The Natives Are Restless

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John Tierney doesn’t understand voters.

You may have heard that American voters are disappointed. They are disappointed with Dennis Hastert and the rest of Congress. They are very disappointed with the war in Iraq. They are very, very disappointed with President Bush.

I share their unhappiness, but I must confess to one further regret. I am disappointed with the voters — or at least the ones who show up in public-opinion polls. They keep complaining that Washington doesn’t understand what they want, but who on earth could?

Since “voters” are hardly a monolithic group, you might assume that “voters” want many diverse and conflicting things. But if you keep reading Tierney’s column, you’ll notice that Tierney has a maddening tendency to confuse soft majorities for solid mandates and to discount the influence of reality.

For example:

Early in the Iraq war, Americans told pollsters they favored it and considered it a major part of the war on terrorism. Then they decided the war was a mistake and didn’t reduce the risk of terrorism. Yet as they got angrier and angrier at Republicans for making a mess of Iraq, they kept telling pollsters that they didn’t trust the Democrats to do a better job of dealing with terrorism.

Early in the Iraq war, Americans were beaten over the head with a steady barrage of propaganda from government and media that if they didn’t support the Iraq war they supported terrorists. Pollingreports shows us some polling taken before the invasion, and I postulate that the majorities simply reflect the messages coming out of Washington and media at the time. Before the war, there was no meaningful national debate on all sides of the issue. Pro-war claims — about Iraq’s alleged nuclear capabilities, for example — went unchallenged. And since most of the public only heard one side of the issue, it’s not a big surprise the public supported that side.

In March 2003, 79% of adults nationwide polled by ABC News said Iraq posed a threat to the United States. This reflects the hysterical shrieking coming from Washington and the VRWC about the diabolical Saddam Hussein and his mushroom clouds. The same poll showed 65% favoring military action against Iraq. One suspects the first result had something to do with the second.

Today, three years later, 53% say that invading Iraq was a mistake (Newsweek poll, October 5-6).

Tierney wants you to believe this change in opinion shows that voters are fickle. That claims about Iraq being a dire threat turned out to be false, and that the war turned out to be one of the biggest blunders in American history, are not meaningful factors in Tierney World.

In March 2003, 55% said the Iraq war would last “a few weeks” or “several months.” Another 16% thought it would drag on as long as a year. Could it be the fact that the war is now more than three years old, with no end in sight, had something to do with changing peoples’ minds? Might the fact that the situation in Iraq has been deteriorating for some time — the phrase “hell in a handbasket” comes to mind — also be a factor?

A close look at the polls from 2003 shows some ambivalence. The ABC poll simply dated March 2003 shows 56% of respondents believing support from the United Nations Security Council was “desirable, but not necessary” before launching an invasion. But a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll taken February 24-26, 2003, said that only 38% of respondents thought the U.S. should act without UN approval. A majority, 40%, though UN approval was necessary, and 19% said the U.S. should not send ground troops at all. I’m no expert, but this suggests to me that public opinion was both soft and volatile; opinions were not strongly held and could be swayed by subsequent events. Which they were.

Tierney stumbles ahead, complaining that voters “can’t break their old prejudices” while exhibiting plenty of old prejudices of his own. For example:

On the domestic front, voters still trust Democrats to deal with issues like education and Social Security even though the Democrats have run out of ideas. Their basic educational strategy is to spend more money and keep teachers’ unions happy. They have no plan to keep Social Security solvent, except “taxing the rich,” which won’t do the trick.

Tierney manages to pack so much bias and misinformation into three sentences that just thinking about flushing it all out makes me tired. Briefly: We hear once again that Dems have “no ideas,” while no one notices the Republicans haven’t had a new idea in at least 40 years (and those ideas have mostly been bad ideas). In these and other sentences in the column Tierney assumes that teachers’ unions have a deleterious effect on public education, and he seems to believe that busting teachers’ unions would all by itself improve public education. But he doesn’t explain why he believes this. And in fact many people who understand numbers better than I do say that raising the Social Security cap would go a long way toward keeping the system solvent. Certainly that would be a better solution than President Bush’s insane privatization scheme, and most voters were smart enough to figure that out in spite of the barrage of propaganda.

I love this part:

Republicans fought to improve schools at the local level by giving more choices and power to students, parents and principals. These reforms (like vouchers and charter schools) were popular in places where Republicans overcame the resistance of Democrats and teachers’ unions, but in national polls, voters preferred Democrats to deal with education.

So President Bush abandoned the party’s principles and made a deal with Ted Kennedy to enact the No Child Left Behind law, a centralized Democratic-style plan that gave the Republicans a brief boost in the polls. Like previous Democratic plans for reviving education with regulations from Washington, it was an expensive flop, but voters still tell pollsters they trust the Democrats to fix the schools.

Get that? “No Child Left Behind” is an expensive Democratic flop. It’s Ted Kennedy’s fault, because he allowed himself to be suckered into a demonstration of bipartisanship to support President Bush’s initiative. Wow.

Tierney continues to believe that voters “overwhelmingly trust Republicans on Iraq, terrorism and other foreign policy issues,” even though most current polls say otherwise. Keep up, dude.

But the biggest flaw in Tierney’s thinking is not that he has replaced his cerebral cortex with a Republican talking points microchip, or that he discounts the influence of empiricism on voter opinion. I think his biggest problem is that he misunderstands what polls are for. He assumes that polls are taken to see how voters think. Not so; polls are taken to understand how the propaganda is working — how “the message” is sinking in. They are taken to give the propagandists some feedback so they can better fine tune the message. They are taken as part of the propaganda campaign — if a poll can be skewed to show that a majority favors X, then proponents of X can use that poll to create a bandwagon effect for X (everybody else likes X; why don’t you?). Polls can also be used to reinforce messages that have taken hold. For example, if news consumers are perpetually being told that polls say people don’t trust Democrats on national security, it reinforces the propaganda that Democrats can’t be trusted on national security.

Since the dawn of the Mass Media Age — sometime in the 1950s — the people at the top of the power pyramid have been using mass media to tell voters what to think. This has been doubly true since the 1980s, after the Fairness Doctrine was eliminated, and after the packaging of news as entertainment rather than, you know, news, became standard practice. And most of all, since the Right Wing media infrascruture came to dominate everything we hear and everything we read about politics and government. The Big Shots tell us what they want us to think, and they take polls to be sure that’s what we’re thinking. That’s how the system works.

If in spite of the system most Americans can, eventually, figure out when they’re being baboozled, then there’s hope for us all .

