CT Blue

Former (thank god the forces of nature that drive all things) Congressman Mark Souder, the deeply devout Christian can’t understand why he couldn’t stop [insert your favorite word for the act here] his abstinence touting mistress, even after praying to Jehovah:

“I prayed multiple times a day, sang hymns with emotion and tears, felt each time that it wouldn’t happen again, read the Bible every morning. . . . So how in the world did I have a ‘torrid’ (which is an accurate word) many-year affair? How could I compartmentalize it so much?

Basically, he could do it because he was a gold plated hypocrite. But not to worry, as the story at the link shows, he is forgiven by his peers, who have a way of forgiving their hypocritical political or religious friends while extending no mercy to their foes (not for them Jesus’ injunction to love your enemy). Souder is apparently hitting the confessional circuit, where no doubt he’ll be a big draw, see e.g., John Rowland.

Meanwhile, what of the over 200,000 college students who lost student loans, courtesy of Mark Souder, because they were convicted of minor drug offenses. No forgiveness for them, and no second act on the lecture circuit.

If they gave a Nobel Prize in Hypocrisy, these folks would be joint winners.

The switchers who voted no on cloture but yes today:

Lamar Alexander (R-TN)
Thad Cochran (R-MS)
James Inhofe (R-OK)
George LeMieux (R-FL)
Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)
Roger Wicker (R-MS)

And those who were absent Monday but voted yes today:

Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
Richard Burr (R-NC)

These are the folks who either actually or implicitly voted to filibuster a jobs bill for which they eventually voted. There is no intellectual justification for that sort of switch, as there would be for voting to stop a filibuster against a bill one does not support.

One must wonder whether the punditocracy that keeps urging “bipartisanship” upon the Democrats, while blaming them for gridlock for catering to their left wing base, will take note. No, one doesn’t wonder. Note will not be taken.

Via Think Progress:

Business groups are worried by the potential effects of provisions banning the import of all goods made with convict labor, forced labor, or forced or indentured child labor that were included in a customs bill sponsored by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) and Ranking Member Charles Grassley (R-IA)

Business sources say this reporting requirement could cause DHS to more actively seek out imported products made with child labor, forced labor or convict labor. [...]

Sources conceded that this was a sensitive issue because industry groups do not want to be seen as opposing strict measures guarding against human rights abuses. However, one source did expect a push from lobbyists closer to the finance committee mark-up of the bill, and speculated that U.S. industry groups and foreign governments could form ad hoc coalitions to help send a united message.

As professionals, the lobbyists must relish a task like this. Compared to selling child labor and slavery, stopping health care is a walk in the park, a mere bagatelle in the trophy case of a true lobbyist.

Imagine the brainstorming session among those lobbyists as they craft their talking points. True, it’s money that matters, but it’s still necessary to burnish the lucre with an attractive veneer of hypocrisy. Here’s just a few possibilities:

1. Banning goods made by non-traditional laborers would increase prices for the American consumer.

2. We have no right to restrict the freedom of non-traditional laborers to get near-gainful employment.

3. The United States should not interfere with the cultures of other countries (unless we intend to bomb them, of course).

I’m sure these are Bush League suggestions. No doubt the lobbyists will be far more creative. But talking points are just the start. For the real lobbyist-they man or woman with absolutely no conscience whatsoever, there is the Holy Grail. Having turned out thousands of brain dead Glenn Beck fans to oppose health care for themselves, shouldn’t it be possible for the lobbyists (with a little moola to Beck on the side of course) to turn out the tea partiers to demand cheap goods made by slaves and children?

There must be award ceremonies for lobbyists, and the guy or gal who can pull that one off surely deserves a special award, along with that special place in hell.

Antonin Scalia has a problem. His intellectual dishonesty is showing:

If there is a topic Justice Antonin Scalia does not relish discussing, it is how he would have voted in Brown v. Board of Education had he been on the Supreme Court when it was decided in 1954.
…

The Brown decision, which said the 14th Amendment prohibited segregation in public schools, is hard to square with Justice Scalia’s commitment to originalism, the theory of constitutional interpretation that says judges must apply the original understanding of the constitutional text.

Brown presents originalists with a problem. The weight of the historical evidence is that the people who drafted, proposed and ratified the 14th Amendment from 1866 to 1868 did not believe themselves to be doing away with segregated schools.

What’s a hypocrite to do?

The dead have a problem. They are defenseless. Even when they have spoken for themselves they are ignored, and people like Scalia presume to speak for them. The “originalists” pretend to believe they can channel the Founders, conveniently ignoring the wide range of views held by that disparate bunch. In fact, it’s truly amazing how often the original intent of the Framers seems to coincide perfectly with the predilections of the originalists themselves. For instance, in a few weeks or months, Scalia will probably be explaining how Jamie Madison would have been all in favor of erecting crosses on public land, despite the fact that he and Jefferson did all they could to keep a divinity school out of the University of Virginia (and succeeded). What would Little Jamie think? No one can say for sure, but my own guess is that he would have opposed that cross, if he thought he could get away with it.

The real problem with originalism is that it is an insult to the Framers. For the most part they were men (sorry, no women) of the Enlightenment. They would have cringed at the idea that they were putting the future into a conceptual strait jacket or that they were writing holy writ. They were acutely aware of the fact that they lived in an age in which they had just recently managed to shake off the “dead hand of the past“. It’s hard to believe they would have wanted their own dead hands to hold down a world they could neither predict nor understand.

But the originalist are endlessly creative. Brown v. Board of Ed is a problem. It is simply politically incorrect (give them 10 years, and maybe that will change) to say out loud what they really think: that it was incorrectly decided. So, if history is against you, there’s only one solution: change history:

The other main way originalists justify Brown is by gathering historical evidence to show that the people who adopted the 14th Amendment did indeed mean to ban segregated schools. Justice Scalia nodded in the direction of that argument in Arizona, saying that “although some states continued to have schools like that, some abolished segregated schools after it was passed.”

