This loony tune accuses the Democratic Party of terrorist tactics because a child appeared in an ad supporting S-CHIP. Continue reading
It’s the Propaganda, Stupid
Joby Warrick reports in the Washington Post:
A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.
Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company’s Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.
The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group’s communications network.
“Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless,†said Rita Katz, the firm’s 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE’s methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.
The release of the Osama tape turned out to be even less significant than first thought. At the time, the tape clearly intended to coordinate the launch of at least three terrorist attacks in the second week of September. The effort was timed to coincide with September 11th, the sixth anniversary of 9/11. The leaks put the tapes out days earlier, and in the meantime, Western agencies had already rolled up the cells planning the attacks.
The US government insists that the leak did no real damage to their intel capabilities. However, the two independent reports, especially Lake’s, demonstrates at least a temporary setback in acccessing AQ’s Internet activities. If the reports are true, then SITE and the intel agencies will have to rediscover AQ’s network of servers, figure out how to hack back into the networks, and re-establish the identities of those who run them. That could take a very long time, and in the interim, we could be missing some vital information.
… the disclosure from ABC and later other news organizations tipped off Qaeda’s internal security division that the organization’s Internet communications system, known among American intelligence analysts as Obelisk, was compromised. …
… One intelligence officer who requested anonymity said in an interview last week that the intelligence community watched in real time the shutdown of the Obelisk system. America’s Obelisk watchers even saw the order to shut down the system delivered from Qaeda’s internal security to a team of technical workers in Malaysia. That was the last internal message America’s intelligence community saw. “We saw the whole thing shut down because of this leak,” the official said. “We lost an important keyhole into the enemy.”
No one is saying who leaked the video. But according to Warrick of WaPo, SITE founder Katz had decided to offer an advance copy of the video to the White House, free of charge, so that the Bushies would be prepared for its release. Katz spoke first to White House counsel Fred Fielding. At about 10 a.m. on September 7, Katz sent an email to Fielding and to Michael Leiter of the National Counterterrorism Center. The email contained a link to the video on a private SITE web page as well as an English translation of the video.
Exactly what happened next is unclear. But within minutes of Katz’s e-mail to the White House, government-registered computers began downloading the video from SITE’s server, according to a log of file transfers. The records show dozens of downloads over the next three hours from computers with addresses registered to defense and intelligence agencies.
By midafternoon, several television news networks reported obtaining copies of the transcript. A copy posted around 3 p.m. on Fox News’s Web site referred to SITE and included page markers identical to those used by the group. “This confirms that the U.S. government was responsible for the leak of this document,” Katz wrote in an e-mail to Leiter at 5 p.m.
Of course, it goes without saying that the outlet that the Bush administration leaked the video to was Fox News, ensuring that the public’s first impression of the video would be presented by an outlet that would attempt to tie bin Laden to the Democrats (VIDEO).
You don’t have to be a fly on the Oval Office wall to know what happened. September 7 was the Friday before General Petraeus’s testimony to Congress, and conventional wisdom of the moment was that nothing Petraeus would say would change anyone’s minds about the surge, one way or another. Clearly, the White House needed a propaganda tool to amp up the fear factor. And lo, Katz dropped just the thing right in the Bushies’ laps.
Al Qaeda was the main theme for the White House just then. The September 8 radio address was all about al Qaeda. September 11 was, of course, our annual Let’s Be Afraid of al Qaeda Day. On September 13 the President gave one of his rare prime-time addresses to the nation about how we have to stay in Iraq to achieve victory over al Qaeda.
You might ask, what does it profit us to fight al Qaeda in Iraq if we’re going to trash our own intelligence about al Qaeda? Oh, my dears, we must see the big picture. The big picture is not that we support the war to defeat al Qaeda; rather, we use al Qaeda to support the war. Keep it straight.
Update: Will Bunch writes,
In this case, in particular, Bush was clearly eager to use the bin Laden video — just hours after it was leaked to the media — to make political points on the issue that dominated the news that week, the run-up to the report by General David Petraeus, and Bush’s campaign for a long-term troop presence in Iraq. Check out how quickly Bush “seized” on the leaked bin Laden video on Sept. 9 of this year, at the Asian ecomomic summit in Sydney, Australia (from Agence France Presse, via Nexis):
On his final day here, he seized on a new video from terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, who called for escalating the insurgency in Iraq, to argue that if the Al-Qaeda chief thinks Iraq is important, so should the US public.
