God Nazis on the March

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Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has announced the ultimate pseudo-conservative project[*] — a program designed to destroy religious liberty in the name of saving it. Ladies and gentlemen, the First Freedom Project —

The First Freedom Project includes a number of facets to ensure that this precious right, guaranteed by our laws and Constitution, is recognized and protected:

  • A commitment to continued expansion of enforcement of civil rights statutes protecting religious liberty.
  • Creation of a Department-wide Task Force on Religious Liberty, chaired by the Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Rights Division, to review DOJ policies impacting religious liberty, coordinate religious liberty cases, and improve outreach to stakeholder communities.
  • Initiation of a series of regional seminars to be held around the country to educate religious, civil rights, and community leaders, attorneys, government officials, and other interested citizens about the laws protecting religious freedom enforced by the Department of Justice and how to file complaints.
  • Increased outreach to religious organizations, civil rights organizations, and other groups and individuals concerned with religious liberty issues through meetings, speaking engagements, and distribution of informational literature.

    • DonByrd of Talk to Action comments,

    Imagine if the religious right’s beloved “war on Christmas” was a year-round affair. Legions of lawyers ready to pounce on school and civic administrators, the persistent neon buzz of ACLU-paranoia in the air, Pat Robertson and the Bill O’Reilly Persecution Complex (nice band name…) pressuring corporate America to replace every “gesundheit” with a “God bless you.” Now, imagine if the leaders of the effort weren’t just the Jerry Falwell Admiration Society, but instead the full weight and force of the Department of Justice, training lawyers and enlisting supporters across the country ready to blow the whistle on any perceived slight to religion. Got the picture? It’s the DOJ’s new “First Freedoms Project” announced earlier this week by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, an effort to tout and enhance the Department’s pursuit of religious discimination claims through the Civil Rights Divison.

    Is there some outbreak of religious oppression I haven’t heard about? Or is Gonzales just trying to keep the culture wars going for politics’ sake? And why am I asking this question?

    See also (from 2004, but still true) — “Conservatives Try to Take Over Protestant Mainlines.”

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~

    [*] Definition of pseudo-conservative — “The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.” — Theodore W. Adorno

    Protesting 102

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    (Please note I’ve turned comment moderation on; the spam is back.)

    Sara Robinson at Orcinus has written a lovely commentary on my old Protesting 101 post from 2005.

    Unfortunately, several of Sara’s commenters don’t get it. I think they’re still caught up in the romance of being Outcasts and Rebels, and Speaking Truth to Power, and are not serious about taking and using power to effect change. A couple of random observations:

    The point of a protest is not to change the minds of politicians but to gain public sympathy for a cause. It’s a change in public sympathy that eventually brings about changes in politics and policy. With this in mind, I cannot emphasize the Bigger Asshole rule enough. Protests are effective when the protesters make the people they are protesting look like bigger assholes than they are. Gandhi, for example, made the whole British Empire look like assholes. But when the protesters come across in public as a pack of assholes, the public will just write them off as, well, assholes, and usually will sympathize with the Powers That Be. This is not the effect protesters want to achieve.

    There’s nothing magical about getting arrested as a form of protest. It’s fine to be willing to be arrested, but getting arrested in and of itself doesn’t mean anything. If you don’t have much in the way of public sympathy before you were arrested, then the arrest will have no significance. People will just think “good; they jailed the son of a bitch.”

    NOLA: Bush’s Plan Is Working!

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    Thomas F. Schaller writes in Salon:

    A key reason for the troubles facing Blanco and her party is the massive out-migration of New Orleans-area Democrats in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The storm, and the administration’s botched handling of it, literally drove Democrats out of Louisiana. Though a perfect estimate is impossible, analysts who follow the state closely project the net decline for Democrats in New Orleans Parish to be somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 voters. In 2002, Blanco beat Jindal by 55,000 votes statewide, but nearly all of that margin came from the city. She won Orleans Parish by 50,000 votes. “It’s doubtful that there are enough Democrats left to provide the wide margin of victory in Orleans Parish that Democrats have traditionally relied upon for victory in statewide elections,” says Bob Mann, who served as former Sen. Breaux’s state director and, later, Blanco’s communications director. “That means candidates like Blanco will have to increase their margins elsewhere, in regions of the state that aren’t as reliably Democratic. That could make for a very tough election season for almost any Democrat running statewide, but even tougher for someone with the governor’s dismal poll numbers.” It may also mean that Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu will be out of a job come November 2008.