Getting back to Tierney’s original question — what do voters want? — polls essentially are a reflection of what Washington insiders expect and desire voters to want. Outside the Web, voters are rarely able to articulate what they might, truly, deep down, want. And they’re restless, Tierney, not fickle.

Update: On the other hand …

Update update: See also Greg Sargent.

More Bombs

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Following up the last post, which is long enough already — here’s something I didn’t know. Selig S. Harrison writes for Newswseek:

On Sept. 19, 2005, North Korea signed a widely heralded denuclearization agreement with the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea. Pyongyang pledged to “abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs.” In return, Washington agreed that the United States and North Korea would “respect each other’s sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize their relations.”

Four days later, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sweeping financial sanctions against North Korea designed to cut off the country’s access to the international banking system, branding it a “criminal state” guilty of counterfeiting, money laundering and trafficking in weapons of mass destruction.

The Bush administration says that this sequence of events was a coincidence.

Frankly, as incompetent as the Bushies are, you can’t rule that out. But Michael Hirsch says,

Bush administration officials will not concede this publicly, but hardliners in Washington have long been pushing for a policy of regime change against Pyongyang. President Bush himself subtly underlined that threat when, at a Monday morning news conference, he said “the oppressed and impoverished people of North Korea deserve” a “brighter future.” Hence, only days after China orchestrated a framework agreement in September 2005 that promised the North it would be rewarded if it abandoned its nuclear program, including with a civilian nuclear reactor, the Bush administration imposed sanctions on the Macao-based Banco Delta Asia that effectively froze the accounts of Kim and other North Korean elites. The action is believed to have so riled Kim that he refused to return to the talks.

Let’s go back to Harrison for a moment:

Whatever the truth, I found on a recent trip to Pyongyang that North Korean leaders view the financial sanctions as the cutting edge of a calculated effort by dominant elements in the administration to undercut the Sept. 19 accord, squeeze the Kim Jong Il regime and eventually force its collapse. My conversations made clear that North Korea’s missile tests in July and its threat last week to conduct a nuclear test explosion at an unspecified date “in the future” were directly provoked by the U.S. sanctions. In North Korean eyes, pressure must be met with pressure to maintain national honor and, hopefully, to jump-start new bilateral negotiations with Washington that could ease the financial squeeze. When I warned against a nuclear test, saying that it would only strengthen opponents of negotiations in Washington, several top officials replied that “soft” tactics had not worked and they had nothing to lose.

If you know the history of the Bushies and North Korea, you understand that last sentence is a joke.

It was no secret to journalists covering the September 2005 negotiations, or to the North Koreans, that the agreement was bitterly controversial within the administration and represented a victory for State Department advocates of a conciliatory approach to North Korea over proponents of “regime change” in Pyongyang. The chief U.S. negotiator, Christopher Hill, faced strong opposition from key members of his own delegation at every step of the way.

You get the picture, I’m sure.

Back to Michael Hirsch:

Indeed by late last week, when U.S. officials grew increasingly certain that North Korea would detonate a nuclear device, there was a sense of resignation in Washington—almost a feeling of relief that, at long last, strategic clarity had arrived. “At least there would be a unified front against North Korea” if Pyongyang tested, one senior official told NEWSWEEK on Friday. “And it would light a fire under some parties.” He was referring to China. For the last year Washington had effectively subcontracted nuclear negotiations to Beijing, which was given the lead in the “six-party” talks that pitted Pyongyang against the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea. China was key because, as Pyongyang’s longtime ally, it held the strongest hand against North Korea, controlling more than 70 percent of its energy supplies.

China has not been particularly tough with North Korea in the past. However,

The hope in Washington is now that Chinese President Hu Jintao will decide he’s finally had enough of his out-of-control former junior partner. With Sunday’s test Kim has now twice rebuffed Hu’s pleas for restraint. The last time was July, when Kim ignored the Chinese leader’s request not to test missiles. This time Kim insulted Hu the day after an important Sino-Japanese summit with Tokyo’s new prime minister, Shinzo Abe—a nationalist who will no doubt be probing China’s strategic determination—and on the eve of a big communist party plenary session at which Hu’s reputation will be on the line.

For Washington, almost everything is riding on this hope.

In other words, President George W. “lone cowboy” Bush is hoping China will save his ass.

U.S. officials are talking tough about beefing up their Proliferation Security Initiative, which mainly involves interdicting suspect shipments on the high seas.

Remember the So San affair?

But last week they quickly walked back any speculation that Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill’s stark rhetoric from last week—“North Korea can have a future or it can have these weapons. It can’t have both,” Hill said—meant a threat of war. The Pentagon is extremely leery of any military options, with the heavily-populated South Korean capital of Seoul lying vulnerable to missile attack just across the North Korean border. What Hill’s comment meant instead, several U.S. officials said, was that the U.N. Security Council would move to impose sanctions, and key countries such as China, Japan and South Korea would join in, ensuring that the Pyongyang regime remains utterly friendless.

At the Guardian, Simon Tisdall explains there may not be much anyone can do about Korea.

A storm of predictable condemnation rained down on the heads of North Korea’s isolated regime in the wake of its first atomic weapons test today…. But the strong words did not disguise the weakness of the international community’s position now that North Korea has finally crossed the line and indisputably become what it has long claimed to be – a nuclear weapons state. In short, the big powers can huff and puff, but there is not a lot new in practical terms that they can do. This development was expected. They simply couldn’t stop it. …

… Sanctions are the obvious tool to which the US, Japan and other concerned spectators such as Britain will now resort. But such measures have been tried before and have failed to modify Pyongyang’s behaviour. In fact, they may have made it worse.

It is only a little more than a year since North Korea agreed in principle to abandon its nuclear ambitions in exchange for US technology, aid and security guarantees. But US financial sanctions imposed on North Korean banks and businesses operating via Macau last winter appear to have caused serious pain in Pyongyang. Intentionally or not, they scuppered any chance of resurrecting the six-party process once it hit renewed difficulties. …

… The prospect that, like it or not, the international community will ultimately have to deal with North Korea on its own terms has significant implications elsewhere. Iran, whose suspect nuclear activities will soon be brought before the UN security council, may be encouraged in its defiance if no effective punitive action is taken against North Korea. Conversely, those in Washington who argue against direct talks with Iran, and against offering the sort of incentives proffered North Korea last year, may be persuaded by today’s events that dialogue is the only viable future option. Arguably, it was the Bush administration’s refusal to persist with former president Bill Clinton’s “framework agreement” with North Korea that has led to the present impasse.

