prohibit criticism generally do so because their conduct warrants criticism. Given the history of organized religion, there is no question at all that religion warrants not only criticism but continuous scrutiny to prevent it from damaging society. The notion that it should be protected from that scrutiny is sufficiently outrageous that one has to wonder about the motives of the religious and political figures who want to erect that shield.

Religion has nothing to fear in the US or UK, or indeed throughout most of the western world. Unless, of course, it is the prospect of facing a free society in which they cannot force their views on others.

Respect should be earned. The surest sign that an institution does not deserve respect is when respect becomes mandatory.

When John Ashcroft appeared before Congress to deny that the Justice Department engaged in torture, he argued that, not only was torture morally repugnant, it wasn’t even effective. Torture victims will, after all, confess to anything just to make the pain stop.

Vice President Cheney and various other GOP politicians and pundits seem unconvinced. For this reason, I’d like to offer an open challenge to them:
Using only a steel chair bolted to the floor, fifty feet of nylon rope, and a pair of wire cutters, I will guarantee that I can get any GOP doubter to confess to personally ordering the execution of Jesus Christ in less than an hour, and still leave them with most of their fingers and teeth, and maybe — no promises, mind you — a complete set of genitalia.

Frankly, I suspect it will take much less than that.

So do I have any takers? Cheney? Wolfowitz? Limbaugh? Novak?

From the Guardian:

British families trapped in New Orleans last night claimed that US authorities had refused to evacuate them as Hurricane Katrina approached the city.

Although assistance was offered to US residents, British nationals were told they would have to fend for themselves. According to those who remain stranded in the stricken city, police had visited hotels and guest houses on the eve of the hurricane offering to evacuate Americans, but not Britons.

You can read the whole ugly thing here.

For what must be the umpteenth time since this mess started, I am speechless. I don’t know which is more mind-boggling: our government’s treatment of the only nation dumb enough to be our ally in the GWOT, or that the Brits were dumb enough to think that we were their ally.

Every time I think we have plumbed the depths of shame, someone goes and digs the pit a little deeper. We’re going to strike oil if we keep going lower.

There’s been a lot of hullabaloo over Pat Robertson’s recent remark that the US ought to assassinate Hugo Chavez. Being a big fan of Chavez, a real social democrat of a sort we simply don’t have in the US, and whose safety from the typical assassination-based foreign policy the US uses in the Third World has been a source of concern to me, I was outraged as well.
Not the least offensive thing in Robertson’s nasty little rant was his assertion that the coup attempt against Chavez was popular. It was in fact not, and it was the popular rejection of the poll that put Chavez back in power. Chavez’ approval rating is some forty points higher than our president’s approval rating. (I’m not holding my breath on Robertson backing a coup in the US, though Robertson did famously suggest using nuclear weapons against our own government in 2003.)

After watching for a couple of days, however, I’m now convinced that rather than try to get Robertson off the TV, as some have suggested, we try to get him more airtime. As far as Venezuela is concerned, Robertson’s remarks have had a number of positive effects. Firstly, Chavez’ already stratospheric approval rating has surged even higher in the face of Robertson’s remarks. Secondly, Robertson gives credence to Chavez’ assertion that there are influential people in the US who want to stop his peaceful revolution by assassinating him. And thirdly, the awkward and probably insincere denials Robertson has forced the US government to make will make it much harder for a CIA hit to take place.

While it is probably politically necessary, as a matter of tactics, to make a big stink about Robertson, the fact of the matter is that he and other American fascists are so repugnant to common decency that they are an albatross around the neck of the Republican party. As long as the GOP welcomes — or tacitly accepts — the kooks, nutballs, and thugs of the extreme theocratic right, their support among the majority will steadily erode.

And forewarned, the forces of progress — like President Chavez — have a better chance of surviving in the face of the current neo-fascist regime in Washington.

—

If you, like me, are an admirer of President Chavez, or if you just deplore Pat Robertson’s remarks and Condi Rice’s very similar sabre-rattling towards Venezuela, you might consider expressing those opinions to the Venezuelan ambassador. Let him know — and the CIA spooks who presumably read all of his mail in Washington — that decent, law-abiding Americans do not stand with Pat Robertson.

Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez Herrera
1099 30th Street NW, Washington, DC 20007

(For those not familiar with Latin American names, the ambassador should be addressed as Ambassador Alvarez, not Ambassador Herrera, when using the short form of his name.)

I’d recommend writing to the US State Department as well, but we all know they don’t care about popular opinion.

After largely ignoring politics since early in Clinton’s first term — you know, back when the worms had eaten into my brain and briefly made me a Republican — I tuned back in with a vengeance after 9/11. I was awakened in time to watch the second tower collapse, and my first thought, before learning that most folks had made it out, was something along the lines of, “Oh dear God, that was 20,000 people killed in a few seconds.” My second thought was, “There goes the Constitution.”

I had paid enough attention leading into the election to know that the Bush II administration was going to make the evils of the Reagan years look like children’s games. But hey, we lost the election, and there wasn’t much to do but wait for the next one. It wasn’t like there was much chance of anything happening that would make me vote Republican.
I wasn’t in favor of invading Afghanistan, but not because I didn’t think it was justified. The implausible claims by the Taliban that al Qaeda was operating independently and without official oversight were nonsense. And it’s not like I didn’t have hopes that the women of Afghanistan might end up better off with the Taliban out of the way. I just didn’t think we could win; no one else had, after all, and nations made of much sterner stuff than America had tried and failed many times before. How could Americans, who flinch at single-digit casualties, succeed where the British Empire and the Soviet Union had failed?

So I learned a new lesson: never underestimate the power of satellite-guided 20,000-pound bombs. Of course, by diverting everything to Iraq, we’ve lost most of what we gained since.

And Iraq — I had studied Saddam Hussein since well before the first gulf war, and I knew everything Bush was saying was utter horseshit. People who believed a Saddam-bin Laden connection were the height of ignorance then; the ones who still believe it are just fucking morons. I started to get really pissed as the Iraq misadventure got rolling, and I have been getting steadily angrier and angrier since. It keeps me up at night. It intrudes on my thoughts during the day.

It’s time to take a break.

As noted in a recent, brilliant diary on this site reccently, anger and hatred are like swallowing poison and hoping your enemy will die.

I’ve thought about that a lot in the past week. And it’s true. George Bush doesn’t know I hate him and wouldn’t care if he did. It’s me that hatred is consuming from the inside out. So I’m going to stop paying attention to politics for a while and focus on finding some kind of internal balance.

Truly, I don’t expect to be able to love this particular enemy. I find, quite seriously, the idea that George Bush has a human heart impossible to believe. Maybe he did, once. Maybe Ted Bundy could have grown up to be a nice guy, too. It’s too much to ask.

But I need to let go of the hate. I believe it was Thomas Szasz who pointed out that sickening acts are just that — they sicken us. I’m not sure how one faces the sickening acts being committed by the great killers of the world, whether Bush or bin Laden, but I am pretty sure that my spiritual resistance would be stronger if I were not already infected by hatred.

Nietzsche’s saying that doing battle with monsters entails the risk of becoming one seems more insightful to me with each passing year. I refuse to surrender to George Bush’s invitation to live in darkness with him. I cannot love this enemy, but I can refuse to hate. I can focus on loving the people who suffer under his lash. I can focus on letting that love guide me in the search for a better world, one in which people like Bush would be ignored — or perhaps offered treatment — instead of being followed to the abyss.

So I’ll be back.

The wheels of justice turn slowly, and many a rich scumbag has been able to buy his way out of his just desserts, but not today. Bernie Ebbers, the former Worldcom CEO whose accounting fraud ended up costing investors nearly $11 billion, was sentenced to 25 years in prison. If his health is nearly as bad as he claimed it was when pleading for leniency, that’s going to be the rest of his life.
According to Scott Moritz at TheStreet.com, U.S. District Judge Barbara Jones rejected defense attorneys’ request for a reduced sentence. “This is not a minor fraud,” she replied. The 25 year sentence she handed down was still considerably lighter than the 85 requested by prosecutors.

U.S. prosecutors had sought a maximum 85-year sentence. Ebbers’ attorneys had pointed to the former telecom titan’s charitable contributions and poor health in an effort to get a lighter sentence. But Jones indicated Ebbers’ heart condition wasn’t “extraordinary” and said her research indicated that he could get adequate care in prison.

