- Meet Joe Stack. The media can't decide whether the Austin kamikaze was a terrorist or not, but they're sure he was crazy. I'm sure he was a terrorist, but his manifesto sounds disconcertingly sane to me.
- Torture is Nobody's Fault. Nobody cares when Dick Cheney confesses to war crimes, and John Yoo gets off scot free. All in all, a bad week for the rule of law.
- Short Notes. My town stands up to conservative slander. Coverage of the stimulus' first birthday lacks substance. A Lord's Prayer parody. The real Ronald Reagan opposed military tribunals. The rich get richer and pay lower taxes. Obama's outrages were OK when the white guy did them. And more.
They mix up the general and the particular, so that an abstract discussion of political philosophy suddenly turns into a denunciation of a boss, sibling, or ex-wife of no public consequence. They want to make sure history records not just that they were right about the direction of western culture, but also about that incident at the bar in El Paso.
If you’re reading this, you’re no doubt asking yourself, “Why did this have to happen?”
the wonderful “exemptions” that make institutions like the vulgar, corrupt Catholic Church so incredibly wealthy. … However, this is where I learned that there are two “interpretations” for every law; one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us. … That little lesson in patriotism cost me $40,000+, 10 years of my life, and set my retirement plans back to 0.
Throughout the piece, Stack's tone is alienated and embittered, but not irrational. He clearly believes that there is a corrupt power structure in this country, and that the people at the top (whether they are in government, business, unions, or churches) recognize each other's power and cooperate.
Is he wrong?
He contrasts the quick bailout of GM and the big banks with the slow effort to reform the medical system, where the insurance companies
are murdering tens of thousands of people a year … It's clear [our political representatives] see no crisis as long as the dead people don't get in the way of corporate profits rolling in.
Bitter, yes. But do you have to be crazy to believe that?
About the plane-crash plan itself, he says very little — and nothing at all about his glorious martyrdom and the wonders it will accomplish. Instead, he seems quietly determined and claims only that other tactics will not work.
Nothing changes unless there is a body count … I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change.
Cynical, definitely. And immoral in his willingness to shed innocent blood to promote his agenda. And maybe, when the full story is told, we'll discover that he was crazy too. But nothing I've seen so far proves that.
The most ridiculous aspect of this story has been the media's uncertainty about calling it terrorism. The guy destroyed a civilian office building outside any war zone in order to produce “a body count” that would draw attention to his political agenda. That would seem to be a textbook example of terrorism — except that what terrorist really means these days is Muslim. That's why the Fort Hood shooter was called a terrorist, even though he targeted soldiers on a military base. (Strictly speaking, that should make him a traitor, but not a terrorist.) Glenn Greenwald elaborates. AtlanticWire collects a range of comments.
Just a couple days before the Stack crash, Fox was trying to make the University of Alabama shootings into an example of left-wing violence — despite a complete lack of evidence for any political motivation.
Only among American neo-cons is there any doubt that waterboarding is torture or that torture of captured enemies is a war crime or that authorizing a war crime is itself a war crime. But Cheney's confession was a non-issue. The NYT combined the Cheney confession with Joe Biden's appearance on a Sunday talk show under the headline: Dueling Vice Presidents Trade Barbs. The WaPo had similar coverage.
If Cheney travels outside the United States, he may be brought to justice through extraterritorial jurisdiction, a legal doctrine by which any country can claim jurisdiction over war crimes that cannot be prosecuted in the home country. Or a country whose citizens were waterboarded under Cheney's signature may prosecute him. Barring that, he will remain at large. (You can sign a petition calling for Cheney's prosecution.)
And then Friday, the Justice Department finally released the 289-page report of its Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR is the Justice Department's internal watchdog agency) on the “torture memos” written by John Yoo and Jay Bybee for the Bush Justice Department's Office of Legal Council (OLC). The OLC is the official interpreter of the law for the executive branch, and other members of the executive branch use its opinions as cover — if the OLC says something is legal, how are they supposed to know it isn't?
Under Mukasey's Paradox, lawyers cannot commit crimes when they act under the orders of a president — and a president cannot commit a crime when he acts under advice of lawyers.
In other words, there are crimes but no criminals — like torture, which violates the Convention Against Torture signed by Ronald Reagan, among other laws. But the torturers (and all those who had command responsibility over them, up to and including the president) can claim to have had the OLC's blessing. And yet the OLC is not responsible either. Everyone now admits the OLC's opinion was wrong, but so what?
So Yoo and Bybee walk away with no consequences whatsoever.
Yesterday, General Petraeus came out against torture on Meet the Press:
I have always been on the record — in fact, since 2003 — with the concept of living our values. And I think that whenever we have (perhaps) taken expedient measures, they have turned around and bitten us in the backside.