Mr. Tisdall is an optimist. “Those in Washington” who helped bring the present impasse about are more likely to redouble their efforts to make matters worse.

Tim Grieve sums it up: The hard-liners in the White House were convinced from the beginning that a confrontational approach would bring North Korea to heel. Instead, the situation has deteriorated, and continues to deteriorate as the Bushies undermine their own diplomacy and throw away one opportunity after another to lower the temperature on a hot crisis.

Bombing

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Well, folks, North Korea claims it tested a nuclear weapon last night. Chalk up another achievement for the Bush foreign policy. David Sanger writes in the New York Times:

North Korea said Sunday night that it had set off its first nuclear test, becoming the eighth country in history, and arguably the most unstable and most dangerous, to proclaim that it has joined the club of nuclear weapons states.

Yesterday I dug up a four-year-old news story in which Condi Rice told Wolf Blitzer that the Bush Administration knew just how to handle Ki Jong Il; it was Saddam Hussein people should be worried about.

Rice said Iraq’s history shows the Baghdad regime is harder to contain than North Korea.

“These are not comparable situations,” she said. “They’re dangerous, both of them dangerous. But we believe that we have different methods that will work in North Korea that clearly have not and will not work in Iraq.”

Meanwhile —

The North Korean disclosure comes as the Bush administration faces a possible military confrontation with Iraq over its efforts to develop nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Florida, told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday that he considered North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and missile capability a bigger threat to the United States than Iraq.

Graham, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, urged the White House to rethink its priorities.

[Update: Please note that Senator Graham, who is now retired, said this in 2002, while the Bushies were busy whipping up hysteria over Saddam Hussein.]

So far, has the Bush foreign policy team gotten anything right? If they have, I don’t remember what it is.

I’ve already spent considerable blog time and bandwidth explaining why the current, um, challenge posed by North Korea is George W. Bush’s doing, and not Bill Clinton’s and/or Jimmy Carter’s, as righties would have you believe. See this post for the short explanation, and “Rolling Blunder” by Fred Kaplan and the Blame Bush for North Korea’s Nukes page from The Mahablog archives if you want more detail. I’m not going into all that again this morning, except to say that any troll who is dumb enough to repeat the “it’s Clinton’s fault” propaganda here without reading my long and carefully documented proof that it isn’t will be mercilessly ridiculed. Mercilessly, I say.

Here’s something I don’t believe I’ve said before, although others have — at Huffington Post, David Wallechinsky wrote,

The North Koreans and the Iranians looked around the world and saw that countries that had nuclear weapons, like Pakistan and China, were not in danger of being invaded by George Bush, while Saddam Hussein, who didn’t have a nuclear weapons program, was in prison and being tried for war crimes. If you were the leaders of North Korea or Iran, what would you do to ensure that your country would not be invaded by the United States? Easy call: you build nuclear weapons, which is exactly what both of them are doing. Nice going, Mister President.

From the Arms Control Association, in a review of At the Borderline of Armageddon: How American Presidents Managed the Atom Bomb by James E. Goodby.

In an excellent chapter on George W. Bush, Goodby characterizes the current president’s mindset as believing that “the time had finally come to scrap the old order.” To date, he has been quite successful in this objective. Goodby notes that other presidents helped build up the international nonproliferation and arms control regimes that they saw as supporting U.S. national security. Yet, Bush clearly believes that the United States, as the only remaining superpower, should be prepared to shape the international order unilaterally and has rejected treaties that would in any way restrict U.S. freedom of action. To this end, he withdrew from the ABM Treaty, despite strong Russian objections, and replaced the unratified START II with the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT). Also known as the Moscow Treaty, SORT lacks verification provisions, and its limits on future U.S. strategic forces are effectively toothless.

Although Bush has given high priority to preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons to perceived U.S. enemies, his actions have either been ineffectual or counterproductive. At the beginning of his term, he overruled the decision of Secretary of State Colin Powell to continue very promising negotiations that the Clinton administration had begun with North Korea, thus spurring Pyongyang to advance its nuclear weapons program. Disregarding the precedent followed by previous presidents, he initiated a preventive war against Iraq on the false grounds that it was illegally developing nuclear weapons. Most recently, he has agreed to negotiate a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with India, despite long-standing U.S. and Nuclear Suppliers Group policy to deny such aid to Pakistan, India, and Israel because they have not signed the NPT and are known to have nuclear weapons.

Today, confronted with the difficult problem of Iran’s potential nuclear weapons ambitions, Bush has made clear that all options are on the table if Iran refuses to terminate its uranium-enrichment program. Because UN agreement on effective sanctions is unlikely, rumors abound that Bush is seriously considering military actions in another preventive war. Given the international hostility that his policies have created, it is clear that any such action would have to be carried out unilaterally, with disastrous results to long-range U.S. security.

I take it from the review that Goodby approved of policies by Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan (as well as Kennedy and Johnson), but he had a little disagreement with Carter and was downright ambivalent about Clinton. So you can’t say the guy dislikes Bush just because he’s partisan.

(Off topic, but I got a kick out of this bit about LBJ:

President Lyndon B. Johnson, despite his growing preoccupation with Vietnam, rejected out of hand the use of nuclear weapons there. His view of nuclear war was brought home to me by his reaction at the final meeting in 1965 on the military budget to an item listed as DUCCS. In response to his question as to what this was, he was told it stood for Deep Underground Command and Control Site, a facility that would be located several thousand feet underground, between the White House and the Pentagon, designed to survive a ground burst of a 20-megaton bomb and sustain the president and key advisers for several months until it would be safe to exit through tunnels emerging many miles outside Washington. After a brief puzzled expression, Johnson let loose with a string of Johnsonian expletives making clear he thought this was the stupidest idea he had ever heard and that he had no intention of hiding in an expensive hole while the rest of Washington and probably the United States were burned to a crisp. That was the last I ever heard of DUCCS.

What do you want to bet some version of DUCCS has been resurrected by the Bushies?)

Anthony Faiola, Glenn Kessler and Dafna Linzer write for the Washington Post:

The announcement [by North Korea] brought a hailstorm of swift international denunciations … South Korean officials said they detected a significant man-made explosion in the barren northeast of the peninsula, and were substantiating the Pyongyang government’s claim. The test would make the Stalinist state the world’s eighth proven nuclear power, as well as its most volatile.

Chinese authorities immediately condemned the test. North Korea “has ignored the widespread opposition of the international community and conducted a nuclear test brazenly on October 9,” China’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement on its Web site. “The Chinese government is firmly opposed to this.”