Jones turned down defense arguments that she should depart from federal sentencing guidelines, though she said she was impressed by his record of charitable contributions. Ebbers lawyer Reid Weingarten emphasized that point in the courtroom Wednesday, saying that some poor families had despaired of sending their children to college before “an angel” emerged. “That angel was Bernie Ebbers!” Weingarten said to some amusement in the courthouse.

It’s easy to be generous when you’re stealing 11-digit sums, isn’t it?

Ebbers will be stripped of most of his assets before going to prison. (Once auctioned off, the funds will go help recoup investors’ losses, though their total value is estimated to be well under $40 million.) He will be following on the heels of 80-year-old Adelphia founder John Rigas, who received a 15-year sentence.

Meanwhile, former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay was indicted last week on 11 counts of securities fraud, wire fraud, and making false and misleading statements, charges which could earn him 175 years in prison.

So at least today, if the avalanche of fresh outrages from Washington gets you down, you can take some solace in knowing that justice is still occasionally served, and that wealth and power are not perfect insulation against the rule of law.

After the unofficial pie purge at dKos, I expected more of the same, while Kos partisans argued that it wasn’t a purge at all, and that those thinking so were, at the very least, a little paranoid.

So I banned these people, and those that have been recommending diaries like it. And I will continue to do so until the purge is complete, and make no mistake — this is a purge.

May I assume that both those of us who thought the purging process would be unofficial, and those who thought there was no intentional purge at all are now equally surprised?
Here’s the whole post by Kos:

Today I did something I’ve never done before (not even during the Fraudster mess), and wish I’d never had to do.

I made a mass banning of people perpetuating a series of bizarre, off-the-wall, unsupported and frankly embarassing conspiracy theories.

I have a high tolerance level for material I deem appropriate for this site, but one thing I REFUSE to allow is bullshit conspiracy theories. You know the ones — Bush and Blair conspired to bomb London in order to take the heat off their respective political problems. I can’t imagine what fucking world these people live in, but it sure ain’t the Reality Based Community.

So I banned these people, and those that have been recommending diaries like it. And I will continue to do so until the purge is complete, and make no mistake — this is a purge.

This is a reality-based community. Those who wish to live outside it should find a new home. This isn’t it. (Emphasis added.)

I guess if you’re assembling a choir to preach to, you have to get rid of anyone singing off-key. And if you want to build a liberal Free Republic, you have to start editing like a freeper.

Now, before this degenerates into a discussion about Markos Moulitsas, I want to steer this in a completely different direction. Forget dKos. Just focus on the theory at work: We are more powerful when we speak with one voice. Maybe “theory” is too weak of a word; it’s indisputably true. But are we smarter when we speak with one voice? How much dissent — including dissenting views of reality — can we tolerate before we lose all cohesion? How much cohesion can we insist upon before we start filtering out unconventional but useful thinking.

One of the dissenting voices in what was otherwise an amen chorus in the comments to Kos’ post pointed out that while he thought the original conspiracy theory was bananas, there were a lot of insightful posts worth reading in the responses to the conspiracy theory. In other words, people who thought it was bullshit calmly and rationally explained why they thought so. Is there a value in permitting — for example — crazies and bigots to speak so that they can be publicly refuted?

A good example of the two sides of this particular debate is the treatment of racism in the US and the EU, Germany being the canonical case. In the US, the KKK can get a parade permit practically any time they want, march down the streets of some small town, and show themselves for the asses and buffoons that they are. In Germany, Neo-Nazis are actively suppressed, impeding their ability to get their hateful message out, but also leaving their flawed doctrine unanswered in public discourse.

The Germans obviously have good reasons for wanting to suppress Nazism: it once led the country into total ruin on a scale that makes Iraq look like a Sunday picnic. One wonders, though, does official suppression really weaken Nazism? Neo-Nazi activity in Germany, both overt and covert, is more active than Klan activity in the US.

I should note here that I don’t count what Kos is doing as censorship. The purged parties can choose another blog or start one of their own. It’s easy and, in most cases, free. It would be different if Kos was a government.