“I find it interesting that on the tape, Iraq was mentioned, which is a reminder that Iraq is a part of this war against extremists,” Bush said after the release of the video, bin Laden’s first in three years.
In the tape the Al-Qaeda chief marks six years since the September 11, 2001 terrorist strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with a pledge “to continue to escalate the killing and fighting against you” in Iraq.
This is so wrong on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin. As has been well-documented over the last couple months, Bush has shamelessly tried to seed confusion over the role of a newer group called al-Qaeda in Iraq — with no direct link to bin Laden, which didn’t exist in 2003 and would not have if the U.S. hadn’t invaded the country — while downplaying the true nature of the Iraq insurgency, which is largely homegrown or supported by our supposed ally, Saudi Arabia.
That blatant misleading of the American public is bad enough, but now that we learn in trying to salvage his failed Iraq policy and score a few cheap political points, the Bush White House was willing to casually undermine a successful spying operation against the terrorists who really did attack American soil. Some called it betrayal, even treason, when Bush aides outed an covert CIA operative, Valerie Plame, but at first blush it looks like this shameful ploy was 10 times worse — putting many more American lives at risk than just one undercover agent.
As you’ve probably noticed, there’s been a lot of debate about the meaning of the word “betrayal” lately. Let’s be clear what this is. The leak of the bin Laden video wasn’t carelessness. It was a betrayal, a betrayal by the president of the United States and his aides of the worst kind — for politics’ sake.
Update 2: This partisan hack at Newsbusters blames ABC for alerting al Qaeda to the leak in their communications system. I swear, there are days I think you could clear out the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum and re-populate it with the Right Blogosphere, and no one would know the difference.
Rabble Rouser
After a target of one of Michelle Malkin’s hate campaigns committed suicide you’d think Little Lulu would show a little restraint.
But no; Malkin and others on the Right have formed a full-scale howling mob to attack the family of 12-year-old Graeme Frost. Righties have been calling the Frosts, harassing them with personal questions. Malkin personally drove by the Frosts’ home so that she could describe it to her readers, and she went to a commercial property they own and interviewed one of the tenants.
Why? Because Graeme appeared in a commercial in support of the S-CHIP program.
Faiz writes at Think Progress:
The right-wing immediately condemned Democrats for daring to put a human face on the SCHIP program at a time when Bush was proposing a “diminishment of the number of children covered.†Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) — who has posed with children to advance his own political agenda — claimed Graeme was being used “as a human shield.â€
Conservatives have more recently turned their targets on young Graeme Frost himself. A poster at the Free Republic propagated information alleging that Frost was actually a rich kid being pampered by the government. Among other bits of information, the post by the Freeper “icwhatudo†asserts that Graeme and his sister Gemma attend wealthy schools that cost “nearly $40,000 per year for tuition†and live in a well-off home.
The smear attack against Graeme has taken firm hold in the right-wing blogosphere. The National Review, Michelle Malkin, Wizbang, Powerline, and the Weekly Standard blog have all launched assaults on the Frost family. The story is slowly working its way into traditional media outlets as well.
Here are the facts that the right-wing distorted in order to attack young Graeme:
1) Graeme has a scholarship to a private school. The school costs $15K a year, but the family only pays $500 a year.
2) His sister Gemma attends another private school to help her with the brain injuries that occurred due to her accident. The school costs $23,000 a year, but the state pays the entire cost.
3) They bought their “lavish house†sixteen years ago for $55,000 at a time when the neighborhood was less than safe.
4) Last year, the Frost’s made $45,000 combined. Over the past few years they have made no more than $50,000 combined.
5) The state of Maryland has found them eligible to participate in the CHIP program.
Desperate to defend Bush’s decision to cut off millions of children from health care, the right wing has stooped to launching baseless and uninformed attacks against a 12 year old child and his family.
Right wing bloggers have been harassing the Frosts, calling their home numerous times to get information about their private lives. Compassionate conservatism indeed.
