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Tuesday, June 26, 2007

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Forgiving the sinner, but not the sin

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

There is a woman named Katrina Swett, who is running in the New Hampshire Democratic primary for the United States Senate. The short case against her candidacy is made here (stolen from My Left Nutmeg):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5dx1nvagrw[/youtube]

Recently Ms. Swett has attempted to distance herself from Saint Joe:

As we reported recently, Swett suggested a couple weeks ago that she was drifting away from Lieberman. At the time, she said that she found herself “disagreeing with him more and more frequently these days,” adding: “This doesn’t change the fact that we are friends, but it does change my support of him as a politician.” …

There is a lively debate, see comments to the TPM post above, about whether Ms. Swett should be forgiven. We learn here that Matthew reports that Jesus said:

Then Peter came up to him and said, ‘Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I do not say to you seven times but seventy times seven.”

For those that are counting, that’s 490 times. Presumably, at 491 you can give up on your brother. Luke, on the other hand, according to the same source (which I’m sure is reliable), indicates that we should withhold forgiveness until we see proof of true repentance:

“if there is repentance, you must forgive.” Luke’s gospel emphasizes repentance more than the gospels of Mark and Matthew. We recall Luke uniquely saying, “Unless you repent, you too will all perish.” (Luke 13:3, 5)

I’m not aware that Jesus said we should ever forget the sin. Even Jesus, I suspect, would not expect us to assume that the sinner, once forgiven, will never sin again.

I am reminded of an event I attended at Colby College back in 1970 during the student strike against the war in Vietnam. Students from all of Maine attended, and both Maine Senators, Ed Muskie and Margaret Chase Smith, addressed the crowd. Ed Muskie had, early on, been a supporter of the war, but had long since changed his position. He said, in essence, that he had done so because he had been convinced by students like us that the war was wrong. Even that didn’t sit well with some of the crowd, and I remember feeling a bit puzzled. What were we there for, if not to convince others of the rightness of our position? If we condemned those who we convinced, what chance did we have of success?

I am convinced today, as I was then, that Muskie had truly repented, but I freely acknowledge that it’s a judgment call, made all the more difficult by the fact that hypocrisy is almost a job requirement for modern politicians.

How then, do we deal with politicians like Swett?

In her case, there are substantial reasons to reject her attempts to ingratiate herself with the members of her own party, who she rejected during the 2006 campaign. We need not decide whether she has truly repented (requiring, as any Catholic can tell you, a true act of contrition), we need only decide that she lacks the judgment to be a United States Senator (remembering always that if she gets the nomination, it is time to hold one’s nose and do the least evil). Any candidate who did not know, by 2006, that Iraq was the preeminent issue of our time, any candidate who did not recognize the threat to our constitution that the war and the Bush brand of empire poses, simply lacks the judgment to be a preferred candidate for the United States Senate. By 2006 any person paying attention should have, must have, known these things. Yet here’s what Swett said shortly after Ned beat Joe in the primary:

Swett believes Lieberman lost because of three perceived Democratic “sins”: the sin of supporting the Iraq war and being tough on defense, the sin of being bipartisan and the sin of displaying religious faith. Swett said those traits might make Lieberman undesirable to many Democrats but they could be key for Democrats in winning future national elections.

Here I am, a convinced agnostic, slowly sliding toward confirmed atheism, yet I say unto you: It is, and was, indeed a sin to support the Iraq war. Moreover, I say unto you, with all the certitude a former Catholic can summon, that this sin is and was not merely venial, but mortal ((Theology at the link not necessarily endorsed by CTBlue)). I bemoan the fact that there is no Hell in which to incinerate folks like Lieberman. Like Jesus, we can forgive Swett for condoning the sin, but we should not forget that she did so, and we must unfortunately continue to suspect that, were she not shilling for votes in a state grown ever more weary of war (and ever more blue), she would still be condoning the sin.