    See? The GOP saw Katrina as an opportunity to make New Orleans whiter and, therefore, redder. And it’s working.

    As Gallup’s latest survey of partisan self-identification reveals, largely because of Katrina Louisiana is the only state in which Democrats lost ground relative to Republicans since 2005, reclassifying it from a Democratic-leaning state to “competitive.” And the news could get worse for Democrats. Demographers expect the post-Katrina exodus to cost Louisiana, which was already losing population before the hurricane, one House seat following the 2010 census and reapportionment. With Democrats presently holding just two of the delegation’s seven seats, redistricting may cost them one of their two. They already lost one to a party switch and may lose another to the federal judicial system. …

    …Along with Florida, Louisiana had been different, a state where multiracial coalitions propelled Clinton, Landrieu and Blanco to victories. In Louisiana, a black population of 32.5 percent made victory for Democrats possible. The post-Katrina question is whether the black population will remain large enough for Democrats to continue building such coalitions, especially if there is a backlash among white voters in the noncoastal portions of the state toward Blanco, controversial New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and state Democrats in general. Recent polls, however, are not promising, and they also show how resolutely racial party identification has become in the Deep South. The blacker the state, the more Republican the whites are.

    Despite the “heckuva job” performance of the Bush administration during Katrina, the president’s approval rating among whites in Louisiana — 57 percent — is tied for second best in the nation with Georgia and Idaho, trailing only Mississippi’s 61 percent. The link between whiteness and Republicanism in the South is now so strong that it can even withstand a Category 5 hurricane. Now, without the tipping-point power of the Orleans Parish black electorate, Louisiana may well become the new Mississippi, which has two Republican senators and a Republican governor and hasn’t given its electoral votes to a Democrat since Jimmy Carter.

    I wrote awhile back about how white racists hurt themselves almost as much as they hurt others. They’ll accept economic stagnation and a poorer quality of life generally for themselves rather than accept racial equality. Unfortunately their backwardness is hurting the rest of us, as well.

    NOLA News: Revelry vs. Reality

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    Director Spike Lee was just named a winner of the annual George Polk Awards for his HBO documentary, “When the Levees Broke,” the Associated Press says. Appropriate, considering today is Fat Tuesday — Mardi Gras — a day associated with New Orleans.

    Mary Foster of the Associated Press reports that NOLA’s Mardi Gras revelers have traded revelry for reality. Last year’s Mardi Gras parades were scaled down, but not this year’s. Tracy Smith reports for CBS News:

    The celebration has been bigger than last year, with more than 700,000 people coming to the party, which ends at midnight.

    A lot of tourists come for the music. And one of the few signs of recovery in the 18 months since Hurricane Katrina is that many musicians have come back home, thanks in large part to a housing program designed to keep and attract them.

    Musicians seem to be an exception. About a third of the city’s residents plan to leave. Bill Walsh reported for the February 7 Times-Picayune:

    Congressional frustration with the pace of Gulf Coast hurricane recovery exploded Tuesday with one lawmaker calling Louisiana’s Road Home housing program “a joke” and others berating the Bush administration for limiting public housing. …

    … Committee Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., went so far as to issue an apology to the residents of Louisiana and Mississippi for what he called “a complete failure of the administration here in Washington to respond to that crisis.”

    Pursuing that theme, the committee hammered away at Roy Bernardi, deputy secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for plans to demolish four major New Orleans public housing complexes with 3,900 apartments rather than rehabilitate them. …

    … But the level of distrust of the federal agency became clear during a break in the proceedings when New Orleans public housing residents confronted Bernardi across the witness table.

    They said HUD was overstating the damage to public housing and that many apartments could be reopened in short order. They also said that $1,100 disaster rental vouchers, which expire Sept. 30, are of limited use in the New Orleans area, where rents have skyrocketed because of limited availability.

    “Why are you playing politics with our lives,” said Sharon Sears Jasper, a former resident of the St. Bernard housing complex. “Why are you destroying livable homes? Why do you want to make us homeless?”

    And then there are the schools. The New Orleans public school system was struggling before Katrina. After, it was devastated.

    Less than a month after Hurricane Katrina, the state of Louisiana received a $20.9 million No Child Left Behind grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The catch? The grant was to reopen charter schools, not open enrollment public schools. In addition, the state announced it would establish ten new charter schools.

    The result is described by Jan Resseger, The Chicago Defender:

    In America public education is supposed to be provided for everybody, but during this past January in New Orleans, 300 children languished out of school on a waiting list because the Louisiana Recovery School District (RSD) had neither buildings nor teachers to serve them.

