Did we say terror? We meant unions.

The Senate is hotly debating the most important subject on every American's lips (emphasis mine):

The U.S. Senate began debating legislation to bolster America's security on Wednesday with the White House threatening a veto because one part would extend union protection to 45,000 airport workers.

The overall bill would implement many of the stalled recommendations of the bipartisan commission created after the September 11 attacks.

What kind of union protection?

A provision in the Senate legislation would require that airport screeners receive the same collective bargaining and whistle-blower rights held by most federal employees.

You know, we complain about airport security, but I wouldn't be an airport screener for anything. It's got to be a stressful job. All day you hear people complaining about taking off their shoes or their belts. Your life is a sea of X-rays and sour faces on rushed and stressed individuals. I also imagine the hours are pretty long and tedious, particularly in the larger cities like L.A. and New York. And this is how Bush and the Republicans are thanking them? "Get bent, you protectors of our security. What the hell do you need rights for?"

If airport security officials form the "home front" on terror, Dubya is doing about as good a job with their morale as he is for the morale of the Armed Forces. But we all knew "terror" was just a word to bring "terror" into Americans' hearts come Election Day. Republicans have no real desire to honor anyone who might actually care a whit about protecting the people.

Another right-wing clone of a pop-culture phenomenon

Merle Kessler's blog post today drew my attention to Conservapedia. This is "a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American," according to its front page. It's "an online resource and meeting place where we favor Christianity and America."

Merle points out several howlers in Conservapedia entries, such as "Nothing useful has ever been built based on the theory of relativity." But I thought I'd explore a few of their articles on controversial religious, scientific, and political topics and see what they had to say. The site is exceedingly slow, but I persevered and found these pearls of wisdom:

• On Evolution: "Evolutionist[sic] have no real evidence that macroevolution occurs and there is no consensus on how it allegedly occurs..."
  "Evolution Violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics: Evolution does in fact lower the entropy of the sum of the living DNA on this planet."
• On the ACLU: "... the ACLU of Michigan (which has no connection with other ACLU organizations) defended a Christian student seeking to have a Biblical passage on the student's yearbook page. Most people believe that these extremely rare occurrences are simply an attempt by the ACLU to mask an anti-Christian and anti-American agenda."
• On Unicorns: "The existence of unicorns is controversial. Secular opinion is that they are mythical. However, they are referred to in the Bible nine times, which provides an unimpeachable de facto argument for their once having been in existence."

(I tried to avoid entries that had been obviously vandalized, like the one on Bill Clinton that noted he "managed to serve two terms without botching the prosecution of two wars, manipulating intelligence, engaging in a systematic program of torture, or mishandling the federal response to flooding of a major American city.")

Liberal Eagle's peace song top five

Stop the war.

5. Barry McGuire, "Eve of Destruction"
4. Michael Franti, "Bomb the World" (acoustic version)
3. Bob Dylan, "Masters of War"
2. John Lennon, "Imagine"
1. Bob Dylan, "With God On Our Side"

We're smarter than God

I've complained repeatedly about the nonsensical idea that the Ten Commandments are 1) the foundation of modern law, and 2) the best basis for morality, even in the modern world.

I mean, the Ten Commandments are lame. The first three are God being insecure. There's a bunch of thought policing (look, God, if you're going to condemn people for wanting things, you should have thought about that before you created us selfish and horny) and some ridiculous religious rules that even the most religious people I know don't observe, like doing nothing but worship on Sunday.

Furthermore, of the few commandments that actually do resemble modern moral precepts (I count three), the highest, "you shall not kill," rapidly becomes less admirable when you consider it in scriptural context: it plainly means only "don't kill other Jews," as demonstrated by the fact that God, after saying that, orders his chosen people to commit merciless slaughter of neighboring tribes who weren't obviously doing anyone any harm (something God does a lot in the Old Testament).

As Sam Harris points out in his Letter To A Christian Nation, if these really were the fundamental, immortal rules the wisest and greatest being in the universe saw fit to hand down, verbatim, they would be the wisest and greatest words written in any language, ever. And they self-evidently aren't.

I would hate to meet someone who actually based is life on the Ten Commandments. But as Richard Dawkins points out in The God Delusion, modern religious people, even the ones who say they base their morality on the Ten Commandments, pretty obviously don't.

So what rules do we live by? What moral ideas guide atheist and believer alike? Because I would say even the very religious, in practice, act a hell of a lot more like their modern atheist neighbors than like the people in the Bible. Either testament.

