Category: Politics

Here in Massachusetts the debate about gay marriage is proceeding in a remarkably restrained, civil, and thoughtful manner, in spite of the posturing of Mitt Romney. (He has no credibility, in part because everyone knows he’s just pandering to the various groups that he needs to make a run for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2008.) But as Gene Stone writes at The Huffington Post, that doesn’t stop people from trying to stir the pot: “the right-wing British newsweekly, The Economist, is running a piece this week called ‘The Slippery Slope to Bestiality.’ (Now there’s a headline designed to placate all sides…)” Stone is right; it’s a pretty disgusting piece. I’ve subscribed to the Economist for most of the last 30 years, and I can remember when they were a respectable, fairly non-partisan journal of economic record. They used to be the scourge of dissembling politicians of all stripes, and no-one would have described them as “right-wing”. But as I noted early last year, those days are gone: the Economist may still have the best writers, but it has lost its soul.

As Stone suggested, I just sent a letter to the editor of the Economist. (If you’re a subscriber, I urge you to do the same.) Since I have no confidence that they’ll publish it, I reproduce it here:

Subject: Romney, bestiality, and bartenders.
Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2005 12:22:50 -0400
To: letters@economist.com

Your story on Mitt Romney’s exploitation of the gay marriage issue was shameful. From the extravagant title to the closing sentence, you seemed determined to use extreme viewpoints to leave the impression that Romney is a moderate on this issue. By quoting those who “claim that it could open the door to legalised unions with horses” and Bob Pitko’s paean to rampant promiscuity, you ignore the majority of Massachusetts’ residents who are wrestling with this question. Why would you seek to trivialise their thoughtful debate?

Your correspondent missed the point that on this subject Romney is widely seen as irrelevant, because of his blatant pandering in advance of his run for the Republican nomination. Remember that Massachusetts is fundamentally a Democrat state; we elect Republican governors simply to keep the legislature in check, not because we like them.

This was well below the standard I’ve come to expect of the Economist over the 30 years I’ve been reading it.

Geoff Arnold
[address deleted]
[expat Brit, resident in the USA since 1981]

By “interesting” I don’t mean “reasonable”, “rational”, “fair”, “representative”, “democratic”, or (heaven forbid) “intellectually rigorous”. No, I mean, where do political rubber-neckers go to gawk, as they might at a train wreck or a runaway moose? Time and again it seems to come back to one place: Texas. Check out Seriously Kinky from the Dallas Observer: “This Texas Jewboy wants to be the next governor of Texas, and if you think he’s kidding, the joke may be on you.” You couldn’t make this stuff up. Screaming Lord Sutch, move over. (OK, he’s dead, I know.)

(Via GeneBob.)

On a mailing list to which I subscribe*, an argument debate was developing about possible Supreme Court nominees. Nothing unusual about that; it happens everywhere. As on many other lists, the views of most of the participants were fairly predictable and a couple of the more vocal members were staking out their positions. Suddenly another occasional contributor to these food-fights chimed in with the immortal words, “Actually, I see you 2 as opposites sides of the same coin called ‘political extremism'”.

Now this pushed one of my buttons: the sloppy assumption that the right answer to any question must lie in the middle. Historically it’s a really dubious stance – how would one apply it to slavery, for instance, or voting rights? Intellectually it’s just plain lazy: a way of positioning oneself as moderate, and therefore right, without actually having to do any of the heavy lifting of working out a real argument.

Slacktivist wrote about this back in 2002 (and again recently):

The middle-path-between-extremes-must-be-right rationale is enormously appealing. But it’s helpful to state it more plainly as a logical argument:
1. Everyone thinks I’m wrong.
therefore
2. I am right.
It’s possible, of course, that statements 1 and 2 are both true, but the “therefore” does not follow. Let’s try a more charitable form of the argument:
1. People who are wrong think I’m wrong,
therefore
2. I am right.
Again, it could be true, but it doesn’t necessarily follow (and you haven’t, in fact, proven that the others are wrong). That magical “therefore” can be a convenient way of justifying your position without any sort of principled rationale.

Staking out a coherent, principled position is a lot of hard work. So is trying to understand and respond to the principles and arguments of your opponents. So why bother with all that?

Instead, just find someone seated to your right and label them “thesis.” Then turn to someone seated to your left and label them “antithesis.” Bingo! That makes you “synthesis” – the inevitable and uncontestable culmination of all right-thinking on the subject. Anyone who disagrees with you now is swept into the dustbin of history as a misguided extremist. All done simply without all that belabored appeal to argument, principle or fact.

I call this maneuver “Hegel’s bluff.”

The astute observer will spot this manoeuvre at work all over the place.

—
* Names withheld, since nobody’s given me permission to drag this private debate into the blogosphere, and it would be unfair to assume that any statements were intended as carefully considered and defensible positions.

Daily Kos on Karl Rove on Plame….