    Only when the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and local attorney Tracie Washington filed separate lawsuits on February 1, under federal law and Louisiana’s compulsory attendance act, did the RSD pledge to open two additional schools for the beginning of second semester, February 5.

    It is now clear that a humanitarian crisis in the aftermath of a hurricane is a poor time to experiment with school governance.

    Aided by a $20.9 million federal charter school grant that came on September 30, 2005, less than one month after the storm, the Louisiana Legislature used Hurricane Katrina as an excuse for state takeover and a massive charter school experiment in New Orleans.

    Today, over half of New Orleans’s 54 public schools are charter schools. From a recent editorial in The Harbus, an Harvard University independent student publication (emphasis added):

    New Orleans currently has the highest percentage of charter schools of any urban school district in the country. With over half of its 54 public schools operating as charter schools, New Orleans has become a focal point of the education reform movement in the United States. If the Crescent City can emerge from Katrina with a more effective school system than it had prior to the storm, two things will happen. On the micro level, the children of the city will benefit tremendously. On the macro level, proponents of charter schools will have the large-scale example they need to push increased reform in other districts around the country.

    Back to Jan Resseger:

    Since the hurricane, parents have been required to apply to a fragmented system: a few selective admissions public schools left to be operated by the New Orleans School Board, 31 independent charter schools, and 18 schools opened by the RSD itself only when too few potential operators filed applications to launch charter schools. While Robin Jarvis, the RSD superintendent, blames today’s dysfunction on the condition of the public schools pre-Katrina, the real problem is that Louisiana and the RSD never planned to manage school operations.

    That the RSD was unprepared to run a school system was clear in July 2006, when its ten person staff included a public relations liaison but no special education coordinator. After Louisiana laid off and then fired all 4,500 of New Orleans’ teachers who had been working in classrooms the day before Katrina struck, the RSD began advertising for 500 teachers only in late July 2006, after those best qualified had already taken jobs in charter schools or outside New Orleans. A shortage of teachers has plagued the RSD since last September. Today 33 percent of teachers hired by the RSD are uncertified.

    So much for the education reform movement. The New Orleans “reformers” seem to be following the Iraq model — lay off everybody with job experience and knowledge and replace them with ideologues and hacks.

    Other school districts across the Gulf Coast have scrambled successfully to welcome children back to the schools they attended pre-Katrina. A better plan for New Orleans would have been to keep one coherent system, retain New Orleans’ pre-Katrina teachers, open schools in all neighborhoods, and plan for slightly more schools than required for children immediately expected to return. The only side effect would have been smaller classes in under-enrolled schools until children moved back to fill the seats.

    Now, after Louisiana granted charters and selective admissions schools the right to cap class sizes, the RSD is in the position of trying to pressure those “protected” schools to accept more children to reduce appalling over-crowding in RSD schools. Meanwhile the RSD has lacked the capacity to get other rotting buildings repaired.

    Becky Bohrer of the Associated Press reported this month that the RSD is trying to attract new teachers by appealing to their sense of adventure:

    Wanted: Idealistic teachers looking for a Peace Corps-style adventure in a city in distress.

    Some of New Orleans’ most desperate, run-down schools are beset with a severe shortage of teachers, and they are struggling mightily to attract candidates by appealing to their sense of adventure and desire to make a difference. Education officials are even offering to help new teachers find housing. …

    … After the storm, some of the worst of the worst public schools were put under state control, and those are the ones finding it particularly hard to attract teachers. The 19 schools in the state-run Recovery School District have 8,580 students and about 540 teachers, or about 50 fewer than they need — a shortage so severe that about 300 students who want to enroll have been put on a waiting list. …

    …At Rabouin High, which has about 600 students, the halls echo with the shouts of teenagers who should be in class. Many have to share textbooks, if they have them at all. Doors lack knobs or, in the case of a girls’ bathroom, don’t close completely. Students have to pass through a metal detector to get inside, and guards patrol the halls.

    About half of Rabouin’s 34 teachers are first-year educators or new to Louisiana.

    Earlier this month the American Federation of Teachers called for a protest.

    “Where will these children receive an education?” asked Ed McElroy, president of the 1.3-million-member AFT, a national affiliate of NYSUT. McElroy was responding to reports in the New Orleans Times-Picayune that at least 300 children seeking spots in the city’s so-called public schools have been turned away – “wait-listed” – and told that the campuses “would have no room.”