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The Supreme Court strikes back

Monday, June 25, 2007

The fan is being hit fast and furiously these days. Joe Lieberman’s gift to the nation-a right wing Supreme Court, has announced itself with force over the last couple of days. Corporate free speech good, student free speech, bad. Corporations good, environment bad. Institutionalized religion good, taxpayer standing bad.

What’s interesting is the degree to which the hard right judges are showing their true colors. The plurality opinion in the student free speech case allowed that students have some free speech rights, just not when they’re saying something that might be interpreted as being pro-drugs. You can look it up, there’s an asterisk in the First Amendment that makes an exception for that. But Clarence Thomas was having none of it. No half way measures for him:

In sort, in the earliest public schools, teachers taught, and students listened. Teachers commanded, and students obeyed. Teachers did not rely solely on the power of ideas to persuade; they relied on discipline to maintain order.

Long and short: no free speech rights for students, according to Thomas. Case closed. Yes, that’s right, Clarence Thomas elevated 18th century educational practices to the status of legal precedent in a constitutional case.

In the long run, the case that may cause the most harm involved a suit by taxpayers against the Bush Administration’s giveaways to religious groups. The court said that atheist and agnostic taxpayers lacked standing to “sue to stop conferences that help religious charities apply for federal grants”.

Taxpayer standing often represents the only effective check on unconstitutional activities by the government. Once again, the court plurality opted to neuter the legal principle rather than kill it, but that was not good enough for Scalia (joined by Thomas):

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas would have gone further that the rest of the court, favoring a repudiation of the 1968 decision that in certain instances allows taxpayer lawsuits.

”We had an opportunity today to erase this blot on our jurisprudence, but instead have simply smudged it,” Scalia wrote.

No doubt Big Tony will have many more chances to deprive ordinary citizens of redress in the courts. They’re in charge now. We are about to see the most activist court in American history, but it won’t be covered that way. Somehow restricting the rights of the American people doesn’t qualify as activism.

I’m waiting, by the way, for Clarence Thomas to call for the reversal of Brown v. Board of Education. After all, segregated schools were universal in the good old days, so they must also be constitutional.

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Secularism rising

Monday, June 25, 2007

Steve Benen, writing at Talking Points Memo, comments on an article in the Atlantic, which noted that the number of Americans who stated that they had “no religious preference” doubled (from 7%) between 1992 and 2002. The authors of a study cited in the article, Michael Hout and Claude S. Fischer, concluded that the increase was not due to a rise in atheism, but to a growing disgust with the religous right. Benen concludes:

But if the Hout/Fischer analysis is right, and more people are turning away from organized religion because they’re just so repulsed by the Dobson/Robertson crowd, well, that’s just hilarious.

It may or may not be hilarious, but I doubt that it would be disturbing to the Dobson/Robertson crowd, on either doctrinal or political grounds.

I’m no expert on Protestantism, since they’re all heretics. But I do know that there are contradictory currents running through their brand of Christianity. On the one hand, they do proselytize, but for many of them there is the concept of the elect, that is, some people are bound for heaven, and some won’t get in no matter what. Naturally, each one believes that he or she is one of the elect, and is more than happy to count nearly every one else as being of the “left behind” variety. The non-believers are just announcing their status, pre-judgment.

Politically, the Dobsons and Robertsons will no doubt thrive if open secularists become more numerous. They flourish by fostering a sense of exceptionalism and victimhood in their followers. The more they can portray themselves and their sheep (Jesus sure chose the right metaphor there, didn’t he?) as persecuted, the more blind loyalty and fanaticism they can engender. They aren’t particularly interested in winning over a majority of Americans. They are particularly interested in controlling a subset significant enough to enable them to control elections. It’s no small achievement to have total control over 20 to 30% of the voting population. The more they can scare the sheep, the more they can herd them to “safety”.

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Connections

Monday, June 25, 2007

Two articles from Thinkprogress came across in my newsreader today, one after the other:

In the first we learn that CNN has dumped an interview with Michael Moore in order to broadcast an interview with Paris Hilton.

In the second, we learn that 41% of the people in this country still believe that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the events of 9/11.

