The Monday Morning Teaser

After getting crowded out by more urgent questions (like whether we should attack Syria) for several weeks, my Lessons From the Summer of Snowden series starts today. The first installment, “The Language of Denial”, explains the bizarre but consistent ways the NSA defines the words it uses, and how that usage allows the Agency’s denials that sound comforting when the facts are not comforting.

Depending on how the word counts go, I might also do a brief post on the cultural exploitation issues raised by the Miley Cyrus controversy. It took a while to find an analogy that works for me, so if there’s space I’ll share it.

As for the weekly summary, of course everybody is talking about the possibility of getting rid of Syria’s chemical weapons without war. As I laid it out last week, the American political problem around Syria was that we have multiple motives and no way forward addresses them all. So if you wanted Assad overthrown, you’re disappointed in a result that looks like an inexpensive victory to the people who were mainly worried about chemical weapons. And if your main goal is just to oppose and denigrate whatever Obama does, that’s the path you’ll take.

Meanwhile, the 1% continue to run away from the rest of us, and there’s still no clear path to keep the government running past October 1.

September 16, 2013 – 8:00 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Applying Pressure

What I’d like is if news accounts on pressure to intervene in Syria made it clear that the “growing calls … for forceful action” aren’t coming from the people, or Congressional majorities, or an expert consensus. The pressure is being applied by a tiny, insular elite that mostly lives in Washington, D.C., and isn’t bothered by the idea of committing America to military action that most Americans oppose.

— Conor Friedersdorf, “How an Insular Beltway Elite Makes Wars of Choice More Likely”
The Atlantic, August 28, 2013

This week everybody was talking about Syria

and so am I. This is one of those rare times when making yourself heard could change history, so say something, and try to get it right. I lay out my own thought process as methodically as I can in Congress Is Listening. What Should You Say?

Some of this week’s Syria talk was amusing, like the Onion’s Poll: Majority Of Americans Approve Of Sending Congress To Syria and Assad Unable To Convince Putin That He Used Chemical Weapons On Syrians.

and the hits just keep coming at the NSA

If you think that little lock icon in your browser is keeping them from watching you, think again. Also, they’re building back doors into software security. Even if you trust the NSA, what if somebody else finds those doors?

and you also might be interested in

All over the world, people tie sneakers together and throw them over wires. And all over the world, people have explanations of what it means.

A couple links to remind you that we’re not anywhere near a “post-racial America” yet. In Charlotte, a church tries to put its best foot forward by making sure that “only white people” greet newcomers at the front door. Meanwhile, a private school in Tulsa sends a little girl home for having dreadlocks.

Have you ever wondered whether those sponsor-a-child programs make any difference? It turns out they do.

50 years after Michael Harrington’s The Other America launched the War on Poverty, poverty is still holding its own.

Grist examines the is-global-warming-slowing-down question. Conclusion: Heat cycles in the Pacific Ocean are slowing the increase in air temperatures, but the planet as a whole is continuing to get hotter.

September 9, 2013 – 12:03 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

Congress is listening: What should you say?

I was for Obama, against the Iraq War, and I wish Clinton had stopped the Rwanda genocide. What should I tell my undecided representative in Congress?

When President Obama asked for Congress to authorize a strike against Syria, he created a chance for your voice to be heard.

I’ve long believed that our power is rooted not just in our military might, but in our example as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And that’s why I’ve made a second decision: I will seek authorization for the use of force from the American people’s representatives in Congress.

It’s just a chance, mind you. Congress often does unpopular things when powerful interests are involved or inside-the-beltway opinion-makers decide that the People don’t really understand the situation. And while the President asked for congressional authorization, he also said that he didn’t need it and he didn’t promise not to act without it. So it’s entirely possible that the attack will go forward whether the American public approves or not.

Still, you have opportunity to be heard. Lots of senators and representatives in both parties are still reported to be undecided, and I believe a number of them honestly don’t know what to do. The White House and the leadership of both parties in Congress want some form of an authorization to pass, so there will be a lot of pressure coming from that direction. If representatives don’t feel countervailing pressure from their constituents, the path of least resistance will be to go along.

So you should definitely contact your representative and senators this week, before they vote. But what should you say?

Pro-Obama but (mostly) anti-war. Syria has been a difficult question for me, and it seems to be difficult for many of my friends, both the face-to-face and Facebook varieties. As this blog’s regular readers undoubtedly know, I generally (though not always) support President Obama. I voted for him twice, I believe in his overall good intentions, and I tend to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I also am not a pacifist. I supported President Clinton’s bombing campaign in Kosovo, and I regret that the United States did not try to stop the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur. And though I was ambivalent about getting involved in the First Gulf War, when I saw how it played out I gave the first President Bush credit for engineering a broad international effort that achieved a decisive victory.

But I also grew up watching the Vietnam War unfold on television, and was glad that the draft ended before I had to decide what to do. While I initially supported the Afghan War (as part of the broad national consensus that we had to chase down the 9-11 planners no matter what government stood in our way), I soon became disillusioned with it. And I opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, because the second Bush administration’s multiple, conflicting justifications just didn’t add up. I supported anti-war candidates like Howard Dean in 2004 and (I thought) Barack Obama in 2008.

So now I have to think about Syria.

Make it stop. In some ways, Syria resembles Rwanda or Darfur: Civilians are being killed by the thousands — more than 4,000 in August, according to PBS. The UN estimates that more than 2 million people have left the country, and another 4.5 million are displaced inside Syria. In a country with a prewar population around 22 million, that means that more than 1/4 of the country has been displaced.

So it’s hard to argue with that voice in your head that says: “Make it stop.” But how?

The August 21 attack. The trigger for the current crisis was the chemical weapons attack on August 21, which the US government has estimated to have killed 1,429 people, mostly civilians, including 429 children. The Assad regime had been accused of using chemical weapons before, prompting President Obama to make his “red line” comment. (Assad’s ally Russia has put out a report claiming that the Aleppo chemical attack in March happened, but anti-Assad rebels were responsible. France, Britain, and the US have accused Assad.) But the evidence for the August 21 attacks near Damascus is clearer.

Multiple independent accounts make it fairly certain that somebody used chemical weapons near Damascus on August 21. You can argue how certain it is that Assad is responsible.  The most persuasive case I’ve heard that he wasn’t behind the August 21 attack comes from the octogenarian foreign policy analyst William Polk. Polk’s argument is basically that (because he was already winning the civil war) Assad had little to gain and a lot to lose by launching a chemical attack that would further destabilize Syria and give the United States a reason to intervene. Conversely, the rebels had reason to want to shake things up.

The German newspaper Bild Am Sonntag quotes German intelligence sources as saying that Assad’s forces launched the chemical attacks without his authorization, which seems a little far-fetched, particularly if you believe the Aleppo attacks happened. Assad also seems to be in no hurry to bring his war-criminal underlings to justice.