    “These recent events make a mockery of the promise, made soon after Hurricane Katrina, that a state takeover of New Orleans’ public schools would create a ‘new birth of excellence and opportunity'” for children in the city’s long-troubled school system, McElroy charged.

    He said the 17 schools that are part of the state-run Recovery School District are resorting to the same tactics – enrollment caps and selective admission standards – that many of the locally operated charter and non-charter schools have long used to turn away applicants.

    McElroy noted that a charter school group called “Teach NOLA” recently sponsored a number of teacher recruitment ads on several Web sites, including Job.net and Idealist.org, that included the proviso: “Certified teachers will teach in charter schools, and non-certified teachers will teach in the state-run Recovery School District.”

    It seems some children are being left behind.

    Stabbed in the Back

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    For more than sixty years the American Right has been fueled by a “stabbed in the back” meme. As Kevin Baker wrote,

    Every state must have its enemies. Great powers must have especially monstrous foes. Above all, these foes must arise from within, for national pride does not admit that a great nation can be defeated by any outside force. That is why, though its origins are elsewhere, the stab in the back has become the sustaining myth of modern American nationalism. Since the end of World War II it has been the device by which the American right wing has both revitalized itself and repeatedly avoided responsibility for its own worst blunders. Indeed, the right has distilled its tale of betrayal into a formula: Advocate some momentarily popular but reckless policy. Deny culpability when that policy is exposed as disastrous. Blame the disaster on internal enemies who hate America. Repeat, always making sure to increase the number of internal enemies.

    On Sunday, Robert Farley of Lawyers, Guns and Money noted current developments in back-stabbing:

    The stab-in-the-back narrative is now in full gear. What Kaus merely abets, Glenn Reynolds, Mark Steyn, and the editors of Investors Business Daily push full throttle; America will lose because of the perfidy of liberals. The Surge is providing the proximate excuse. After four years of disastrous ineptitude during which Reynolds et al happily watched the Bush administration destroy America’s standing in the world and wage the most incompetent conflict since the War of 1812, they’ve decided that opposition to the trivial escalation provided by the Surge is the final necessary indicator of treason in the Democratic Party.

    Never mind that, when the surge was proposed, the Joint Chiefs unanimously opposed it. Never mind the advice of Lt. Gen. William Odom —

    A Congress, or a president, prepared to quit the game of “who gets the blame” could begin to alter American strategy in ways that will vastly improve the prospects of a more stable Middle East. …

    … The first and most critical step is to recognize that fighting on now simply prolongs our losses and blocks the way to a new strategy. Getting out of Iraq is the pre-condition for creating new strategic options. Withdrawal will take away the conditions that allow our enemies in the region to enjoy our pain. It will awaken those European states reluctant to collaborate with us in Iraq and the region.

    Sooner or later, U.S. troops will withdraw from Iraq. And just as the Right whined that Franklin Roosevelt gave away eastern Europe at Yalta, and that “liberals” in the State Department “lost China” to Mao, and that we could have “won” in Vietnam were it not for the dirty bleeping hippies, the Right will spend the rest of this century pointing fingers at the Left for losing Iraq. Count on it.

    But now the Right is in self-marginalization mode, commonly called “eating their own.” For example, Republican presidential candidate John McCain has blamed Donald Rumsfeld for the “mismanagement” of the war. And the True Believers are outraged. One called this a “cheap shot” and declared McCain to be “anathema in 2008.” Another predicted that McCain’s campaign would end in a “well-deserved rout.”

    John Hinderaker of Power Line     attempts nuance:

    McCain is entitled to editorialize, of course, and I believe he has been consistent in calling for more troops. It seems odd to blame Rumsfeld, though; the administration’s position has always been that it would provide more troops if the generals said they needed them. The military judgment of the generals on the ground has been, up until recently, that they had enough personnel to do the job.

    In other words, the “commanders on the ground” didn’t want more troops as long as George Bush didn’t want to send more troops, but now that he wants to send some, they have changed their minds. None of these meatheads can extrapolate from this that Bush doesn’t give a bleep what the “commanders on the ground” think.

    My guess is that McCain’s criticism is more about the future than the past. What he really wants is to buy time for the surge to work. As Paul noted yesterday, McCain has acknowledged that if the surge doesn’t work, there probably won’t be sufficient public support for the war effort to try a Plan B. By emphasizing the alleged “mismanagement” of the past, McCain is trying to generate optimism that, if properly run and adequately manned, our effort can succeed.