The latest posting to Baghdad Burning about Bush’s recent speech is essential reading. Money quote – first Bush, then Riverbend:

“We continued our efforts to help them rebuild their country. Rebuilding a country after three decades of tyranny is hard and rebuilding while a country is at war is even harder.”

Three decades of tyranny isn’t what bombed and burned buildings to the ground. It isn’t three decades of tyranny that destroyed the infrastructure with such things as “Shock and Awe” and various other tactics. Though he fails to mention it, prior to the war, we didn’t have sewage overflowing in the streets like we do now, and water cut off for days and days at a time. We certainly had more than the 8 hours of electricity daily. In several areas they aren’t even getting that much.

Remember what Tip O’Neill said: All politics is local. Bush can blather on about 9/11 and freedom and terrorists and 9/11 and democracy and 9/11 and Bin Laden all he wants; to people in Iraq that don’t have fresh water or electricity to run the air conditioners when the temperature goes over 100F, it’s simple: “Fix this stuff or get the fuck out of our country and let us fix it!”.

Pressure of work meant that I missed Bush’s televised speech on Iraq, so I was forced to rely on the transcript and the pronouncements of the pundits to determine what he said. And that’s a pity, because I’m sure I missed something – a subtitle, or an ad-lib that wasn’t captured in the transcript. How else can one explain the following juxtaposition?

First, Bush promised that “If our commanders on the ground say we need more troops, I will send them. But our commanders tell me they have the number of troops they need to do their job.” So the troop levels are a matter of military judgment, right? And since quite a few officers have been saying that they don’t have enough troops….

But wait. The President then said “Sending more Americans would undermine our strategy of encouraging Iraqis to take the lead in this fight. And sending more Americans would suggest that we intend to stay forever – when we are in fact working for the day when Iraq can defend itself and we can leave.” Huh? So now we can’t send more troops because that would undermine the strategy and send the wrong message? So it’s a political decision then.

Well, no. Maybe Bush realized that he was speaking in front of a military audience, because he later said, “As we determine the right force level, our troops can know that I will continue to be guided by the advice that matters – the sober judgment of our military leaders.”

So which is it? Did they explain in the subtitles that I wasn’t there to see? Or did the President manage to flip and then flop in the course of a single speech? Inquiring minds, etcetera…

According to today’s Guardian:

Channel 4 has teamed up with the award-winning film director Michael Winterbottom to make a docu-drama about three British Muslims who were incarcerated at Guantánamo Bay as “enemy combatants”. The Road to Guantánamo will tell the story of the so-called “Tipton Three”, who were released without charge from the US government’s Camp X-Ray prison last spring after two years in captivity.

(I wonder if it will be shown on US TV? PBS seems increasingly unlikely; maybe HBO.)

Over at Balkinization, Jack Balkin discusses Scalia’s uncompromising dissent in McCreary County v. ACLU, the courtroom 10 commandments case:

Scalia forthrightly explains that the Establishment Clause is not about preserving neutrality between religion and non-religion. It is not even about neutrality among religions. Rather, it requires neutrality among monotheistic religions that believe in a personal God who cares about and who intervenes in the affairs of humankind, and in particular, among Christianity (and its various sects), Judaism, and Islam.

Quite apart from its viciously divisive tone, Scalia’s argument displays remarkable ignorance. For example, he asserts that “With respect to public acknowledgment of religious belief, it is entirely clear from our Nation’s historical practices that the Establishment Clause permits this disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists”. Yet the phrase “believers in unconcerned deities” clearly describes deists, a category that included many of the framers of the Constitution.

Balkin’s analysis is much more detailed than my brief note. Among other things, he dissects the curious pretzel logic that Scalia employs in including Jews and Moslems. The (scathing) bottom line: “Justice Scalia’s tradition of establishment of monotheism is, like so many other traditions, an invented tradition which he has made up to produce an outcome that he politically prefers.”

Highly recommended.

In his attempt to beat out Karl Rove for the title of Most Shameless Fabricator of Guilt by Association, Senator Rick Santorum explains the origins of child molestation by Roman Catholic priests in Catholic Online: “It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning ‘private’ moral matters such as alternative lifestyles. Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.”

(Via Sully. But Josh thinks Santorum first said this back in 2002.)

UPDATE: Sullivan received a great email from a reader in the Republic of Ireland which emphasizes the sheer stupidity of Santorum’s attempt to link priestly pedophilia with liberalism:

99% of schools were Catholic, 90% of the population were weekly mass goers and monthly confession was the norm for the majority. Divorce was banned by the constitution. There was no “plague of cultural liberalism”; there was no liberalism at all! It was almost a perfect Catholic State. Yet the physical and sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy was rampant. Indeed it has been the exposure of these crimes that has revolutionized Irish society in the course of 10 years.

Now here’s an interesting idea: a website devoted to foreign media coverage of the U.S.A. It includes English language original material as well as translated stories. I think I’m going to add WatchingAmerica‘s RSS feed to those that I monitor via NetNewsWire.