Dawkins googles the phrase "new ten commandments" and comes up with a suggested list from an atheist web site. I googled the same phrase and came up with the same list, from a site called Ebon Musings:

1. Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you. (The Golden Rule of Jesus, yes, but presented earlier by the likes of Buddha and Confucius and Epicetus and Zoroaster--but usually stated in the negative, as it is here, which I personally prefer.)

2. In all things, strive to cause no harm.

3. Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect.

4. Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted. (To be honest, I much prefer this both to Jesus's instruction to turn the other cheek, and everyone else in the Bible's jaw-dropping bloodlust.)

5. Live life with a sense of joy and wonder. (For some reason it strikes me as funny to imagine these new commandments, like the old ones, backed up with the threat of capital punishment for breaking them: "Live life with a sense of joy and wonder. Or I'll kill you!")

6. Always seek to be learning something new.

7. Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them. (This one wins the award for most diametric opposition to Yahweh's whole "believe with no evidence, or I'll let Satan torture you for eternity" thing.)

8. Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you.

9. Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.

10. Question everything.

The first five guide moral behavior; the last five guide thought in a moral direction. They don't tell you what to think; they simply tell you to think.

Honestly--and I do mean that literally; please be honest with yourself--how is it possible not to look at a list like this one--or any of hundreds of similar ones around the internet and elsewhere--and not recognize far greater morality in them than in that bronze-age set of tribal religious rules so many people want to hang in American courtrooms?

The fact is, thousands of years of moral philosophy have led us to a consensus that would have been unrecognizable even decades ago, let alone milennia. Today, to believer and unbeliever alike, it is unthinkable in the civilized world to go slaughter a neighboring tribe simply because you want their land, to keep slaves, to treat women as property and batter them to death with rocks for adultery. But that's only scratching the surface of all the things that the authors of the Bible, and pretty much everyone else alive back then, thought were morally acceptable.

That fact alone is, to me, pretty inarguable proof that, in fact, the Bible is noy only not immortal, inerrant revealed truth, it's not, in fact and practice, even the foundation for the morals of believers, even if they think it is. If the second list seems more moral to you than the original commandments, you are not getting your morality from the Bible; you are getting it from some other source, which is not scriptural, and therefore it is just as possible for an atheist to be moral as it is a religious person.

I might even say it's more so, though I think religious and unreligious people are probably genuinely moral in roughly equal numbers. But, an atheist or agnostic does not have to painstakingly cherry-pick a very flawed ancient text for those few passages, in between all the weirdness and incest and rape and genocide and God asking people to slaughter their children, that conform to modern morals ("okay, let's ignore all the obscene glorification of pointless slaughter in Exodus; it does say not to kill, so let's focus on that!").

I had an e-mail exchange, recently, with a Christian who took me to task for not acknowledging that not all believers take the Bible literally. Well, in fact, I think I did acknowledge that in the post in question, but never mind that; my point is, the fact that modern, liberal Christians, the kind who, in my judgment, are actually behaving in a loving, tolerant, moral fashion, have to disregard huge sections of the Bible to do it, and focus on others. How do they select which passages count and which are "metaphors" of some convoluted variety?

Well, they exercise their own moral sense. They know going in what they believe is right and wrong, and they find the parts of the Bible that conform to that. That's precisely what I, an atheist, do, only without the Bible part. But atheists and liberal believers are drawing morality from some deeper, more complicated, very modern place, and it's the same place, and it is emphatically not scripture.

Muslim support for terrorism surprisingly low

While American views on Islam are warming, the nation is still somewhat suspicious of Muslims. A recent Cornell University poll found that 44% of us favor restricting the civil rights of American Muslims. But is that suspicion justified? Are Muslims more likely to favor terrorist actions?

Terror Free Tomorrow and the University of Maryland conducted polls aimed at answering precisely that question. The polls of populous, majority-Muslim countries produced surprising levels of opposition to terrorism. 74% of Indonesians felt that terrorist attacks were "never justified." In Pakistan, the number was 86%; in Bangladesh, 81%. When Americans were asked about "bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians," only 46% said these attacks were "never justified."

The surprising conclusion is that not only are Muslims no more likely to support terrorism than Americans in general, they're actually less likely by a wide margin.