A variety of conspiracy theories blame third parties for the attacks: Obama did it, the Israelis did it, and so on. (I haven’t found a space-alien theory yet, but why not? It sounds like exactly the kind of thing the Founders from the Gamma Quadrant would do to foment internal discord among the humans.) I have a high evidence threshold for such theories, so I’m ignoring them until I hear something a lot more substantial than what’s come out so far.

Maybe this is my general give-Obama-the-benefit-of-the-doubt assumption talking, but I find the argument the US government is making more convincing: Simultaneous attacks on multiple locations implies a level of coordination the rebels don’t have. The locations correspond to places the regime was shelling anyway. Satellite images show rocket launches from regime-controlled areas. And:

We intercepted communications involving a senior official intimately familiar with the offensive who confirmed that chemical weapons were used by the regime on August 21 and was concerned with the U.N. inspectors obtaining evidence. On the afternoon of August 21, we have intelligence that Syrian chemical weapons personnel were directed to cease operations.

Now, you and I can’t check the satellite imagery and the communication intercepts; all we have is the word of people like John Kerry. Presumably the classified briefing given to Congress had more details. According to the Washington Post, after hearing the briefing

Lawmakers from both parties said there was widespread agreement with the evidence that Bashar al-Assad’s regime carried out the chemical attacks

(That includes Ron Wyden, a Democrat who is skeptical of administration claims on other intelligence-related issues.) I interpret this to mean that if you doubt Assad is responsible, you have to believe that the Obama administration is fabricating evidence out of whole cloth. After the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq, that kind of villainy in high places is not unthinkable. But I just don’t believe Obama is that dishonest, and I don’t see his motivation for trumping up an unnecessary war. (I know about the Iran pipeline theory, but I’m not persuaded.)

So I’m assuming the Assad regime used chemical weapons on August 21 near Damascus, and quite likely in March and April near Aleppo. I don’t see why we can’t or shouldn’t wait for the UN inspectors to confirm that conclusion — former UN inspector Hans Blix made this point to Rachel Maddow — but I expect that they will confirm it.

Why attack? The next step in the administration’s case is that we have a responsibility to enforce the international norms against chemical weapons use. Secretary of State Kerry put it like this: Our response

matters because a lot of other countries, whose polices challenges these international norms, are watching. … They are watching to see if Syria can get away with it, because then maybe they too can put the world at greater risk.

This is where they lose me, in the steps from “Assad has done something evil.” to “Somebody should do something about it.” to “The United States should launch an attack.”

Inconsistent motives. The problem is that we’re juggling two very different motives: The humanitarian desire to make it stop (where the chemical attacks are only one slice of “it”) and the desire to punish Assad for using chemical weapons, in the belief that his punishment will deter governments in general from using chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons in the future.

Punishment produces the vision of a surgical strike: We’ll launch a wave of cruise missiles that destroy a bunch of stuff Assad values, convincing him that future chemical attacks will cost him more than he’ll gain. The whole thing will last a couple of days and then we can stand aside again. But make-it-stop requires a much more involved commitment: We need to hit Assad hard enough (with the threat of more later) to convince him he can’t win militarily, then broker a peace settlement and maybe provide peacekeeping troops to enforce it. (That’s the Kosovo scenario.)

Make-it-stop pushes us to act quickly: People are dying every day. That’s why we can’t wait for a laborious (and possibly broken) UN process to assess Assad’s responsibility and do something about it. But the punishment scenario is much less time-sensitive. If Assad winds up deposed and facing the World Court in five or ten years, the point will be made.

I’m worried that the combination of motives will get us in trouble: We’ll move quickly and imagine we can disengage quickly, only to discover we haven’t really accomplished either objective. Then what?

The Emperor of the World. The punishment motive also has two roots: Are we punishing Assad for violating international norms against chemical weapons, or for doing something the President of the United States told him not to do.

Much of the inside-the-Beltway talk revolves around the second root: President Obama drew a red line, and now he has to back it up. We have to prove that we mean what we say. Otherwise the United States will lose face in the world, with dire consequences like Iran going forward with a nuclear weapons program.

This is imperial thinking, and I believe it’s dangerously misguided. It frames the President as the Emperor of the World, empowered to decide who is allowed to fight whom and which countries can be granted which kinds of weapons. If we think this way, we will always be fighting a war somewhere, until ultimately our economy breaks under the strain.

I totally understand the temptation to fantasize about ruling the world and making everyone behave. Without that fantasy, the future is filled with fears I have no answer for, what-if-Iran-gets-the-bomb being only the beginning. But it is a fantasy and we need to plan for the real world, where not even the United States has the power to make everyone behave. It is simply insane to be debating whether we can afford Food Stamps or Social Security while at the same time imagining that we have the resources to rule the world.

Another example of imperial thinking: We always imagine that our opponents will submit to whatever moves we make rather than respond with moves of their own. We imagine that the battlefield will be the one we define, and the enemy won’t step outside it. What if we’re wrong about that? What if Assad or Iran or Hezbollah decides to expand the battlefield with assassinations or subway bombings or hostage-taking or something else we’re not discussing? If you’re prepared to take the first step, are you prepared to take more steps if that’s not the end of it?

The international process. I spent a little time this week looking into the international-law aspect of chemical weapons, and it turns out to be iffier than you might think. (Ezra Klein does an excellent summary.) The Geneva Protocol of 1925 (which Syria signed) does ban chemical weapons for “use in war”. At the time, everybody was thinking about World War I, so whether it was intended to ban governments from gassing their own people is still a dubious point. (Is Assad “at war” in the Geneva-1925 sense?) The Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993 is more sweeping, but Syria never signed it.

Still, let’s assume that taken together, these and other international agreements establish a global consensus against chemical-weapon attacks. How should that be enforced?

The CWC creates the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to monitor the agreement and delegates enforcement to the UN. Article XII says:

The Conference shall, in cases of particular gravity, bring the issue, including relevant information and conclusions, to the attention of the United Nations General Assembly and the United Nations Security Council.

Rajon Menon at The National Interest summarizes the weakness of Obama’s international-law case:

The president has also stated that it’s essential to ensure that the bans on chemical weapons are respected. Yet the 1925 Geneva Protocol contains no provisions for unilateral enforcement by states, let alone via military force. The same goes for the Chemical Weapons Convention (which Syria has not signed). It calls for “collective measures…in conformity with international law” to address serious breaches. There’s no basis for the United States to don the mantle of self-styled enforcer.

And the legal case for unilateral action is further weakened by the lack of a self-defense rationale under the terms of the UN Charter: Assad has not used chemical (or any other) weapons against the United States.

Our case would also be stronger if we supported international law across the board, rather than only when it suits us.

Everyone is assuming Russia will veto any action against Assad in the UN Security Council. But we don’t actually know that, and if it happens, we could still appeal to the General Assembly. (Both steps depend on the UN inspectors agreeing with our assessment that Assad used chemical weapons, or at least not contradicting it.) If that failed, we could still assemble a coalition of nations outside the UN. Assembling that coalition will be easier if the UN process is demonstrably broken, rather than if we just assume it won’t work and don’t try it.