On hearing this statement, Matt Yglesias pronounced the death of the Petraeus for President movement.
it seems impossible at this point to imagine a Republican nominee who believes in the rule of law and humane treatment of detainees. And that, in turn, is obviously a sad state of affairs.
I'm used to national conservatives making up sensational nonsense, but recently a local conservative has been slandering my town's public schools. During a hearing of the New Hampshire House Judiciary Committee, Nancy Elliott, a Republican state representative from neighboring Merrimack, said that a Nashua parent had told her that fifth-grade students in Nashua were being shown pictures of naked men and told how anal sex is performed. Elliott blamed New Hampshire's same-sex marriage law for this outrage, rather than the true culprit: her own lewd imagination.
Fortunately, a Nashua alderman had the courage to call her on it: “Either turn in the name of the mother whose child was subjected to this alleged display of pornography to the Nashua Police Department, as required by law to protect the children, or recant and apologize publicly.” Wednesday Alderman Sheehan got her apology from Elliott, who admitted that she could not verify her claims.
Back when I first analyzed the Palin phenomenon in September, 2008, I predicted she would have trouble with “the other Republican base” — not the working-class evangelicals, but the suburban professionals. At the time I fantasized what Barbara Bush might be thinking, but George Will would have worked just as well.
Glenn Greenwald calls attention to the opposite media treatment of two similar events: It's bad for protesters to wave Mexican flags, but good for Sarah Palin to sport an Israeli-flag pin.
Ron Paul won the straw poll at the Conservative PAC convention Saturday with 31% of the vote. Romney got 22% and Palin 7%. Remind me again how popular Palin is.
Breaking news from the Onion News Network: The newly crowned Miss Teen USA declares herself beauty queen for life after executing several judges: “Opposition to my rule will be, like, totally crushed.”
At some point conservatives are going to have to decide how far to ride the energy of the lunatic fringe. Michael Gerson is already starting to worry.
These days racism always claims to be about something other than race, but whatever was OK when the white guy did it is outrageous when the black guy does it. Case in point: President puts feet on historic desk.
The comedians at Second City Network suggest a different way to make the point I wrote about last week: Climate is not weather.
Two interesting articles about the practice of journalism: (1) Michael Kinsley (Atlantic) claims that the conventions of newspaper-writing make stories much longer and harder to follow than necessary. And (2) George Packer (New Yorker) says that if the subject were war or finance, we would never accept the vapid stuff that passes for analysis of American politics:
A war or an economic collapse has a reality apart from perceptions, which imposes a pressure on reporters to find it. But for some reason, American political coverage is exempt.
Harper's Scott Horton interviews Will Bunch about his book: Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy. The most interesting paragraph:
And the idea of trying terrorists in military tribunals as opposed to a civilian court of law? The Reagan administration was completely against that. Paul Bremer (yes, that Paul Bremer) said in 1987, “a major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are — criminals — and to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law, against them.”
The New York Times Magazine had a long-but-worth-it article asking How Christian Were the Founders? It starts with the largely successful efforts of Christian fundamentalists to make Texas history texts say what they want: “that the United States was founded by devout Christians and according to biblical precepts.” And then it examines how accurate that position is.
Apropos of nothing: a hilarious story of what happens when your 2-year-old gets his hands on something totally embarrassing.
Former Senator Rick Santorum understands why Admiral Mullen and other military leaders want to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military: “I'm not too sure that we haven't so indoctrinated the officer corps in this country that they can actually see straight to make the right decision.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, female MBAs aren't keeping up with male MBAs. Prioritizing family over career may account for some of the long-term problems, but the bad first jobs are hard to explain without invoking discrimination.
Sunday the WaPo's Dana Milbank published what amounts to a fan letter for Rahm Emanuel, blaming every problem of Obama's first year on not listening to Emanuel. In response, Cynk Uygur does some interesting speculating: He figures that Emanuel is on his way out, and Milbank is publishing Rahm's parting shots for him.
Emanuel, schooled by Bill Clinton, knew what the true believers didn't: that bite-sized proposals add up to big things.
After 10 years it's fair to ask: What “big things” started as bite-sized Clinton proposals? Seeing none, I draw the exact opposite lesson: Bite-sized proposals fritter away your supporters' energy. Being too small to affect most voters, they just validate the conservative view that government can't solve our problems. I give Clinton credit for being a good executive (at least by comparison to W). But he left the Democratic Party no Clintonism to run on — no long-term vision, no inspiring ideas, nothing to organize a movement around. That's why the Democrats got pounded in 2000, 2002, and 2004.
More details of the smear against ACORN are coming out.