To the list of shameless liars attacking the Frost family I would like to add spree at Wake Up America, Jimmie at The Sundries Shack, and Don Surber. I only wish there was some way these tools could get a taste of their own medicine.
John Cole, on Malkin’s stalking campaign:
Maybe she can get some of her flunkies at Hot Air to sit with binoculars and see what they have for dinner. Better not be government cheese, or the SHIT is going to hit the fan.
The Malkin wing of the current Republican party makes me fucking sick. …
…This is about the base instincts of the modern right, and the attempts to intimidate and smear and label it as “investigating.†I don’t have a problem with opposing SCHIP, I don’t have a problem with opposing legislation by anecdote (which is why I, unlike Michelle, hated the Schiavo legislation). I do have a problem with publishing a desperate family’s financial information, scouring pictures of their kitchen to determine the value of their appliances, and stalking their abode. Even if they were used at a press conference by Democrats.
What Michelle has done here is creepy and weird and wrong.
Her defense for her behavior, and for that of Greater Wingnuttia:
Asking questions and subjecting political anecdotes to scrutiny are what journalists should be doing.
But all this shit started with obviously stupid and dishonest “questions” that weren’t questions at all, but vile innuendo. The reason actual journalists didn’t ask these “questions” is that there was never any reason to ask them except to engage in this innuendo. “Mr. & Ms. Frost, you appear to be spending $40,000 a year on your $45,000 income in order to send your kids to a swanky private school. Could you explain to our readers how you are perpetrating tax fraud and lying to the government to qualify for financial benefits?” A reporter who asked a “question” like that ought to expect a punch in the snout, frankly.
Nothing in this family’s story is remotely implausible, and anyone who pretends otherwise is making up crap because they don’t like a healthcare program that benefits the middle class. Period.
Malkin and the mouth breathers who follow her think they can force their way on America by mob rule and intimidation. Let’s prove ’em wrong. Support S-CHIP.
Update: Digby offers mild objections.
This is so loathesome I am literally sick to my stomach. These kids were hurt in a car accident. Their parents could not afford health insurance — and sure as hell couldn’t get it now with a severely handicapped daughter. And these shrieking wingnut jackasses are harassing their family for publicly supporting the program that allowed the kids to get health care. A program, by the way, which a large number of these Republicans support as well.
They went after Michael J. Fox. They went after a wounded Iraq war veteran. Now they are going after handicapped kids. There is obviously no limit to how low these people will go.
They’d better pray that they stay rich and healthy and live forever because if there is a hell these people are going to be on the express train to the 9th circle the minute they shuffle off their useless mortal coils.
Scum.
Changing His Tune
Josh Marshall calls this the first live-on-cable castration.
Support SCHIP
John Amato explains how. See also Christy and Digby.
Legacies
Yesterday in the Washington Post, Bill Kristol expressed frustration that the U.S. didn’t do more to help Burma.
What about using our national power to help the Burmese people against their tyrannical rulers? Burma’s regime lost what little legitimacy it had with its bloody crackdown. Parts of the ruling elite must be nervous. Couldn’t we give at least some of Burma’s generals and soldiers reason to doubt the wisdom of slaughtering political opponents? Couldn’t we turn our intelligence-gathering capabilities on Burma to monitor, document and publicize what is happening? Couldn’t we tell the generals who are ordering and the soldiers who are carrying out this crackdown that they are being watched, that their names are being recorded — and that the day will come when there will be plenty of evidence to hold them personally accountable for their deeds?
I believe that day comes for us all, Bill, but let me address your questions anyway.
As I explained last week, a critical fact about Burma is that it shares a 2,000 kilometer border with China. Burma also supplies natural gas and other vital resources to China. Therefore, any messing around with Burma by a western power is likely to be of keen interest to China.
And there are two key facts to keep in mind about China:
1. China has the largest standing army in the world.
2. China is holding a big honking chunk of U.S. debt.
Niall Ferguson, of all people, has noticed this second fact, and it bothers him. He writes in today’s Los Angeles Times:
France, Britain, America: They each have had their era of hegemony. Now, however, they all belong to the club of developed debtors, with combined current account deficits of $970 billion last year. Other members of this club are Australia, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain. Apart from Iceland, it reads like a list of ex-empires, with the former members of the British Empire (energy-rich Canada excepted) in the lead.
