I’m traveling today. My brother is being buried at Arlington tomorrow, so I’m in the DC area. My motel room has a great view of the Pentagon, which is a very boring building to look at. So talk about whatever.

I see that David Axelrod wrote in his new book that President Obama was in support of same-sex marriage all along, and just said he wasn’t back in 2008 so he wouldn’t scare off voters. Righties are incensed.  The President lied! Booman says, “The President Lied, People Got Married.”

Some People can’t handle the truth. President Obama referenced the Crusades at yesterday’s prayer breakfast, and from the reaction you’d think he’d just pissed on Jesus.

What he said:

“Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” Mr. Obama said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

These are what we call bare-assed facts. Yes, terrible things were done in the name of Christ during the Crusades and the Inquisition. Yes, lots of antebellum ministers delivered sermons supporting slavery, quoting the Bible as they did so. These are well-documented facts that ought to be taught in high school level history, and certainly anyone who has a bachelor’s degree in just about anything should have had enough History 101 to have been exposed to these facts.

But I guess not.

“The president’s comments this morning at the prayer breakfast are the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime,” said Jim Gilmore, the former Republican governor of Virginia. “He has offended every believing Christian in the United States.”

Rush Limbaugh devoted a segment of his show to what he said were the president’s insults to the “whole gamut of Christians” and Twitter’s right wing piled on. Guests on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News show spent 15 minutes airing objections to the president’s comments.

Another article quotes Gov. Gilmore this way —

“He has offended every believing Christian in the United States,” said Mr. Gilmore, a Republican. “This goes further to the point that Mr. Obama does not believe in America or the values we share.”

Of this, Ed Kilgore writes,

While some of Obama’s critics may claim the Inquisition and the Crusades just weren’t all that bad (though an auto-da-fe in a capital case for, say, the refusal to eat pork, was probably about as “barbaric” as a beheading), I think Gilmore articulates the main objection: we’re in a “religious war” and the president needs to show solidarity with “our” religion. Others, of course, reject the idea of separation of church and state that Obama spoke of yesterday, typically by drawing on David Barton’s spurious histories of the Founders’ intentions.

In other words, it’s possible that knowledge of Christianity’s less glorious episodes does reside in a little-used nook in Gilmore’s head, but it’s disloyal to the Team to talk about that stuff! (See also “Mass Rage Event.”)

Ed Kilgore goes on to make some excellent points about the President’s understanding of Christianity being more traditional and, well, religious than those of his critics, but for now I want to skip to another point, which is the rightie obsession with labels. I’ve written about this in the past (see, for example, “Why Are Righties So Obsessed With Labels?” ). Many righties, such as South Carolina Senator Miss Lindsey Graham, are demanding that the President say the words “we are in a religious war against radical Islamists.”

Even assuming we can define “radical Islamist” narrowly enough so that it doesn’t include anyone who’s ever visited a mosque or worn a headscarf, what do you mean by “religious war”? America is not supposed to do “religious wars,” I don’t think. A “religious war” by definition is “a war primarily caused or justified by differences in religion,” according to Wikipedia, and I honestly don’t think “differences in religion” are the real problem. The problem is “whackjob radicals murdering people and destabilizing the Middle East,” as I understand it. The radicals may have co-opted some twisted version of Islam to justify what they’re doing, but it’s what they’re doing, not our “differences in religion,” that is the problem.

John Amato quotes Uber-Catholic Bill Donohue as saying “We have a problem with Islam. Not just with Islamists, but a problem with Islam.” But who is “we”? I don’t have a problem with Islam. As John Amato says,

For some reason the right has focused on Obama for not constantly bashing the Muslim religion, as Bill Donohue does in this interview, but then they demand that Muslim countries join us in fighting groups like ISIS. Do they not understand the fallacy of their reasoning?

Peter Beinart (yeah, I know, it’s Peter Beinart) writes,

If there’s one thing top Republicans know, it’s that America can’t defeat terrorism unless we call it by its real name. “We are in a religious war with radical Islamists,” Lindsey Graham recently told Fox News. “When I hear the President of the United States and his chief spokesperson failing to admit that we’re in a religious war, it really bothers me.” Rudy Giuliani agrees: “If we can’t use the words radical Islamic terrorism, we can’t get rid of them. So does Ted Cruz. At the Iowa Freedom Summit in January he declared that, You cannot fight and win a war on radical Islamic terrorism if you’re unwilling to utter the words ‘radical Islamic terrorism.'”