So why are American views of Muslims so skewed? It's impossible to know for sure, but I can make some educated guesses. Part of it is that the small, violent fringe of Islam is very violent indeed. Like in any group, it's the fringe that gets the most attention from the press. The press also tends to fixate on the religion of Muslim perpetrators in a way they don't with other groups. No one speculated that Timothy McVeigh's Roman Catholic upbringing might have been a factor in the Oklahoma City bombing, but when a Muslim commits a crime that question is always the first one asked. Finally, many Americans have no personal experience with Muslims, and fear of the unknown always figures big in our psyche. Whatever the reasons, this fear appears to be largely unjustified.

Oh, that wacky Joe Lieberman!

With his constant, unbridled support for the war and the Bush Administration, as well as his weaselly performance during last year's election, Joe Lieberman seems to be the biggest thorn in the progressive cause's side. Granted, in the last Congress, he had a higher progressive rating than the most liberal member of the Republican party (and some Democrats). But it's his vehement vocal props to this White House insanity that sticks in most progressives' craw. And he gives constant indications that he could switch parties at any time, which in this case, could wrest the tenuous control Reid and the Democrats have over the Senate away from them.

What a despicable ploy. Because in the end, there's no way he'd really do it. Once he becomes a full-tilt Republican, he'll be marginalized beyond belief, because the base doesn't trust him and there would practically be no threat of him switching back. Does anyone think Connecticut voters would vote for him if he kept changing parties when he didn't get his way? Even considering the low opinion people have of politicians, that would go beyond the pale. Lamont, or anyone else, could make mincemeat of him by time of the next election.

No, this is just his way of getting attention. I've never seen any politician behave like a four-year-old like this. Most of the time, it's worked, but if I were Chuck Schumer, I'd be working overtime to play serious offense and give the Senate a bigger Democratic majority for 2008. Lieberman's an intense distraction to the Democrats' and the progressives' message. Now that the media aren't watching Tim Johnson expecting the Reaper to stop by, they're glued to Joe's side as he's the second biggest chance to make the Senate "exciting." Lieberman knows it, and for the next two years, he'll be coy and calculating until finally, one way or another, neither party will need him.

One Man's Terrorist Is Another's Refugee

Several news organizations have picked up an AP story about Hmong refugees being denied entry to the U.S. The Hmong fought in Laos for the CIA, during the Vietnam War, and many of them have fled that country since, often resettling and building new lives in places like Minnesota and Wisconsin. But recently they've been running into trouble. The USA PATRIOT Act barred anyone who had given "material support" to a terrorist organization from immigrating. "Terrorist organization" was broadly defined to include any group that uses an "explosive, firearm, or other weapon or dangerous device (other than for mere personal monetary gain), with intent to endanger, directly or indirectly, the safety of one or more individuals or to cause substantial damage to property." The Hmong, many of whom rebelled against their government in service of the U.S., are running afoul of this restriction.

It would be easy to dismiss this story as yet another example of a law with unintended consequences, but that would ignore the deeper lesson. This is just one example of the problems that happen when we decide to divide the world population into "good guys" and "terrorists." Real life is more complicated, and real people don't sort neatly into categories. The Hmong are not evildoers, even using Bush's comic-book-like idea of what evil is, but viewed through the lens of a law meant to separate those who are "for us" from those who are "against us," they look just a bit like terrorists.

Any of them are better than Chimpface McBomby

I've put some thought into who I support for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

Sen. Clinton? I admire her personally, and in many ways I think she'd make a pretty good president. But I can't support her in the primaries. She voted to authorize the war, and she's noncommittal about whether that vote was wrong. Plus, as Seagull has pointed out, health care reform is an enormously urgent issue--one more child dying from an avoidable lack of medical care is one too many--and, having already botched the matter 14 years ago, Ms. Clinton has damaged credibility there.

Sen. Edwards? I love Sen. Edwards, on domestic issues. He's the one candidate running I've actually shaken hands with, and he's an inspiring, hopeful speaker with a pleasingly populist message. Furthermore, the kinds of David-taking-on-corporate-Goliath cases that made his name as an attorney reveal him as a thoroughly good human being. And, he has said unequivocally that his vote to authorize the Iraq war was wrong. I almost, almost, support him for the nomination.

But at this early stage, I'm for Sen. Obama. Obama is also an inspiring, charismatic speaker who's good at hitting positive themes but, I suspect, won't take crap from Karl Rove lying down. In many ways he and Sen. Edwards are similar figures (Obama/Edwards? Edwards/Obama?). What tips the scales in his favor for me is, Obama spoke forcefully against the war in 2002 and 2003.

This is, to me, critical. Edwards recognizes that his war vote was a mistake, in hindsight. Obama knew it at the time. I support Barack Obama for the nomination because, in my eyes, this evinces superior real-time judgment.