The Iraq lesson. We always have these discussions in analogies. Is this Iraq or Kosovo or Vietnam or World War II? (BTW: I think it’s time to retire the Munich analogy. Assad is not going to conquer France if we fail to stop him now.)

Obviously, Syria is its own unique situation. So if we bring up another country from another time, we need to be specific about what lesson we’re trying to apply.

Here’s the lesson I bring forward from the decision to invade Iraq: It’s important to pin down one clear reason to act, with one clear goal for the action.

In the 2002-2003 Iraq debate, the Bush administration had at least half a dozen reasons to invade: Saddam was developing nuclear weapons, Saddam was evil to his own people, Iraq was a threat to Israel, we could make Iraq a beacon of democracy for the Muslim world, Saddam was responsible for 9-11, Saddam might give WMDs to al Qaeda, and on and on and on. None of them exactly held water, but if you challenged one, administration spokespeople would shift to another rather than answer your objections. So arguments with well-informed critics tended to go round and round rather than reach any clear conclusion.

The result of that muddle was that we invaded with no clear goal, so we could never declare victory and get out. We couldn’t get out quickly after toppling the regime, or later when we captured Saddam, or later when our inspectors determined there were no WMDs.

We’re out now. Do you feel victorious?

And so in Syria: Are we attacking to end the suffering of the Syrian people? To topple Assad? To punish a violation of international norms? To prove to Iran that we mean what we say?

You can’t say “all of the above” because there is no plan that accomplishes all those things. The only reason the administration is hinting in all those directions is that no single reason persuades enough people.

That’s dangerous. It invites mission creep, where we decide we’re doing a quick-and-easy strike to punish Assad, and then go further rather than explain why the strike didn’t accomplish all the objectives people had in mind when they supported it.

The objectives one-by-one. Make-it-stop is the motive I most sympathize with, but also the one that calls for the most open-ended commitment with the least chance of success. I like the goal, but I’m not willing to pay the price.

Punish-Assad-for-using-chemical-weapons is the low-cost scenario, but we need to be open about the limitations of the goal. We’ll hit Assad, stop, the killing will go on, and eventually Assad will probably win the war anyway. The public needs to understand that from the outset. So far, the administration has been hiding that limitation rather than explaining it clearly. I can’t support them until they discuss this more honestly, because otherwise we’re setting ourselves up for the mission to creep towards make-it-stop.

By itself, the anti-chemical-weapons motive is not time sensitive, and I think we’ll succeed better by playing a long game that goes through the UN process. Whether that process succeeds or fails, we’ll build a larger coalition that will be a more persuasive deterrent going forward.

Punish-Assad-for-defying-the-World-Emperor is part of a long-term delusion that will eventually crash the United States if we don’t root it out. We have to reject this thinking wherever it appears.

What I am telling Rep. Annie Kuster (NH-02), and what I hope you’ll tell your representative. The primary lesson of Iraq is that an intervention needs two things:

  • a single clear justification that gives us a single clear goal
  • a plan that leads to that goal at a price we are willing to pay

So far, President Obama has not identified that justification/goal/plan/price. Until he does, Congress should not authorize an intervention in Syria.

September 9, 2013 – 10:22 am Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

Tagged |

The Monday Morning Teaser

Syria. Syria. Syria.

I’m sorry if you’re sick of hearing about Syria, but I believe this is one of those rare moments when ordinary people really might make a difference. Syria stands outside the standard Republican/Democrat polarization, so a lot of Congresspeople in both parties seem honestly undecided. And it’s possible (though not certain) that President Obama won’t attack if Congress says no.

So the featured article this week “Congress is Listening. What Should You Say?” is how I thought through the Syria issue, starting from the position of someone with conflicting pro-Obama and anti-war inclinations.  It should go up about 10 Eastern time, and the weekly summary before noon.

September 9, 2013 – 7:14 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (3)

Radical

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

— Martin Luther King “Beyond Vietnam” (1967)

This week everybody was talking about war with Syria

Saturday, President Obama more-or-less said: “I can attack Syria if I want, but there’s no hurry, so I’ll give Congress time to agree with me.” OK, what he actually said was:

I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets. … Yet, while I believe I have the authority to carry out this military action without specific congressional authorization, I know that the country will be stronger if we take this course, and our actions will be even more effective.

I didn’t hear any pledge to submit to the will of Congress if it follows the example of Britain’s Parliament and doesn’t give authorization. He’s just offering media exposure to “members of Congress who want their voices to be heard”.

What will this military action accomplish? Sadly, the person who summarized it best was satirist Andy Borowitz:

Attempting to quell criticism of his proposal for a limited military mission in Syria, President Obama floated a more modest strategy today, saying that any U.S. action in Syria would have “no objective whatsoever.”

The President is not claiming he can or will topple the Assad government or capture Assad for trial at the World Criminal Court or destroy Syria’s capacity to use chemical weapons. (The chemicals are in artillery shells and could be anywhere.) The only possible point is to punish Assad’s side in the civil war, thereby sending a message to all chemical-weapon-wannabees that the United States has appointed itself the enforcer of international norms. Doing nothing, on the other hand, would cause President Obama to lose face, because his talk of a “red line” and “serious response” would appear empty.

Anytime a problem can be solved by breaking things and killing people, the military is the tool for the job. But it’s lousy at sending messages and saving face.

For once I find myself wishing Obama would follow President Reagan’s example. Reagan dispatched Marines to Lebanon, and when a truck bomb killed hundreds of them, he pulled them back out. That was a huge loss of face for the United States and its president, but sometimes your best choice is to accept that all your options are bad and move on. Like a quarterback who realizes he called the wrong third-down play for a blitzing defense, you throw the ball out of bounds and punt.

and the anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech

It was ironic that President Obama spoke at the rally honoring America’s greatest advocate of nonviolence, and then announced his decision to strike Syria a few days later. I agree with almost everything he said Wednesday, but what he didn’t say was striking too.

To mark the anniversary, everybody but the white supremacists struggled to claim Martin Luther King’s legacy. Bill O’Reilly invoked King, Joe Walsh invoked King … it went on all week. Everybody, it seems, knows only the content-of-their-character quote, and is willing to bend that to support whatever position they favor. I protest this dumbing-down of Dr. King’s legacy in MLK: Sanitized for Their Protection. (Joan Walsh and Matt Berman also wrote on this theme.)

Joan Walsh pointed out somebody else who gets mis-represented: another 1960s liberal, Senator Moynihan. His 1965 report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action is often cited by conservatives for its focus on out-of-wedlock births and other signs of dysfunction in black families. Walsh puts that report in the larger context of Moynihan’s career:

Around the same time, Moynihan helped write President Lyndon B. Johnson’s famous Howard University speech on race, which committed the country not merely to equality of opportunity but demanded efforts to achieve a much more controversial “equality of results.” Working for Johnson’s Labor Department, Moynihan proposed public works jobs and affirmative action measures, as well as a guaranteed national income, to lift black families, whether they were headed by one or two parents, out of poverty. Later, under Richard Nixon (a career move that sealed his reputation as a proto neoconservative), he again proposed a guaranteed family income.

