More Doubts

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Via Glenn Greenwald, here’s a lovely column from yesterday’s Washington Post by Joel Achenbach asking people to give doubt a chance.

Doubt has been all but outlawed in contemporary Washington. Doubt is viewed as weakness. You are expected to hold onto your beliefs even in a hurricane of contradictory data. Believing in something that’s not true is considered a sign of character.

This is what I’m trying to get at in the Wisdom of Doubt series, which is not just about religion. Here’s a paragraph that goes along nicely with yesterday’s sermon:

And now even the doubters have become overly certain. Look at all the atheism books on the bestseller lists. In “God Is Not Great,” Christopher Hitchens writes, “The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.” But it’s hard to think of a public intellectual more certain of himself than Hitch. (Carl Sagan was certainly no believer, but he once told me, “An atheist has to know a lot more than I know.”)

The point I tried to make yesterday was not that there’s something wrong with not believing in God. I don’t believe in God either, so I can’t very well fault it. This is not about whether atheists or the religious are “right,” but about fanaticism as defined by Eric Hoffer in The True Believer (1951; see previous post for quotes from the book). My point is that fanaticism (and its cousins, absolutism, dogmatism and certitude) about anything is destructive, and I’m against fanaticism in all its forms, no matter what the fanatic is fanatical about. If you oppose one fanatic but make excuses for another because he’s on “your” side, you aren’t seeing the big picture.

Anyway, Achenbach’s column is genuinely excellent and I hope you take the time to read the whole thing. Here’s another bit:

All of us — citizens and senators and shopkeepers and scholars — need to review the principles of “critical thinking.” In 1990, psychologists Carole Wade and Carol Tavris listed eight elements of critical thinking:

1. Ask questions; be willing to wonder.

2. Define your problem correctly.

3. Examine the evidence.

4. Analyze assumptions and biases.

5. Avoid emotional reasoning.

6. Don’t oversimplify.

7. Consider other interpretations.

8. Tolerate uncertainty.

This would get you instantly fired from many jobs in Washington. Asking questions is a time-waster in a culture that demands instant answers. Defining your problem correctly, examining evidence and contemplating biases can be extremely inconvenient. The media marketplace favors absolutism and hysteria.

Absolutist and dogmatic thinking has been with us from the beginning of the species, of course. But here in the U.S. it generally did not so thoroughly permeate our political culture until the past forty years or so. We’ve reached a point at which the federal government is pathologically dysfunctional — more so than ever before it its history, including the Civil War — because it’s being run by fanatics. As a nation, we can’t seem to have dispassionate discussions or make rational decisions about anything because fanatics and absolutists shout it down. The recent immigration bill episode is an excellent example. So is our lack of ability to have a sensible national dialog about health care, and the failure of our politicians and media to foster a full and open discussion about the invasion of Iraq before it happened.

I suspect that mass media has something to do with this. Thanks to the Right Wing infrastructure that dominates most mass media, media is playing the part of a positive feedback loop for fanatics. Fanaticism has become the norm, and moderation is seen as extreme.

Peter Baker has an article in today’s Washington Post that is equally fascinating.

At the nadir of his presidency, George W. Bush is looking for answers. One at a time or in small groups, he summons leading authors, historians, philosophers and theologians to the White House to join him in the search.

Over sodas and sparkling water, he asks his questions: What is the nature of good and evil in the post-Sept. 11 world? What lessons does history have for a president facing the turmoil I’m facing? How will history judge what we’ve done? Why does the rest of the world seem to hate America? Or is it just me they hate?

Is it possible the Creature is feeling doubt? That he’s trying to learn something?

Not generally known for intellectual curiosity, Bush is seeking out those who are, engaging in a philosophical exploration of the currents of history that have swept up his administration. For all the setbacks, he remains unflinching, rarely expressing doubt in his direction, yet trying to understand how he got off course.

Um, maybe not.

And yet Bush does not come across like a man lamenting his plight. In public and in private, according to intimates, he exhibits an inexorable upbeat energy that defies the political storms. Even when he convenes philosophical discussions with scholars, he avoids second-guessing his actions. He still acts as if he were master of the universe, even if the rest of Washington no longer sees him that way.

“You don’t get any feeling of somebody crouching down in the bunker,” said Irwin M. Stelzer, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who was part of one group of scholars who met with Bush. “This is either extraordinary self-confidence or out of touch with reality. I can’t tell you which.”

The Creature isn’t looking for answers. He’s looking for validation.

The fight over whether Gonzales should remain attorney general has exposed a deep fault line. Bush remains convinced that his old friend did nothing wrong ethically in firing U.S. attorneys, and senior adviser Karl Rove angrily rejects what he sees as a Democratic witch hunt, according to White House officials. Yet beyond the inner circle, it is hard to find a current or former administration official who thinks Gonzales should stay.

“I don’t understand for the life of me why Al Gonzales is still there,” said one former top aide, who, like others, would speak only on the condition of anonymity. “It’s not about him. It’s about the office and who’s able to lead the department.” The ex-aide said that every time he runs into former Cabinet secretaries, “universally the first thing out of their mouths” is bafflement that Gonzales remains.

