Framed

Hangman

I've never made my mind up about capital punishment.  The problem for me is that justice is carried out by imperfect humans.  If justice was perfect, guilt was certain and executions were carried out regardless of race, poverty, gender or politics, then I could see how in some cases it would be appropriate.  Those cases are ones in which the crimes were heinous and there was no real doubt about the accused's responsibility for them.  Saddam Hussein certainly fits those criteria.

To put it another way, I'm not sure that capital punishment ought to be an element of any justice system, but it is, and I don't know of many people more deserving of it than Hussein.

I don't buy the argument that because Pinochet wasn't executed then Hussein shouldn't have been either.  That claim reduces to the proposition that unless justice can be done everywhere, it shouldn't be done anywhere.

It would be nice to think that maybe the administration will now truly have accomplished its mission and pull American troops out of Iraq.  It would be nice . . . .

Atheism

Sam Harris has written the Cliff's Notes version of his two books on atheism.  He takes on the following ten myths about us nonbelievers:

1) Atheists believe that life is meaningless.

2) Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.

3) Atheism is dogmatic.

4) Atheists think everything in the universe arose by chance.

5) Atheism has no connection to science.

6) Atheists are arrogant.

7) Atheists are closed to spiritual experience.

8) Atheists believe that there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding.

9) Atheists ignore the fact that religion is extremely beneficial to society.

10) Atheism provides no basis for morality.

I think #4 and #5 are weak.  The whole basis of fundamentalist anxiety about the theory of evolution is that the claim that the science behind it leads to a rejection of religion.  That's why science is under attack.  And while chance alone did not give rise to biology, even Harris admits it played a role.

Still, this is a pretty good list of talking points.   

 

Florida

Jonathan Singer at MyDD drops this demographic trend into the pot:

By the time of the next census, Florida may have as many congressional seats as New York. This prospect indicates that the Democrats need to get straight to work at strengthening the party infrastructure in the state so that Republicans are not able to indefinitely capitalize on the population shift away from so-called "blue states" to the so-called "red states."

I agree, and I'd take it farther.  The Democrats need work doubly hard in all southern and western states where the population is expanding.

Conflict

Sometimes I myself have argued that there is no conflict between science and religion because they are two different ways of knowing.  I was wrong:

Some wacky creationist has slapped together routine statements from creationist websites (especially Answers in Genesis) that declares a central scientific theory false, that accuses scientists of conspiracy to lie to students and citizens, that demands that you have to accept their religion and repudiate science or burn in hell forever, and we've got scientists shrugging their shoulders and saying there isn't a battle. One side is shooting at the other, and my side is in a state of denial. Of course there's a freaking conflict between science and religion. We're in the middle of a war right now where what is at stake is the minds of our children (and the creationists would agree with that statement), while too many of us pretend nothing is going on to be concerned about.

When my kids were younger, they sometimes complained to me about being picked on at school.  My advice was generally to ignore it, and the jerks will get bored and move on to someone else.  There were situations, though, where ignoring harassment didn't work.  It was in those circumstances that I suggested breaking the offending kid's nose.

I've tried politely ignoring religious attacks on reason and science with a tight-lipped PC smile.  From now on, though, while I won't go out of my way to be hostile to religion, I'm not going to be all quiet and respectful when people attack science and reason.  Too much is at stake.  I don't want to go back to the dark ages.

Ford

Full disclosure and confession: in one of my first-ever editorials, written in 1976 for the Ottawa Hills High School Arrowhead, I urged my readers to vote for Gerald Ford over Jimmy Carter.

I came of age politically during Watergate.  I followed it very closely.  I still remember getting the news of the Saturday Night Massacre and gleefully relaying it to my parents' traditional Republican friends, who were over at our house for a dinner party that night; when I saw their stunned expressions, I knew that Nixon had just signed his own political death-warrant.  I also recall the night Nixon nominated Gerald Ford to replace Spiro Agnew.  I ran the scoreboard for the Ottawa Hills football team, and I'd brought a small black-and-white TV into the press box so I could keep an eye on things.  I put the announcer's mike up to the TV speaker and broadcast the news to the football crowd, much to the irritation of the coach.