There are, of course, a lot of candidates besides these three, and of course they deserve a look (really, who thought Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton was going to be the next president, in February of 1991?). For instance, I know Beagle is a big Wesley Clark fan, and justifiably so--if Gen. Clark runs a really good campaign, I would have no problem supporting him for the nomination.

It's early. I am entirely open to being won over by any of the candidates (now that none of them is Joe Lieberman). A year and a half is a long long time in politics.

The looming Bush hangover

My posting's been light, and I'm back down to one IDT comic a week lately, because I'm facing a bit of a political identity crisis.

In a way I've come of age politically during the Bush years. I read stuff I wrote on the subject in the 90s, when I fancied myself a bubbling fountain of youthful political insight, and it all seems like a shallow, totally unnecessary regurgitation of 90s conventional wisdom. Newt Gingrich overreached! Impeachment is a bad idea! Deng Xiaopang opened China up to capitalism! The Reform Party is funny!

The Bush era has been different. The media conventional wisdom was wrong. Everyone but a few of us went temporarily batshit insane. In 2000 the media and the public seemed to believe the presidency was a fundamentally unimportant office so we may as well hold a giant popularity contest and oh isn't Al Gore a big annoying dork for actually knowing about policy. Let's put that affable George in, he'll be more fun at parties! And then 9/11 and the media propping Bush up as the Decider in the Flight Suit for the next several years.

And, ironically given this worldview is one of my biggest criticisms of Bush, it became temporarily useful to divide the world into good vs. evil. Because they had to be stopped, and I lost sleep for years worrying that they would win, and they often did.

But we had to fight. Nuance could go by the wayside. No point in rearranging the furniture when the house is on fire.

I know I'm not alone in this. Among other things, there's this Salon.com article by Gary Kamiya:

Hating George W. Bush sometimes feels like a full-time job. I get up in the morning, open the paper, and it's Bush World. His ruinous handiwork is all over the place, whether it's Putin threatening to start a new Cold War, another Neanderthal anti-Enlightenment skirmish in the U.S. or some fresh hell in Baghdad. I turn on the TV and there he is, uttering reality-averse platitudes while mangling the English language in his best frat-boy twang. And then there's the Internet, where my bookmarked band of rhetorical assassins stir facts and commentary about his wretched tenure into a damning cocktail that I happily imbibe.

...

Maybe we Bush-haters are extreme and obsessive. But Bush made us this way. We didn't want to hate the guy -- he left us no choice. And the respectable people calling for us to calm down and go to our rooms are the same good Germans who somehow didn't notice he was taking us down the garden path to hell.

...

One of the consequences of living under a dreadful president like Bush is that you start magically thinking that getting rid of him will solve everything. You start believing if it weren't for Bush, the glaciers would not be melting, the Democrats would grow a spine and Bible-thumping reactionaries would be reading Bertrand Russell. Alas, the day after the Bush-countdown keychain becomes a collector's item, these things will still all be true.

So we will have to recalibrate our brains, learn how to make finer distinctions, be less Manichaean in our judgments. Bush has been so egregious, such a cardboard villain, that he has made us intellectually lazy -- just about anything he is for, you know you're probably going to be against. This is not exactly training to run an intellectual triathlon. Whoever succeeds him is going to be good in some ways, not so good in other ways. The knee-jerk response was appropriate to Bush -- his entire presidency consisted of whacking the national patella with a huge hammer. But it won't make sense anymore. We're going to have to learn to work with gray, not black and white.

That's what worries me, in a nutshell. Well, maybe not even worries, but it's a looming adjustment I know I'd better start making. I've come of age as a political thinker in a historically unique era (at least I hope I have, because I honestly don't think the country could survive another one like this any time soon--it's almost destroyed what we are, as it is). The skills appropriate to it--mostly hammering at power by exercising common sense, which almost always meant simply disagreeing with the mind-bendingly horrible policy the administration was pushing, and then explaining why--will be less useful in an era when the government, again, has some policies I like, and some I don't, and shades of gray come into existence again.

And we'll have to learn things like debate, again. The narrative will no longer be good vs. evil.

As a political commentator I'll have to change, because I'm very aware that this bag of tools isn't the right one for an Obama presidency, or another Clinton presidency, or probably even a Giuliani presidency.

There is some soul-searching to be done. I'm not sure how to approach it.