There are several problems here. Even if one believed that calling the enemy radical Islam were a good idea, it would hardly explain how to defeat it. …In reality, denouncing radical Islam offers little guidance for America’s actual policy dilemmas.

Back to Ed Kilgore:

As Beinart suggests, the real purpose of these demands seems to be a sort of defiance of “political correctness” — a test of the president’s willingness to offer unnecessary and counter-productive offense for the sheer hell of it. Some conservatives, of course, wish to wage war on Islam in its entirety, which would require a degree of unilateralism and bottomless resources that might daunt even Dick Cheney. Others are simply intoxicated with the alleged power of “moral clarity” involved in insulting people. Any way you look at it, though, it’s an irresponsible obsession.

So they don’t really have a plan, but just think America will be naturally empowered if its head of state says the right magic words. Of course, some of this is the usual faux outrage intended to damage the President politically, even if it means messing up U.S. foreign policy. But the faux outrage wouldn’t score points if it didn’t tap into something deep and nasty and real.

Every now and then one runs into something that gets to the heart of things, and I ran into such a thing this morning. This is from an article on karma (emphasis added) —

We read the early Buddhist attacks on the caste system, and aside from their anti-racist implications, they often strike us as quaint. What we fail to realize is that they strike right at the heart of our myths about our own past: our obsession with defining who we are in terms of where we come from — our race, ethnic heritage, gender, socio-economic background, sexual preference — our modern tribes. We put inordinate amounts of energy into creating and maintaining the mythology of our tribe so that we can take vicarious pride in our tribe’s good name.

That’s at least 80 percent of most right-wing politics these days — the mythology of their tribe. It’s all about taking vicarious pride in being Christian, or American, or white, or whatever. And the other 20 percent is protecting the assets of the 1 percent.

Public health is in the news lately, as Republicans — who shamefully exploited ebola fear last year — suddenly find themselves playing defense on measles. Most of them are saying encouraging things about vaccines but won’t say the “m” word, mandate. Although Rand Paul recently said on television that many children develop “profound mental disorders” after vaccination. And it wasn’t long before several spokespersons for wingnuttery were blaming the measles outbreaks on illegal aliens. And it also has to be said that if you go back a few years you can find some anti-vax pandering coming from Democrats who knew better.

And then there’s the guy who says regulations requiring restaurant employees to wash their hands after using the restroom is an example of government overreach. Which leads us into why things are mandated.

I remember reading an article awhile back about how businesses that rely heavily on tourism welcome government regulation, because if tourists have bad experiences at a particular destination, and go home and tell their friends about it, it potentially hurts all the businesses at that destination, not just the offending ones.

Not that anyone is following restaurant staff into restrooms to monitor their hand washing, but it’s somewhat reassuring to know employees are being reminded.

Well, maybe somewhere there’s somebody who wants white men to hate themselves, but it isn’t me, and it isn’t anybody I know, even though most people I know are liberal to a fault.

I bring this up because of an article I stumbled into, written by a guy who says he’d be a natural-born social justice warrior except that he’s a white man, and those other SJWs out there hate him and say mean things about white mandom. He says,

The problem is that I no longer wish to be a subject of the social justice ideology.  I like Plato, I like Shakespeare, and I am interested in John Milton.  I think reason and logic are still valid.  I don’t think my ancestors were purely evil patriarchs, and if they were, I still love the ideas and culture they left me. In the humanities and academy at large, I find that the very things I love and cherish as part of my tradition and culture are under attack.

Accepting that I am subject and can never be a true ally, I find that I am moved to align more closely with the movement that would not have me tear my culture to the ground and burn it in the name of justice.  So I ask you, please make room for me in the conservative tent; If not your tent, then your voting bloc.  I am one of many nameless who has fallen to the “law of merited impossibility.”

Not being aware of any movement to suppress Shakespeare, never mind reason and logic, I kept reading for an example of what this guy is talking about. The one example provided  was a complaint by a couple of UC-Berkeley students that their humanities courses amount entirely to studying the thinking of dead white guys and leave out the perspectives of women and nonwhites. And, of course, the problem here is that for many centuries of western civilization only white guys were paid attention to, so theirs are the only “thoughts” left us in the western civ curricula. It’s a variation of the Saving Private Ryan problem — people complained about the film because all the soldiers in the Normandy Beach scene were white. But they were — at the real event, I mean. The U.S. military was racially segregated at the time, and I see no purpose being served in pretending that it wasn’t. It’s good to be reminded of these things, actually.