Some aides see it as Bush refusing to accept reality. “The president thinks cutting and running on his friends shows weakness,” said an exasperated senior official. “Change shows weakness. Doing what everyone knows has to be done shows weakness.” Another former aide said that no matter how many people Bush consults, he heeds only two or three. [emphasis added]

Once upon a time, doing what everyone knows has to be done even if you don’t want to do it showed strength of character, and running away from doing what everyone knows has to be done was not a sign of strength, but of weakness.

Beyond Gonzales, the discontent with the Bush presidency is broader and deeper among Republican lawmakers, some of whom seethe with anger. “Our members just wish this thing would be over,” said a senior House Republican who met with Bush recently. “People are tired of him.” Bush’s circle remains sealed tight, the lawmaker said. “There’s nobody there who can stand up to him and tell him, ‘Mr. President, you’ve got to do this. You’re wrong on this.’ There’s no adult supervision. It’s like he’s oblivious. Maybe that’s a defense mechanism.”

There’s no adult supervision. Running away from doing what everyone knows has to be done is what children do.

Amid the tumult, the president has sought refuge in history. He read three books last year on George Washington, read about the Algerian war of independence and the exploitation of Congo, and lately has been digging into “Troublesome Young Men,” Lynne Olson’s account of Conservative backbenchers who thrust Winston Churchill to power. Bush idolizes Churchill and keeps a bust of him in the Oval Office.

Funny thing about Washington and Churchill. Joel Achenbach writes in the column linked above,

George Washington, who was always the first to cite his lack of qualifications for a job (Continental Army commander, president), said in his farewell address that he did the best he could with a “very fallible judgment.” No one today would dare say such a thing.

And in yesterday’s Washington Post, Lynne Olson argues that Dubya bears a closer resemblance to Neville Chamberlain than Winston Churchill.

Let’s go back to Peter Baker:

Much of the discussion focused on the nature of good and evil, a perennial theme for Bush, who casts the struggle against Islamic extremists in black-and-white terms. Michael Novak, a theologian who participated, said it was clear that Bush weathers his difficulties because he sees himself as doing the Lord’s work.

“His faith is very strong,” said Novak, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “Faith is not enough by itself because there are a lot of people who have faith but weak hearts. But his faith is very strong. He seeks guidance, like every other president does, in prayer. And that means trying to be sure he’s doing the right thing. And if you’ve got that set, all the criticism, it doesn’t faze you very much. You’re answering to God.”

I argued in yesterday’s “Wisdom” post that people without doubt mistake their own ego for the voice of God.

Baker mentions several times that Bush is in a self-imposed isolation because of his unpopularity. Literally, he doesn’t get out much. His friends insist he is aware of how the nation sees him. “He is the furthest thing from oblivious. . . . Somewhere in the back of his mind there’s a pretty complete autopsy,” said one. Yet people who have met the President recently are astonished at how serene he is.

[British historian Alistair] Horne said he is not a Bush supporter but was nonetheless struck by the president’s tranquility. “He was very friendly, very relaxed,” Horne said. “My God, he looked well. He looked like he came off a cruise in the Caribbean. He looked like he hadn’t a care in the world. It was amazing.”

Let’s finish by going back to Joel Achenbach.

The president sets the tone: He told Bob Woodward that he relies on “gut instinct” and said, “I’m not a textbook player. I’m a gut player.” Blogger Glenn Greenwald’s new book, “A Tragic Legacy,” opens with something Bush told journalists last September: “I’ve never been more convinced that the decisions I made are the right decisions.” The smart bet: He’ll become more convinced yet. He’s not the type to slap his forehead and say, ” What a bonehead I am!”

BTW, I got my copy of Glenn’s book over the weekend, but I haven’t read it yet. Here’s a review.

The Wisdom of Doubt, Part IV

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Christopher Hitchens published a book this year called God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Full disclosure: I have not read it. I have read excerpts from the book, and interviews of Hitchens describing his book, and reviews of the book. If someone gave me a free copy I might read it, but I’m not going to spend money on the thing.

I take it that Hitchens has decided religion is the root of all evil. Stephen Prothero wrote in the Washington Post:

Historian George Marsden once described fundamentalism as evangelicalism that is mad about something. If so, these evangelistic atheists have something in common with their fundamentalist foes, and Hitchens is the maddest of the lot. Protestant theologian John Calvin was “a sadist and torturer and killer,” Hitchens writes, and the Bible “contain[s] a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre.”

As should be obvious to any reasonable person — unlike Hitchens I do not exclude believers from this category — horrors and good deeds are performed by believers and non-believers alike. But in Hitchens’s Manichaean world, religion does little good and secularism hardly any evil. Indeed, Hitchens arrives at the conclusion that the secular murderousness of Stalin’s purges wasn’t really secular at all, since, as he quotes George Orwell, “a totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy.” And in North Korea today, what has gone awry is not communism but Confucianism.

In other words, in order to prove his claim that religion is the cause of all evil, he defines all destructive mass movement of history as “religion.” See this about “moral clarity.”