Atheists don't go on more killing sprees

So Atrios got his hackles up when Mara Vanderslice, Kerry's director of religious outreach, said in this interview that:

I'd love to be involved in continuing to build up the voices of faith in the party and providing the training and infrastructure on the ground to state parties, to future candidates, to reach out to these constituencies, because I just believe that the religious community can be the conscience and the soul of the Democratic Party, and the more we bring that back in, I believe, the stronger our party will be, the better we'll be able to represent our positive vision for the future, and I think it'll help us start winning elections again.

Atrios:

So, "the religious community can be the conscience and the soul of the Democratic party." Presumably, and if I'm misunderstanding correct me, she's suggesting that basic moral grounding must come from the religious community. Now, this is part and parcel with the basic messages people like me get regularly from people all over the spectrum, that atheists and agnostics lack a conscience and a sense of values, and these things only come from religion and the religious.

I'd never write that "the atheist community can be the conscience and the soul of the Democratic party," though I imagine if I did Bill Donohue would send out a press release. It'd be a highly exclusionary statement, and it would suggest an inherent moral superiority of the godless over the faithful.

I want to second that. I'm tired of the idea that religion is inherently a better guide to moral behavior than anything us unbelievers can possibly offer up.

I mean, just to be clear, I believe (and Atrios says he believes) that when believers and nonbelievers can unite to pursue shared progressive goals, that's a great thing. And while I personally have no use for the idea of God, I believe in other people's right to feel differently, just as I expect them to believe in my right not to believe.

That said, though, I am very suspicious of religion as a guide to morality. I mean, the argument that religion is inherently the best source for morality seems to hinge on something like this: "if morality isn't set down by God, where does it come from? Then you could just run around and murder people."

Well, look, morality to an atheist like me is something more like a community objective. I, like all humans, need for the community I live in and the natural world I live in to be able to function. I will be better off if everyone behaves in a certain way toward those entities. So, I have a moral imperative to my community and my world, not to dump toxic waste in rivers, rob banks, or go on killing sprees, because those things are damaging to the community and world, and if everyone did them civilization and the natural order would collapse.

That might seem like thin gruel to someone who's used to the idea that morality is set in stone by a sky dude who can cast you into eternal torture if you step out of line, but it seems to work; atheists do not behave more antisocially than religious people.

In fact, I would say that atheists can be trusted on moral matters better than people who take bronze-age texts literally and act on that. I am not especially familiar with the actual content of the Koran, but I did study the Bible in school. The Bible endorses slavery in a lot of places. It never once opposes slavery. The Bible is also very soft on rape. It mandates the killing of disobedient children--multiple times. It instructs men who find their wives not to be virgins to beat them to death. Actually, the Bible is pretty much cover-to-cover appallingly anti-female.

Taken at its word, the Bible would seem to endorse killing heretics--in both the Old and New Testaments. Certainly this is what some of the church's greatest minds got from a careful reading of it--Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine both endorsed this reading.

I would say we who have the benefit of the last 2000 years of civilization and philosophy are a damn sight better at the whole morality thing than anyone who had anything to do with the Bible, including Jesus of Nazareth.

Ah, but my religious liberal friends (and I am using the word "friends" sincerely; a number of my dearest friends are believers of some sort) will correctly point out that they don't take the Bible literally, that their faith guides them in moral matters but they don't take every word as, well, gospel truth.

To which I would ask, well, how do you decide? What is it that tells you that, say, the golden rule is a noble moral principle (and it is, which is why it turns up in so many different religions) and the death penalty for working on the Sabbath is not? When Jesus waxes about how obedient a good slave should be, how do you know he's wrong?

You know because you are a modern person, with modern moral ideas. And, using those ideas and your modern eyes, you are able to be morally right where the Bible is wrong. To me, this suggests--maybe even proves--that the kind of morality that is free of religion is superior to the kind of morality that is tied to it. At the very least, it would seem to demonstrate that the followers of that very, very flawed bronze-age text have no more claim to being the "conscience" of the Democratic party than anyone else does.

Is there any sanity left?

Only the most sociopathic person in the world would want to trigger another war while we're already drowning and losing it in a war already, but of course, we know that said person or persons are running this country now:

At least one former White House official contends that some Bush advisers secretly want an excuse to attack Iran. "They intend to be as provocative as possible and make the Iranians do something [America] would be forced to retaliate for," says Hillary Mann, the administration's former National Security Council director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs.

We know that the Republicans, like the sheep-lemming hybrids they are, will sign over their souls to this immoral and genocidal act. We can hope that the Democrats will not. I feel confident about the House, but it wouldn't be enough.