Collectively, the developed debtors had to borrow about $1.3 trillion last year. On the other side of this great global equation is the club of emerging exporters. According to the International Monetary Fund, more than 40% of the developed debtors’ funding requirement last year was met by China, Russia and the Middle East.
The problem for the deficit countries is essentially that their people think the world owes them a living. Their politicians pander to this assumption by making a series of more or less incompatible promises: that expenditure on healthcare and education will always go up; that direct taxation will never go up; and that the assets against which voters borrow will never go down. The only way to fulfill these promises is to pump out ever more printed paper: bank notes, bills, bonds, stocks and the rest. The emerging exporters buy these. The net result must be a creeping transfer of financial ownership from West to East.
This process is about to enter a new phase as China establishes its own sovereign wealth fund to join those operated by the likes of Kuwait, Abu Dhabi and Singapore. According to Morgan Stanley, these funds manage about $2.6 trillion. In 15 years, their assets could reach $27 trillion, giving them control of nearly 10% of total global financial assets.
Bottom line, the more in debt we become to China, Russia, and the Middle East, the less power we have to influence anything they do. Ferguson thinks this is bad. Frankly, so do I. So let’s talk about why this is happening.
Furguson writes, The problem for the deficit countries is essentially that their people think the world owes them a living. Their politicians pander to this assumption by making a series of more or less incompatible promises: that expenditure on healthcare and education will always go up; that direct taxation will never go up; and that the assets against which voters borrow will never go down. Oh, those greedy people who want education and health care!
Ferguson didn’t mention the tab we’re running on the war in Iraq, currently estimated at $600 billion and climbing. The Congressional Budget Office says Bush’s long-term plans in Iraq will cost trillions. Even better, appropriations for the war in Iraq are supplemental rather than regular, which means that our military costs in Iraq are off-budget. That makes it easier for the Bush Administration to lie to the American people about the effect of the war on our national debt.
And for the most part it’s not American citizens who dissolve into twitches of apoplexy at the mention of raising taxes. It’s the Bush Administration. And why is that, you ask? Paul Krugman dropped a hint in his column today:
Here’s how Irving Kristol, then the editor of The Public Interest, explained his embrace of supply-side economics in the 1970s: He had a “rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems†because “the task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority — so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.â€
So Bill Kristol’s daddy, Irving, helped to sell voodoo economics to a gullible public in order to buy power — a conservative majority; a Republican majority. And now after 30 years of right-wing propaganda it has become political suicide — conventional wisdom says — for any politician to even think about raising taxes. So, we raise debt. Meanwhile, our military and intelligence resources are being depleted in Iraq, so that we are hurting to cover our real national security needs, never mind mess around with Burma.
And now Bill Kristol — a major supporter of the Iraq War, as is Niall Ferguson — wonders why the Bush Administration has no way to apply pressure to help Burma. Maybe he should ask his daddy.
Killer Law
Last November, Nicaragua became the third country in the world, after Chile and El Salvador, to criminalize all abortions. There are no exceptions; not for rape, not for incest, not for threats to the life of the mother.
So far, this law has resulted in the deaths of at least 82 women. Rory Carroll reports for The Guardian:
Abortion has long been illegal in Nicaragua but there had been exceptions for “therapeutic” reasons if three doctors agreed there was a risk to the woman’s life. Those exceptions were no longer necessary, said the Nicaraguan Pro-Life Association, because medical advances obviated the need to terminate pregnancies. “The conditions that justified therapeutic abortion now have medical solutions,” says a spokesman. Pope Benedict XVI welcomed the ban but added that women should not suffer or die as a result. “In this regard, it is essential to increase the assistance of the state and of society itself to women who have serious problems during pregnancy.”
The “assistance” the state offers is to let women die. The article focuses on a young woman named MarÃa de Jesús González who was denied medical help for an ectopic pregnancy. These occur when the fertlized egg implants somewhere other than in the uturus, usually the fallopian tube. Ectopic pregnancies occur from 1 in every 40 to 1 in every 100 pregnancies. Ectopic pregnancies have no chance of ending in a live birth. Eventually the growing fetus will cause an internal rupture in the mother, leading to bleeding, shock, and death. The developing cells must be removed to save the mother’s life.