Yet the reaction from the U.S. was more subdued.

The White House did not immediately confirm the test, but spokesman Tony Snow said in a statement: “U.S. and South Korean intelligence detected a seismic event Sunday at a suspected nuclear test site in North Korea. A North Korean nuclear test would constitute a provocative act, in defiance of the will of the international community and of our calls to refrain from actions that would aggravate tensions in northeast Asia. We expect the Security Council to take immediate actions to respond to this unprovoked act.”

Billmon predicted:

Tony Snow will step out tomorrow to tell us it’s really not such a big deal — the North Koreans and Kim Jong-il being ever so much nicer and more rational than those genocidal Iranians and their power-crazed dictator, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

This is followed by an update — a bit of transcript of Tony Snow tap dancing furiously to distract reporters from White House ineptitude. Pathetic and hilarious at once.

Via Memeorandum, a quickie survey of Right Blogosphere reactions indicates the Official VRWC Spin: It probably didn’t happen; if North Korea keeps testing, it will run out of weapons soon and we won’t have to worry about them; it’s Clinton’s and Carter’s fault.

I like this one:

I claim some credit for calling the timing just before the election [although I don’t claim to have predicted, one way or another, whether they’d go through with this]. I think this was an enormous miscalculation on North Korea’s part. The Republicans will be gleeful that no one will be talking about Mark Foley next week. The national conversation will be back to national security, and the Republicans will have the chance to do what they do best — act tough on such issues.

The operative word is, of course, act. But I’d be very surprised if North Korea’s test registers more than a blip in the national consciousness, and I’d be extremely surprised if it drives the Foley sex scandal off cable news. In the Nooz Biz, the operative word is, of course, sex.

President Bush will probably have no choice but to ignore the counsel of State Department doves who had nearly unopposed control of Bush’s North Korea policy until last August.

Yeah; until last August, he was doing a heck of a job.

Now, he’ll most likely use many of the options he didn’t use after North Korea’s July missile tests. I would expect some very severe sanctions and a move for a U.N. arms embargo.

He’s going to run to the UN for help? My, how the child has fallen.

I’m going to predict that in the next few days the Bush Administration will be taking a back seat to China and other world powers in dealing with North Korea. The Bushies might try some saber-rattling to impress the home folks (and distract reporters from Dennis Hastert), but the world knows Bush is running low on sabers to rattle. In truth, the only options Bush has, other than run to the UN, are embargos and sanctions, which is what Condi was talking about back in 2002. And embargos and sanctions just don’t have the sex appeal that war has.

For a more intelligent analysis of what Bush might do, see emptywheel.

Update: For a different view, see Bill Scher:

As LiberalOasis has noted several times in the last four years, the Bush Administration never was interested in a negotiated deal to prevent North Korea from getting nukes.

The neocons want regime change in North Korea, in an attempt to constrict the rise of China. And they see any deal as helping the North Korea dictator remain in power.

After initially suspending talks with North Korea, and unraveling the diplomatic progress made by the Clinton Administration, the Bushies then agreed to “six-party” talks.

But the move was not intended to make new diplomatic progress. It was intended to make the Bushies look like they tried diplomatic avenues, when in fact, they made no serious proposals.

We can now see the results of this so-called “hard-line” strategy. A nuclear North Korea. A greater risk of more nuclear proliferation. A more unstable world.

Also, Glenn Kessler’s analysis in the Washington Post is pretty good, although it doesn’t clarify the uranium versus plutonium issue.

Update update: Josh Marshall has a good analysis, too, but the permalink isn’t working. You’ll have to scroll down to “(October 09, 2006 — 02:00 AM EST // link)” to read it.

More updates in the next post.

Give ’em an inch …

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Diana Henriques writes in today’s New York Times:

At any moment, state inspectors can step uninvited into one of the three child care centers that Ethel White runs in Auburn, Ala., to make sure they meet state requirements intended to ensure that the children are safe. There must be continuing training for the staff. Her nurseries must have two sinks, one exclusively for food preparation. All cabinets must have safety locks. Medications for the children must be kept under lock and key, and refrigerated.

The Rev. Ray Fuson of the Harvest Temple Church of God in Montgomery, Ala., does not have to worry about unannounced state inspections at the day care center his church runs. Alabama exempts church day care programs from state licensing requirements, which were tightened after almost a dozen children died in licensed and unlicensed day care centers in the state in two years.

The differences do not end there. As an employer, Ms. White must comply with the civil rights laws; if employees feel mistreated, they can take the center to court. Religious organizations, including Pastor Fuson’s, are protected by the courts from almost all lawsuits filed by their ministers or other religious staff members, no matter how unfairly those employees think they have been treated.

And if you are curious about how Ms. White’s nonprofit center uses its public grants and donations, read the financial statements she is required to file each year with the Internal Revenue Service. There are no I.R.S. reports from Harvest Temple. Federal law does not require churches to file them.

And they whine about a “war on Christianity.”

Henriques writes that some of the exemptions from taxes and regulations have existed since the beginning of the republic, but many more have been added over the past 15 years — more than 200 “special arrangements, protections or exemptions for religious groups or their adherents” since 1989.

As a result of these special breaks, religious organizations of all faiths stand in a position that American businesses — and the thousands of nonprofit groups without that “religious” label — can only envy. And the new breaks come at a time when many religious organizations are expanding into activities — from day care centers to funeral homes, from ice cream parlors to fitness clubs, from bookstores to broadcasters — that compete with these same businesses and nonprofit organizations.

But it gets better. According to today’s Boston Globe, under the Bush Administration our government has begun to sponsor Christian missionary work on foreign soil.

For decades, US policy has sought to avoid intermingling government programs and religious proselytizing. The aim is both to abide by the Constitution’s prohibition against a state religion and to ensure that aid recipients don’t forgo assistance because they don’t share the religion of the provider.

Since medical programs are aimed at the most serious illnesses — AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis — the decision whether to seek treatment can determine life or death.

But many of those restrictions were removed by Bush in a little-noticed series of executive orders — a policy change that cleared the way for religious groups to obtain hundreds of millions of dollars in additional government funding. It also helped change the message American aid workers bring to many corners of the world, from emphasizing religious neutrality to touting the healing powers of the Christian God.

Bush’s orders altered the longstanding practice that groups preach religion in one space and run government programs in another. The administration said religious organizations can conduct services in the same space as they hand out government aid, so long as the services don’t take place while the aid is being delivered. But the rule allows groups to schedule prayers immediately before or after dispensing taxpayer-funded aid.