    Slightly off topic, but noteworthy:

    While McCain is entitled to editorialize, the AP reporter isn’t. But get this, immediately after McCain’s criticism of Rumsfeld:

      The comments were in sharp contrast to McCain’s statement when Rumsfeld resigned in November, and failed to address the reality that President Bush is the commander in chief.

    Apparently it’s a matter of policy at the Associated Press that President Bush be blamed for everything, so the reporter made up for McCain’s omission.

    Apparently it’s a matter of policy among rightie bloggers that President Bush be blamed for nothing, in spite of the fact that he claims to be “the Decider.” It’s as if, deep down inside, they know he’s an empty suit and don’t expect anything from him but speeches and ribbon-cutting. For another point of view, see “George Bush as Fifth Columnist: Aiding America’s Enemies” by Doug Bandow at Antiwar.com.

    Back to the marginalization of the Right — there’s an old saying — Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. The Republican Party stopped being “centrist” years ago, and instead based its power on a coalition of hard-right whackjob factions — Fetus People, Gun People, homophobes, isolationists, neocons, racists, etc. And now it’s flea-bit. As DownWithTyranny asks (and I love the photo), how could any candidate possibly win the GOP nomination by appealing to these mutts and still be marketable in the general election?

    But for a real stabbed-in-the-back extravaganza, check out Richard Viguerie’s new book, Conservatives Betrayed. Along with John McCain, entities identified by Viguerie as backstabbers include Congress, Democrats (of course), and Arnold Schwarzenegger. But Viguerie also feels “betrayed” by President Bush. You’ll love the reason why —

    Even after being mercilessly pummeled by them time and again on every issue during his first six years as President, George W. Bush has not learned his lesson — he still wants to make friends with the Democrats. Albert Einstein said it best: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.”

    Naturally, the President of the (entire) United States must shun the majority party, or else he’s a traitor. I guess Viguerie hasn’t noticed Bush’s long-standing pattern of making conciliatory noises even as his actions prove he doesn’t mean it.

    An online poll identifies the worst offenders: “Conservative leaders who kept silent while the GOP became the party of Big Government”; corruption, legal and illegal; President Bush (doesn’t say why); “Mainstream media that may have influenced the voters to throw out the Republicans”; “Conservative media that kept silent while the GOP became the party of Big Government”; Sen. Ted Stevens; Sen. Bill Frist; Rep Dennis Hastert; and “Blunders and misstatements by Republican candidates.”

    You can see the stabbed-in-the-back mentality all over this list. Republicans didn’t lose in 2006 because they screwed up, or because they are out of step with most voters. They were betrayed.

    More Shame

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    Riverbend:

    Let me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts: It’s worse. It’s over. You lost. You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets. You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq’s first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile.

    Shame

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    Top Gear in New Orleans

    This is a clip from a British reality show, Top Gear. In this episode, three Brits buy cheap cars in Florda and take a road trip across the Deep South to New Orleans. A video to another segment is posted at Crooks and Liars.

    This clip shows the end of the trip, as the guys drive into New Orleans. Here’s a transcript:

    [voiceover] My word; were we in for a shock. We had seen on the news what Hurricane Katrina had done, but seeing the devastation for real was truly astonishing.

    [The Brits look around]

    [Brit #1:] Oh, my god

    [Brit #2:] Oh, look at this

    [Brit #3:] Well, now this is extraordinary. Every house! I’ve been driving now, what about 15 miles. There isn’t a pavement, there isn’t a building, there isn’t anything that isn’t smashed. It’s such a vast scale of destruction.

    [Voiceover] A year had passed since Katrina had blown through, and we sort of assumed that after 12 months the wealthiest nation on earth would have fixed it. But we were wrong.

    How can the rest of America sleep at night knowing that this is here?

    Well, how can we?

    Happy Mardi Gras. I guess.

    Irreconcilable Differences

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    Jeff Jacoby has written a Boston Globe column titled “Irreconcilable positions: support troops, oppose war.” It begins:

    WHAT DOES IT mean to support the troops but oppose the cause they fight for?

    It is not at all irreconcilable to oppose the Iraq War but wish to support the troops fighting the war. “Supporting the troops” means seeing to it they have whatever they need to stay as safe and healthy as possible, both while at war and after. It means providing state-of-the-art body armor now, not three years from now, maybe. If they are wounded, it means providing first-class medical care, not parking them in moldy, roach-infested hospital.