Wednesday’s celebration also underlined the continuing chaos in the Republican Party. No Republican elected officials spoke at the rally and I have yet to find any claiming to have attended. A spokesman for the event claimed:

This was truly a bipartisan outreach effort. All members of congress were invited to attend and the Republican leadership was invited to speak.

But they all had scheduling conflicts. Eric Cantor is supposed to have tried to find somebody to represent the Party, but failed.

and (God help us) Miley Cyrus

Cyrus became famous as Disney’s squeaky-clean Hannah Montana, so you knew she’d have to rebel against that at some point, just as Britney Spears and Christian Aguilera rebelled against their Mickey Mouse Club origins. So that inevitable event happened at the Video Music Awards. For the historical record, the video is here.

The subsequent flurry of commentary is more noteworthy than the performance itself (which — to me at least — seemed more desperate than sexy or shocking). My favorite is the Onion’s faux-CNN “Let Me Explain Why Miley Cyrus’ VMA Performance Was Our Top Story This Morning”. There was also a discussion of slut-shaming (why isn’t Robin Thicke’s role bringing him criticism?), the rich-white-girl-exploiting-black-urban-culture angle (when is cultural cross-pollination legit and when does it cross over into blackface-minstrel territory?), and female-black-bodies-as-props-for-white-sexuality.

but I wish more people were paying attention to this

Hugo-winning science fiction author Charles Stross, who visualizes the future for a living, gave Foreign Policy magazine a glimpse of what he sees in “Spy Kids”, an article that explains why the basic assumptions of post-World-War-II organizations like the NSA and CIA are incompatible with the lived values of the next generation. Unless the security state fundamentally changes its culture, he believes, we’re due for a generation in which Edward Snowden is the norm, not the exception.

These organizations are products of the 20th-century industrial state, and they are used to running their human resources and internal security processes as if they’re still living in the days of the “job for life” culture. Potential spooks-to-be were tapped early (often while at school or university), vetted, and then given a safe sinecure along with regular monitoring to ensure they stayed on the straight-and-narrow all the way to the gold watch and pension. Because that’s how we all used to work, at least if we were civil servants or white-collar paper-pushers back in the 1950s.

… To Generation Z’s eyes, the boomers and their institutions look like parasitic aliens with incomprehensible values who make irrational demands for absolute loyalty without reciprocity. Worse, the foundational mythology and ideals of the United States will look like a bitter joke, a fun house mirror’s distorted reflection of the reality they live with from day to day.

And that raises his concluding question:

If you turn the Internet into a panopticon prison and put everyone inside it, where else are you going to be able to recruit the jailers? And how do you ensure their loyalty?

and this was interesting too

You may have heard that Arkansas State Senator Jeremy Hutchinson “shot a teacher” with a rubber bullet. Not exactly. When a local police chief heard that Hutchinson supported arming teachers against a Sandy-Hook-style school shooting, he invited Hutchinson to take part in a police school-shooting exercise with rubber bullets. The chief wanted Hutchinson to understand how hard it is for police to tell the good guys from the bad guys when everybody is shooting at each other. And sure enough, in the course of a simulation of an armed teacher shooting it out with a bad guy, Hutchinson shot the “teacher” by mistake.

To his credit, Hutchinson got the point. (The story is public because he tells it.) He still supports armed security guards at schools, but not letting teachers have guns in their classrooms.

Major Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people and wounded 32 others in the Fort Hood shooting in 2009, was convicted by a military jury, which recommended a death sentence. A general still has to sign off before the sentence can be carried out.

In hopes of keeping the word terrorism from becoming completely meaningless, I’ll repeat something I’ve said many times before: Hasan is a military officer who attacked his own base, targeting soldiers and collaterally killing some civilians. It was treason and may well merit a death sentence under military law, but attacks against soldiers on military bases are acts of war, not terrorism.

Back in July I told you what happened to the bold claims of South Carolina’s attorney general that dead people had cast “over 900” votes in recent South Carolina elections: State police investigated the 207 cases from the most recent election, whittled the number of suspicious votes down to 4, came to no clear conclusion about those final 4, and recommended no action be taken.

Fox News gave the AG face time to make his claims, but the investigation debunking them wasn’t covered.

Well, similar story recently in Colorado: The Secretary of State identified 155 votes “possibly” cast by non-citizens. Boulder DA Stan Garnett investigated and found:

the 17 people suspected of voting illegally in the November election in Garnett’s district are citizens who were easily able to verify their status.

“Local governments and county clerks do a really good job regulating the integrity of elections, and I’ll stand by that record any day of the week,” Garnett said. “We don’t need state officials sending us on wild goose chases for political reasons.”

So once again: A big headline-grabbing story about voter fraud evaporates when somebody bothers to investigate.

He was an outstanding college quarterback: Heisman finalist and star of a national championship team. As an NFL rookie, he led his team to a series of miraculous come-from-behind wins that put him on the cover of Sports Illustrated. But his career subsequently floundered. Critics said his strong running but inaccurate passing had been a better match for the college game than the NFL. Recently he was competing to be the back-up to one of the NFL’s legendary quarterbacks, but this weekend he was released. No one is sure where his career goes from here.

Tim Tebow? No, I was talking about Vince Young, who just got cut by the Packers with very little fanfare. What a difference it makes to be white and outspoken about your Christian faith.

You know that rhetoric about big government draining the life’s blood out of the people? Well, in Tennessee it’s literally true: On this holiday weekend, police in at least a dozen counties are setting up checkpoints to look for drunk drivers. If you’re stopped and they find you suspicious, they can force you to give a blood sample. A similar law holds in Georgia.

I’m glad I live in a blue state, where we don’t tolerate the kind of big-government oppression they have in red states.

I continue to think that The League of Ordinary Gentlemen is one of the blogosphere’s best-kept secrets. In this post, Tod Kelly debunks the “pseudo-libertarian” argument that the free market will root out bigotry.

Businesses in the pre-civil-rights South that refused serve African Americans didn’t make less money for their bigotry – they made more; a restaurant owner’s primary motive for having a white’s only seating area (or entire establishment) was profit.  In those bigoted communities, allowing economically disenfranchised blacks to sit with far wealthier whites meant losing profitable customers at the expense of ones who couldn’t afford to pay as much.

and let’s end with something amusing

All the Katrinas and Sandies don’t deserve to have national disasters named after them, but climate-change deniers do. “Senator Marco Rubio is expected to pound the eastern seaboard sometime early tonight …”

September 2, 2013 – 10:33 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (7)

MLK: Sanitized for Their Protection

Mug shot from the Montgomery bus protest, 1956.

One of the best ways to silence a dead revolutionary is to venerate him.

It’s a story as old as Jesus. If you say “Jesus is Lord” loud enough and often enough, you can march your armies into battle behind the symbol of the cross, ignoring all that nonsense like “resist not evil” and “turn the other cheek” and “He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.” You can forget everything he said about rich men and beggars (or camels), and explain away all that stuff about selling everything and giving the money to the poor. Instead, you can claim he really meant to preach a prosperity gospel, and then practice what you preach by living in a $10 million mansion. As Mark Twain wrote in his parody Battle Hymn of the Republic: “As Christ died to make us holy, let men die to make us rich.”