Ford figured prominently in my political maturation.   I thought he was a good man, and even if I didn't agree with some of his policies, I  thought he was honest and genuine.    For me, this paragraph in the CNN story about his death yesterday sums it all  up:

Gerald Ford was the unlikeliest of presidents, a man brought to power by unprecedented circumstances without seeking the office, at a time when Americans -- reeling from the Watergate scandal -- were disillusioned and weary.

Rest in peace.

Abrogation

Guest-blogging over at Unclaimed Territory, Anonymous Liberal has two posts about honesty in political advertising and the lack thereof.  A.L. makes some interesting suggestions there, and I recommend reading one or the other or both.  One of his observations is about the media's abrogation of its role in distinguishing truth from falsehood:

As I’ve observed before, when it comes to covering politics, journalists today are much more like play-by-play announcers than referees. They no longer see it as their job to step in and call fouls, i.e., to call a lie a lie. This is a pity because--for the reasons explained above--it is in the arena of politics where we are most in need of referees; it is in the arena of politics where the normal referees (government officials, judges, private litigants) cannot operate effectively.

We saw this quite clearly just after the November 2006 election, when the President announced that Donald Rumsfeld was leaving as Secretary of Defense.  Bush was asked why, just days beforehand, he had unequivocally told reporters that he had no intention of replacing Rumsfeld.  His response:

The reason why is I didn't want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign. And so the only way to answer that question and to get you on to another question was to give you that answer.

In other words, he lied and he admitted lying.  But how did the mainstream media report it?  As Glenn Greenwald noted at the time, the Washington Post initially wrote:

At his news conference, Bush called the election results a "thumping" but vowed to maintain his policy of refusing to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq "before the job is done." Bush indicated that he had made the decision to replace Rumsfeld before the elections, but he said he had not held a "final conversation" with the defense chief or talked to Gates at the time he told reporters in response to a question last week that Rumsfeld would be staying on.

Asked about that comment, Bush said he made it because "I didn't want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign," Bush said. He appeared to acknowledge having misled reporters, saying, "And so the only way to answer that question and to get you onto another question was to give you that answer."

He added later, "Win or lose, Bob Gates was going to become the nominee.

But at some point, the Post fundamentally changed this article (without leaving any indication that it did so). Now, in that same Post article, the passage I quoted about the President's having acknowledged that he "misled reporters" is gone entirely -- just disappeared, deleted with no trace -- and instead one finds only this:

He said that he had begun to contemplate Rumsfeld's exit before the election -- even while he was publicly vowing that he would keep the defense secretary through the end of his term and insisting that polls forecasting Republican defeat were wrong. "I thought we were going to do fine yesterday," Bush insisted. "Shows what I know." But "win or lose, Bob Gates was going to become the nominee."

At some point, the Post changed what was the accurate reporting -- that Bush expressly acknowledged that he "misled" reporters because he had "indicated that he had made the decision to replace Rumsfeld before the elections" -- by claiming in the new version that he merely "contemplated" Rumsfeld's exit before the election. Worse, the Post deleted entirely the accurate statement that the President "appeared to acknowledge having misled reporters."

The point here is not to specifically rehash the President's remarks about Rumsfeld's departure.  It's to illustrate the point Anonymous Liberal made about how the press has gone all postmodern on us and now refrains from comparing the President's narratives against the known facts.  It's as if the exercise of Aristotelean logic--both A and Not A cannot be simultaneously true--is beyond the pale in a family newspaper. 

Soul

Andrew Warner makes the same old argument I've been hearing for decades:

Few people can sell their soul so completely just to further their careers – those who do become President.

He then suggests that this is the reason for the Obama boomlet:

Because of this, voters are throwing out the standard question they ask of all politicians. Liberal or Conservative? Those labels are being replaced with two new, far more appropriate categories: Full of crap and politically inexperienced – That's why Obama has a chance.

I have a several reactions to this.

First, Obama is the latest in a long line of American early dark horse candidates, people about whom the electorate knows very little and therefore onto whom they can project their own ideas, biases and positions.  Such candidates enjoy the kind of popularity that is a mile wide and an inch deep for a few months.  Their approval ratings sink pretty rapidly once the campaign is joined and they are forced to stake out positions that inevitably alienate substantial segments of the population.

Second, we are now suffering through the sixth year of governance by a politically inexperienced leader.  I for one am more than ready for a more seasoned and mature occupant of the White House.  I think that for every voter who finds Obama's freshness appealing, there is another who finds him insufficiently practiced.