Bush’s orders also reversed longstanding rules forbidding the use of government funds to pay for employees who are required to take an oath to one religion. In addition, the president’s orders allowed faith-based groups to keep religious symbols in places where they distribute taxpayer-funded aid.

And in implementing the president’s orders, the administration rejected efforts to require groups to inform beneficiaries that they don’t have to attend religious services to get the help they need. Instead of a requirement, groups are merely encouraged to make clear to recipients that they don’t have to participate in religious activities.

Bush made some of the changes by executive order only after failing to get Congress to approve them; the bill faltered in the Senate, where moderate Republicans joined Democrats in raising concerns about breaking down the barrier between government and religion.

Are we having fun yet?

… the faith-based initiative overseas is almost exclusively a Christian initiative: Only two Jewish development groups and two Muslim groups of any type got any grants or contracts between fiscal 2001 and fiscal 2005, and Christians received 98.3 percent of all such funds to religious groups from fiscal 2001 to fiscal 2005.

The prime beneficiaries have been large groups including Catholic Relief Services and evangelical organizations such as World Vision — the former employer of Bush’s longtime USAID director Andrew Natsios — and Samaritan’s Purse, which is led by evangelist Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, who guided Bush to his own religious rebirth.

Groups counted on to be GOP “values voters,” I believe. The Bushies are using bleeping foreign aid to funnel money to their constituents.

However, Howard Fineman reports in Newsweek that the faithful are restless.

A Pew Foundation survey found an 8-percentage-point drop in Republican preference among “frequent churchgoers.”

Long before the Foley e-mails surfaced, the gears were grinding in the faith-based machine that Ronald Reagan inspired and Karl Rove perfected. It has been 30 years since evangelical, “Bible-believing” Christians flocked into politics. Figures such as James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Charles Colson of the Prison Fellowship have enormous clout within the GOP; Rove is a phone pal of both. But a younger crop of grass-roots activists views the elders of the cultural right as accommodationists who have failed to press a social agenda aggressively, and who now balk at calling for the ouster of Speaker Denny Hastert. “They need to wake up!” said Jamie Johnson, a religious broadcaster in Iowa. “Heads have to roll! The older generation is satisfied with a seat at the table. We want to build a whole new table.”

Interesting times.

If you missed it in the comments to an earlier post — here’s a good page on fundamentalism to bookmark for future reference.

Foley Frolics

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See if you can spot the flaw in Karen Tumulty’s otherwise spot-on article in Time magazine. It’s in this section:

If you think politicians clinging to power isn’t big news, then you may have forgotten the pure zeal of Gingrich’s original revolutionaries. They swept into Washington on the single promise that they would change Capitol Hill. And for a time, they did. Vowing to finish what Ronald Reagan had started, they stood firm on the three principles that defined conservatism: fiscal responsibility, national security and moral values. Reagan, who had a few scandals in his day, didn’t always follow his own rules. But his doctrine turned out to be a good set of talking points for winning elections in a closely divided country, and the takeover was completed with the inauguration of George W. Bush as President.

But after controlling both houses of Congress and the White House for most of Bush’s six years in office, the party has a governing record that has come unmoored from those Grand Old Party ideals.

Tumulty’s premise (illustrated by the graphic, which is inspired) assumes that Republicans started out as principled and reasonably pure but lost their way. However, if you assume that today’s Right is essentially the same critter Richard Hofstadter identified as pseudo-conservative back in the 1950s, then it follows that the “ideals” and “values” were always a sham.

Hofstadter wrote that pseudo-conservatism was “a kind of punitive reaction” to the New Deal era. Quoting Theodore W. Adorno, Hofstadter wrote in the essay “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt” (1954):

I borrow the term [pseudo-conservative] from The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950 by Theodore W. Adorno and his associates — because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions, and institutions. They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word, and they are far from pleased with the dominant practical conservatism of the moment as it is represented by the Eisenhower administration. …

… From clinical interviews and thematic apperception tests, Adorno and his co-workers found that their pseudo-conservative subjects, although given to a form of political expression that combines a curious mixture of largely conservative with occasional radical notions, succeed in concealing from themselves impulsive tendencies that, if released in action, would be very far from conservative. The pseudo-conservative, Adorno writes, shows “conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness” in his conscious thinking and “violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere… 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.”

Later in the same essay:

The restlessness, suspicion and fear manifested in various phases of the pseudo-conservative revolt give evidence of the real suffering which the pseudo-conservative experiences in his capacity as a citizen. He believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been arbitrarily and outrageously invaded. He is opposed to almost everything that has happened in American politics in the past twenty years. He hates the very thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He is disturbed deeply by American participation in the United Nations, which he can see only as a sinister organization. He sees his own country as being so weak that is it constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world — for instance, in the Orient — cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed.

Over the years the pseudo-conservatives have managed to erect a facade of political ideology to cover their social pathologies, and I believe at least some movement conservatives came to genuinely believe in that ideology. But in truth it has been their seething, inchoate resentment that has fueled the American Right lo these many years. The Bush cult of personality is just a new manifestation of a long-festering disease. Glenn Greenwald may have wondered at how easily righties could chuck their almighty ideology to stand with Bush, but for most of them it was never about the ideology. In George W. Bush they found the pure distillation of their resentment and ignorance. His smarmy insolence is the one-finger salute they have long desired to give to the world.

Please do read Tumulty’s piece in Time all the way through, as it very good. For now I just want to quote a bit from the end:

… the way the House has operated under Hastert has been anything but humble. He quickly came to be viewed as little more than a genial front for then majority leader Tom DeLay, whose nickname—the Hammer—pretty much summed up his leadership touch.

“There has been no institutional rule, means, norm or tradition that cannot be set aside to advance a partisan political goal,” says Brookings Institution political scientist Thomas Mann, co-author of the recently published book whose title describes Congress as The Broken Branch. In 2003, instead of fashioning a compromise that might woo a few Democrats, Hastert and DeLay held what was supposed to be a 15-min. vote open for three full hours as they squeezed the last Republican votes they needed to pass a bill to provide an expensive prescription drug benefit to the Medicare program. Far more than in the past, they brought bills to the floor with no chance of amendment and allowed the normal appropriations process to be circumvented so that pet projects could be funded without scrutiny. When DeLay faced indictment by a Texas grand jury, Hastert changed the Republican rules so that DeLay could stay on as leader—though in the ensuing outcry, he had to reverse himself. Hastert was successful, however, in purging the ethics committee of its chairman and two Republican members who had reprimanded DeLay for misconduct. Stretching the limits of arcane House rules and shuffling committees around may not seem like earthshaking offenses, but they are the same type of procedural strangleholds and power plays that the G.O.P. had hoped to excise from the body politic 12 years ago.