González was told at the hospital that any doctor who terminated her pregnancy would face two to three years in jail and she, for consenting, would face one to two years. … What González did next was – when you understand what life in Nicaragua is like these days – utterly rational. She walked out of the hospital, past the obstetrics and gynaecological ward, past the clinics and pharmacies lining the avenues, packed her bag, kissed her aunts goodbye, and caught a bus back to her village. She summoned two neighbouring women – traditional healers – and requested that they terminate the pregnancy in her shack. Without anaesthetic or proper instruments it was more akin to mutilation than surgery, but González insisted. The haemhorraging was intense, and the agony can only be imagined. It was in vain. Maria died. “We heard there was a lot of blood, a lot of pain,” says Esperanza Zeledon, 52, one of the Managua aunts.
According to the Nicaraguan health ministry it would have been legal for the doctors to remove the embryo growing in González.
But such is the climate of fear and confusion that the protocols are widely ignored and misunderstood. The doctors who turned González away from the hospital in Managua thought it was illegal, as did medical staff the Guardian interviewed in Ocotal, González’s home town.
“The ban has people frightened. You could lose everything – that’s the first thing on your mind,” says Dr Arguello, a leading critic of the ban. So far there have been no prosecutions but many doctors are unwilling to take the risk on behalf of women who are often poor, uneducated and from a lower social class.
No one knows how many other women have died.
The Pope seemed to acknowledge an increased risk to women’s health but Nicaragua’s government has made no formal study of the law’s impact. Women’s rights organisations say their 82 documented deaths are the tip of the iceberg. The Pan-American Health Organisation estimates one woman per day suffers from an ectopic pregnancy, and that every two days a woman suffers a miscarriage from a molar pregnancy. That adds up to hundreds of obstetric emergencies per year.
Human Rights Watch, in a recent report titled Over Their Dead Bodies, cited one woman who urgently needed medical help, but was left untreated at a public hospital for two days because the foetus was still alive and so a therapeutic abortion would be illegal. Eventually she expelled the foetus on her own. “By then she was already in septic shock and died five days later,” said the doctor.
The Catholic News Agency reports that last month Pope Benedict XVI praised Nicaragua for its policies “respecting” human life.
During his remarks the Pope praised Nicaragua for “the position it takes on social questions in the international arena, especially as regards the theme of life, and in the face of no small amount of domestic and international pressure.”
The Holy Father said it was very “positive that last year the national assembly approved the revocation of therapeutic abortion,” and he affirmed the “need to increase the aid that state and society provide to women who have serious problems during pregnancy.”
American “pro life” organizations like Concerned Women for America also support the Nicaraguan abortion ban.
Shortly after the law was passed in November 2006, N.C. Aizenman wrote for the Washington Post:
Jazmina Bojorge arrived at Managua’s Fernando Vélez Paiz Hospital on a Tuesday evening, nearly five months pregnant and racked with fever and abdominal pain. By the following Thursday morning, both the pretty 18-year-old and the female fetus in her womb were dead.
The mystery of what happened during the intervening 36 hours might not ordinarily have catapulted Bojorge into the headlines of a nation with one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the Western Hemisphere.
But a week before her death on Nov. 2, Nicaragua’s legislature had voted to ban all abortions, eliminating long-standing exceptions for rape, malformation of the fetus and risk to the life or health of the mother. Now, outraged opponents of the legislation have declared Bojorge its first victim.
“It’s clear that fear of punishment kept the doctors from doing what they needed to do to save her — which was to abort the pregnancy immediately,” said Juanita Jiménez of the Women’s Autonomous Movement, an advocacy group that is leading the campaign to reverse the ban. “This is exactly what we warned would happen if this law was passed. We’ve been taken back to the Middle Ages.”
So-called “right to life” advocates in the U.S. will tell you categorically that “There is no such thing as an abortion to save the life of the mother.” “Life of the mother” is not a valid exception, they say.
Of course, if ever their own sorry carcasses were about to be opened up by a couple of “traditional healers” without anesthesia in a last-ditch effort to avoid death by internal rupture and hemorrhage they might feel a bit differently.