Third, the idea that candidates sell their souls and trim their positions and personality seems to be applied to Democrats more than Republicans.   Al Gore was harshly criticized by the media for being too aggressive in his first debate with Bush in 2000.  So in the second debate, he nodded and smiled a whole lot and stressed areas where he and Bush agreed.  Then, of course, the media pounced, claiming that Gore had no core personality or values, and that by heeding their advice he had demonstrated a lack of spine.  Howard Dean screamed his famous scream in 2004, and then after it had been re-run on cable TV for the 4295th time, he contritely submitted to an interview where he admitted that his behavior wasn't very presidential and that he was sorry and would never do it again.  In doing so, he lost what was most appealing about him as a candidate.  In the same election, John Kerry was successfully painted by the GOP as a flip-flopper (remember the wind-surfing ad?) who would take any position.

One of the biggest framing challenges for the Democrats in 2008 will be how to avoid being once again being defined by the Republicans as a bunch of unprincipled opportunists who will say anything to become president.

Biconceptuals

George Lakoff's analysis of the Democratic congressional victory has some great ideas about the November election and who won, who lost and why.  The whole thing is well worth reading, but here's the nut of it:

In short, the Democratic candidate who campaigned on conservative values lost; those who may have had such values, but campaigned on their progressive values, won.

Like Shuler and Casey, swing voters are biconceptuals, with both conservative and progressive worldviews in different areas of life and with both available for politics. How did these biconceptual candidates appeal to biconceptual swing voters? By taking progressive positions, and campaigning vigorously on them. How did this work? They activated the progressive values in the brains of swing voters.

Why did it work? Because swing voters, being biconceptual, already had many progressive views. A large proportion of those identifying themselves with the word "independent" or even "conservative" happen to have progressive views in many issue areas: They love the land — as much as any environmentalist, even though they wouldn't use words like "biodiversity"; many are progressive Christians who take Christianity to be about helping the poor and serving the needy; many are civil-libertarians, though they would never join the "too liberal" ACLU; and most care about their families and empathize with people in dire straights. In short, these are self-identified "conservatives" and "independents" who have very real progressive values in important areas of life.

In the last ten years or so, the national media have tended to oversimplify the electorate by dividing the country into "red" and "blue" states and voters into "Republicans," "Democrats" and "swing voters."  Perhaps the media apply these broad labels out of laziness.  Perhaps it comes out of pressure to meet the impossible deadlines of the 24 hour news cycle that demand instant analysis, no matter how simplistic.  Perhaps it is part of the efforts of Gingrich and Rove to define liberals as wildly out of touch with American values.  What I see Lakoff doing is reminding us that most people are not as unidimensional as that--and that when candidates understand that and use that idea to their advantage, they have a better chance of winning.

Hate

Writing in AMERICAblog, John in DC links to a story out of Arizona about a gay-bashing incident, and then makes this dubious argument:

Federal hates crimes law already covers race, religion and national origin. It does not cover gender, disability or sexual orientation. It should cover everyone. Whether or not you agree about the need for, or wisdom of, hate crimes law, if we're going to have a law on the books - and we already do (and ironically, the existing federal hate crimes law already covers Christian conservatives, the very people who most object to adding anyone else to it) - then the law ought to cover everyone.

I yield to no one in my condemnation of homophobia, but this is simply sloppy thinking.  First, what does John mean by "It should cover everyone"?  I don't agree that every time someone is assaulted because he or she belongs to a group or class that is hated it should be a federal offense.
I am one of those who disagrees about "the need for, or wisdom of, hate crimes law," particularly the federal law that John refers to.  Such laws are redundant.  We already have laws on the books against making threats, assault, mayhem and murder.  These crimes don't become any worse when they're prompted by prejudice.  They're not properly federal matters, either.  Such statutes seem to me to be part of my fellow liberals' unfortunate tendency to want to criminalize bad speech  and bad thoughts.

Alarmist

This is a bit over the top, this talk about how alarming it is that Bush is so isolated and detached, that he is delusional, unnerving, disturbing, and frightening and that he needs an intervention.  And it goes on and on.  Still, I remember hearing this kind of panel going on about Bill Clinton and the impeachment imbroglio and how terrible all that was.  It's interesting how the MSM is now piling on.  Where were they two, three, four, five years ago?