Hitchens is not so forgiving when it comes to religion’s transgressions. He aims his poison pen at the Dalai Lama, St. Francis and Gandhi. Among religious leaders only the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. comes off well. But in the gospel according to Hitchens whatever good King did accrues to his humanism rather than his Christianity. In fact, King was not actually a Christian at all, argues Hitchens, since he rejected the sadism that characterizes the teachings of Jesus. “No supernatural force was required to make the case against racism” in postwar America, writes Hitchens. But he’s wrong. It was the prophetic faith of black believers that gave them the strength to stand up to the indignities of fire hoses and police dogs. As for those white liberals inspired by Paine, Mencken and Hitchens’s other secular heroes, well, they stood down. …

… What Hitchens gets wrong is religion itself.

Hitchens claims that some of his best friends are believers. If so, he doesn’t know much about his best friends. He writes about religious people the way northern racists used to talk about “Negroes” — with feigned knowing and a sneer. God Is Not Great assumes a childish definition of religion and then criticizes religious people for believing such foolery. But it is Hitchens who is the naïf. To read this oddly innocent book as gospel is to believe that ordinary Catholics are proud of the Inquisition, that ordinary Hindus view masturbation as an offense against Krishna, and that ordinary Jews cheer when a renegade Orthodox rebbe sucks the blood off a freshly circumcised penis. It is to believe that faith is always blind and rituals always empty — that there is no difference between taking communion and drinking the Kool-Aid (a beverage Hitchens feels compelled to mention no fewer than three times).

Hitchens sees himself as quite open minded, of course. This is an excerpt from the book:

And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically. …

This is from a guy who still defends the invasion of Iraq, mind you. And get this from an interview:

[Interviewer]Your book discusses the problems with the Abrahamic faiths, but then says Eastern religion is not the answer. It seemed like your main criticism of Eastern religion wasn’t so much about its tenets so much as one sex abuse scandal at one ashram.

Oh, no. My objection was to the sign [at the entrance to one tent] saying, “Shoes and minds must be left at the gate.” It’s the idea that the whole effort of meditation is to try and dissolve your mind, which is the only thing you’ve got that’s unequivocally worth having.

In other words, this blockhead who says he stands for “free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake” dismissed centuries of philosophy from the entire continent of Asia because of a sign on a tent. If he’d checked, he’d have found that the sign doesn’t mean what he assumed it meant — Asian philosophy regarding the nature of mind would take a lifetime to learn — but I’ll leave that alone for now. In any event, IMO, Hitchens has a mind that were better left outside with the shoes.

I’m pointing to Hitchens because he exemplifies so nicely one of the real roots of all evil — I’m not saying it’s the only one — which is fanaticism. People can be fanatics about religion and non-religion alike, and even the most benign and innocuous human activity or belief becomes pernicious in the hands of fanatics.

Hitchens fancies himself to be an openminded man of logic and reason, but his intellectual dishonesty reveals him to be quite the opposite. In the last episode of The Wisdom of Doubt I argued that religion gets screwy when people use it to bullshit themselves about themselves. Here we see an atheist bullshitting himself about himself, to similar results.

Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer (1951):

Only the individual who has come to terms with his self can have a dispassionate attitude toward the world. Once the harmony with the self is upset, he turns into a highly reactive entity. Like an unstable chemical radical he hungers to combine with whatever comes within his reach. He cannot stand apart, whole or self-sufficient, but has to attach himself whole-heartedly to one side or the other. …

… The fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure. He cannot generate self-assurance out of his individual resources — out of his rejected self — but finds it only in clinging passionately to whatever support he happens to embrace. This passionate attachment is the essence of his blind devotion and religiosity, and he sees in it the source of all virtue and strength. Though his single-minded dedication is a holding on for dear life, he easily sees himself as the supporter and defender of the holy cause to which he clings. … The fanatic is not really a stickler to principle. He embraces a cause not primarily because of its justice and holiness but because of his desperate need for something to hold on to. …

… The fanatic cannot be weaned away from his cause by an appeal to his reason or moral sense. He fears compromise and cannot be persuaded to qualify the certitude and righteousness of his holy cause. But he finds no difficulty in swinging from one holy cause to another. He cannot be convinced but only converted. His passionate attachment is more vital than the quality of the cause to which he is attached. [Hoffer, The True Believer, HarperPerennial edition, pp. 84-86]

Hoffer goes on to say that fanatics of all stripes are more like each other than they are like moderates of the same stripe. “The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not,” he writes. I’ve never subscribed to the idea that atheism is a religion, but the point is that a fanatical atheist and a religious fanatic are more like each other than, say, a dispassionate guy who doesn’t believe in God but who doesn’t attach his ego to atheism. Or, for that matter, than a sincerely and deeply religious person who doesn’t attach his ego to his religion.

If you know much at all about Hitchens, you see how well Hoffer describes him. In his life he has swung from one ideology to another, embracing each with passion. He’s a classic fanatic.

I wrote awhile back about elective ignorance. People practicing elective ignorance start with a point of view and then admit into evidence only those facts that support their point of view. Those with a really bad case of elective ignorance become incapable of acknowledging facts that contradict their opinions. Thus, Christopher Hitchens came to the remarkable conclusion that Martin Luther King was not really Christian; acknowledging MLK’s Christianity contradicts his faith that religion is the root of all evil. If the facts don’t fit, change ’em.

Ideologies can be understood as a form of codified elective ignorance, or a strategy to make the world easier to understand by limiting one’s cognitive choices. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Since we all have finite cognitive resources, adopting an ideology is one way to obtain a workable understanding of issues without devoting the time and brain work required to become an expert. As long as a person appreciates that his understanding and knowledge are incomplete — if he has the wisdom of doubt, in other words — and he remains open to changing his views, he’s not a fanatic.