On the other hand, there’s a real problem in some academic studies in which perspectives other than those of dead white European guys are still being frozen out. For centuries, women were locked out of contributing to both eastern and western civ, but that doesn’t mean current, well-documented gender bias in academia can be ignored. And the philosophy departments of American universities continue to shortchange Asian philosophies. I have read that even major universities with highly regarded philosophy departments have no faculty who specialize in Chinese philosophy, for example. American students who want to focus their graduate studies on Chinese philosophy often are told to go to Hong King or Singapore. When one Asian-American student wrote a widely circulated article complaining about this, a prominent U of Chicago professor wrote, “And should we really add East Asian philosophers to the curriculum to satisfy the consumer demands of Asian students rather than because these philosophers are interesting and important in their own right?”

And, of course, it’s panels of white guys whose education is limited to the standard Dead White Guy curricula determining what is “interesting and important.” The student who complained about the lack of Asian philosophy had written, “Philosophy, it is often claimed, deals with universal truths and timeless questions. It follows, allegedly, that these matters by their very nature do not include the unique and idiosyncratic perspectives of women, minorities, or ‘people of culture.’” It’s the default norm syndrome, in other words. The experiences and perspectives that vary from the universal default norm (white maleness) are aberrations and not worthy of consideration.

But let’s go back to the guy who imagines Plato is being pulled off library shelves to make room for Simone de Beauvoir. It’s been obvious to me for a long time that the way Americans are educated, from Kindergarten on, has a European bias that makes no real sense any more. It’s possibly not as blatant as when I was in school, where “world history” was a trajectory going from Egypt to Greece to western Europe to North America, and anything else was just ignored. It is argued that this is where “our” culture comes from, so American students should know about it. And that’s fine, but I thought the purpose of education is to teach us what we need to know to understand and appreciate the world, and leaving out perspectives other than European is not accomplishing that.

Awhile back, when the Eurocentric nature of American higher education was first challenged, guys like Harold Bloom mounted a spirited defense of The Way We Have Always Taught Stuff by defending the western canon. But I looked and looked and couldn’t find anyone arguing that we shouldn’t study any of that western canon stuff any more. The argument was that there’s other stuff of huge value that western academia ignores because it doesn’t come from the Eurocentric tradition, and we should be looking at that, too. But the old keepers of the White Male Western Civ Flame react to these suggestions as existential threats. If we take Zhuangzi seriously, somehow Plato is diminished. If white men  aren’t allowed to dominate higher education, somehow reason and logic will be lost, a perspective that is neither logical nor reasonable.

And the allegedly Wise Men who keep the flame are too blinkered to see this. It’s like the whiny white guy extolling the virtues of “his” culture, as if somehow Europe was a continent inhabited only by men. As if a whole lot of what is unique and wonderful about American culture  didn’t emerge from African American culture. Obviously this guy is has emotionally invested a whole lot of his self-worth into his race and gender, so challenges to his racial-gender dominance sound to him as if he’s being asked to hate himself.

Of the whiny person who complains that he won’t be a liberal if that requires hating himself, I put him in the same boat as white racists who snarl that liberals want them to feel guilty. Guilt is of no importance to me. Guilt does not so much as butter toast. All I want is for guys like him to see that the default norm syndrome exists, and is holding all of us back, including white guys. It’s possible he would find Zhuangzi’s perspectives enriching, if he ever learned what they are. It’s possible that if he stops clinging to race and gender as if that’s what makes him special, he might actually like himself more.

Related: Jonathan Chait recently stepped in a pile of doo-doo by complaining about “political correctness.” He said PC is an attempt to stifle free speech. Actually, I’ve come to see whining about PC as an attempt to stifle free speech. Lindsay Beyerstein responds.

I’m up against my usual end-of-month deadline wall. But in the light of this week’s flash mob trashing of the First Lady for not wearing a scarf in Saudi Arabia, here’s a trip down memory lane — what happened in 2007 when Nancy Pelosi DID wear a scarf to visit a mosque in a Muslim country.

The elites of Europe made a mad dash for their smelling salts yesterday when the Greek people rebelled against the IMF, the European Central Bank and the European Commission and elected politicians who promised to govern Greece for the benefit of Greeks, which of course is a crazy far-left radical idea that no sensible elitist would approve. The new members of Parliament and their new Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, ran on an anti-austerity platform that proposed the Greek people shouldn’t have to suffer for the sins of international finance.