And that’s the question I’m really interested in. What do you think the limits, if any, ought to be to free speech. We can probably all agree to the canonical example of yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater as being something that steps over the line, but where else would you draw that line? When does free speech cease to be an asset and become a liability?

During the now-infamous Pie Fight and the ensuing exodus of liberal Democrats, there were a number of well-intentioned (and some not so well-intentioned) folks who urged the offended parties to stay and fight. There were several reasons offered, the chief of which was, essentially, that dKos had become a powerful force on the left, and therefore was worth fighting for. I’d like to debunk that notion, and present the reasons I decided to move on.
The fact of the matter is that dKos, like every other blog on earth, and the majority of voluntary associations, has no value or power outside of its members. There may be the odd exception, like the Better Business Bureau, which is potent in part because of its long-established good reputation, but dKos and blogs generally have barely been on the radar of the more attentive sections of the general public for scarcely a year. Moreover, based on Markos Moulitsas’ occasional revealing comments about his hardware and — thanks to the selfsame Pie Fight — his ad traffic, it’s plain that it isn’t even that big of a site. Big, perhaps, for the nascent field of political blogs, but there was a time when the biggest, baddest (and only) search engine on the block was Lycos. It didn’t matter in the long run.

DailyKos, just for the sake of perspective, gets half to one-third the traffic of FreeRepublic.com. And dKos’ traffic is amazingly stable. Aside from some small growth in the aftermath of the presidential elections, it’s not growing. If dKos is the great white hope (irony intended), we have problems.

Now, here are the reasons I think fighting this is futile:

1. Moulitsas and his close allies have backed themselves into a corner. It would take a degree of humility one may be fairly certain they do not possess for them to change course, much less apologize.
2. DailyKos has very clearly — if less than honestly and openly — staked out its turf. It’s all about winning elections by chasing the center. The Kos-DLC sniping that has gone on over the past year isn’t about ideology; it’s a simple turf war. Kos plainly objects to the level of corporate influence in the DLC, but it’s hard to see any other difference between the two.
3. DailyKos is, as Moulitsas is fond of saying, about partisan politics. Activists, on the other hand, are driven by ideology and issues. It’s probably safe to say that if the American political system made third parties viable, there would be massive defection from the Democratic Party. This makes sense: if you want politicians to listen to you, being a party-line voter is counterproductive. Politicians listen to the people whose votes they’re not sure of. Partisan activists need to be fed and watered, of course, but it’s the ideological factions that have to be appeased.
4. There is a real danger in any blog becoming the self-appointed voice of the party. Recent refugees from dKos know why this is, but politicians need to take care as well. By closely associating with dKos or any blog, as some congresscritters have, they run the risk of being tied to the inflammatory comments posted by J. Random Troll and the site’s owner. Elizabeth Dole has already made much of the association of Democratic politicians with Markos Moulitsas and his intemperate remarks referring to the contractors who were massacred, mutilated, and hanged in Iraq as “mercenaries”. By learning to communicate, possibly via a mechanism as simple as RSS, with as many liberal blogs as possible, our elected officials will increase their reach while reducing their vulnerability to loose cannons.
5. Finally, and most importantly for me personally, the thing I value most about America is the egalitarian ideal for which it has striven since its inception. Everything else is secondary to that ideal, because, IMHO, everything else flows from it. For Moulitsas and his crew, that is evidently a fungible issue. For me, it is not. Without devotion to equality before the law, no country and no party — and certainly no website — is itself worthy of devotion.

Practical liberal activists need to be focused on three things. Firstly, they need to craft a persuasive message and get it out. Secondly, they need to be able to form coalitions with each other. And thirdly, they need to engage in meaningful two-way communications with our elected officials. Political blogs may well turn out to be an important tool in all three areas, but they can never be more than tools and remain effective. Once the blog branding and the personality of its webmaster become the foremost issues, that blog is well along on the road to irrelevance.

The war in Iraq is nearing its end, at least the portion of the war involving American forces. And it’s not because of the noble efforts of Congressman Conyers and others. None of that matters right now, though it will in the days to come. What does matter is that a slim majority of the public doesn’t consider the war to have been worth fighting. A larger majority believes that, worth it or not, it’s time to call the troops home. Worse, we are losing, and we are losing badly.