Fanatically attached to, ideologies become a substitute for thinking. When confronted by a new situation, instead of looking at it directly and seeing it as-it-is, the ideologue runs through the list of cognitive choices his ideology affords him and picks the one that seems to relate. No amount of empirical evidence that his choice is wrong will shake his faith in its correctness. The real world is hidden from him; the ideology is all he can see.

Hoffer writes that people become fanatical because they are estranged from themselves. This looks like a paradox — I’ve been talking about ego attachment, and also talking about alienation from the self. When the ego attaches to something, that something becomes a projection of the self. When ego attaches to a religion or a cause or an ideology, that religion, cause, etc. becomes inseparable from self-identity. It is no longer just an opinion or an interest or a practice. It becomes who you are. Fanatics cling to ridiculous positions because being wrong feels like an existential threat.

Now, some of you are probably thinking Hitchens is right and that religion is the root of all evil. Religion is, unfortunately, an easy thing to be fanatical about. Religion presents itself as a solution to our deepest pain and fears. It’s a perfect escape route for people running away from themselves. This is particularly true of dogmatic, authoritarian religions.

In Escape From Freedom, Erich Fromm wrote that people who fear personal freedom, who are uncomfortable with their own autonomy, tend to escape into authoritarianism and conformity. Religion that combines passion with absolutism is the perfect medium for fanaticism. Let’s check back with Hoffer and The True Believer —

To be in possession of an absolute truth is to have a net of familiarity spread over the whole of eternity. There are no surprises and no unknowns. All questions have already been answered, all decisions made, all eventualities foreseen. The true believer is without wonder and hesitation. “Who knows Jesus knows the reason for all things.” The true doctrine is the master key to all the world’s problems. With it the world can be taken apart and put together. [p. 82]

Hoffer goes on from there to quote from an official history of the Communist Party claiming that Marxist-Leninist theory answers all questions and even perfectly predicts the future. Fanaticism is not just found in religion.

History shows us that when authoritarian religion gets mixed up with political power, the results can be nasty. The Inquisition — which was as much about political authority as church authority — is a grand example. We should fear for the Middle East; whose residents seem determined to fold themselves into some kind of authoritarian Islamic theocracy. And we should fear for ourselves as long as fundamentalism is affecting the outcome of elections.

But religion is not always absolutist. In 1946 the liberal evangelical theologian Reinhold Neibuhr wrote an essay titled “Mystery and Meaning” in which he extolled the virtues of not-knowing —

It can not be denied … that this same Christian faith is frequently vulgarized and cheapened to the point where all mystery is banished. … a faith which measures the final dimension of existence, but dissipates all mystery in that dimension, may be only a little better or worse than a shallow creed which reduces human existence to the level of nature. …

… When we look into the future we see through a glass darkly. The important issue is whether we will be tempted by the incompleteness and frustration of life to despair, or whether we can, by faith, lay hold on the divine power and wisdom which completes what remains otherwise incomplete. A faith which resolves mystery too much denies the finiteness of all human knowledge, including the knowledge of faith. A faith which is overwhelmed by mystery denies the clues of divine meaning which shine through the perplexities of life. The proper combination of humility and trust is precisely defined when we affirm that we see, but admit that we see through a glass darkly. [Robert McAfee Brown, editor, The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr (Yale, 1986), p. 248]

What Niebuhr is talking about here is the wisdom of doubt.

In this old post I wrote about Saint Anselm of Canterbury, a leading theologian of the 11th century.

Anselm’s motto is “faith seeking understanding” (fides quaerens intellectum). … Faith for Anselm is more a volitional state than an epistemic state: it is love for God and a drive to act as God wills. In fact, Anselm describes the sort of faith that “merely believes what it ought to believe” as “dead.” … So “faith seeking understanding” means something like “an active love of God seeking a deeper knowledge of God.” [Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

I admit that the word epistemic gives me a headache, but it has to do with the validity of knowledge and belief. So Anselm’s approach to faith is not about trying to get his belief system validated. Beliefs by themselves have no purpose. Faith is not an end in itself. Rather, Anselm says, faith is a means for seeking a deeper knowledge of God (or the Dharmakaya, or the Great Whatever). A religion that isn’t looking past the dogmas to a deeper truth is a dead religion. Conversely, a religion that is not absolutist, and which accepts the imperfection of understanding, is not necessarily a wishy-washy religion as some assume. It can be the deeper and more wholesome religion.

And in the first installment of The Wisdom of Truth I linked to a dharma talk by Sevan Ross, director of the Chicago Zen Center, called “The Distance Between Faith and Doubt.” In this talk, the sensei says “Doubt is what unseats the ego.” Doubt — accepting the limitations of one’s understanding — prevents ego-attachment. People without doubt mistake their own ego for the voice of God. This is what makes religion fanatical, and dangerous.

I cannot think of a better antidote to fanaticism than the Precepts of Engaged Buddhism of the Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. Here are the first three:

1 Do not be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even Buddhist ones. Buddhist systems of thought are guiding means; they are not absolute truth.