Anyone who signs off on this deadly, pointless war in the middle of another deadly, pointless war should not only be removed from office but put on trial for war crimes. The Bush Administration has proven time and time again that it wants to be remembered as the most morally bankrupt governing unit ever. I wish they didn't feel innocent people had to die to prove it.

How about it, all you voters who let Karl say "Boo" to you in 2004? Feel safe now?

Liberal Eagle's weekly top five

I haven't done this in a couple weeks. But, here's what I'm digging at the moment.

5. Thom Yorke, "Black Swan"
4. The Shins, "Phantom Limb"
3. David Gray, "The One I Love"
2. Ben Folds, "Still"
1. The Decemberists, "Sons & Daughters"

Who's a bigot, now?

The rather repulsive Bill Donohue, president of the far-right Catholic League, has been expressing outrage that the John Edwards campaign has hired two bloggers, Amanda Marcotte and Melissa "Shakespeare's Sister" McEwan, he feels have made "anti-Catholic" comments on their blogs in the past.

RJ Eskow points out in the Huffington Post that, really, interpreting what Ms. Marcotte and Ms. McEwan said as religious bigotry is pretty hard: Marcotte said that "the Catholic church is not about to let something like compassion for girls get in the way of using the state as an instrument to force women to bear more tithing Catholics." McEwan asked why religious conservatives don't understand about "keeping your noses out of our britches, our beds and our families?"

I mean, I'm sure Bill Donohue doesn't agree with those sentiments, but that doesn't make them outside the realm of acceptable debate.

You know who is a bigot? Bill Donohue, who said at one of those "Justice Sunday" gatherings that lesbians were "something I'd expect to see in an asylum, frankly."

Actually, this is something that really bugs me about religious conservative types. You're not allowed to criticize anything if they justify it on religious grounds, or you're a "religious bigot." Meanwhile, they're allowed to actually be bigots, only you're not allowed to say they're bigots because it's part of their religion and that makes everything okay. In fact, ironically, you're a "religious bigot" if you point out that they're being anti-gay bigots.

It's such a convenient dodge. I recall that a few years ago, then-RNC chairman Ed Gillespie put it pretty bluntly, saying that gay people who want the law to stop discriminating against them are practicing "religious bigotry" by not respecting the right of Christian conservatives to discriminate against them: "I think when people say, well, no, that is not enough, it is not enough that you accept me for who I am, you have to agree with and condone my choice. That to me is religious bigotry and I believe that is intolerance and I think they are the ones who are crossing a line here."

Oh, sorry, Ed. I guess I'll go back to being a second-class citizen, because to do otherwise would be disrespectful to your reading of scripture.

Really, I wish we as a society would get rid of this idea that beliefs and actions that would be considered totally unacceptable in any other context become instantly and uniquely worthy of respect if there's a religious justification for them. I don't think it's doing us any good at all.

Look, the point is, liberals are BAD!

Digby makes an excellent point:

The ubiquitous right-wing accusation against those of us on the left, for years, has been that we're in league with al Qaeda and assorted other "Islamofacists," because we hate America and want to let them destroy it. Ann Coulter got a whole "book" out of this, Treason. Basically, we're accused of wanting to just surrender to al Qaeda.

Which would seem to directly contradict the newly ubiquitous right-wing accusation that liberals are the ones pissing al Qaeda off by being so, you know, gay and licentious and liberal and did I mention gay? Dinesh D'Souza has just gotten a whole "book" out of this idea, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11.

So, to recap: we're a treasonous "fifth column" guilty of helping, and wanting to surrender to, al Qaeda, so they can suspend our freedoms. But, at the same time, we're guilty of being the ones making al Qaeda mad, so the only solution is to suspend our freedoms and surrender to al Qaeda so they'll stop being mad.

Either we're guilty of surrendering to them, or we're guilty of not surrendering to them. Conservative logic, dear readers.

Staggering from election to election

On Monday, the Republicans decided to filibuster a resolution against the Iraq war. In order to halt a filibuster, the Senate needs to vote to invoke cloture, which requires 60 votes. Only two of the 49 Republicans voted for cloture; the rest basically decided against the "up or down vote" that they thought was so important a couple of years ago when the issue involved approving pernicious judges.

Kos of the Daily Kos site had this to say:

Because of the Senate filibuster and presidential veto, It's near impossible for Democrats to end this war. But what we can and do, and should do, is keep bringing up these resolutions. Bring them all up -- the Kennedy measure, the Dodd measure, the Obama measure, and anything else lying around. Bring them up and keep forcing Republicans to stand with Bush in support of this war.