The Dems were plagued by corruption in 1994, when the GOP took over the House, and the Dems had made use of “procedural strangleholds and power plays,” although I don’t know if they were as ruthless about it as is the current House leadership. The moral is not that one party is intrinsically superior to the other, but that all these politicians need OVERSIGHT. And no party should be able to manipulate Congress so that it can operate in the dark and shut out the opposition entirely. If the Dems do take back the House in November, I think we should lean on them heavily to make some reforms.

Another warning for the Dems comes from rightie blogger Rick Moran:

As it now seems likely that the GOP will be given the boot by voters on election day, America will turn toward the Democrats looking for leadership on budget issues, entitlements, the War on Terror, and other vital issues facing the country.

It says volumes that the American people will not find any new ideas or solutions from Democrats – only the promise that they will “drain the swamp.”

This assumes that Republicans have “new ideas and solutions.” The GOP has been dragging essentially the same mummified ideas around since Goldwater — hell, some of those ideas date back to Coolidge, if not McKinley — and the GOP had a clear shot at putting those ideas into practice. And (once again) they failed. But as I said here, if Dems get a shot they had better hustle to show voters that they can provide better government than the GOP, because otherwise the GOP will come roaring back in 2008. And Dems will have to deliver something tangible that voters can see with their own eyes, so that the mighty rightie media machine can’t spin it away.

At Orcinus, Sara Robinson thinks some right-wing voters have finally come to a moment of reckoning. On the other hand, Margaret Talev and Eric Black of McClatchy Newspapers write that “Polls show little national fallout from page scandal.” This is no time to be complacent.

Happy Talk

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Back in October 2002, Condi Rice was certain she knew how to keep North Korea in line.

North Korea’s collapsed economy gives the United States and its allies the diplomatic leverage to convince the communist regime to abandon its nuclear ambitions, Rice said.

“North Korea has been signaling and saying that it wants to break out of its economic isolation,” Rice told CNN’s “Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer.” “It has to break out of its economic isolation.

“This is a regime that in terms of its economic condition is going down for the third time. Its people are starving.”

But Rice said, “It’s not going to break out of that isolation while it’s brandishing a nuclear weapon.”

U.S. officials have launched a “full-court press of consultations” with other countries in the region to convince North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to give up the nuclear weapons effort, Rice said.

The North Korean disclosure comes as the Bush administration faces a possible military confrontation with Iraq over its efforts to develop nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Florida, told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday that he considered North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and missile capability a bigger threat to the United States than Iraq.

Graham, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, urged the White House to rethink its priorities.

But Rice said Iraq’s history shows the Baghdad regime is harder to contain than North Korea.

“These are not comparable situations,” she said. “They’re dangerous, both of them dangerous. But we believe that we have different methods that will work in North Korea that clearly have not and will not work in Iraq.”

Now it’s October 2006. North Korea claims it is about to test a nuclear bomb. This morning South Korean soldiers fired warning shots at North Korean troops that had crossed the border, and Pyongyang threatens “catastrophe.”

Where is Secretary of State Rice today, btw? She’s off the radar at the moment. She may be in hiding after her recent trip to Iraq. From an editorial in today’s Los Angeles Times:

AFTER CIRCLING THE BAGHDAD airport for 40 minutes because of mortar and rocket fire, traveling by helicopter to the Green Zone to avoid the deadly bomb-strewn highway into the city and holding a meeting with President Jalal Talabani in darkness because the power was suddenly cut off, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held a news conference Thursday to talk about all the progress being made in Iraq.

Latest news from Iraq, courtesy of the Washington Post:

The number of U.S troops wounded in Iraq has surged to its highest monthly level in nearly two years as American GIs fight block-by-block in Baghdad to try to check a spiral of sectarian violence that U.S. commanders warn could lead to civil war.

Last month, 776 U.S. troops were wounded in action in Iraq, the highest number since the military assault to retake the insurgent-held city of Fallujah in November 2004, according to Defense Department data. It was the fourth-highest monthly total since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Nicholas Kristof suggests we should listen to the Iraqis.

Iraqis are crystal clear about what the U.S. should do: announce a timetable for withdrawal of our troops within one year. They’re right. Our failure to declare a timetable and, above all, our coveting long-term military bases in Iraq feed the insurgency and end up killing more young Americans.

A terrifying new poll conducted last month found that 61 percent of Iraqis now approve of attacks on Americans. That figure, up from 47 percent in January, makes counter-insurgency efforts almost impossible, because ordinary people now cheer, shelter and protect those who lay down bombs to kill Americans. The big change is that while Iraqi Sunnis were always in favor of blowing up Americans, members of the Shiite majority are now 50 percent more likely to support violent attacks against Americans than they were in January.

The poll, by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, also found that 78 percent of Iraqis now believe that the American military presence is “provoking more conflict than it is preventing.”


Fareed Zakaria says it IS civil war:

Over the past three years the violence has spread and is now franchised down to neighborhoods with local gangs in control. In many areas, local militias are not even controlled by their supposed political masters in Baghdad. In this kind of decentralized street fighting, 10,000 or 20,000 more troops in Baghdad will not have more than a temporary effect. Nor will new American policies help. The reason that the Democrats seem to lack good, concrete suggestions on Iraq is that the Bush administration has actually been pursuing more- sensible policies for more than a year now, trying vainly to reverse many of its errors. But what might well have worked in 2003 is too little, too late in 2006.

Iraq is now in a civil war. Thirty thousand Iraqis have died there in the past three years, more than in many other conflicts widely recognized as civil wars. The number of internal refugees, mostly Sunni victims of ethnic cleansing, has exploded over the past few months, and now exceeds a quarter of a million people. (The Iraqi government says 240,000, but this doesn’t include Iraqis who have fled abroad or who may not have registered their move with the government.) The number of attacks on Shiite mosques increases every week: there have been 69 such attacks since February, compared with 80 in the previous two and a half years. And the war is being fought on gruesome new fronts. CBS News’s Lara Logan has filed astonishing reports on the Health Ministry, which is run by supporters of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. According to Logan, hospitals in Baghdad and Karbala are systematically killing Sunni patients and then dumping their bodies in mass graves.

If I were Condi Rice I’d be off the radar, too. I don’t believe she’s scheduled for the talk shows today; we’ll see.