Pennies From Heaven
What’s gotten into Tom Friedman? He’s written good columns two Sundays in a row.
Here’s last week’s, in case you missed it. Now, on to this week’s.
Every so often a quote comes out of the Bush administration that leaves you asking: Am I crazy or are they? I had one of those moments last week when Dana Perino, the White House press secretary, was asked about a proposal by some Congressional Democrats to levy a surtax to pay for the Iraq war, and she responded, “We’ve always known that Democrats seem to revert to type, and they are willing to raise taxes on just about anything.â€
Yes, those silly Democrats. They’ll raise taxes for anything, even — get this — to pay for a war!
And if we did raise taxes to pay for our war to bring a measure of democracy to the Arab world, “does anyone seriously believe that the Democrats are going to end these new taxes that they’re asking the American people to pay at a time when it’s not necessary to pay them?†added Ms. Perino. “I just think it’s completely fiscally irresponsible.â€
Friends, we are through the looking glass. It is now “fiscally irresponsible†to want to pay for a war with a tax. These democrats just don’t understand: the tooth fairy pays for wars. Of course she does — the tooth fairy leaves the money at the end of every month under Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s pillow. And what a big pillow it is! My God, what will the Democrats come up with next? Taxes to rebuild bridges or schools or high-speed rail or our lagging broadband networks? No, no, the tooth fairy covers all that. She borrows the money from China and leaves it under Paulson’s pillow.
Is it me, or is Friedman sounding a tad shrill?
Of course, we can pay for the Iraq war without a tax increase. The question is, can we pay for it and be making the investments in infrastructure, science and education needed to propel our country into the 21st century? Visit Singapore, Japan, Korea, China or parts of Europe today and you’ll discover that the infrastructure in our country is not keeping pace with our peers’.
We can pay for anything today if we want to stop investing in tomorrow. The president has already slashed the National Institutes of Health research funding the past two years. His 2008 budget wants us to cut money for vocational training, infrastructure and many student aid programs.
Not to mention providing health insurance for children.
Of course, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, the Democrat David Obey, in proposing an Iraq war tax to help balance the budget was expressing his displeasure with the war. But he was also making a very important point when he said, “If this war is important enough to fight, then it ought to be important enough to pay for.â€
Our bridges are falling down, too many of our children go without health care, we’re in debt up to our eyeballs to Japan and China, and the Right wants perpetual war in the Middle East, but by gawd we won’t raise taxes!
And why not? Because then we’d be going down the same road as sick ol’ socialist Europe, and we all know how badly they’ve …. wait a minute … um, actually Europe is doing pretty well these days. See also Ezra.
An Easy Choice
X-tians: The Last Stand
Tim Watkin says the Republicans are hoisted by their own values. James Dobson’s announcement that the religious Right will not support a pro-choice candidate is more than a blow to Rudy Giuliani’s candidacy, he says. The statement also “shows just how the Republicans have gotten themselves tangled in knots over all things moral and signals a turning point for the religious right in America.”
But for the religious Right, the only “value” that seems to matter is sexual purity, rigidly defined. Is that to be the sole measure of a leader?
Studies over the years have repeatedly shown that integrity is core to successful leadership; the hard part is deciding what integrity means to us as voters. A lack of hypocrisy seems to be the gold standard these days. But what about a willingness to admit and apologize for mistakes? Or simple honesty? Is an entirely untainted virtue now required? I’ve spoken to university students whose wanna-be politician friends even in their early twenties abstain from anything with even a whiff of controversy. Is that really the best preparation for wise leadership? In political terms, is it worse to tap your foot under a bathroom door, cheat on your spouse or start illegal wars? These are all moral judgments.
The left tends to scoff at the right’s emphasis on morality, but it has its own set of moral no-goes – just look at their criticism of presidential lies, illegal wars and torture, and politicians denying women the right to choose an abortion.
Still, it’s true that those on the religious right have made “character” a core issue in US elections and placed a disproportionate weight on “values” over policy. Their stands on candidate morality are now so entrenched, and their obsession with sexual purity so deeply embedded, that it seems no one among them has the ability to step back and see how insignificant those demands may be in terms of leadership performance.
The great leaders in US history would all trip over one moral hurdle or another. Washington had slaves, Roosevelt had a mistress and Jefferson had both.