The truth — that this war was deceitfully launched by a bizarre alliance of would-be imperialists, arrogant ideologues, oil industry shills, and outright nutcases — is entirely beside the point. A voluntary war, by definition, is an act of either madness, stupidity, or brazen evil. Reason and truth come later.

Here’s how it plays out:
Even if the situation gets no worse, public support for the war is fast evaporating. In Congress, even some Republicans are calling for a withdrawal plan. As the situation on the ground in Iraq deteriorates, so will the domestic political situation.

The military situation is dire. We never had the forces we needed to win at the outset, and we are even worse off now. Recruiting is not adequate to keep the number of troops in the field at a break-even level, and that despite heavy-handed recruitment tactics so outrageous that even the Pentagon called for a stop to them. Conservative pundits, incredibly, won’t even urge their audiences to enlist. The only remaining option is a draft, and common wisdom says Bush wouldn’t dare. That might or might not be true. Bush doesn’t have brains, but he does have brass balls. Public support will fall through the floor if he does call for a draft.

From a purely military perspective, however, the simple fact is that the United States military does not have the strength to take and hold territory in Iraq without first turning it into a lifeless wasteland. We can “win” Iraq that way, but in no other sense. Our opportunity to win a true victory, which was a narrow opportunity at best, disappeared behind the walls of Abu Ghraib. The insurgency, far from being in its “last throes”, is now broad and well-entrenched, and it is gaining ground. The only Iraqi territory under secure US control is the Green Zone in Baghdad. Everything else is contested, save for the growing number of cities under total insurgent control.

All that has to happen now is for the insurgents to push Baghdad into chaos. They do not need to achieve decisive control of the capital any more than the North Vietnamese Army needed to win a decisive battle against the United States (they never did). All they have to do is deny control to the invader. When it becomes obvious to the American public that the situation is completely out of control, lack of support for the war will become active opposition. And the insurgency knows it.

Scott McClellan is not going to be able to stand behind his podium with his non-answers once the Iraqi Tet is well under way. Republican congressmen, after all, are not going to be willing to throw themselves on the Iraq grenade for George Bush. And while FOX News can ignore Democrat politicians, dissent from leading GOP politicians is going to get coverage. And public opinion will turn.

I do not believe that BushCo is going to back down, no matter how much public opinion turns against them. These people are too convinced of their own righteousness, their divinely-appointed mission from God, to be swayed at this point.

That’s where Dennis Conyers comes in.

The left has spent the last two years assembling a damning case against the Bush administration. We have so many smoking guns that you can’t tell how many we have because there’s so much damn smoke in the air. As soon as Congress and the public seriously want out of the war, they will seize at anything to achieve that goal. Winning a war makes the majority willing to forgive anything; losing one, on the other hand…

So we will withdraw, with or without George Bush. If he has to be impeached to accomplish that, he will be impeached. I suspect that it will come to that; for Bush to retreat or resign is unimaginable. Republican congressmen will eagerly join that drive if it happens, hoping that they will be among the political survivors if they are energetic enough in distancing themselves from Bush.

The war will go on, of course. If Saddam hasn’t been executed by then, it’s not completely impossible that he could find himself back in charge of the Sunni region of Iraq. If not him, one of his lieutenants surely will. The Kurds are certainly not going to accept the Baathist yoke again, while the Turks are not going to accept an independent Kurdistan. The Shia south will rapidly become more of an Iranian puppet than it is already. It’s going to be a goddamn ugly mess for a long, long time. And if the last US defeat is any indication, we’re going to be licking our wounds for even longer, too busy repairing the economic damage of GOP rule to bother with rebuilding the military.

The terrible outcome to this story is going to be that everyone loses. The power and prestige of the United States, if not completely destroyed, will be severely damaged. Iraq will be much worse off that it was under Saddam; arguably, it already is. The war will spread, certainly not to apocalyptic proportions, but bad enough to earn a chapter in the history books. Perhaps worst of all, the precedent set by American behavior in this war will be used to justify atrocities in other countries’ wars for decades to come.

We will have our work cut out for us.