2 Do not think the knowledge you presently possess is changeless, absolute truth. Avoid being narrow minded and bound to present views. Learn and practice nonattachment from views in order to be open to receive others’ viewpoints. Truth is found in life and not merely in conceptual knowledge. Be ready to learn throughout your entire life and to observe reality in yourself and in the world at all times.

3 Do not force others, including children, by any means whatsoever, to adopt your views, whether by authority, threat, money, propaganda, or even education. However, through compassionate dialogue, help others renounce fanaticism and narrow-mindedness.

When dealing with fanatics it’s tempting to push back with equal and opposite fanaticism, but that doesn’t work. Fanaticism isn’t easily cured, but it’s best to deal with it as coolly and dispassionately as possible.

See also the Hsin Hsin Ming by Seng-Ts’an (the Third Patriarch of Zen; sixth century).

Update: See also “Not Knowing is Most Intimate,” a dharma talk by Zoketsu Norman Fischer.

Executive Privilege

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Nice editorial in tomorrow’s New York Times:

The courts have recognized a president’s limited right to keep the White House’s internal deliberations private. But it is far from an absolute right, and Mr. Bush’s claim of executive privilege in the attorneys scandal is especially ludicrous. The White House has said repeatedly that Mr. Bush was not involved in the firings of nine United States attorneys. If that’s true, he can hardly argue that he has the right to conceal conversations and e-mail exchanges that his aides had with one another and the Justice Department. …

… Last week, in a bit of especially mendacious spin, Tony Fratto, the White House deputy press secretary, responded to the subpoenas on the illegal wiretapping by saying, “It’s unfortunate that Congressional Democrats continue to choose the route of confrontation.”

Actually, Mr. Bush chose that route long ago by defining consultation as a chance for lawmakers to hear about decisions he had already made, bipartisanship as a chance for Democrats to join Republicans in rubber-stamping those choices and Congressional oversight as self-serving and possibly seditious. At this point, confrontation is far preferable to the path the Republican majority in Congress chose for so many years — capitulation.

Inflammatory

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A flaming SUV crashed into the main terminal of Glasgow airport, MSNBC says.

In Glasgow, the green SUV barreled toward the building at full speed shortly after 3 p.m., hitting security barriers before crashing into the glass doors and exploding, witnesses said. Two men jumped out of the burning vehicle, one of them engulfed in flames, they said.

“The car came speeding past at about 30 mph. It was approaching the building quickly,” said Scott Leeson, who was nearby at the time. “Then the driver swerved the car around so he could ram straight in to the door. He must have been trying to smash straight through.” …

… Passengers fled running and screaming from the busy terminal, Margaret Hughes told the British Broadcasting Corp. “There was black smoke gushing out where the car had obviously been driven into the airport,” she said.

Flames and black smoke rose from the vehicle outside the main entrance. Police said it was unclear if anyone was injured. Other passengers were stranded, with at least one airplane grounded on the runway, the BBC said. …

… “The jeep is completely on fire and it exploded not long after. It exploded at the entrance to the terminal,” witness Stephen Clarkson told the BBC. “It may have been an explosion of petrol in the tank because it was not a massive explosion.”

Two men—one of them engulfed in flames—were in the SUV, witnesses told BBC News executive Helen Boaden, who was at the airport at time. She described the men as South Asian.

Larry Johnson comments:

Preliminary, unconfirmed reports indicate a nuclear blast has occurred at Glasgow’s international airport. No one has seen the mushroom cloud or heard the blast, but something by God is happening and it must be terrible. There is smoke and fire. In fact, a car is on fire. It must be Al Qaeda. Only Al Qaeda knows how to set themselves on fire inside a car. Please. Flee to the hills (leave you doors unlocked). Oh the humanity!

As events unfold I’m simply asking that folks take a big deep breath and try to keep things in perspective. Are there jihadist extremists in the world who are willing to kill innocents? Absolutely. Are they amenable to negotiation? No. I am not in the, “have you hugged a terrorist today” camp. However, we need to stop equating their hatred with actual capability.

If today’s events at Glasgow prove to be linked to the two non-events yesterday in London, then we should heave a sigh of relief. We may be witnessing the implosion of takfiri jihadists–religious fanatics who are incredibly inept. While I am not an explosives expert I am good friends with one of the world’s foremost explosives experts. Propane tanks and petrol (gas for us Americans) can produce a dandy flame and a mighty boom but these are not the tools for making a car bomb long the lines of what we see detonating on a daily basis in Iraq.

My main beef remains that much of the cable news media reacts to this nonsense like a fifty year old guy on Viagra or Cialis–they pop major wood. And the same warnings are appropriate–an erection lasting more than four hours may be harmful. Amen.

Thursday a single explosion killed five U.S. soldiers in Baghdad, and I don’t see the media or the wingnuts flame about that.

I do take terrorist attacks seriously, even inept ones. I live in New York, remember. Episodes like this are what make me crazy about people who still support the Iraq war — the “why don’t you want to fight al Qaeda?” whackjobs. If that’s who we were fighting in Iraq they might have an argument. But most of al Qaeda is sitting safe and sound in Pakistan, or elsewhere, just watching us shoot ourselves in the foot in Iraq. The bulk of the violence there is between Sunni and Shi’ia militants, not al Qaeda, and both those groups are getting very good at playing the U.S. to do some of their fighting for them. Makes me crazy.