I want to go back to Korea for a moment. Rightie mythos says that it’s Bill Clinton’s fault that North Korea has nukes. I explained here why this is nonsense; it was Bush who screwed up, not Clinton. See also “Rolling Blunder” by Fred Kaplan and the Blame Bush for North Korea’s Nukes page from The Mahablog archives. I’m not going to re-explain all that this morning, except to say that the series of Bushie blunders that led to North Korea resuming plutonium processing was partly a reaction to diplomatic talks between Japan and North Korea. And why was that a problem? Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi had gone to North Korea to work out a long-range missile agreement without consulting the United States first.

Well, today it appears that Japan and China have stepped into the foreign policy vacuum created by the implosion of U.S. global influence. (And is it significant that Shinzo Abe, Japan’s brand-new Prime Minister, made China his first official overseas destination? China and Japan haven’t had bilateral talks for years.) This seems to me a pretty clear indicator of how much our standing in the world has fallen.

And if you want to hear more about the progress we’re making in Iraq, read Peter Beaumont in today’s Observer: “Hidden victims of a brutal conflict: Iraq’s women.”

All together now — we’re doin’ a heck of a job.

See also: Michael Hirsh, “Ike Was Right.”

Happy Happy Joy Joy

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Meanwhile, the president’s approval rating has fallen to a new all-time low for the Newsweek poll: 33 percent, down from an already anemic 36 percent in August. Only 25 percent of Americans are satisfied with the direction of the country, while 67 percent say they are not. Foley’s disgrace certainly plays a role in Republican unpopularity: 27 percent of registered voters say the scandal and how the Republican leadership in the House handled it makes them less likely to vote for a Republican Congressional candidate; but 65 percent say it won’t make much difference in determining how they vote. And Americans are equally divided over whether or not Speaker Hastert should resign over mishandling the situation (43 percent say he should, but 36 percent say he shouldn’t). [Marcus Mabry, Newsweek]

Hate Speech and Its Consequences

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Michelle Malkin is on the warpath, literally, because YouTube is pulling what she calls “anti-jihad” videos from its servers.

She presents one such video, of which she is clearly proud, on her site. I say it’s not so much “anti-jihad” as “anti-Muslim.” The point of the video is to present Muslims as murderous, violent people who must be “stopped.” As I watched I noticed a photo in which a protester held up a sign calling for the beheading of anyone who insults the Prophet. At least the jihadists are upfront about their intentions. Malkin fervently stirs up hate and fear and says jihadists must be “stopped,” but doesn’t follow through with explicit proposals for how to do the “stopping.” The clear implication of the video is “kill them before they kill us,” but Malkin lacks the intellectual honesty to say that and will, I assume, deny that’s what she meant.

That’s why I say the video is not “anti-jihad.” More accurately, it is “counter-jihad,” albeit with the punches (or beheadings, if you will) pulled. An “anti-jihad” video would be one that proposes peaceful and rational solutions.

As the Buddha said, hate is never appeased by hate, but by metta (loving kindness; Dhammapada 1:3). Jesus had an opinion on this matter also:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. [Matthew 5:43-48, King James Version]

Is that not clear? Is there some other passage in the Gospels where Jesus threw in qualifiers (e.g., Thou mayest make hateful videos and post them on YouTube) that I’ve missed?

Awhile back Malkin threw a fit over alleged insults to Christianity. At least she’s speaking out for a religion other than her own, since she clearly isn’t a Christian herself. But let’s go on …

[Update: Right-wing columnist Jeff Jacoby says Jesus was wrong.]

Malkin also alleges that YouTube is being inconsistent with its standards, because videos posted by Islamic jihadists are allowed to remain. I’m going to take her word on that, as I’m not terribly interested in spending the next several hours checking out the content of YouTube. I’m all in favor of consistency in applying standards. However, “they get to do it, so why can’t we do it too?” is not a compelling moral argument.

Sharing of web content — text, music, photographs, or videos — brings up a number of issues touching on intellectual property, fair use, copyrights, and free access to information. I don’t want to get into most of those now, except to say that lots of people have some fuzzy notions about “rights” and “fairness.” As of this morning YouTube is, still, a privately owned company, I believe. It may be aquired by Google soon, which would make it part of a publicly owned company. What it isn’t is a public utility. That means nobody has a right to post whatever they want on YouTube. The owners are perfectly within their rights to restrict content to that which works well with their business model and doesn’t get them into legal trouble.

I feel the same way about blog comments. This blog is my property, I pay for the bandwidth, and I get to decide what stays and what goes. To anyone who gets pissed because I delete their comment, I say: Get your own blog. I am under no obligation to disseminate “information” that I believe is false or opinions with which I do not agree.

Which is pretty much what Tbogg says to Michelle:

Now Michelle could post her videos at her own site or at Hot Air but doing so indicates a lack lack of revolutionary zeal, not to mention that the cost of bandwidth would come out of her own mom pants pocket…. so I won’t mention it. This might cause the Great Leap Forward to become a mere Stumble on the Sidewalk-Crack Forward and those revolutions take way too long and then the proletariat masses get bored and they wander back inside to watch Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and wonder if they could afford one of those refrigerators that has the TV in the door because that would be really cool and besides, if you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell is brother you have to wait.

Shooby-do-wah.

Offensive speech was one of the issues discussed at the Clinton Global Initiatives conference, such as in this panel discussion. The discussion was interesting but not entirely satisfactory. For example, at one point Farheed Zakaria asked why protests in the Muslim world about speech — for example, over the Danish cartoons and recent comments by the Pope — so often turn violent, even murderous. Queen Rania of Jordan responded by calling for “more interreligious and intercultural dialogue between all of us,” which is nice, but it doesn’t answer the question. However, in another part of the same discussion she described how violence begets violence —

I would like to say for example, like two months ago, before the war in Lebanon began. Here’s Lebanon, which is made up of a group of people that are peace-loving. They are very moderate and open and modern by nature. They are the natural allies to the global community. Then this war took place. And innocent civilians were seeing, on a daily basis, bodies of babies being put into plastic bags. The vital infrastructure was destroyed. A quarter of the population was displaced. And I can say that over the course of two months, the Arab public became much more radicalized. Because they saw this injustice. They saw this grief. And even the moderates, what we thought was a moderate majority started to shrink, and you can see this shrinking taking place. And the extreme voices came out as the victorious ones. And you could see that the voice of moderation, the voices that called for peace and diplomacy and engagement, they are losing currency. They are being marginalized.