Headline at the Wall Street Journal:

Greece Must Repay Debt, Europe Officials Say

Some Officials Concerned Syriza’s Election Win Could Encourage Other Antiausterity Movements

Ya think?

Krugman points out in his column today that the austerity measures crammed down Greece’s throat not only caused untold hardship for Greeks but left the country deeper in debt.

What went wrong? I fairly often encounter assertions to the effect that Greece didn’t carry through on its promises, that it failed to deliver the promised spending cuts. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, Greece imposed savage cuts in public services, wages of government workers and social benefits. Thanks to repeated further waves of austerity, public spending was cut much more than the original program envisaged, and it’s currently about 20 percent lower than it was in 2010.

Yet Greek debt troubles are if anything worse than before the program started. One reason is that the economic plunge has reduced revenues: The Greek government is collecting a substantially higher share of G.D.P. in taxes than it used to, but G.D.P. has fallen so quickly that the overall tax take is down. Furthermore, the plunge in G.D.P. has caused a key fiscal indicator, the ratio of debt to G.D.P., to keep rising even though debt growth has slowed and Greece received some modest debt relief in 2012.

Other commenters are skeptical that the new government can deliver what it promises, for a variety of reasons. But as Krugman says, ” in calling for a major change, Mr. Tsipras is being far more realistic than officials who want the beatings to continue until morale improves.”

Europe is laughing at Fox News, in particular over hysterical claims that Europe is riddled with Muslim “no-go zones” where only Muslims may enter.

…the French equivalent of the David Letterman show, “Le Petit Journal,” managed to convey some much-needed comic relief to a national prime-time TV audience in France where much of the country grieved.

The Petit Journal’s broadcast of the Parisian neighborhoods could not have more patently depicted the absurdity of Fox’s portrayal of Paris, where, in reality, people of different ages, religions and ethnic origins freely go about their business, running errands, pushing strollers, etc.

Le Petit Journal correspondents were shown visiting the “no-go zones,” prompting guffaws from both the live studio audience and the incredulous passersby who were asked if their safe streets were comparable to those in Iraq or Afghanistan, if they ever saw someone wear bin Laden T-shirts, or other absurd questions. The U.S. equivalent would be asking people on the streets in Manhattan if Shariah law was the law of the streets there.

In another broadcast, Le Petit Journal cast members dressed up like U.S. journalists ventured into the “Most Dangerous City in the Universe.” They confronted such dangerous situations as a man with a “terrorist beard” driving a taxi or the site of a couscous restaurant. The sounds of a jackhammer are taken for gunfire as the fake TV reporter rolls on the ground in terror.

The Mayor of Paris threatened to sue Fox News for defaming her city, and British Prime Minister David Cameron famously said he “choked on his porridge” upon hearing the claim that Birmingham UK is “totally Muslim.”

Fox News has uncharacteristically issued apologies for the “no go zone” claims, but that has not deterred Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who made similar “no go zone” claims while in London this week. And unlike Fox News, Jindal is not backing down, but told CNN he was only “speaking the truth.”

Clearly, Jindal wants to be a contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, a competition that’s something of a cross between a circus clown car act and “Survivor.” Speaking of which, if you missed Mike Huckabee on the Daily Show, you missed Jon Stewart being a little less kind than usual.

The highlight film:

Some people have no sense of humor:

Republicans were irked by President Barack Obama’s caustic reminder in his State of the Union speech that he defeated them twice.

“I’ve run my last campaign,” Obama said toward the end of the nationally televised address. Republicans in the chamber applauded derisively, which prompted the president to ad-lib a zinger which wasn’t in his prepared remarks: “I know because I won both of them.”

Democrats erupted with applause.

In the Capitol after the speech, Republicans expressed displeasure at being jabbed by the president in the same speech where he asked for their cooperation.

“Probably not helpful when you rub the other guy’s nose in the dirt a little bit,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), a close ally of Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), told reporters.

The problem with Republicans is that they dish it out but can’t take it. Weenies. Maybe the baby party needs a nap.

Elias Isquith saw the SOTU as a repudiation of both Reagan conservatism and Clinton neoliberalism.  This President prefers the long game, Isquith said, and realize it or not, he’s pushed the country’s trajectory to the left. Charles Pierce was less enthusiastic, however, and thinks the President avoided the issue of poverty:

The argument as I understand it is that all these policy initiatives will work to “expand” the middle class by enabling people to rise and to join it. But can it not be argued that this position is merely trickle-down in populist drag, merely trickle-down from a lower height?