Because in 2008, we'll elect people who WILL end this war, from the White House, to the Senate, to the House.

From a tactical point of view, this makes sense. But is our form of legislation turning into one run up to an election after another? At some point, we are going to turn into a horse race country, because until this kind of gridlock can be countered, we'll never get anything done.

I'm aware this is the kind of thinking that made Republicans invent the "nuconstitutionalear" option, which was fully created to usurp what little powers the minority party has. And I'm not for any form of that option now. But I wish that "furthering the debate" actually meant measuring and weighing meritocratic ideals as opposed to bloviating at each other across a wide chasm of an aisle. For now, real progress, progress upon which all of our lives will depend, seems to depend entirely on the cynical ploys of election-year emotion-pulling. Knights, lay down your swords at the shrine of Madison Avenue.

Judo politics and gay marriage

Some of you may recall that the Supreme Court here in Washington state upheld the state's ban on same-sex marriage back in July. Specifically, the majority opinion stated:

...the legislature was entitled to believe that limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples furthers procreation, essential to survivial of the human race, and furthers the well-being of children by encouraging families where children are reared in homes headed by the children's biological parents.

Recently, a group in favor of equal marriage rights launched I-957, the Defense of Marriage Initiative. I-957 applies the court's reasoning to heterosexual marriage; it would require all married couples to show evidence of procreation within three years or have their marriage automatically annulled. Couples from out of state would be required to provide proof within three years of moving to the state or have their marriages declared "unrecognized."

The goal, of course, is to point out the absurdity of the court's (and legislature's) reasoning by carrying it to its logical conclusion. This is the essence of judo politics -- turning the force of your opponent's strongest arguments against them.

The importance of suffixes

George W. Bush, and the media, seem finally to have caught on to the fact that the phrase "the Democrat party" is, in fact, a passive-aggressive insult.

Bush, of course, used it on the campaign trail in 2006, while he was screaming about how the Democrat party wanted us all to get blowed up. That didn't surprise me much, since it was rarely even the most insulting thing in that particular sentence. But it was striking when he used that construction in the state of the union address--more so when you know that the teleprompter said "Democratic party" and Bush, apparently, deliberately dropped the last syllable.

Bush claimed, when he met with Democrats on Saturday, that it was merely the product of poor diction. Which I don't believe for a second. (I also don't think he was trying to insult anyone; I think that's just what people in his circles say, and it had become a habit, like when Dick Armey accidentally called Barney Frank "Barney Fag" in public.)

The press has, mostly, seemed oblivious until now to the fact that that construction is an insult, but it is. Deliberately mispronouncing the name of a group is disrespectful, and this particular mispronounciation tacitly strips the party's name of the characteristic of being "democratic," which is also rude.

I mean, if you think there's no meaningful difference between "Democrat party" and "Democratic party," consider this: would you shrug, if Bush started referring to the Jewish people as "the Jew people"?

I actually first encountered the "Democrat party" line, which I would hear numerous times from angry right-wing guys over the next four years, in 2003, at an anti-Iraq-invasion march in Tacoma. There was a group of counter-protesters, one of whom had a sign that informed us "you are pawns of the socialistic communistic Democrat party."

And I was like, first of all, if we anti-war types are being used by the Democrats, most of whom supported the invasion, they're using some very sophisticated reverse psychology here. Second, not wanting to go to war makes you both a socialist and a communist? Someone should have told the Soviet Union before they invaded all those countries.

And third...you've used the suffix "ic" twice already. (Incorrectly, I might add.) You couldn't be bothered to use it one more time to correctly name the party you're dissing? That's just rude.

And it never got any less so.

Bush's last desperate acts

A reader on Josh Marshall's "Talking Points Memo" made an observation about the Bush Junta that I've been turning over in my head:

It seems like an appropriate analogy for current administration is a Chapter 11 reorganization (like say, oh I don't know, maybe Enron?). In a bankruptcy case, management has every incentive to risk everything it can to save its own hide. If it goes a little (or a lot) further into debt, what's the difference? But if management takes a big risk and it works out, then they look great. The only problem is that it's not in the other stakeholders' interest at a certain point for management to play Russian roulette with the company. The best solution is always to put in new management that can put the bigger picture interests ahead of saving its own hide.