In my lifetime, something similar has been happening to Martin Luther King. We celebrate his birthday and make anniversaries of noteworthy events in his life, but by their very veneration the Powers That Be have sanitized Dr. King’s memory, removing everything they find threatening.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m happy that King has his own holiday and I believe the March on Washington and the “Dream” speech King gave there totally deserve the attention their 50th anniversary got this week. Much of what has been said and written about him this week (and is written every year in January) has been excellent. But in spite of those efforts, every year the real Martin Luther King — the “dangerous Negro” feared by the FBI — recedes further and further into the misty past. In his place, we are to often offered a dumbed-down King whose message can be claimed and co-opted by everyone this side of the KKK.

The co-opting of his character. In the public mind, Martin Luther King has been reduced to one sentence:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

And the meaning of that quote has been reduced to advocating a color-blind society. Worse, it has been reduced to advocating a consciously and legally color-blind society. (If your unconscious racism causes you to believe and repeat absurd allegations about a black president or a dead black teen, no problem. If the law does not mention race, but prosecutors and juries apply the law differently to whites and blacks, no problem.)

And so, conservatives  often invoke Dr. King’s dream as an argument against color-aware policies like affirmative action — ignoring what King actually said in Why We Can’t Wait:

Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree, but he should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man enters the starting line of a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some incredible feat in order to catch up.

or in an interview with Alex Haley for Playboy:

All of America’s wealth today could not adequately compensate its Negroes for his centuries of exploitation and humiliation.

They accuse President Obama of betraying King’s dream when he appoints blacks like Eric Holder or Hispanics like Sonia Sotomayor to positions of power. Even just by talking about race Obama “divides America“. That’s the “real” race problem — that we talk so much about race. Governor Jindal equates MLK’s dream with the “melting pot” image of America and then says

we still place far too much emphasis on our “separateness,” our heritage, ethnic background, skin color, etc. We live in the age of hyphenated Americans: Asian-Americans, Italian-Americans, African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, Indian-Americans, and Native Americans, to name just a few.

Here’s an idea: How about just “Americans”? That has a nice ring to it, if you ask me. Placing undue emphasis on our “separateness” is a step backward. Bring back the melting pot.

Last Monday, Bill O’Reilly invoked Dr. King’s “content of their character” quote (and nothing else King ever said) and then proceeded to put his own views in Dr. King’s mouth, repeating against today’s black community and black leaders many of the same charges that were made against King and his followers 50 years ago: blaming racial inequality entirely on black failures, accusing black leaders of just being in it for the money (Haley raised that issue in the Playboy interview: “Many Southern whites have accused you of being among those who exploit the race problem for private gain. You are widely believed throughout the South, in fact, to have amassed a vast personal fortune in the course of your civil rights activities.”), and refusing to even recognize white racism as a problem. (O’Reilly’s objection to unions providing funding for the 50th anniversary celebration was particularly clueless, given that union support was central to the original March on Washington. Dr. King had a career-long relationship with the union movement. When he was killed in Memphis, he was in town to support a strike by local sanitation workers.)

Wednesday, talk radio’s Joe Walsh (the white ex-congressman) announced “My Own Dream for America“, which is basically that black people will finally straighten up and fly right (unlike Walsh himself, whose divorce featured an ugly legal battle over child support). It concludes:

I have a dream that one day black America will cease their dependency on the government plantation, which has enslaved them to lives of poverty, and instead depend on themselves, their families, their churches, and their communities.

So what was Martin Luther King really about? As I read him, two things:

  • the goal of a world where all people have an opportunity to make something of their lives
  • achieving that goal through nonviolent activism.

He was suspicious of capitalism, because its values are materialistic rather than humanistic.

When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. [“Beyond Vietnam“, 1967]

He was suspicious of a world order dependent on American economic and military power, because it continued many of the patterns of European colonialism.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions. [“Beyond Vietnam“, 1967]

His compassion extended to all oppressed peoples, not just his own race.

Our destiny is tied up with the destiny of India, and of every other nation. I started thinking about the millions of dollars we spend each day to store surplus food, and I said to myself, I know where we can store that food free of charge—in the wrinkled stomachs of millions of God’s children in Asia, in Africa, in South America, and in our own nation who go to bed hungry. [Ware Lecture, 1966]

His nonviolence was not passive. He sought to confront issues rather than avoid them.

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. [“Letter from a Birmingham Jail“, 1963]

All through his career he rejected calls for patience.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” [“Letter from a Birmingham Jail“, 1963]

He warned against listening to premature claims that the goal had been reached.

A second myth that we must deal with is that of exaggerated progress. [Ware Lecture, 1966]

He rejected the idea that peaceful ends could be achieved through violent means.

There are still those who sincerely believe that the end justifies the means, no matter what the means happen to be. No matter how violent or how deceptive or anything else they are. Non-violence at its best would break with the system that argues that. Non-violence would say that the morality of the ends is implicit in the means, and that in the long-run of history destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends. [Ware Lecture, 1966]

What I don’t believe he ever said. I’m not an MLK scholar and my reading is far from complete, but I have never run across an example of Dr. King airing the dirty laundry of the black community in front of whites. So if he were to give another Dream speech today, I very much doubt he’d finger-wag about the black illegitimacy rate or denounce hip-hop culture, as white conservatives fantasize he would. I don’t know whether he would raise those topics while preaching in a black church or in private discussions among blacks, but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t do it for a national audience.

I also have not found any quote where he says it’s OK to mistreat people if they’re not perfect, or that massive and growing inequality is OK if the underclass deserves it. When he was part of the overclass — say, as an American talking to other Americans about Vietnam or India  — he didn’t give his own group a pass and focus on the failings of Asian culture. So I’m pretty sure that a 2013 Dream speech would not tell whites to just sit back and criticize while waiting for the black community to fix itself.

Color-blindness revisited. In Dr. King’s day, segregation was a primary instrument of injustice, a way of keeping whites on top. He opposed it on those terms. But he attended the historically black Morehouse College, and I haven’t found any record of him urging his alma mater to achieve a more representational racial balance by recruiting whites. That’s only hypocrisy if you imagine that racial balance is supposed to be an end in itself and not a means to the end of justice. Morehouse had a mission that was not being served by the white universities, and the cause of justice would not have been advanced by abandoning it.

Dr. King often talked about his dreams, visions, and goals — most clearly in his final Mountaintop speech, where he said “I’ve seen the Promised Land.” But he never said that we should just sit down where we are and pretend we’re in the Promised Land now. Someday the lion will lie down with the lamb, but no shepherd should try to implement that arrangement now. In the world where we live today, race matters — just like gender matters and class matters. It would be foolish to pretend that they don’t and blind ourselves to the problems that need to be solved.