I don’t even have to look at the rightie blogs to know what they’re saying. The evil terrorists are evil, and liberals don’t understand that, which is why they don’t want to fight in Iraq. The reality that our fighting in Iraq isn’t stopping terrorist attempts in Britain doesn’t sink in.

See Sicko Again

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Gateway Pundit writes,

Yahoo defines “Sicko” as a documentary in the Politics/Religion genre. Truly, the socialism pushed in the movie is nothing short of a religion to many.

First, one of the things I hope to bring out in the ongoing Wisdom of Doubt series is to establish that religion is something other than “fanatical belief in things that demonstrably are not true.” But let’s put that aside for now. The real fantasy is, of course, that the United States has The Best Health Care in the World. It does not. It does not by any empirical measure. The only way one could possibly still believe that the United States has The Best Health Care in the World is if one is utterly ignorant of the health care systems here and abroad.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll repeat it. There’s an old joke that a “conservative” is a liberal who got mugged. The new joke is that a “liberal” is a conservative who lost his health insurance.

A brainwashed twit named Sheila commented to the last post, saying that

First of all, 4 out of 5 Americans are satisfied with the health care system, so it is really a non-issue (this will likely be the reason the movie flops).

Take a look at the latest polls on health care at pollingreport.com. It’s very encouraging. A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll of May 4-6, 2007, asked the question “Do you think the government should provide a national health insurance program for all Americans, even if this would require higher taxes?” 64 percent said yes; 35 percent said no. Interestingly, a smaller percentage of people in the same poll said yes to “Do you think all employers, including small businesses which employ few workers, should be required to provide health insurance to every employee, or don’t you think so?” Here the spread was 56 percent yes to 43 percent no. I think people are starting to catch on that the cost of employee health insurance is terribly burdensome to business, large and small. Well, except to the health insurance industry, of course.

Anyway, Gateway Pundit’s post is fairly typical of the “Best Health Care in the World” genre. It consists mostly of photographs of filth and cockroaches alleged to have been taken in Cuban hospitals and not at Walter Reed. And they may very well have been taken in Cuban hospitals; I wouldn’t know. But then there’s France, whose health care system is generally considered to be the crème de la crème of health care systems on the planet. And Canada. and Britain. And about 30 other nations with nationalized health care and better life expectancy and lower infant mortality rates than ours.

But after reading Gateway Pundit’s post I decided that I’d like to amend something I wrote in the last post, which is:

But most of the bad reviews I’ve read amount to sputtering defenses of the status quo and personal attacks on Michael Moore. What the critics never ever do is honestly address the problem of people who can’t get insurance, or our crumbling emergency rooms, or our dismal health data. They just make excuses.

To “sputtering defenses of the status quo and personal attacks on Michael Moore” I’d like to add “photographs of roaches in Cuban hospitals” and, of course, the old stand by: waiting lines in Canada. Still, not a peep about the problem of people who can’t get insurance, or our crumbling emergency rooms, or our dismal health data.

See also: “Bush to Uninsured Kids: Drop Dead” and The Mahablog health care archives.

See Sicko

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I believe Sicko opens today nationwide, so be sure to see it over this long weekend.

Ari Melber responds to a criticism of the film from Dean Barnett. You remember Barnett; he’s the twit who thinks fertilized eggs are people, but soldiers aren’t, and of course women are merely major appliances. Barnett makes the knee-jerk assumption that Moore made the film to elect Democrats.

Melber points out that Moore probably is harder on Hillary Clinton than he is on George Bush in this film. I’ll let Melber continue (emphasis added) —

These are not the kind of stories that prime people to think of partisan affiliations or presidential campaigns. If anything, the genuine human struggles in “Sicko” raise questions about our society that run much deeper than what passes for political discourse today.

Why does such a rich nation let people suffer and die without health care? If we truly value the Americans who risked their lives on Sept. 11, why do some struggle without treatment for injuries they sustained while trying to keep us safe? And in the toughest challenge for American exceptionalists, why do so many other countries do a better job of providing care to all of their citizens? (Specifically, 36 countries, according to the World Health Organization.)

These questions probably won’t send people running from the theater to endorse a particular health care policy. Yet “Sicko” could drive the public to demand a realistic national debate on how to achieve quality care for all Americans, and to reject the recurring political attacks on the people working toward this admirable goal.

The recent personal attacks on Moore – and other health care reformers, such as former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) – are in line with the vacuous scare tactics that have stifled health care policy long before the Clinton administration attempted reform. The detractors typically don’t offer solutions or engage reformers’ ideas. They don’t join the vital debate over how our public policy should value every human life. They just defend the status quo and launch personal attacks.

This brings us back to Mr. Barnett’s Politico column. It offers a conservative’s supposed concern that the intricate politics of “Sicko” will backfire on Democrats (why would he care?). Then it recycles the canard that Edwards should not help the poor because he is wealthy. (By that logic, Americans with good health care shouldn’t help anyone else, and cities with solid homeland security shouldn’t collaborate to defend more vulnerable areas.)

