Politics

Here's a Salon interview with Rev. John Paris, professor of bioethics at Boston College, on the Christian right's legal dance macabre.

So, I'm a little late with this, but Jon Stewart's appearance on Crossfire is pretty extraordinary for a number of reasons, not the least of which was Stewart calling Tucker Carlson a dick on national television. His basic point was that the 24 hour news channels and their sundry debate shows (like Crossfire) are political theater, and have little to do with honest political debate. More to the point, they are just another tool for the political parties to spread the party line, uncritically, despite all the shouting.

In an interview in 2003 with Bill Moyers, it's pretty clear that Stewart has been annoyed for quite some time with the state of the mainstream media's political reporting, or lack thereof.

Toward the end of the video, notice a deflated Jon Stewart realizing that his appearance is subject to the same trivial theatrics he was trying to point out. The hosts keep trying to get him to do a funny man schtick (the questions about Bill O'Reilly and vibrators, the doctored naked pictures of the Supreme Court justices from his book) or off on tangents (whether the election results will help or hurt his writers when coming up with material for the show).

"Why can't we just talk -- please, I beg of you guys, please."

What's the meaning of stacking naked, hooded men on top of one another? Is it as harmless as a fraternity prank? Perhaps not, at least when the activity is coerced, and the men are prisoners of war, and I'm surprised one even needs to point this out.

As the far-right in this country continues to furtively glance in the direction of outright fascism, I'm left pondering the significance of the thumbs up sign in all those photos of our patriotic defenders of freedom and their subhuman charges in various poses of humiliation and torture. What does it mean?

The evident ease in the U.S. soldiers' dispositions tell you just about everything you need to know about whether this was "a few bad eggs" or systematic abuse. Does anybody remember the pictures of a bound and gagged John Walker Lindh at Guantanamo Bay? It seems so...similar.

Part of me has enjoyed hearing and watching Rumsfeld and his military commanders squirm during their testimony before Congress (even if I know it's only temporary political theater), but I'd like somebody to ask these guys why we have officially sanctioned gulags in Cuba, Afghanistan, and Iraq, full of enemy combatants not subject to the Geneva Conventions.

clap clap clap clap clap

From the Opinions of the Justices to the Senate, SJC-09163:

"The history of our nation has demonstrated that separate is seldom, if ever, equal."

On religious and moral objections to same-sex marriage:
"These matters of belief and conviction are properly outside the reach of judicial review or government interference. But neither may the government, under the guise of protecting "traditional" values, even if they be the traditional values of the majority, enshrine in law an invidious discrimination that our Constitution, "as a charter of governance for every person properly within its reach," forbids."

So, FCC chairman Michael Powell is shocked (shocked!) at the risque Super Bowl halftime show, that featured a brief, long-focus shot of Janet Jackson's breast that may or may not have been intentionally exposed by Justin Timberlake. He's launching an investigation into the "incident" (for what aim, exactly?), and has claimed that family-hour television is "sacred." Right.

NFL commisioner Paul Tagliabue also expressed shock and outrage that the non-football entertainment at a football game involved sexual titillation, and has said that he's taking steps to ensure that future halftime shows reflect the dignity of the game, with no hanky panky. The logical conclusion of this would be to can the cheerleaders, but somehow I don't think that's going to happen. I'd also like to review with Tagliabue the Coors commercials specifically tied in with the NFL, and the Super Bowl in particular, featuring busty women bouncing up and down in the stands cut with images from the gridiron. I'd like to know what makes the Janet Jackson issue outrageous and the Coors commercial just business as usual.

...is not The Return of the King, although I'm looking forward to seeing it, but rather Errol Morris's The Fog of War, a new documentary about Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, whose name is synonymous with Vietnam.

Morris appears to be continuing his exploration of the nature of evil he began with Mr. Death. McNamara, unlike Fred Leuchter, Jr. in Mr. Death, has self-awareness and expresses regret for his past actions.

In 1995 McNamara released In Retrospect, a memoir in which he admits that the Vietnam War was misguided, and the policies he oversaw were disasterous and unnecessary. This opinion is held by nearly everybody but the extreme hawkish right, but McNamara was viciously criticized after In Retropsect was released, which I find illuminating.

The U.S. has a schizoid attitude toward Vietnam. We all pretty much agree our involvement was wrong, but we also don't really want to face the full consequences of that. Witness the Democratic presidential candidates and the press's questions regarding their actions during the Vietnam War. The public admires Wesley Clark and John Kerry for fighting in a wrong-headed and unpopular war that, in retrospect, we think should not have occured.

Similarly, the public dislikes hearing McNamara volunteer the opinion he, and by extension the administrations of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, was wrong about Vietnam. Would we prefer a defiant figure, a la Henry Kissinger, who doesn't apologize for a conflict that killed tens of thousands of Americans, and more importantly 3.5 million Vietnamese (not to mention the resulting chaos, war, and killing in Laos and Cambodia)? I don't know. Maybe we just wish that whole era would fade into the abstract world of history, like a bad choice made when we were young and foolish.

Now that the Massachusetts Supreme Court's decision on the right of gay people to marry has been handed down, the right has, predictably, begun its backlash campaign. It will likely culminate in the attempt to ammend the Massachusetts constitution to explicitly ban same-sex marriage.

There have been similar ammendments passed in other states, including Alaska and Hawaii. The idea is to make it harder to legally establish gay marriage, as "marriage" in these cases must be between a man and a woman.