    Bill Maxwell writes in the St. Petersburg Times (“White House delivers surge in lies, hypocrisy“):

    Here is a substantive example of the reality of who supports the troops and who does not. The Washington Post reported last week that the Army, which has suffered the largest number of fatalities, began the Iraq war in 2003 with an estimated $56-billion shortage of equipment – including advanced Humvees equipped with armor kits designed to reduce troop deaths from roadside bombs.

    Well, guess what? Nearly four years later, the Army, the Marine Corps and the National Guard still do not have an adequate number of Humvees equipped with the needed FRAG Kit 5 armor manufactured with more flexible materials that slow projectiles and contain debris, thus causing fewer deaths.

    Is this support of our troops?

    Pentagon brass and the president have known about these shortages from the beginning. And, while saber rattling, they have known all along that serious shortages of the new armor have been responsible, directly and indirectly, for hundreds of U.S. deaths.

    Is this support of our troops?

    Yet Jeff Jacoby, who (I infer) “supports” the troops, doesn’t write a word about armor or hospitals. Indeed, he only obliquely refers to the war in Iraq. Instead, he writes about the “cause.” What does it mean to support the troops but oppose the cause they fight for?

    But what is the cause? If the cause is making the United States safer from terrorism, then it is perfectly logical to support the cause and oppose the war. The war is counterproductive to that cause. This was the conclusion of a National Intelligence Estimate of April 2006 portions of which were declassified and released in September 2006. It says,

    We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere.

    • The Iraq conflict has become the “cause celebre” for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.

    We assess that the underlying factors fueling the spread of the movement outweigh its vulnerabilities and are likely to do so for the duration of the timeframe of this Estimate.

    I also wish everyone could read James Fallows’s “Declaring Victory” article from the September 2006 Atlantic Monthly, which I’m very sorry is available only to subscribers. However, I have blogged about this article here, here, and here, here, and probably elsewhere. In this article Fallows interviews a number of national security experts for their assessment of where the U.S. stands in its counterterrorism efforts. Fallows’s experts and the NIE came to pretty much the same conclusions.

    Among other things, the NIE and the Fallows experts agreed that the war in Iraq is growing the threat of terrorism against the United States, not reducing it. Very briefly, Bush’s Folly is not only increasing the number of Islamic hotheads who want to strike America; it is also diverting many national security resources that could be put to better use elsewhere.

    I realize that the cause keeps changing even as the war goes on. As Frank Rich wrote,

    Oh what a malleable war Iraq has been. First it was waged to vanquish Saddam’s (nonexistent) nuclear arsenal and his (nonexistent) collaboration with Al Qaeda. Then it was going to spread (nonexistent) democracy throughout the Middle East. Now it is being rebranded as a fight against Tehran. Mr. Bush keeps saying that his saber rattling about Iran is not “a pretext for war.” Maybe so, but at the very least it’s a pretext for prolonging the disastrous war we already have.

    And then there’s the democracy thing. There’s an outstanding article about this in the March issue of Harper’s magazine (not yet online). It is by Ken Silverstein, and titled “Parties of God: The Bush Doctrine and the Rise of Islamic Democracy.” Silverstein explores a paradox — that, if Middle Eastern countries actually became democratic, Islamists would control large blocs, if not majorities, in every one of those countries. This may account for the fact that the Bush Administration’s best allies in the region are not democracies (e.g., Saudi Arabia; Jordon).

    Jacoby doesn’t say what the cause is, either, although I take it he thinks it has something to do with liberty.

    America is a free country, but it is not the Michael Moores or the ROTC-banners or the senatorial loudmouths who keep it free. They merely enjoy the freedom that others are prepared to defend with their lives. It is the men and women who volunteer to wear the uniform to whom we owe our liberty. Surely they deserve better than pious claims of “support” from those who are working for their defeat.

    Now, I have thought about it at considerable length, and I say honestly that I have no idea what Jacoby is talking about. Exactly what does fighting a war in Iraq have to do with America being a “free country”? And what does Jacoby mean by “free country,” anyway? Does it mean that the United States governs itself, and is not a vassal state of some other country? Or does he mean the people of the United States enjoy political liberty because the government respects their rights? Or both? Those are both perfectly fine things, and I support them. But what does either one have to do with Iraq?

    Republicans’ hysterical shrieking     notwithstanding, Islamist jihadists are not an existential threat to the United States. And Geoffrey Stone notes today that the Bush Administration has has broken new ground in gathering information about protesters of the war. What does that say about the connection between the Iraq War and liberty, pray tell?