The 2013 Dream. What would Martin Luther King say in a Dream speech today? We should all be humble about putting words in his mouth that he didn’t say in his lifetime. But looking at the words he did say, I think it’s not too big a stretch to imagine that he would still be talking about the same themes. Because while we’ve fixed some of the specific injustices he campaigned against — like blacks being forced to the back of the bus — the larger issues are still the same: We live with massive inequality. The poor both here and in other countries often have few prospects for improving their lot. The overclass continues to be disproportionately white and the underclass disproportionately non-white. Systemic inequality is enforced by systemic violence and threats of violence, and more violence is unlikely to lead to justice.

So I think Dr. King would still be telling us about injustice and urging us to meet that injustice with the moral force of active nonviolence. In the short run that strategy always looks like a loser, because violent people hit you and you don’t hit back. That’s why the nonviolent activist needs a longer vision of a universe whose arc bends towards justice, and of a Promised Land worth the arduous journey.

That’s why the activist needs a dream — not to live in, but to keep striving towards.

September 2, 2013 – 8:36 am Categories: Articles | Comments (18)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

In honor of the 50th anniversary of the Dream speech, today I’ll do a longer version of the comment I usually make around MLK Day: Over the years, Martin Luther King’s image has been dumbed down beyond recognition. These days, the only thing most people know about Dr. King is the content-of-their-character quote, and everybody this side of the KKK claims to speak for him. So I’m going to use quotes from a variety of King speeches and interviews to recapture what was considered dangerous and edgy about him in his lifetime.

In a second article, I’ll begin a series looking back on the Summer of Snowden and what we’ve learned about the NSA. This week’s topic: the checks and balances in Congress and the courts aren’t working.

The weekly summary will discuss (obviously) the prospect of attacking Syria, the Miley Cyrus thing — I can’t believe I just went straight from Syria to Cyrus — and a mind-blowing article where SF author Charles Stross explores the incompatibility between the culture of the NSA and the 21st-century kids they’re going to have to hire.

September 2, 2013 – 6:55 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Nostalgia for the Future

The future ain’t what it used to be.

— attributed to Yogi Berra

This week everybody was talking about the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech”

and just how much has or hasn’t changed since then.

Nobody who was alive in 1963 (I was six) can honestly say that nothing has changed. In the white working class where I grew up, white supremacy — the idea that whites are inherently superior and ought to be superior under the law — was a mainstream position. Supremacists didn’t sneak around and use code words and build camps out in the woods, they announced their ideas openly (saying “nigger” if they wanted to) and were included in respectable conversations.

So yes, things have changed. But changed a half-century worth? That’s a more dismal question. It’s like re-reading the science fiction of the era. By now we were supposed to have flying cars, Moon colonies, limitless energy, and maybe even teleporters or time machines. I like smart phones and a black president and all, but 2013 was supposed to be the effing FUTURE. Anything was supposed to be possible.

It sure doesn’t feel like anything is possible.

and the school shooting that didn’t happen

Antoinette Tuff showed that sometimes a bad guy with a gun can be stopped by a compassionate woman without one.

and the violence in Egypt and Syria

Speaking of dismal, the maps in some of my grade-school textbooks still showed Egypt and Syria as the United Arab Republic. In four years we’ll have the 50th anniversary of the Six Day War (which kept 10-year-old me glued to the TV during a sick day). Who thought we’d be here?

This week brought new reports of the Assad regime using chemical weapons. After the Bush administration’s shenanigans about Iraq’s WMDs, you always have to look for independent sources on stuff like this. So here’s what Nobel-prize-winning Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) says:

Three hospitals in Syria’s Damascus governorate that are supported by the international medical humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) have reported to MSF that they received approximately 3,600 patients displaying neurotoxic symptoms in less than three hours on the morning of Wednesday, August 21, 2013. Of those patients, 355 reportedly died.

… “MSF can neither scientifically confirm the cause of these symptoms nor establish who is responsible for the attack,” said Dr Janssens. “However, the reported symptoms of the patients, in addition to the epidemiological pattern of the events—characterised by the massive influx of patients in a short period of time, the origin of the patients, and the contamination of medical and first aid workers—strongly indicate mass exposure to a neurotoxic agent. This would constitute a violation of international humanitarian law, which absolutely prohibits the use of chemical and biological weapons.”

President Obama has promised a “serious response“, and now we’re left to wonder what consequences America can inflict without doing our interests more harm than good.

In yesterday’s NYT, strategist Edward Luttwak (never a bleeding heart) claimed that victory by either the Iran-backed regime or the jihadist rebels would be bad for the United States. So:

Maintaining a stalemate should be America’s objective. And the only possible method for achieving this is to arm the rebels when it seems that Mr. Assad’s forces are ascendant and to stop supplying the rebels if they actually seem to be winning.

Lovely.

As for Egypt, I recommend reading “Egypt in Crisis: Ten Observations” by University of Illinois Professor Feisal G. Mohamed. The gist: Egypt’s military is a vast institution with no foreign enemy to fight, so it’s mainly interested in extending its own power. There’s not much hope of balancing that power until the Islamists and the democrats come together in a movement that genuinely feels both Islamic and democratic. So far that’s not happening.

and what to do about Russia’s anti-gay laws

Dan Savage says boycott Russian vodka, but Villanova’s Mark Lawrence Schrad says not to. Since I never drink vodka no one can tell whether I’m boycotting or not. So I don’t find either choice very satisfying.

The bigger question is how to handle the Winter Olympics, which will start in February in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. If you are gay or just in the habit of correcting people who say incredibly ignorant things about homosexuality, it’s really not safe to go to Russia now. Legally, “propaganda of homosexualism to minors” (i.e., tweeting that gays and lesbians are people just like you and me) can get a foreigner fined, deported, or jailed for up to 15 days. And then there’s the illegal stuff. PolicyMic reports:

Against this backdrop, violent attacks on gays or “suspect gays” are becoming commonplace.

If gay athletes (or reporters or fans) aren’t safe at the Olympics, or if they’re safe only as long as they keep their mouths shut, why are we sending any people there at all?

But what’s the alternative? Given the huge logistics that surround an Olympics, moving the Games somewhere else really isn’t feasible. I also hate the idea of boycotting the Winter Olympics, since that affects mainly athletes, most of whom only get one shot at an Olympic medal during their prime.

The only satisfactory outcome I can imagine is a massive protest. Individual protests (as when Tommy Smith and John Carlos gave a black power salute from the medalists’ podium in Mexico City in 1968) would be welcome, but I hope the entire U.S. delegation plans something together. Sneak a rainbow flag into the opening ceremonies.  Attach a rainbow-flag patch to the standard uniform. Make a statement for freedom.

and that photographer in New Mexico

You may have missed this, but the religious right is going nuts (read the 3300+ comments at National Review) over a straightforward ruling the New Mexico Supreme Court made Thursday.