It is my hope that in the future such laws will be repealed, and we as a society will look back at these amendments with the same shame that we now feel toward Jim Crow laws.

The press has been throwing around a lot of survey data concerning gay marriage lately, but I don't see the relevance of opinion polls when it comes to civil rights. John Stuart Mill, champion of utilitarianism and the democratic spirit that it entails, nonetheless was concerned about the "tyranny of the majority." I don't think it matters particularly what the people of Alabama in the 1950s thought about segregation. Nobody in this country should live as a second class citizen, in principle denied the freedoms, opportunities, and rights enjoyed by the populace at large.

I'm also not particularly moved by the notion that heterosexual marriage is under attack, and needs to be defended to prevent social anarchy. Such arguments reek of Pollyanna-quality delusion about that strange abstraction, The Institution of Marriage. If anybody is destabilizing The Institution of Marriage, it's us heterosexuals, who, like everyone else out there, are not on the whole sane, emotionally mature individuals with boundless capacities to love and be loved. But our wise lawmakers don't want to open up that can of worms, so I am skeptical of their professed concern for the state of marriage.

Instead, they pirhouette around and characterize the people who seek the legal and social stability that marriage provides as, weirdly, a disruptive force that will turn our society upside down. Granting tax breaks and inheritance rights is hardly what I would consider wild-eyed anarchy.

A funny write-up of...whatever it was that the G.O.P. senators staged Wednesday night and Thursday by Michael Crowley at the New Republic.

For some reason the entire "protest" reminds me of a letter some brittle socialite would have written to Miss Manners, only there's nobody here to gently, but firmly, tell the letter writer to stop making such an ass of herself.

This proposal is so rational, it'll never get anywhere. Check it out anyway.

The specter of tainted elections should be unacceptable to any U.S. citizen (or anybody who cares about democracy), regardless of political affiliation. Sadly, it is not.

As Uncle Joe sez, it's not who votes that matters, it's who counts the votes. Or in this case, whose software counts the votes.

"Victory is a poor adviser, and nations tend to slip on the blood they have shed."
-Vienna newspaper addressing triumphant Prussians in 1870

Last Wednesday, Jay and I saw the documentary Willful Infringement at the Roxie in San Francisco. Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor and author, spoke before and after the movie.

Both the documentary and Lessig advocated a retreat from the stifling intellectual property laws in which our culture is currently in the grip. Both made the case that creativity and free speech are impossible when the threat of lawsuits by content creators and copyright holders hangs over the heads of artists and writers.

As Lessig pointed out, he would be perfectly happy with the restrictions on the use of copyrighted materials in place when Nixon was president. In the intervening years, thanks to the DMCA and similar legislation, media companies have seen their effective rights greatly enhanced.

I'm personally waiting for an outrage index, a measurement of when the average person gets sick and tired of having her behavior monitored and controlled by large corporations.

According to this story in Salon, an appropriations bill in congress will eliminate the $600 million earmarked for bicycle paths and pedestrian walkways while increasing by $2.5 billion the amount spent on highways.

Hopefully the senate will stop this nonsense, but I'm not hopeful.

Postmodernists take note: The best example of recursive facsimile I can think of comes not from the avant-garde, and is not buried in multi-layered ironies and a labyrinth of textual references.

It is the modern Republican president and his circle of friends, and by this I mean Ronald Reagan and G.W. Bush (but not his father, actually). Reagan was an actor who played cowboys on screen and cultivated that image in his political career. He ushered in the neo-conservative era by putting a likable face on militarism, bichromatic foreign policy, and the erosion of public social services and safeguards. Bush is the wayward scion of old New England money who remade himself in the image of Reagan, the false cowboy, and became president.

Unlike postmodernist artists and writers, however, these personaes are adopted without any intended irony. When Reagan said the Soviet Union was an "evil empire," he meant it just as much as Bush meant it when introducing the "axis of evil." Both president's vacations to their respective ranches were not a political sideshow. Like a college sophomore with a new wardrobe, it's important to not only look the part, but act it as well.

This could explain L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer III always appearing in combat boots, even while wearing a suit at the World Economic Forum in Jordan.

While the academic left has been baffling each other with theory, corporate America and the right has been perfecting applied postmodernism.

...Ari Fleischer, who would be funny if he wasn't such an unlikable prick. His latest bit of boggling of the mind is two-pronged: "I think the American people continue to express their support for ridding the world of Saddam Hussein based on just cause, knowing that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons that were unaccounted for that we're still confident we'll find. I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are."

An absolutely marvelous logical pirrouette, Ari. If the administration knowingly used incomplete, incorrect, or plain made-up intelligence to start a war in Iraq, and if in the aftermath of such a war, this use of incomplete, incorrect, or made-up evidence came to light, how is it exactly the administation's critic's responsibility? Not to mention, if the US manufactured or exagerated the threat of WMDs in Iraq, then the WMDs don't exist, and therefore they can't "tell the world where they are."

He wasn't done, though. On Joseph Wilson's investigation in to the forged documents that purportedly had Iraq seeking Uranium from Niger: "He [Wilson] spent eight days in Niger and concluded that Niger denied the allegation. Well, typically nations don't admit to going around nuclear nonproliferation."

No, that's not the conclusion. The conclusion was that the intelligence that indicated that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger was baseless and false. I swear if I hear another swipe from Bush or anybody in his administation or party about "revisionist history" I'm going to seriously lose it.

I propose that Ari Fleischer get a new nickname: Humpty Dumpty. As in:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."