But after 800 words, Mr. Barnett fails to say anything about health care policy, or whether the Sept. 11 rescue workers deserve assistance or whether the U.S. should even try to improve our world health rankings. The column, like so many attacks on health care reformers, ignores the issues and gloomily accepts America’s dismal health care condition – and then labels Moore as the pessimist. “Smart politicians would avoid him like the plague,” concludes Mr. Barnett.

Here it’s painfully obvious that Mr. Barnett didn’t see the movie or didn’t get it. The issue is not how “smart politicians” position themselves – the public could not care less. The issue is what our nation can do about a health care crisis that leads to the needless suffering and death of our fellow citizens. They are the ones who have to avoid a real “plague,” since they can’t count on decent treatment when they get sick.

I’ve read a number of reviews that complain Sicko is one-sided and that Moore doesn’t always explain where he gets his facts. To this I say, first, that the more you know about what’s going on in American health care, the more you realize the “other” side is indefensible. Second, Moore said very little that I hadn’t already learned in my own research. I can’t swear the film is without factual error, but overall the way it portrays U.S. healthcare is accurate. Moore may be guilty of oversimplifying — the Canadian and British health care systems do have some problems that aren’t discussed in the film. But Moore is also an entertainer. This is a theatrical film, not a presentation for policy wonks.

But most of the bad reviews I’ve read amount to sputtering defenses of the status quo and personal attacks on Michael Moore. What the critics never ever do is honestly address the problem of people who can’t get insurance, or our crumbling emergency rooms, or our dismal health data. They just make excuses.

Clarence Page writes:

Numerous congressional proposals have offered wider, less-expensive and more-reliable coverage than Americans receive from our current patchwork, employer-based system.

But no matter how workable, practical or desirable the proposals may be, the insurance industry reliably shoots them down. Armed with billions of dollars for political campaign contributions, spin doctors and attack ads, the industry has largely steered the nation’s health care debate for decades.

Mr. Moore evens things up a bit. He uses the same pop culture that brings you Paris Hilton and American Idol to offer something truly valuable: a vision of a better American health care system than the one we have.

The fact is that whatever truncated national discussion we’ve had about health care going back as far as I remember has been entirely one sided. It’s the health care industry saying we have the Best Health Care in the World, and if you don’t agree you must be a Communist. End of discussion.

He offers something else that most Americans never see: how easily anyone – including visitors – can access good public health care in Canada and Europe and how satisfied those country’s citizens are with their systems. Critics predictably charge Mr. Moore with sugar-coating his view of the other countries, particularly Cuba, where Fidel Castro’s government still affords superior care to favored Communist Party elites. Nevertheless, having witnessed health care in each of the countries Mr. Moore visits, I think he got it about right.

In Canada and Europe, customer satisfaction is high, despite the drawbacks. Defenders of our health care status quo come up with one horror story after another of long lines, waiting lists, rising costs or rationed care. But they don’t like to talk about the long lines, waiting lists, rising costs or rationed care that Americans face in our existing system. Mr. Moore’s movie does.

Nobody’s system is perfect. But despite the smear job that conservatives over here give to British health care, for example, stalwart conservatives over there aren’t mounting much of an effort to change it.

If the film does nothing else but get people to realize it doesn’t have to be this way, it has done its job.

Update: See Crooks & Liars about a hit piece on Sicko in the Los Angeles Times.

Fear Itself

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Following up this morning’s post on impeachment: I admit at times I’ve been ambivalent about the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. This is not because I don’t think they deserve it. It was not necessarily because I thought it politically risky for the Democrats. The biggest reason is that if it were done and did not result in conviction and removal from office, then it were better not done. Because that would amount to exoneration. Conviction and removal require a two-thirds vote in the Senate, not just a simple majority, so unless some Republicans vote to convict it ain’t gonna happen.

But I feel the time to act has arrived, especially regarding Mr. Cheney.

As I wrote in comment #4 to this morning’s post, my primary concern is restoration of the balance of power and the integrity of the Constitution. This is the goal from which all other goals — including withdrawal from Iraq — flow. I don’t think in terms of what Bush and Cheney “deserve” — I leave such things to the law and karma — nor do I much care if they are punished for the mess they’ve made of America. What’s important to me is to make it clear beyond any shadow of doubt that they are wrong. They are wrong about executive power, about the role of government, about the justice system, and about pretty much everything having to do with the Constitution and the civil liberties protected by the Bill of Rights.

What’s important to me is that we send a clear signal to posterity that this will not happen again.

Remarkably, a blogger who fancies himself a libertarian linked to the morning post with the comment, “Yup … there’s no wrath like that directed at those who don’t toe the Netroots line.”

Here’s the Netroots line. It begins “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union…” and ends (currently) with “Amendment XXVII: No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.”

And make no mistake, m’dears — this is what is on the line. It’s not about partisan squabbles, or who’s going to win the next election. It’s about preserving what has been the bleeping political foundation of our nation throughout its history. If you don’t see that, “libertarian,” open your eyes.

There is more than a whiff of abuse of power and criminal activity surrounding this administration. Particularly after the recent revelations about Dick Cheney, I’d say the White House stinks out loud these days. Even conservatives are putting together damn strong articles for impeaching Dick the Dick. See also “The Misunderestimated Mr. Cheney: The Vice President’s Record of Willfully Violating the Law, And Wrongly Claiming Authority to Do So” by John Dean.