    But let’s pretend for a minute that there is a cause, that we all agree on what it is, and that it serves the interests of the whole United States, not just some special interest groups therein. With that assumption in mind, let’s go back to Jacoby’s question, What does it mean to support the troops but oppose the cause they fight for?

    The answer to that would, I think, depend on what the cause is. And since we’re dealing with a hypothetical cause, we can only give a hypothetical answer. But I still don’t think such a position is necessarily irreconcilable.

    Jacoby continues,

    No loyal Colts fan rooted for Indianapolis to lose the Super Bowl. No investor buys 100 shares of Google in the hope that Google’s stock will tank. No one who applauds firefighters for their courage and education wants a four-alarm blaze to burn out of control.

    The Colts fan may have bet on Indianapolis, but otherwise there’s no rational reason for anyone to do any of those things. But the situation in Iraq is not comparable to any of those things. There are a great many rational reasons to be opposed to the war there. Jacoby seems to be saying that opposition to the war is irrational. Then he goes on …

    Yet there is no end of Americans who insist they “support” US troops in Iraq but want the war those troops are fighting to end in defeat. The two positions are irreconcilable. You cannot logically or honorably curse the war as an immoral neocon disaster or a Halliburton oil grab or “a fraud . . . cooked up in Texas,” yet bless the troops who are waging it.

    Again, I don’t see why not. The troops are our fellow Americans who have been put in danger, and the “cause” for which they fight makes no sense. We want to get them out of danger, but for a lot of reasons (Republicans) we are unable to do that legally. Until we can get them out of danger, we support them in any way we can.

    Jacoby’s position makes sense only if one assumes that the troops and the cause are, somehow, indivisible. Jacoby doesn’t seem to grasp that “the troops” are individual human beings and not some amorphous, soulless entity created by the military-industrial complex.

    Jacoby, unfortunately, continues,

    But logic and honor haven’t stopped members of Congress from trying to square that circle. The nonbinding resolution they debated last week was a flagrant attempt to have it both ways. One of its two clauses professed to “support and protect” the forces serving “bravely and honorably” in Iraq. The other declared that Congress “disapproves” the surge in troops now underway — a surge that General David Petraeus , the new military commander in Iraq, considers essential.

    And which the Joint Chiefs unanimously opposed. See also Gen. William E. Odom, “Victory Is Not an Option.”

    Jacoby:

    It was a disgraceful and dishonest resolution, and it must have done wonders for the insurgents’ morale. Democrats hardly bothered to disguise that when they say they “support and protect” the troops, what they really intend is to undermine and endanger their mission.

    The Democrats want to endanger their mission? The troops‘ mission, which is indivisible from the troops? Never mind that no one knows what the bleeping mission is any more. Jacoby has decided there is no rational reason for opposing troop escalation, and now he’s saying the Democrats are trying to “undermine” it. Makes them look pretty bad, huh?

    The Politico, a new Washington news site, reported Thursday that the strategy of “top House Democrats, working in concert with anti war groups,” is to “pursue a slow-bleed strategy designed to gradually limit the administration’s options.”

    “The Politico” has turned out to be the new online branch of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. Politico congressional bureau chief John Bresnahan coined the phrase “slow-bleed” to characterize the Democrats’ strategy in dealing with the administration on Iraq. But the RNC then circulated a letter that attributed the phrase to the Democrats, claiming that “slow bleed” is what the Dems call their Iraq policy. Expect “slow bleed” to be the Right’s favorite phrase for a while.

    Can we say “disgraceful and dishonest,” Mr. Jacoby?

    If they had the courage of their convictions, they would forthrightly defund the war, bring the troops home, and brave the political consequences. Instead they plan a more agonizing and drawn-out defeat — slowly choking off the war by denying reinforcements, eventually leaving no alternative but retreat.

    After yesterday’s farce in the Senate, in which Republicans blocked a bleeping debate on a bleeping nonbinding resolution, I’m not entirely sure what Jacoby thinks the Dems could do. At this point I believe most of them want to end the war and bring the troops home as quickly as practicable. If there’s to be a “slow bleed,” as opposed to a quicker and cleaner redeployment, it will be the Republicans causing it.

    That is how those who oppose the war “support” the troops — they “slow-bleed” them dry. Or they declare that the lives laid down by those troops were “wasted,” as Senator Barack Obama did last Sunday. Obama later weaseled away from that characterization , but the gaffe had been made. And like most political gaffes, it exposed the speaker’s true feelings.