This is, I think, a useful way of viewing the current situation, and also an excellent argument for checks on power. In cases of drastic mismanagement, of a company or of a country, there reaches a point where those in charge are screwed if they do nothing, and even if they're probably screwed anyway, they may as well take big risks, because they have everything to gain if something happens to work out, and nothing more to lose if it doesn't.

The problem being that the shareholders, or the public, do still have a lot to lose.

George W. Bush is doubtless, on some level, aware that right now, he's looking at being remembered as one of history's most disastrously bad presidents. (Look, people, I told you so; you should have listened in 2004.) If he pulls out of Iraq now, no one else will die for his mistakes, but any possibility for his reputation to be salvaged is completely gone at that point.

Now, things like troop "surges" or goading Iran into war look like awful ideas from our point of view. But, Bush's reputation can't suffer any more than it has already; history can't judge him any more harshly for whatever he does next than it's already going to for what he's done already. So he might as well try insane stuff, in case something works and he ends up hailed as a Truman-esque visionary.

The rest of us, though, have more on the line than George Bush's standing in history. Trillions in debt. Thousands of lives. Our national goodwill, further squandered. Bush is gambling with our money, lives, and reputation, because he has nothing to lose by fucking up even more than he has already. But we could still lose a lot more.

And this is exactly why power should have checks on it, why a leader in Bush's position should not be left in office to try more and more risky and desperate things. It's why the "unitary executive" theory where the President ultimately has no checks on his power is dangerous.

It always works this way, with leaders who have gambled big-time and lost. In the latter days of the second world war, Hitler was sending guys in their 80s and elementary-school-age boys out to fight because that's who he had left. Sure, he was sacrificing lives of innocents to protect himself from almost-certain defeat, but there's a big difference, in his position, between almost-certain and certain, so he tried what was left for him to try, even though it was in no one's interests but his. He had nothing to lose, but Germany still did.

It always works that way with failed leaders. Bush has failed. The opposition's job, now, is to make sure that, between now and when he leaves office, he has as little power to take stupid risks as possible.

More Global Warming News

Marketplace and CNNMoney.com both reported today that the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank partially funded by Exxon-Mobil, sent out letters in July offering $10,000 plus expenses to scientists to write reports critical of the U.N. Climate Change Assessment. The author of the letters, Steven Hayward, dismisses the idea that this amounts to a bribe. I'll let you draw your own conclusions. But when you hear a quote from a scientist who's skeptical about global warming, it's worth asking yourself if he or she was paid to come to that specific conclusion.

Quick note: Global warming FAQ

The Seattle Post Intelligencer has a sidebar article today called Climate Change Questions Answered. I wanted to point it out because it concisely addresses several common objections raised by global warming deniers. While more citations would be nice, it's worth checking out to give you a starting point for argument when people ask you leading questions like, "weren't scientists in the 1970s predicting an ice age?"

...but that would belittle the name of our moon, which is 'The Moon'

I've gotten an email (more are probably coming) from a Bostonian who thinks I was too hard on the city. I kind of expected that reaction; I understand the "you just can't be too careful" feeling that a lot of people have these days. It's the same paranoid instinct that caused people to vote for Bush, because they felt only he would keep us safe from the terrorists. But after thinking it over...no, the Boston police still overreacted to a ridiculous extent. Consider:

• The device had a big lighted display with a cartoon character on it. This is a feature generally not found on bombs outside of bad action movies. Of course, according to the latest CNN report, the attorney general says it was "very sinister" because it had "a battery behind it, and wires." Again, someone's been watching too many action movies.
  
• The devices had a translucent casing, so it should have been pretty obvious there was no amount of explosive material inside.
  
• The same displays had been installed in nine other cities, including L.A., Chicago, Atlanta, and Seattle. Boston is the only city that reacted by calling out the bomb squad and closing two bridges, maritime traffic on a river, and a university. Other cities generally removed them without a fuss. New York, where people are understandably jittery, closed a street for 45 minutes to remove two of the signs from an overpass -- but there was no terrorism panic there, in spite of forty-one of the devices having been placed in the city.
  

Of course, the Boston city government has no sense of humor about this. They screwed up, so it's time to find someone to scapegoat. The two men who installed the signs have been arrested and charged with creating a panic. They've plead "not guilty." They'll probably walk because the law requires intent, and it's pretty clear they didn't intend to cause a panic. The city plans to file a civil lawsuit against Turner to get them to pay for the police response, though, which may stick.

My advice to Bostonians: Whatever you do, don't take your Lite Brite out in public. The police may mistake it for a bomb.