Both the issues of the shrinking middle class and poverty have to be addressed, IMO, but let us not forget that this is the President who expanded Medicaid. That may have been the greatest single anti-poverty initiative undertaken in decades, even if it was denied to a lot of people because of the backward ideologies of their governors.

People seem uniformly underwhelmed by the several Republican responses, which were long on either folksiness or whining but short on any actual ideas that might remotely translate into policy.

As many have pointed out, the President has laid down a challenge to Republicans — how can they block his proposals and still claim to care about ordinary Americans instead of just the rich? I’m sure they’re deep into meetings right now to figure that out.

I can remember when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a darling of the American Right. His books, especially The Gulag Archipelago, were cited time and time again as proof of the moral superiority of the West — America especially — over the wicked Soviet Union. The Soviets silenced critics by shipping them off to forced labor camps with no right to a fair hearing, and we didn’t do that, did we?

Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay since 2002. A manuscript account of his captivity was released today, although not before being heavily redacted by the U.S. government. You can read it online at the Guardian. There’s an abridged version at Spiegel. The manuscript may not rise to the literary quality of Solzhenitsyn’s work, but I’d say it permanently relieves the U.S. of any assumption of moral superiority over the Soviets.

If it’s ever published in book form, the ruling in favor of his habeas petition needs to be an appendix. The judgment ends with these words:

The question, upon which the government had the burden of proof, was whether, at the time of his capture, Salahi was a “part of” al-Qaida. On the record before me, I cannot find that he was. The petition for writ of habeas corpus is granted. Salahi must be released from custody. It is SO ORDERED.

That was in 2010. The government appealed. Slahi remains in Guantanamo.

Slahi is a former mujahideen and al Qaeda member who claimed to have severed ties with al Qaeda in 1992. However, he is also a cousin and former brother-in-law of Mahfouz Ould al-Walid, a guy with direct connections to Osama bin Laden. On a couple of occasions he gave money to al-Walid. He is accused of conspiring with members of the “Hamburg Cell,” although according to some accounts all he may have done is let Ramzi bin al-Shibh stay overnight in his house in Germany once in 1999. Late in 1999 he moved to Montreal, where he was a member of the same mosque as Ahmed Ressam. His association with known jihadists got him on the radar, so to speak. He returned to his native Mauritania in 2000, but on the way home he was detained by FBI agents who believed him to be involved in the Millennium Plot to bomb the Los Angeles airport. After three weeks he was released. In November 2001 he was subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and has been in American custody ever since.

Joe Nocera writes,

What was he accused of? Slahi asked this question of his captors often and was never given a straight answer. This, of course, is part of the problem with Guantánamo, a prison where being formally charged with a crime is a luxury, not a requirement. His efforts to tell the truth — that he had no involvement in any acts of terrorism — only angered his interrogators. “Looks like a dog, walks like a dog, smells like a dog, barks like a dog, must be a dog,” one interrogator used to say. That was the best his captors could do to explain why he was there. Yet the military was so sure he was a key Al Qaeda player that he was subjected to “special interrogation” techniques that had been signed off by the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, himself.

“Special interrogation techniques,” of course, is a euphemism for torture. The sections of the book that describe his torture make for harrowing reading. Slahi was so sleep-deprived that he eventually started to hallucinate. Chained to the ground, he was forced to “stand” in positions that were extremely painful. Interrogators went at him in shifts — 24 hours a day. Sometimes during interrogations, female interrogators rubbed their breasts over his body and fondled him.

Yes, Slahi made confessions under torture, which he has recanted.

While it’s always possible Slahi was more directly involved with terrorism than his public record suggests, it appears he is a victim of zealotry on the part of U.S. national security. Rumsfeld, Cheney, and no doubt the Boy Wonder president wanted all the evildoers rounded up and punished, and those charged with carrying out these wishes don’t seem to have been terribly picky about who they nabbed to fill their quotas.

American conservatives, including former POW Sen. John McCain, continue to insist that the men detained in Guantanamo must stay there, because they are dangerous. It’s more like some people are trying to keep their own moral cowardice out of sight.

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I’m not going to live blog the SOTU tonight, but feel free to comment here if you like.