    One rarely finds a column by Jacoby that isn’t pure weasel. This one is a fine example. Anyway, I’d like Jacoby to explain to me how American lives aren’t being wasted in Iraq, seeing as how there’s no discernible cause or mission they’re fighting and dying for.

    And why wouldn’t Obama feel that way? If an American serviceman dies in the course of a war that toppled a monstrous dictatorship, opened the door to decent Arab governance, and has become the central front in the struggle against radical Islam, his death is not in vain.

    Actually the war toppled a monstrous dictatorship and replaced it with a monstrous chaos that Iraqis hate even more than they hated Saddam Hussein. It no more opened a door to “decent Arab governance” than I can fly. And I’ve already discussed what a crock it is to think the Iraq War is going to reduce radical Islam.

    It is the sacrifice of an American hero, the last full measure of devotion given in the cause of freedom. But if he dies in the course of a senseless and illegitimate invasion — which appears to be Obama’s view of Iraq — then his life was wasted. If that’s what you believe, Senator, why not say so?

    I guess he did, and the Right threw a fit about it.

    Obama’s is merely the latest in a series of senatorial comments that offer a glimpse of the left’s anti military disdain.

    By now it should be pretty obvious that it’s righties like Jacoby who truly disdain the military. They’re just cannon fodder to him, not people.

    Smart people who work hard become successful, John Kerry “joked” last fall, but uneducated sluggards “get stuck in Iraq.” Osama bin Laden is beloved by Muslims for “building schools, building roads . . . building day-care facilities,” Washington Senator Patty Murray explained in 2002, while Americans only show up to “bomb in Iraq and go to Afghanistan.” Obama’s Illinois colleague Dick Durbin took to the Senate floor to equate US military interrogators in Guantanamo Bay with “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags,” and similar mass-murderers, such as “Pol Pot or others.”

    Three lies in a row, Jacoby. Jacoby cannot so much as sneeze without being disgraceful and dishonest. Here are links to the facts about each quote: John Kerry, Patty Murray (see also this); and Dick Durbin.

    Next:

    It goes without saying that many Democrats and liberals take a back seat to no one in their admiration and appreciation of the US military. But there is no denying that a notable current of antimilitary hostility runs through the left as well. Examples are endless: ROTC is banned on elite college campuses. San Francisco bars a historic battleship from its port. Signs at antiwar protests urge troops to “shoot their officers.” An Ivy League professor prays for “a million Mogadishus.” Michael Moore compares Iraqi insurgents who kill Americans to the Minutemen of Revolutionary New England.

    I’m not going to fact check those. By now it’s clearly established that “facts” and “Jeff Jacoby” have irreconcilable differences. Even if true, these are isolated incidents, and anyway, Jacoby wants to keep the troops in Iraq. I’d say that’s antimilitary.

    From the Bill Maxwell column linked above:

    To surge or not to surge could be a great and honest national debate. It certainly is a needed debate. But we are not having an honest debate.

    We are being fed devious semantics about who supports our troops and who does not. To Republicans backing the surge, wanting to bring our troops home and take them out of harm’s way is tantamount to being the enemy of our troops.

    Think how illogical this position sounds: If you want to save the lives our soldiers, if you do not want to see another limb blown off, if you do not want to see another brain pierced by shrapnel and if you want little children to see their parents return home safely from the battlefield, you do not support the troops.

    Back to Jacoby, final paragraph:

    America is a free country, but it is not the Michael Moores or the ROTC-banners or the senatorial loudmouths who keep it free.

    Nor, might I add, disgraceful and dishonest Boston Globe columnists who can’t string two sentence together that aren’t a lie.

    They merely enjoy the freedom that others are prepared to defend with their lives. It is the men and women who volunteer to wear the uniform to whom we owe our liberty. Surely they deserve better than pious claims of “support” from those who are working for their defeat.

    They deserve better than pious claims of “support” from the disgraceful and dishonest likes of Jacoby. They deserve to be brought home from Bush’s Folly.

    See also:

    Glenn Greenwald, “Gen. Odom explains basic reality to Hugh Hewitt and the ‘Victory Caucus‘”

    Rep. Jerry McNerney: “Why supporting the troops means opposing the president.”

    Also also: “Bring Them Home” bumper sticker, t-shirt; “Love America, Leave Iraq” t-shirt.

    Update: Mark Steyn descends into madness.

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