And indeed, it’s not impossible to find examples of Congressmen (Thaddeus Stevens, for example) who would have opposed school segregation. That doesn’t change the fact, however, that Brown represented a departure from majority sentiment at the time of the adoption of the 14th Amendment.

One must wonder, too, how Scalia manages to fit women’s rights within the ambit of the 14th Amendment. It’s a sure bet that virtually none of the Framers of that Amendment had women in mind when they wrote it.

But for those of us with memories that go back 9 years or so, this really hits the spot:

In Arizona last month, Justice Scalia chose his words carefully. He seemed to suggest that Brown reached the right result as a policy matter but that it was not compelled by the Constitution. Still, Justice Scalia said, that is no reason to favor Justice Breyer’s more flexible view of how to determine the meaning of the Constitution.

“Don’t make up your mind on this significant question between originalism and playing it by ear on the basis of whether, now and then, the latter approach might give you a result you like,” Justice Scalia said.

“Hitler developed a wonderful automobile,” he went on. “What does that prove? I’ll stipulate that you can reach some results you like with the other system. But that’s not the test.

“The test is over the long run does it require the society to adhere to those principles contained in the Constitution or does it lead to a society that is essentially governed by nine justices’ version of what equal protection ought to mean?”

Think Bush v. Gore. It was decided on equal protection grounds. How many of the Framers of the 14th Amendment expected that they were giving 4 men and a woman license to steal a presidential election, yet apparently, according to Scalia, they did.

David Broder has rightly been subjected to more withering blogger scorn than I am capable of expressing, but that doesn’t mean I can’t add my mite. His recent column (Stop Scapegoating) advising against prosecuting torturers has been deconstructed here and here as well as elswhere, but there are many levels of absurdity in the column, so I will concentrate on a point I have not yet seen made.

As digby points out, Broder exemplifies the the beltway philosophy that holds that people in power should suffer no consequences for either mistakes or criminality. But he has gone even further in this piece.

Let’s start with his his injunction that Obama “stop the retroactive search for scapegoats”.

A scapegoat, as we all should know, was an innocent goat upon whom the Jewish people ritually transferred their own sins. The goat was then forced into the desert, where it died in expiation for the sins it had not committed. Jesus Christ, according to the Christian tradition, was the ultimate scapegoat.

Broder turns the meaning of the word inside-out. He argues that we should transfer the actual guilt of the goat to us the people:

Again, [Obama was right to release the torture memos], because these policies were carried out in the name of the American people, and it is only just that we the people confront what we did. Squeamishness is not justified in this case. (Emphasis added)

We, the people are the guilty parties because these people made the decision to torture in our names. That being the case, those who actually committed the crime should not be punished.

It’s an odd sort of logic. Now that Nazi comparisons have been legitimized by the right, we are free to point out that it’s a bit like arguing that the German people were primarily responsible for the holocaust, so it was inappropriate to punish Hermann Göring, et. al. And, as Broder demonstrates, God forbid we should have punished Hitler had we caught him alive:

Suppose that Obama backs down and Holder or someone else starts hauling Bush administration lawyers and operatives into hearings and courtrooms.

Suppose the investigators decide that the country does not want to see the former president and vice president in the dock. Then underlings pay the price while big shots go free. But at some point, if he is at all a man of honor, George W. Bush would feel bound to say: That was my policy. I was the president. If you want to indict anyone for it, indict me.

Is that where we want to go? I don’t think so. Obama can prevent it by sticking to his guns.

No, we wouldn’t want to put George Bush in the dock. Look how well it worked out when we gave Nixon a pass on Watergate and Reagan a pass on Iran-Contra.

But there’s something more profoundly repellent about Broder’s thinking here. To return to the Nazi comparison, the German people did accept their share of responsibility for the crimes committed in their names, and they are a better people for it. But Broder is not really looking for that. His reference to these crimes as “policy disagreements” gives him away. What he is really saying is that since we are all guilty, none of us are guilty.

Republicans must be immune from cognitive dissonance. There are plenty of examples, but here’s one that truly needs to be more widely known.

We are told by Rove and his ilk that Democrats would be criminalizing “policy differences” if they so much as think about investigating the Bush era war criminals.

At the same time they threaten to filibuster someone who is on the other side of that policy divide, Obama’s nominee to head up the Office of Legal Counsel, who happens to oppose torture. Make no mistake about it, their reasons for opposing her, after you strip away all the bullshit, is that she is anti-torture. So, a person who is anti-torture is fair game for Republican attacks, but actual torturers are off limits.

Speaking of hypocrisy and inability to see ourselves as others see us, someone with time on their hands could have a good time taking apart Arlen Specter’s recently published article in the New York Review of Books entitled The Need to Roll Back Presidential Power Grabs. When I read it I was stunned. If I didn’t know better I would have thought, based on this article, that Specter was a fearless opponent of the Bush power grabs, standing up for truth, justice and the American way. He even makes a pitch for keeping the courts open to lawsuits against the phone companies (substituting the government as the defendant) after he enabled that unconstitutional immunity statute in the first place. Specter is in a bind these days. He is tacking to the right to protect himself in the Republican primary, but he badly wants to protect his unearned reputation for moderation and independence. In fact, when push came to shove (or even just to poke) he always caved. The article is full of the self congratulatory use of the personal pronoun. It would be the work of a weekend, at least, to do the googling necessary to demonstrate how mendacious his article is. It is just jam packed with lies, distortions, and special pleading. Unfortunately, this is not a weekend that I can devote to this worthy endeavor. Here’s hoping someone will.