So, if you want to strengthen the moderates, we have to see ― people have to see the dividends of moderation. They have to see the dividends of peace. And now, they are not seeing them. So again, I just want to say that if we want to gain the moderates, if we want to increase ― it’s almost percentages, you know. The percentage of extremists to moderates. If you want to increase and strengthen your moderate block, then people have to really feel an important difference in their lives. They have to see justice. They have to see ― and as I said, an honest engagement and an interest in their cause.

As I explained in this post, at the CGI conference several speakers said we shouldn’t be talking about a war on terrorism, but about a war on extremism. And fighting extremism with military aggression is a bit like using heavy machinery to re-arrange a china shop. The china may indeed be re-arranged, but the end results may still be unsatisfactory.

Further, you can’t reduce extremism with counter-extremism, but with moderation. That’s why we as a society need to discourage extremism in our own midst, just as we wish moderate Muslims would speak out more forcefully about extremism in their backyards. I’m not calling for censorship. I’m just saying, one private citizen to another: The counter-jihadist videos are not helping any of us.

I mean, what is the point? As I say, Malkin doesn’t provide strategies for dealing with Muslim hate and anger; she’s just interested in stirring up hate and anger against Muslims. Does she think people need to be warned about Islamic terrorism? Are we not, in fact, perpetually and robustly being warned about Islamic terrorism?

As an eyewitness to the collapse of the WTC towers, and as someone who spends time in New York City and its public transportation and other infrastructures (likewise my children and friends), believe me, I don’t need to be warned about the dangers of terrorism. I am genuinely worried about train and subway bombings, à la Madrid and London. I worry that eventually we’ll be plagued by suicide bombers in our major cities.

There’s free speech, and there’s irresponsible speech — yelling fire in a crowded theater, and all that.

It seems to me that the video Ms. Malkin is so proud of serves no other function than to fan the flames of hate. If she presented information that is not already very public, or provided some kind of strategy for dealing with Islamic jihadism, that would be different. But she doesn’t. The video is nothing but hate speech, IMO.

Back during the Danish cartoon flap I mused over whether American news outlets were right not to republish the cartoons. Malkin was heading up a crusade to get those cartoons re-published all over America, saying that not publishing the cartoons was giving in to terrorists. I said in the earlier post that solidarity with the free speech of Danish newspapers was certainly a compelling stand.

But then I looked at the cartoons, and for the most part they were crude and hateful and conveyed no other message than Muslims are bad. They were not cartoons most American news editors would choose to publish without the controversy. And it’s not like the cartoons were hidden, as they were all over the web. So what do you call it if newspapers allowed themselves to be bullied by righties into publishing something they didn’t want to publish? Is coercion ever acceptable?

One of the commenters wrote, “Sorry, but I can’t see how cultural sensitivity and respect (which are good) should EVER trump a fundamental value in our own culture.” I respect that. On the other hand, the fact is that news media self-censor themselves all the time for the sake of cultural sensitivity. Racist, sexist, anti-semitic, and other bigoted expression once common in the American press are pretty scarce now. This self-censorship is inspired mostly by marketing — publishers don’t want to drive away readers by offending them. Ah, the magic of free markets …

Freedom of speech is a fundamental value in the West. Yet it has never been absolute, even here in the Land of the Free. The German Opera of Berlin was slammed recently for canceling a production of Mozart’s Idomeneo in which Jesus, Mohammed, and the Buddha are decapitated, a scene not in the original opera. Police had warned the opera company management that the production might incite violence. As a matter of principle I think the production should have been performed, even though (as an opera buff) most artistic revisionism of standard repertoire annoys me. Just get the best singers you can get and put them in pretty costumes and perform the damnfool opera, I say.

But it’s also realistic to assume that few if any opera companies in the U.S. would have scheduled that production at all. That’s because grand opera is so expensive to produce that opera companies cannot support themselves with ticket sales. This is true even of Big Shot companies like New York’s Metropolitan Opera, which consistently sells out performances even though the tickets ain’t cheap. The Met draws more than 800,000 attendees every season, their web site says. Yet the Met seems to be in perpetual telethon mode; I get solicited for donations at least once a month. In fact, this report says the Met gets more of its funds from “contributions and bequests” than from the box office.

I don’t know about the Met, but most opera companies in the U.S. depend in part on government grants to stay afloat. If you care to study it, here’s a financial statement from the Los Angeles Opera Company, for example.

That’s why I doubt any opera company in America would even consider mounting the Idomeneo production that was bounced in Berlin. Beheading Jesus might piss off too many contributors, corporate and private. Forget about selling ads in the program. And as for government grants — the wingnuts still get worked up about the photograph “Piss Christ” that was exhibited in bleeping 1987. They’ve been on a rampage to reduce or eliminate public funding of the arts since, in spite of the fact that public funding underwrites preservation and exhibition of traditional sacred art and objects (including Bibles) and uncounted performances of Handel’s Messiah.

Take also reactions to the Terrence McNally play, “Corpus Christi,” which depicts Christ and the Apostles as gay men living in Texas. These include death threats against actors and arson threats against theaters. What’s not documented are the number of theater companies that might like to produce the play but wouldn’t dare touch it with a ten-foot pool.

I’m rambling on longer than I intended to. My general point is that we’re real good at pointing out the logs in others’ eyes when we’re not so quick to notice the logs in our own (Matthew 7:1-5, sorta). And, really, nobody needs counter-jihadist videos on YouTube.

Update: Reuters reports:

Danish state TV on Friday aired amateur video footage showing young members of the anti-immigrant Danish Peoples’ party engaged in a competition to draw humiliating cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad.

The video images have surfaced little more than a year after a Danish paper published cartoons of the Prophet that sparked violent protests worldwide.

The images, filmed by artist Martin Rosengaard Knudsen who posed as a member of the party for several months to document attitudes among young members, show a number of young people drinking, singing and drawing cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Mohammad.

The faces of the young people were blurred in most of the footage. One cartoon appeared to depict the Prophet Mohammad as a camel, urinating and drinking beer. The competition took place in early August, according to Danish media.

Another cartoon strip aired in the partly masked footage on state TV seemed to show the prophet Mohammad surrounded by beer bottles and included an image of an explosion.

The news story is titled “Danish TV shows cartoons mocking Prophet Mohammad,” but it appears Danish TV was not mocking the Prophet but presenting a news story about young people mocking the Prophet, which is somewhat different.

Some of the children on the blosophere — by which I mean some rightie bloggers — have embraced the cartoons as their newest cause célèbre and are posting as many bits and pieces of the broadcast as they can get their virtual hands on. This is done in the same spirit of concerned interest that you find in any gang of eight-year-olds with a purloined Hustler magazine.

Somebody, please call their parents …