I disagree that we lefties “scoff” at morality. Rather, we prioritize morality differently. Starting illegal wars is a serious offense against humanity; consensual sexual acts ain’t nobody else’s business. In any event, Watkin says, the religious Right’s quest for absolute purity has reached a dead end.
They elected a president who ticked all the right boxes but turned out to be an inept leader, while the candidates who tick the boxes this time are proving to be too bland, too lightweight or too out of touch with modern life. They have chosen sexual morality as their defining issue. Politically, they’ve painted themselves into a corner.
The truth is that other values are going to win next year’s election – sound judgment, competence, team-building, compassion. After dominating American politics for a generation, the religious right finds itself out of step with mainstream American, and even with many of its conservative pals.
I’ll take compassion over morality any day. In fact, I’d say that a person without compassion cannot be genuinely moral, no matter what rules of conduct he follows. But a compassionate person generally will do the right thing by his fellow human beings, rules or no rules. Sound judgment and competence sound pretty good to me, too.
Steven Thomma of McClatchy Newspapers says the power of the religious Right within the GOP is on the wane.
Today, their nearly three-decade-long ascendance in the Republican Party is over. Their loyalties and priorities are in flux, the organizations that gave them political muscle are in disarray, the high-profile preachers who led them to influence through the 1980s and 1990s are being replaced by a new generation that’s less interested in their agenda and their hold on politics and the 2008 Republican presidential nomination is in doubt.
“Less than four years after declarations that the Religious Right had taken over the Republican Party, these social conservatives seem almost powerless to influence its nomination process,” said W. James Antle III, an editor at the American Spectator magazine who’s written extensively about religious conservatives.
“They have the numbers. They have the capability. What they don’t have is unity or any institutional leverage.”
The Religious Right never had absolute power in the Republican Party. It never got the Republican president and Republican Congress to pursue a constitutional amendment banning abortion, for example.
But it did have enormous clout in party politics and a big voice in policy, and it’s lost much of both heading into 2008.
Worse for the religious Right, there may be an anti-Christian backlash brewing. David Van Biema writes for Time:
Back in 1996, a poll taken by Kinnaman’s organization, the Barna Group, found that 83% of Americans identified themselves as Christians, and that fewer than 20% of non-Christians held an unfavorable view of Christianity. But, as Kinnaman puts it in his new book (co-authored with Gabe Lyons) UnChristian, “That was then.”
Barna polls conducted between 2004 and this year, sampling 440 non-Christians (and a similar number of Christians) aged 16 to 29, found that 38% had a “bad impression” of present-day Christianity. “It’s not a pretty picture” the authors write. Barna’s clientele is made up primarily of evangelical groups.
Kinnaman says non-Christians’ biggest complaints about the faith are not immediately theological: Jesus and the Bible get relatively good marks. Rather, he sees resentment as focused on perceived Christian attitudes. Nine out of ten outsiders found Christians too “anti-homosexual,” and nearly as many perceived it as “hypocritical” and “judgmental.” Seventy-five percent found it “too involved in politics.”
Not only has the decline in non-Christians’ regard for Christianity been severe, but Barna results also show a rapid increase in the number of people describing themselves as non-Christian. One reason may be that the study used a stricter definition of “Christian” that applied to only 73% of Americans. Still, Kinnaman claims that however defined, the number of non-Christians is growing with each succeeding generation: His study found that 23% of Americans over 61 were non-Christians; 27% among people ages 42-60; and 40% among 16-29 year olds. Younger Christians, he concludes, are therefore likely to live in an environment where two out of every five of their peers is not a Christian.
This is a healthy development for all of us. For example, at some point in the future the Republican Party might be forced to campaign on issues that actually matter to the running of government instead of by stirring up fear and resentment among various factions of whackjobs. This might bring the GOP back to some semblance of sanity and increase the number of politicians in Washington who give a bleep about good government.
And it might also be a good thing for Christianity. I dimly remember that there’s more to Christianity than stoning transgressors for unauthorized sexual practices. Maybe someone will look into that.
Update: See also “A Nation of Christians Is Not a Christian Nation.”
Update 2: “Militant Atheists Are Wrong.” Clever.