Maybe if CNN spent as much time spreading the truth about 9/11 as it does spreading the vital word on Paris that 41% number would go down a bit. How can we really blame all these people for believing a fiction when many of them have never been exposed to the truth? How can we blame them for getting caught up in trivialities when that’s all they are fed?

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Frank Rich on the surge

Sunday, June 24, 2007

I’m sort of taking the day off. I’m going to watch Sicko, which I am downloading as I write, with Michael Moore’s blessing, apparently. You can download it here.

While I’m waiting, I do want to pass on portions of Frank Rich’s column (Times Select, so you have to pay) in the Times today. Rich’s experience as a film and theatre critic serves him in good stead in his role as a political columnist. So much of what Bushco does is performance of a sort.

BY this late date we should know the fix is in when the White House’s top factotums fan out on the Sunday morning talk shows singing the same lyrics, often verbatim, from the same hymnal of spin. The pattern was set way back on Sept. 8, 2002, when in simultaneous appearances three cabinet members and the vice president warned darkly of Saddam’s aluminum tubes. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” said Condi Rice, in a scripted line. The hard sell of the war in Iraq — the hyping of a (fictional) nuclear threat to America — had officially begun.

America wasn’t paying close enough attention then. We can’t afford to repeat that blunder now. Last weekend the latest custodians of the fiasco, our new commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and our new ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, took to the Sunday shows with two messages we’d be wise to heed.

The first was a confirmation of recent White House hints that the long-promised September pivot point for judging the success of the “surge” was inoperative. That deadline had been asserted as recently as April 24 by President Bush, who told Charlie Rose that September was when we’d have “a pretty good feel” whether his policy “made sense.” On Sunday General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker each downgraded September to merely a “snapshot” of progress in Iraq. “Snapshot,” of course, means “Never mind!”

The second message was more encoded and more ominous. Again using similar language, the two men said that in September they would explain what Mr. Crocker called “the consequences” and General Petraeus “the implications” of any alternative “courses of action” to their own course in Iraq. What this means in English is that when the September “snapshot” of the surge shows little change in the overall picture, the White House will say that “the consequences” of winding down the war would be even more disastrous: surrender, defeat, apocalypse now. So we must stay the surge. Like the war’s rollout in 2002, the new propaganda offensive to extend and escalate the war will be exquisitely timed to both the anniversary of 9/11 and a high-stakes Congressional vote (the Pentagon appropriations bill).

…

Come September 2007, Mr. Bush will offer his usual false choices. We must either stay his disastrous course in eternal pursuit of “victory” or retreat to the apocalypse of “precipitous withdrawal.” But by the latest of the president’s ever-shifting definitions of victory, we’ve already lost. “Victory will come,” he says, when Iraq “is stable enough to be able to be an ally in the war on terror and to govern itself and defend itself.” The surge, which he advertised as providing “breathing space” for the Iraqi “unity” government to get its act together, is tipping that government into collapse. As Vali Nasr, author of “The Shia Revival,” has said, the new American strategy of arming Sunni tribes is tantamount to saying the Iraqi government is irrelevant.

For the Bush White House, the real definition of victory has become “anything they can get away with without taking blame for defeat,” said the retired Army Gen. William Odom, a national security official in the Reagan and Carter administrations, when I spoke with him recently. The plan is to run out the Washington clock between now and Jan. 20, 2009, no matter the cost.

Precipitous withdrawal is also a chimera, since American manpower, materiel and bases, not to mention our new Vatican City-sized embassy, can’t be drawn down overnight. The only real choice, as everyone knows, is an orderly plan for withdrawal that will best serve American interests. The real debate must be over what that plan is. That debate can’t happen as long as the White House gets away with falsifying reality, sliming its opponents and sowing hyped fears of Armageddon. The threat that terrorists in civil-war-torn Iraq will follow us home if we leave is as bogus as Saddam’s mushroom clouds. The Qaeda that actually attacked us on 9/11 still remains under the tacit protection of our ally, Pakistan.