A New Mexico photographer refused to shoot a lesbian commitment ceremony, saying that she photographed only “traditional weddings”. This is a fairly obvious violation of New Mexico’s Human Rights Act, which states:

It is an unlawful discriminatory practice for: [skip over paragraphs A-E]

F. any person in any public accommodation to make a distinction, directly or indirectly, in offering or refusing to offer its services, facilities, accommodations or goods to any person because of race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, spousal affiliation or physical or mental handicap

The Court’s ruling isn’t long (30 pages including a concurrence) because the law is so clear. Justice Bosson’s concurring opinion addresses the “religious freedom” issue directly:

In a constitutional form of government, personal, religious, and moral beliefs, when acted upon to the detriment of someone else’s rights, have constitutional limits. One is free to believe, think and speak as one’s conscience, or God, dictates. But when actions, even religiously inspired, conflict with other constitutionally protected rights—in Loving [i.e., Loving v Virginia, the case that established the right to interracial marriage] the right to be free from invidious racial discrimination—then there must be some accommodation. … [The photographer’s] refusal to do business with the same-sex couple in this case, no matter how religiously inspired, was an affront to the legal rights of that couple, the right granted them under New Mexico law to engage in the commercial marketplace free from discrimination.

As I have stated on this blog many times, the principle is simple: When you open your business to the public, you have to serve the whole public. You don’t get to decide who is or isn’t included in “the public”.

and Private Manning

Wednesday, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for releasing a vast cache of secret documents through WikiLeaks, including hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables. He’ll be eligible for parole in ten years.

Manning’s case (like that of Edward Snowden and Vietnam-era whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg) raises the fundamental conflict of a system that keeps so many secrets:

  • The system can’t survive if every individual makes his or her own judgments about what secrets to keep.
  • At some point, you have to make your own judgments.

It’s the nature of secrecy that a person’s pledge to keep secrets is never really an informed choice. Only after you start learning secrets do you understand what your pledge means. Sometimes you sign up for a secret-keeping position because you believe you’re fighting for the good guys, but after you start learning secrets you come to believe that you’re fighting for the bad guys. Or you sign up to keep secrets from the enemy, and end up keeping them from your own people.

Then what?

That said, I only have a limited amount of sympathy for Manning, because he could not possibly have read all the material he released or thought carefully about the consequences of releasing it — something I believe every responsible whistleblower ought to do.

Finally, I know that some people will consider this simplistic and naive, but the best solution to the whistleblower problem is to keep fewer secrets and do fewer morally objectionable things. The more nasty secrets our government has, the more likely it is that somebody on the inside will grow a conscience and tell the world.

Another twist in the Manning story was his announcement Thursday that he wants to be considered a woman and addressed as Chelsea. Manning wants to undergo hormone therapy, which is not part of the healthcare provided by military prisons.

A person’s gotta do what a person’s gotta do, but I consider this twist unfortunate, because a story that connects whistleblowers and the transgendered isn’t going to help either group. National Review has already published the predictable they’re-just-delusional article about the transgendered (and ThinkProgress responded). I’m sure somebody is already writing a trangendered-people-can’t-be-trusted-with-secrets article and a whistleblowers-are-mentally-ill article.

and what voters are telling Congress

Nothing I’ve heard in the last two weeks has changed my belief that we’re heading towards a major budget crisis, either when the new fiscal year starts in October or when we hit the debt ceiling in November. The gist of the conversation between the Republican leadership and their conservative base during the August recess — which I detail in How Republican Congressmen Spent Their Summer Vacation — has been the leaders’ warning that shutting down the government to stop ObamaCare is a doomed strategy, and the base responding “So?”

The Far Right really wants to see a Charge of the Light Brigade, and they may get it.

and you also might be interested in …

I’ve been working on an article summarizing what we now know about the NSA’s domestic spying. The story has been a bit hard to follow, since startling revelations are usually followed by the release of details that make the revealed program look a bit less startling, and then later we find out there’s a loophole in those details or another program entirely that is even worse. And so on.

Space considerations are pushing that article off to next week’s Sift. In the meantime I’ll leave you with TPM’s summary.

The scariest story I saw this week was Bloomberg’s “China Coal-Fired Economy Dying of Thirst as Mines Lack Water“.

About half of China’s rivers have dried up since 1990 and those that remain are mostly contaminated. Without enough water, coal can’t be mined, new power stations can’t run and the economy can’t grow. At least 80 percent of the nation’s coal comes from regions where the United Nations says water supplies are either “stressed” or in “absolute scarcity.”

… Severe water pollution affects 75 percent of China’s rivers and lakes and 28 percent are unsuitable even for agricultural use, according to the 2012 book “China’s Environmental Challenges,” by Judith Shapiro, director of the Masters program in Natural Resources and Sustainable Development at the School of International Service at American University in Washington.

Slate’s David Weigel coins the perfect phrase to describe right-wing talking heads’ repeated attempts to equate some black-on-white crime with Trayvon Martin’s shooting: “the search for the Bizarro Travyon“. The latest attempt fails for the same reason all the others did: The Martin story was never about white-on-black crime, it was about official indifference to black victims.

[U]ntil some white teen is killed and the killer walks for 40-odd days before being charged, the search for a Bizarro Trayvon will be fruitless.

Media Matters notes the difference between Obama-birtherism and Ted-Cruz-birtherism:

Absent from Hannity’s attack on “the left” was any specific example of a high-profile liberal or Democrat who has actually questioned Cruz’s eligibility. That differentiates Cruz birtherism from Obama birtherism, which has adherents in the House Republican caucus, was endorsed by Hannity’s Fox News colleagues, and became an absurd national spectacle in early 2011 owing to the incessant agitating of fake Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

The two strains also differ in that no one doubts Cruz’s U.S. citizenship or his place of birth, while the animating principle of Obama birthers is that Obama is lying about where he was born and engaged in a decades-long conspiracy to falsify documents to that effect.

Finally, let’s close with something optimistic

OK, at least the Future gave us this much:

August 26, 2013 – 10:54 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (5)

How Republican Congressmen Spent Their Summer Vacation

The conservative base wants to see a Charge of the Light Brigade against ObamaCare. Their congressmen are trying to distract them with less dangerous crazy talk.

Congress went into its summer recess with everything up in the air. None of the major appropriation bills to fund the government in fiscal 2014 (which starts October 1) are passed yet, and the House and Senate versions of them are still far apart. Even if compromises could be reached in time, the far right wants to shut down the government until President Obama agrees to delay implementing ObamaCare. Or, if they can’t block the FY 2014 appropriations, they want Congress to default on the spending it just approved by not raising the debt limit.

Other big policy decisions are also pending: The Senate overwhelmingly passed an immigration reform bill, but the House leadership has neither brought that bill to a vote nor offered an alternative. Proposals to fix the Voting Rights Act (which the Supreme Court gutted in June) are stuck in committee.

What to do?

The sticking point in all these negotiations is the Republican caucus in the House, and in particular its Tea Party faction. It represents only about a third of the Republicans, but that’s enough to prevent Speaker Boehner from passing anything without Democratic votes. And its red-meat rhetoric is popular enough with the grass roots to threaten a primary challenge against any Republican who compromises with the Democrats over its objections. So Tea Partiers feel they are in a position to call the tune for the Republican caucus, which calls the tune for the House, which in turn should call the tune for the country in spite of a Democratic Senate and President.