Yesterday some bloggers had a conference call with Nancy Pelosi. There’s an account of this at Scholars and Rogues:

Pelosi’s argument against impeachment was, simply, that it wouldn’t be worth expending the political capital and effort to push the process forward. If the situation had been Bush coming in as a new president, she said, things might have been different, but with less than two years left on his watch and his record as a miserable failure etched in stone , the stronger weapon was oversight. Pelosi specifically mentioned the subpoena power that, she said, is making the Dem Congress “Bush’s worst nightmare.”

Essentially, Pelosi argued that we need to push forward and get a Dem in the White House in 2008 to really start enacting serious change, noting that even with majorities in both Houses, the Dems’ power could not overcome the 60 Senate votes needed to beat a Bush veto, and that the courts would be particularly unfriendly to Democratic moves for criminal investigations unless they substantially “built the cases” for each move. “Let the process play out,” she said. “Oversight isn’t political, it’s patriotic.”

I’d say sometimes impeachment isn’t political, either. Sometimes avoiding the hard issues by letting the clock run out is not patriotic.

If you owned a retail store and you saw pickpockets stuffing your merchandise into their coats, would you choose not to call the cops because it’s half an hour to closing time?

Captain Ed — who always has our best interests at heart, you know — writes,

Obama has this correct, not just legally but also strategically. First, although many people like to claim that impeachment is a political tool, the Constitution makes it clear that the remedy should only apply to actual criminal conduct. “High crimes and misdemeanors” makes it plain that the founders didn’t want a Parliament that removed an executive for a simple loss of confidence, but an independent executive whose election should only be nullified for actual and provable criminal conduct.

Exactly. As I said, it’s time.

Strategically, it’s difficult to understand why anyone still argues for impeachment — but the fact that Obama has to address this shows they do. George Bush and Dick Cheney have 18 months left in office, and sixteen until the next election. Even if the Democrats started impeachment now, it would probably take that long to gather enough evidence for a win in the House, let alone the two-thirds in the Senate needed for removal, which would be the entire point.

Protecting the Constitution is the point, so even if conviction were voted on the day before the 2009 Inauguration, it would be worth it.

Regarding time — for comparison’s sake — the Senate Watergate Committee began its nationally televised hearings on May 18, 1973, and the House Judiciary Committee passed the first of three articles of impeachment, charging obstruction of justice, on July 27, 1974. But the committee investigations into the Bush Administration are ongoing already, and much depends on whether the Bush White House gets away with ignoring subpoenas. That’s the real holdup. Once evidence of criminal activity is in hand, impeachment itself doesn’t take that long.

They would risk a huge backlash from moderates and centrists who would see this as a stunt, much the same way the Republicans did in 1998 — only this time, it would come in a presidential election cycle instead of the midterms. It might be the one event that could restore George Bush’s flagging approval ratings, and it would be political suicide for a Democratic Congress that has done nothing in its first six months.

Oh, I don’t think so. Impeaching Bill Clinton was a stunt, and everyone but the wingnuts themselves recognized that. Which is why the impeachment stunt backfired backlashed nastily (although not fatally) against congressional Republicans.

But if you’re old enough to remember the Nixon episode, you know things can take a very different turn when the issues are serious. Remember, Nixon was reelected in one of the largest landslides in American political history on November 7, 1972. By the time he resigned less than two years later, the nation was content to see him go, and the members of the House and Senate committees that investigated him were rock stars. Senate committee chair Sam Ervin became so popular he went on to a second career making television commercials. On the House committee, Rep. Barbara Jordan was a standout, but the entire judiciary committee, both Republicans and Democrats, clearly were trying to do due diligence for the Constitution. On the whole, the nation recognized how serious this matter was and respected Congress for what it did.

Compare/contrast to the slobbering smarminess exhibited by Republicans in the Clinton impeachment process.

And Democrats reaped rewards in the 1974 midterms, picking up 49 seats in the House and 5 in the Senate. So many new Democrats elected to Congress they were called “Watergate babies.”

John Dean, who would know, says the current White House is worse than Watergate. On the other hand, news media of the time hadn’t been taken over by a Right Wing Echo Chamber that distorts nearly everything the public hears. Doing the right thing is riskier now than it was in 1974, unfortunately.

But how things are done are enormously important. If the impeachment process is handled with seriousness and dignity instead of bellicosity, and if the focus is kept on the importance of protecting the integrity of the Constitution, I think the public can handle it. On the other hand, if we go into this thinking “these people screwed up America and we’re going to make them pay,” that’s a problem. As tempting as it is, don’t go there.

One other point — waiting until after 2008 to find out what the Bushies are up to may sound grand now, but by then the public may not be in the mood for it. They might very well want to forget they ever heard of Bush and Cheney. And a new Democratic administration will have other things on its plate. Now is the time.

Along these lines — I took a look at the articles of impeachment against Dick Cheney filed by Dennis Kucinich a couple of months ago. (Go here and search for H. Res. 333.) I’m not impressed. “He’s sneaky and got us into Iraq,” while true, is far from the strongest case that can be made, seems to me. I wonder if Kucinich is serious or just likes to file articles of impeachment from time to time to get his name in the papers.

I believe the better model would be based on John Dean’s suggestions — he overstepped his office, committed crimes, and violated the Constitution.