As General Odom says, the endgame will start “when a senior senator from the president’s party says no,” much as William Fulbright did to L.B.J. during Vietnam. That’s why in Washington this fall, eyes will turn once again to John Warner, the senior Republican with the clout to give political cover to other members of his party who want to leave Iraq before they’re forced to evacuate Congress. In September, it will be nearly a year since Mr. Warner said that Iraq was “drifting sideways” and that action would have to be taken “if this level of violence is not under control and this government able to function.”

Mr. Warner has also signaled his regret that he was not more outspoken during Vietnam. “We kept surging in those years,” he told The Washington Post in January, as the Iraq surge began. “It didn’t work.” Surely he must recognize that his moment for speaking out about this war is overdue. Without him, the Democrats don’t have the votes to force the president’s hand. With him, it’s a slam dunk. The best way to honor the sixth anniversary of 9/11 will be to at last disarm a president who continues to squander countless lives in the names of those voiceless American dead.

Has Rich noticed, I wonder, the linguistic shift in his own paper that I mentioned yesterday. He implicitly notes in his column that the “Qaeda” we’re fighting isn’t the Qaeda that attacked us. The Times is actively assisting in their attempt to conflate the two. It sure would be helpful if someone like Rich were to call them on it.

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Yet more bike blogging

Saturday, June 23, 2007

A couple of pictures from our area.

This, I believe, was once a tavern atop a hill on Pequot Trail. It burned many years ago, but the walls still stand, awaiting restoration.

And, on the Mystic River, an egret (I think it’s an egret) poses.

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Glued to the tube

Saturday, June 23, 2007

One of my pet peeves is restaurants that have television sets visible in the dining area. I have to take care to position myself so I can’t see the tube. I don’t want to watch, yet I continually find myself drawn to watch as if by magnetic force.

I don’t watch TV at home, so I’m not an addict in any real sense. Why this strange attraction?

Well, today I learned the answer. I just started reading Al Gore’s book, The Assault on Reason. In the introduction he relates how this strange attraction is the result of the “orienting response”. On the savannah, as Gore points out, there were very good reasons to respond to, and look at, sudden movement in our field of vision. He observes that humans lacking the response didn’t get to be ancestors. They got to be food. Television provokes that response, repeatedly. We literally can’t help ourselves.

All is not lost, however. Gore also points out, citing Marshall McLuhan, that television is a cold medium-most people simply passively accept what the TV feeds them. However, some of us have evolved past that stage. We do question and engage with the drivel sent our way. It may be a cool medium, but it makes some people very hot. Unfortunately, our only recourse-yelling at the tube- is terribly unsatisfying. It just stares back at us, unblinking. Nonetheless, we fight back to the best of our ability.

Gore’s book, by the way, is good reading. Contrary to what the TV pundits say, it is not a wild eyed screed. Here’s a wild eyed screed (from the movie “Network”), making a lot of Gore’s points in more colorful fashion:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTN3s2iVKKI[/youtube]

How did this movie ever get made?

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More adventures in linguistics

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Speaking of misuse of language (see the previous post), a few weeks back I mentioned that the Oxford English Dictionary was so far holding firm against McDonald’s attempts to redefine the term “McJob“. Here at home, corporate America, in the form of Anheuser Busch in this instance, is finding that Bushco is more accommodating when it comes to perverting the language.

In tihs morning’s Times there’s a very short article (not on the web) about the Administration’s decision to redefine the term “organic” to make it more corporate friendly. The article I read is not on the web, but I found a similar article, which is, unfortunately, on Times Select.

The rules provide that something is organic if it is made of 95% organically grown ingredients, with the other 5% made up of approved non-organics. A substance can get on the approved list only if it’s unavailable in organic form in sufficient quality or quantity. It seems the Budweiser folks want to sell organic beer, but they don’t want to use organically grown hops. It says here that beer consists of four ingredients: water, malt, hops, and yeast. It also says there that water comprises 90% of beer, so hops may in fact be less than 5% of the volume of beer. Of course, you know without having to check that the Bud folks just don’t want to put out the coin for the real stuff, nor do they want to be bothered with encouraging organic production. Far easier to redefine the term. Afer all, is it really so important that the ingredients in organic labelled foods really be organic? It isn’t only hops:

The latest battle over what can be called organic involves beer and gelatin, food colorings and casings for sausage. The Department of Agriculture, the final arbiter of all things organic, is poised to approve a list of nonorganic ingredients that can be used in food stamped with its green-and-white organic seal.

The list includes hops for beer, dill weed oil for flavoring pickles, and elderberry juice coloring for making foods bright red to blue purple. There is also chia, an herb from Central America that is used in some baked goods, and fructooligosaccharides, a bulking agent that adds fiber.

I have to admit I believe there’s a shortage of organic fructooligosaccharides.

The industry had two years to petition for the changes; the public has seven days to object. Seven whole days. Bushco is getting soft.

Maybe the Country Time folks can get their product labeled organic lemonade, on the theory that it’s expensive to buy organically grown lemons and the product is 99% water anyway. (Just as an aside, since water is in no sense “organic”, shouldn’t it be excluded in computing the percentages?)

It seems to me that this sort of linguistic legerdemain has all kinds of possibilities. Why not allow Ben and Jerry’s to call its ice cream fat free on the theory that it is made with all fat free ingredients, except for those that are not available fat free in sufficient quantities?

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Talking lesson from George (Orwell, that is)

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Further proof that Bushco considers Orwell’s 1984 a How-To book.

Yesterday, I read this post on Josh Marshall’s site, in which he showcased a comment that noted the fact that the people fighting us in Iraq are now being called Al Qaeda by the media. In this morning’s Times the observation is borne out:

The operational commander of troops battling to drive fighters with Al Qaeda from Baquba said Friday that 80 percent of the top Qaeda leaders in the city fled before the American-led offensive began earlier this week. He compared their flight with the escape of Qaeda leaders from Falluja ahead of an American offensive that recaptured that city in 2004. (Emphasis added)

I have a nifty little program, in which I store newspaper articles and other things of interest in various electronic notebooks. I spent a little time today to verify my recollection, which coincided with the commenter’s, that the folks in Falluja were not identified as members of Al Qaeda in 2004. As an example there was this article in the Washington Post, in which a Fallujah resident expressed support for the fighters:

Karim speaks fondly of the insurgents, many of whom are Fallujans themselves, saying they were defending the city against non-Muslim troops

Some might remember that what is now Al Qaeda was known once as “insurgents”. In fact, there is a group in Iraq that has called itself Al Qaeda is Iraq. However, as Billmon, reporting on a lecture by Juan Cole in 2005 remarked:

Juan Cole doesn’t claim that Zarqawi and his group are complete fictions, although the “Al Qaeda in Iraq” label appears to be a flagrant violation of Bin Ladin’s intellectual property rights, possibly perpetuated by some Internet wannabes who don’t have any connection to either crew. But Cole does make the case that the strength and influence of “foreign fighters” in Iraq has been even more exaggerated than I assumed, and that the key underground networks sustaining the insurgency are all probably run by remnants of the old Ba’ath security services.

I’m not going to try to document this anymore, because for anyone actually following what’s been going on in Iraq, this is old news. What is new news is the decision on the part of someone (Karl, are you there?) to start calling one party in the Iraq civil war Al Qaeda. One would think that we would want to avoid giving Osama more credit than he’s due, but as was observed in another context, everything these Mayberry Machiavellis do is done with an eye toward domestic political consumption. If Osama’s reputation is unnecessarily burnished, then that’s just collateral damage hardly worth a thought. What’s important is that we ratchet up fear at home and attempt, by any means possible, to buttress the idea that we are fighting them there to avoid fighting them here and to reintroduce or reinforce the idea that the war in Iraq is connected to the “global war on terror”.

What’s distressing, of course, is that the media has accepted this terminology without breaking stride. Nothing in the article appears to question the use of the term. Once again, despite its editorial policy, the Times is the willing enabler of Administration policy and propaganda.

Update: This subject is treated exhaustively be Glenn Greenwald here.

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