That minority-rule plan is symptomatic of what’s wrong with the Republican Party in general. Republicans tell each other that the majority of the country is conservative, so the more conservative the Party gets the better it represents the People. But leaders like Boehner and Mitch McConnell know that’s not true: If Republicans close Yellowstone and delay processing Grandma’s Social Security application in a quixotic attempt to repeal the law that allows Cousin-Bob-with-diabetes to get healthcare, they’re going to lose big in 2014.

[A poll done for Republican members of Congress showed that self-described “very conservative” Republicans (9% of the electorate) support a government shutdown 63%-27%, while the next most conservative 10%, the “somewhat conservative” Republicans, oppose it 62%-31%.]

So that set up the drama of the August recess: Republican congressmen would go home and meet with their constituents — typically not a representative sample, but invited groups of Republican supporters (“We’re actually talking to the choir,” Senator Coburn admitted to a meeting promoted by the Glenn-Beck-inspired Tulsa 912 Project) — who presumably would tell them to get in line behind the far right. They, on the other hand, would be trying to talk softly while slowly backing out of the padded cell — not directly confronting their base’s delusions, but also not promising to jump off any cliffs to prove their faith in the protective angels of the hidden conservative majority. (I wrote that padded-cell metaphor before seeing the following cartoon.)

For the most part, the congressmen preserved their conservative bona fides by pandering in areas that didn’t demand an immediate on-the-record vote, like doubting Obama’s birth certificate or fantasizing about impeachment.

ObamaCare. For the most part, far-right groups like Heritage Action and FreedomWorks succeeded in delivering rooms full of people so opposed to ObamaCare that they support a government shutdown, and most of the politicians succeeded in sticking to their I-agree-with-you-but response. (Senator Coburn, for example, kicked the can down the road from October 1, saying the debt-ceiling confrontation would be a better opportunity to defund ObamaCare. He cited the danger a government shutdown would pose to the economy, while conveniently ignoring the larger threat of casting doubt on the government’s willingness to pay its debts.)

Occasionally, though, reality seeped into even the most conservative townhall meetings. In Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, and elsewhere Republicans had to face real people (middle-aged white people that they couldn’t instantly write off) with pre-existing conditions whose only shot at health insurance goes away if ObamaCare is repealed.

The disconnect here is that the provisions of ObamaCare are popular, even in states where the name “ObamaCare” is unpopular. That’s why Jim DeMint describes this fall as “the last off-ramp for us to stop Obamacare”, because after it gets implemented people will be dealing with the real thing rather than DeMint’s death-panel horror stories.

What makes facing ObamaCare’s real beneficiaries so tough for Republicans is that after four years of attempting to repeal the law, Republicans still have offered no alternative. So their basic message to the uninsured is: Rejoice in your “freedom” and pray you don’t get sick. (Their underlying problem is that ObamaCare is the Republican alternative to HillaryCare that the Heritage Foundation promoted in the 1990s and Mitt Romney signed as governor of Massachusetts in 2006. Republicans have no healthcare plan because Obama stole their old one — which they then felt they had to denounce as “socialism”.)

Immigration. Atlantic’s Molly Ball notes the dog that hasn’t barked: Opponents of immigration reform tried to pressure Congress with big rallies, but people just didn’t show up. We’ll see if that frees House Republicans to compromise with the Senate.

So far, it doesn’t sound that way. Immigration reform has to go through the House Judiciary Committee, whose chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, told a townhall meeting last Monday that the House should be “setting forward the right way to do things” … “even if it doesn’t go all the way through to be signed by this president”.

Impeachment. The weirdest thing to come out of the August recess was the talk about impeaching President Obama. None of Rep. Bentivolio of Michigan, Rep. Farenthold of Texas, or Senator Coburn of Oklahoma had the courage to tell their townhall questioners what they didn’t want to hear: that constitutionally President Obama can only be impeached for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” and so far Republicans have uncovered not a shred of evidence to support such a charge.

Bentivolio said it would be a “dream come true” to submit an impeachment bill, but his good intentions get frustrated by lawyers who ask “What evidence do you have?” and by a press that would “make a laughingstock” out of anybody who tried to impeach Obama without evidence. (The press, he adds, is “the most corrupt thing in Washington”.) But for those interfering lawyers and reporters, though, he’d be all over it even without evidence.

Coburn (in response to the meeting’s last question, beginning at about the 1:04 mark in the video) does say that impeachment “is not something you take lightly”, but dodges the question of whether impeachment is appropriate now, passing the buck to the House (where impeachment proceedings would have to start). “I don’t have the legal background to know if that rises to high crimes and misdemeanor but I think they’re getting perilously close.” (The meaning of “that” and “they” is never spelled out.)

Farenthold regrets that an earlier House didn’t look into “the whole birth certificate issue” and then passes the buck to the Senate:

if we were to impeach the President tomorrow, you could probably get the votes in the House of Representatives to do it. But it would go to the Senate and he wouldn’t be convicted. … I think there’s some potential damage to society that would be done with a failed attempt at impeachment.

At least when Democrats talked about impeaching President Bush, we had enough respect for the process to point to specific crimes. You define the crime first, then you collect evidence to prove it, and then you talk about impeachment. You don’t just say “I want to impeach this guy” and hope you can find evidence that he did something wrong.

Now what? During the August recess, the far-right base made it clear they want to see a last-ditch charge against ObamaCare, while polls show the American people in general don’t want a government shutdown. In general, I think the electorate wants to see more solutions and less drama, while the far-right base won’t be satisfied until it gets the apocalyptic battle it keeps fantasizing about. Nothing less will cause God’s hand to reach out of the clouds and give their Gideon-like band the victory.

I believe the stage is set for an epic conservative defeat. The only question is how much damage it will do to the country. We can only hope Tea Partiers keep identifying with Gideon, and not Samson pulling the Philistine temple down on himself.

August 26, 2013 – 8:15 am Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

I’m back. I know I just missed one week, but it seems like I haven’t done a Sift in forever.

In an hour or so I’ll post this week’s featured article “How Republican Congressmen Spent Their Summer Vacation”, which is more-or-less a follow-up to “Chaos in Congress” from three weeks ago. The conservative base wants to see their representatives do a Charge of the Light Brigade against ObamaCare, and the politicians are (understandably) reluctant. That led to some bizarre townhall meetings, where the congressmen tried to distract the base by talking crazy about impeachment, Obama’s birth certificate, and other stuff that doesn’t lead to an immediate on-the-record vote.

I want to do a long article that summarizes what we now know about the NSA’s domestic spying, but instead I’ll link to somebody else’s summary and push my own off to next week. My word limit got taken up by more timely stories that each needed 3-5 paragraphs in the weekly summary: the “I Have a Dream” anniversary, Egypt and Syria, Russia’s anti-gay laws, Bradley/Chelsea Manning, and the New Mexico Supreme Court outraging the religious right by refusing to overlook the words “sexual orientation” in the New Mexico Human Rights Act. (It’s still up in the air whether that will break off into a second featured article.)

August 26, 2013 – 6:54 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment