perfidy

Over at Norbizness' house, there is a discussion a-raging about a Steven Den Beste post that somebody called Balasubramania didn't like and didn't finish, that Instapundit linked to, that Norbizness called them on, and now everyone's piling on. What fun!

To sum up comments in support of den Beste: if you haven't drunk the kool-aid you cant't possibly understand the depths of den Beste. So shut your cryptoislamofascist liberal pansy piehole until you grow a pair, and learn that your snarky generalizations are inferior to others' dead-serious generalizations.

Bloggers like polemic; it garners traffic and approval. But jeez... this is a whole lot of fur flyin' from a pretty small dogfight. The Clueless piece is one of the more reasonable ones of late, and he deserves credit for that. But how can any commenter disagree with Norbizness' statement that the Clueless echo chamber have taken the loosest bits of the argument and turned them into Strangelovian crazy talk? 

The first half of den Beste's article (the part that Balasubramania read) says: "if you (I mean "Muslims") place us in a position where only you or us can survive, it's going to be us, and you'll all be dead."

I can see how that might come across a bit rectocranial.

But the second half says:

"We don't want to kill you, and we don't want you to surrender to us. We just want you to stop your fellow Muslims from trying to kill us. Do that, and this war is over."

I'm assuming #2 is what SDB meant to say, since it came at the end of his free-association where the actual thinking goes on. Also, this statement recognizes that Islam is comprised of individuals, not just suicide units and fellow travellers. The first statement is laughable and the second is tough but reasonable.

When I was teaching history, I was told always to lead my grading comments with the good news. It makes the medicine go down easier. I also taught my students that: context is everything; to make sure you've done your homework so you know the facts; to organize your work so that your point is clear; and to revise afterwards so you don't contradict yourself. Without doing all these things you risk building a castle that will very shortly burn down, fall over, and sink into the swamp. And then what do you have? A burning swamp and an ugly wife with huge tracts of land!

Den Beste? It might be a blog but that doesn't excuse lazy writing. Balu-wha? Finish your reading! Or, alternately, admit you came to uncertain conclusions.

Glenn Reynolds? Tell the whole story or go home! Also, "indeed" and "heh" don't count as incisive commentary anymore; they're schtick.

Johno? What a raging presumptuous a-hole!

SDB, Baluwhatever, and Reynolds are all guilty of lazy reading and writing, no matter what disagreements they may have otherwise. That doesn't help anyone. It's just a blog, but if you take challenges seriously, you better make sure you've done your homework. Participating in a discussion without arming yourself with knowledge is like making Shaq play donkey basketball. Weblogs tend to attract good writers and thoughtful, creative people, but the culture of polemic and generalization that tends to prevail among many weblogs is more donkey show than Shaq. Myself included.

This has been Johno, reporting from atop his high horse. Thank you, and good night.

NDR at I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts has this analysis of the EU's unity problems: "for all the people who complain that EU cannot work because agreement is impossible, they should point their fingers squarely at Blair, the chief obstructionist."

He has a point there, I think... but isn't the UK not part of the EU?

Last night I had an opportunity to attend the live broadcast of MSNBC's "Crossfire" at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government, featuring the smooth vocal stylings of Howard Dean.

I'm pretty wiped out right now and about to commit felonies on co-workers, so how about I merely advertise in this space that I'll write something substantial about this later today, mmmkay?

In the meantime, check out this quickie discussion by brdgt that hits most of the major points.

[wik] ....well, it's later.

Howard Dean came to the Crimson Permanent Assurance yesterday as part of the Chris Matthews "I'm a JOURNALIST, dammit!" Travellin' Jolly Roadshow." I managed to snag a hoi polloi ticket through certain connections (my ibogaine dealer is a Juris Doctor candidate at Harvard Law), and showed up at the appointed hour.

My first thought is that they hold these events in a wildly inappropriate setting. The room they use is an atrium at the Kennedy School that consists of a fairly small main floor and two upper levels looking down. Great for studying, but terrible for affording 500 people sightlines to the action. I know why they chose that room: security is easy to control, the building opens to the street and not to the inner campus, and because a super-damn-packed room looks grrrreat on camera.

My first thought: Chris' Matthews' producer must be hell to work for. Maaaan.

My second thought: Chris Matthews has orange skin. And it's not makeup!

I was seated two levels up from the action, with a clear view of the back of Matthews' and Gov. Dean's heads as well as the VIPS in the front rows. Since I could not see Dean's face, it was hard to tell whether he merely sounded less enraged, or whether he had actually quit doing that terrible smile-grimace that makes him look like Bruce Banner simultaneously trying to Hulk out and pass a peach pit. Brdgt, watching from home, corroborates my conclusion that Dean was more at ease than in past TV appearances. Goody for him. One thing is for sure-- in person he has definite charisma and a prickly charm that doesn't always translate on camera.

My sense is that Dean did himself a pretty good service by appearing on Crossfire. Matthews stuck to some issues that Dean can score pretty easily off of: gay marriage/civil unions; runaway spending, and stayed away from the stuff that could be really bad for him: how he's going to pay for his national health plan; his recent protectionist trade posture. That being said, it's a little scary how Dean doesn't have a dissembling bone in his body. Last night, when pressured, he said: that he was hoping not to get drafted during 'nam; that he would support breaking up media conglomerates; and that he would pursue international solutions to terrorist crises.

I don't think that the Vietnam issue is going to play for Dean's opponents. He went to the draft board; they kicked him free. Whether not he spent the next few years skiing is immaterial-- was he supposed to keep a vigil for all the people that went 'in his place'?

The media breakup question is a tougher one, because it means toughening up antitrust and competitiveness laws that are simultaneously toothless and burdensome. In the actual exchange during the show, it was clear that Dean is not planning on crusading to break up Fox and GE, but (I paraphrase), "if a bill came across my desk to that effect, I would sign it. I'm just not going to push for it." Fair enough.

Dean had many kind words for Colin Powell last night, though he stopped short of promising him a cabinet position in the event he wins. Dean seems committed to pursuing something like the Powell doctrine of international relations, something that could work out well for him as President though it might make it hard to win the actual election. Where he is strongest is in taking the Bush administration to task for squandering the US's goodwill on quixotic tasks, while ignoring the practical, achievable things the government should be doing domestically and abroad to combat terrorism.

Dean's favorite film: A Beautiful Mind. A safe choice.

His favorite musician: Wyclef Jean. A wacky and ill-considered choice. Wyclef's albums are tending more and more to stinky-turd status with every passing year. If he wants to be hip like this, why not tout the genius of Sean Paul, Keb' 'Mo, Robert Randolph, or even Outkast? But, what the hell. Anything, anything to keep Fleetwood Mac away from the White House.

His favorite book: Dean dodged this question to present Chris Matthews with a dedicated copy of his new campaign book, Winning Back America. Funny. During the commercial break, I heard Dean say as an aside to Matthews that he had thought better of citing "Sometimes A Great Notion" instead. Matthews replied "yeah, Kesey, right? That woulda been bad. Drugs." Indeed. Dean then floated the idea that "All The King's Men" would have been a good thing to say. I can get behind this-- Ken Kesey and Robert Penn Warren are hallmarks of a well-rounded mind.

The audience questions were all pretty good with one or two exceptions: one snot-nose from Harvard asked why Dean was too "busy" to meet one-on-one with students. Brdgt's take on this, which I fully endorse: "I feel really sorry for a privileged Harvard student who doesn't get to talk one on one with every presidential candidate - really my heart goes out to you. Really."

One person asked about Dean's sealing certain records from his terms as governer, and the reply was classic: in essence, "everyone does it. If you wrote me a letter as a private citizen, and you had HIV, and you were asking for state HIV research funding, would you want that letter to be public when I leave office?" I'm sure there's more to it than Dean lets on, but the Republicans are going to have to work pretty hard to make this into more than a one-news-cycle story, especially when literally everybody does this.

Someone else asked about Dean's foreign policy experience, and Dean replied that he had as much experience as Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush43 before they became President. QED.

Overall, I came away favorably impressed with Dean's forthrightness (even when it has to be dragged out of him), his clear-headedness, and his seeming willingness to table issues that he won't be qualified to discuss until after he becomes President.

Best quote of the evening: "We have to stop making every election in this country about abortion, god, guns, and gays."

Worst verbal tic: Dean kept saying "Soviet Union" for Russia, in a discussion of the nuclear threats posed by North Korea and Iran.

Dean/Clark: that's my prediction.

On Salon.com today I find this headline about Dubya's Thanksgiving visit to Baghdad: " 'Mission Accomplished' footage is no longer usable, so Karl Rove recalls his cast and crew to shoot a new Bush commercial in Baghdad."

I'm no booster of the President, but give him a little credit, please. First he isn't going to troop funerals, and he's a heartless jerk. Now he's visiting a war zone, and he's an opportunistic SOB. Isn't it possible that once in a while he just remembers to act Presidential? The "left" is going to have to stop demonizing the guy if they're going to make any headway.

Want to get educated on Proportional Representation, which just might be able to fix a lot of the problems we face as a society? Start here:

PR Library

Here's a little reading...the gap between the western and arab press never ceases to amaze me...

Hearts and Minds - US style

Dozens killed in Samarra carnage

Thwarted Ambush Was Highly Coordinated, U.S. Officials Say

U.S. Forces Kill 54 Iraqis After Ambushes

You can see the dramatic differences...

Here's the thing: Last night the lead on Aljazerra was this:

"Innocents killed in Samarra bloodbath
Al-Jazeera, Qatar - 17 hours ago
US troops in the Iraqi town of Samarra have admitted to perpetrating a bloodbath,
with one occupation spokesman confirming nearly four dozen people were killed ... "

I just cut and pasted that from google's news cache...now, if you click through that same story reads like this:

"US occupation authorities in Iraq have raised the Samarra carnage toll to 54.

An unnamed military spokesman on Monday did not specify if those killed were resistance fighters or civilians."

The Aljazeera headline was revised between last night and today. The question is, what does the Arabic headline say? Who revised it? Who wrote it in the first place? I am still trying to find a cached version of the page from last night, which basically said that US forces went in and shot up a bunch of civilians, in a "bloodbath".

At first I thought that was completely ridiculous. I still do, but this morning I heard another report describing a number of civilian casualties during this event. It is clear that at least some civilians died. It is also very clear that the "resistance" fighters melt into the local population, and therefore put that population at risk. A US soldier has the right to shoot back, when he's being shot at.

My old line about Arabs applies in this situation. What the Arab should fear the most is that we begin to think about him the same way he thinks about us. If that ever happens...they only think they know suffering.

The sheer level of disinformation that the average Arab must wade through is incredible. Read this piece by John Burns. It's a conversation between Iraqis and a reporter. It's amazing. These are smart people; how did they get to this point? How are their information sources so corrupt, so inaccurate?

If you've got the time, I also suggest reading Greg Packer's New Yorker article, which gives us great examples of the hope and frustration on both sides. It's lengthy, so set aside some time, but well worth it. I read the print version, but this online version has additional content.

Dean Esmay looks at the definition of liberal, and it's worth reading.

The Liberal I want to be: lib-er-al ( P ) Pronunciation Key (lbr-l, lbrl) adj.

1. Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry.
2. Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded.
3. Of, relating to, or characteristic of liberalism.
4. Liberal Of, designating, or characteristic of a political party founded on or associated with principles of social and political liberalism, especially in Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. 

1. Tending to give freely; generous: a liberal benefactor.
2. Generous in amount; ample: a liberal serving of potatoes.
3. Not strict or literal; loose or approximate: a liberal translation.
4. Of, relating to, or based on the traditional arts and sciences of a college or university curriculum: a liberal education. Somehow I must find a way to become a bigger serving of potatoes, so I can complete my mission.
    

My work as a historian (such as it is) has mainly concerned modes of belonging.

Put in plain english (riiiight), that means I'm interested in the ways that people use the materials available to them to order their worlds into communities that include and exclude them. Practically speaking, I am especially interested in the roots of American citizenship as articulated and spread in the early years of the 19th century and afterwards. The vexed questions of the status of women and freed slaves are especially interesting to me, and there's whole roomfuls of music-history geekery on this question that I won't even begin to elucidate here.

Why do I bring this up? Because, today, the day before Thanksgiving, Republican swine and infantile shitmongers (my non-partisan term of animadversion against Senators) introduced the "No Marriage For Inverts" Constitutional amendment proposal into Congress. [Buckethead: Exhibit A in why I will never again make the mistake of registering Republican.]

At the New Republic, Andrew Sullivan rips the amendment to pieces and demonstrates that it is finely calibrated to deny homosexuals, and only homosexuals, the benefits, rights, priveliges, and pleasures of union of any kind. In fact, he makes the case that it's an attempt to deny homosexuals access to rights enjoyed by every single other citizen of the United States. Would that make gays less than full citizens, you ask? You bet your ass it would!

An excerpt and my analysis is below the fold.

This final clause was inserted by evangelical activist, Charles Colson, according to several reports. It would be the first time that the word "sexual" is inserted into the Constitution of the United States. And what it is apparently designed to do is to reassure people that the second sentence of the amendment does not indeed do what it seems to do, i.e. ban all forms of civil union or domestic partnership. The religious right would, it appears, be willing to allow civil unions between brothers, or an aunt and uncle, or a son and mother, or two college roommates--as long as it was assumed that no sexual activity was implied in the relationship. By this deft move, the amendment would apparently allow gay couples to get civil unions--but only if they pretended that they were not gay couples. Call it the Bert and Ernie amendment.

What it amounts to, however, is a constitutional acceptance of any number of social arrangements short of marriage, as long as those relationships are asexual. . . . It seems, on the face of it, to contradict the second sentence. But it doesn't. It merely underlines the fact that no sexual activity between two people can be a basis for a civilly recognized relationship except heterosexual marriage. It would make civil unions for straight people void as well, if those straight couples had the temerity to be in love or want to have sex.

But it reveals something else about the real motives of those pushing this amendment. They claim to be defending marriage. But in fact the upshot of their Bert and Ernie provision would be effectively condoning all sorts of marriage-lite alternatives (under the pretense that they're not sexual) and expanding their reach and number to an extraordinary degree. If the fundamentalist right actually cared about marriage as such, they wouldn't want to open up any number of alternatives to marriage to heterosexuals. Multiplying "asexual" civil unions is exactly what marriage advocates have feared for years--an easy alternative to marriage that will, in fact, undermine the institution.

But the beauty--indeed the only rationale--of this contraption is that it alone ensures that gay couples get no recognition as gay couples. It's an attempt to push gay people back into civic nothingness, a place where they are invisible, where their emotional and sexual needs are deemed as worthy as the financial arrangements of two asexual roommates. It's a desire to recreate the fantasy that gay people do not exist--in the Constitution itself.

In this sense, it's a perfect product from the religious right. They do indeed want gay people to disappear. They cannot achieve this in reality in a free society. But they can in their own words. Theirs is an America where gay citizens are actually straight citizens in need of either jail or therapy, where gay citizens' loves are a form of sickness, and their relationships a threat. And they want to assert this image of an ideal 1950s-style society up by rewriting the Constitution to reflect it.

This amendment has therefore very little to do with marriage as such; and everything to do with homosexuality. If the social right wanted to shore up marriage, they could propose an amendment tightening divorce laws. They could unveil any number of proposals for ensuring that children have stable two-family homes, that marriage-lite versions of marriage are prevented or discouraged. But they haven't. The amendment is simply--and baldly--an attempt to ostracize a minority of Americans for good. It is an attempt to write them out of their own country. It is an attempt to say that the meaning of America is heterosexual and heterosexual only. It is one of the most divisive amendments ever proposed--an attempt to bring the culture war into the fabric of the very founding document, to create division where we need unity, exclusion where we need inclusion, rigidity where we need flexibility. And you only have to read it to see why.

I can think of two instances when groups were specifically written out of the Constitution. The first was by the inclusion of the three-fifths clause, which of designated slaves as non-citizen ciphers. This clause and the conditions it implied were of course eventually overturned by Amendments XIII-XV to the Constitution.

The second example is perhaps more interesting today, concerns the appearance of the word "male" in the XIV amendment. This usage marked the first time what we pointy-heads call gendered speech was included any portion of the Constitution. The word "male" was used to specify that women were exempt the liberalization of voting rights that the amendment was granting all citizens of 21 years of age and older. I repeat: this amendment marked the first time that women were expressly prohibited from voting at the Federal level.

Why did the word "male" appear in Fourteenth Amendment, and not in the original document? Because by the 1860s, challenges by early feminists had begun to crumble the bulwarks of tradition. On the heels of the Seneca Falls Convention of 1845 and follow-up meetings from Maine to Indiana, certain women's-rights crusaders argued that many women met the standards for voting eligibility (e.g. taxpayers, property-owners), and therefore should be granted the right to vote. I will point out that this group was a tiny minority of the women's rights movement at the time, and were widely considered to be moonbats.

Nevertheless, the moonbats made an impression. The clash between women and voting laws was a confrontation centuries in the making, ever since Blackstone enshrined the concept of "coverture" in English law, and established that women had no legal existence whatsoever. Of course, circumstance and frontier improvisation softened Blackstone's hard line in American jurisprudence, and by the late 17th century one can find plenty of cases of women running households, owning property, and otherwise participating in public life in ways that the law officially did not recognize. The pudding hit the fan when public life met voting rights. The first generation of American radical feminists realized that since those women who paid taxes, owned property, etc., met every legal requirement that a voter must meet, and demanded that women's right to vote be made explicit in state Constitutions. This first effort was not well supported and was easily beaten back.

But the damage was done. Women's rights advocates had made lawmakers realize that there was no good legal reason why women shouldn't get the vote, and so they had to go and make one up. Citing women's inferior intelligence, delicate constitutions, and manifest unfitness for the rough-and-tumble of public life, lawmakers hastened to clarify their State laws, and made sure to enshrine their cause in stone at the Constitutional level. The XIV Amendment, along with securing voting rights for former slaves, ensuring due process, nullifying slaveholder debts, etc. etc., was also a backdoor way to fully and completely bar women from full citizenship. That one single word, "male," led to more than a half-century of further work to get women recognized as full citizens of the United States.

Why do I bring this up? No reason. Just to show that twice before the Constitution has been used to exclude specific groups from the rights it grants, and each time it was later overturned.DuToitified conservatives aside, I can't imagine very many people today who think it was a mistake to give women the vote, and the same goes for the demise of slavery. I simply mean to point out that each time the Constitution has been used to exclude specific groups from the full exercise of American citizenship, it has ended up being proven wrong and the exclusion left behind on the losing side of history.

If you want still more, I wrote a paper on this subject a few years ago that I will forward upon request. As if.

In an otherwise unrelated interview in Gawker, "Betty Pearl" (not his real name) observes that in New York City,

"when the smoking ban went in and the smoke cleared it was amazing how many places smelled like vomit."

Um, eww. Ban the ban, pronto!

If you're interested, the interview in question is a quick and dirty rundown of the best gay bars in New York. Based on my admittedly sketchy experience, it's true: the Phoenix does have cute guys, and they do hedge their bets. Also, it has one of the greatest juke boxes in the history of juke boxes.

Good lord. Last night I read Josh Marshall, and he was reporting that Orrin Hatch had (quite rightly) shelved a staffer or two. If you read this Washington Post article, it seems like it's no big deal. They just "leaked" the memos. CalPundit notes a few other vague mentions.

It turns out that the staffer in question actually hacked in or otherwise circumvented security in these systems and went hunting in the confidential information. He then released it to the press.

A "leak" implies that the leakee had a right to see the information, but did the wrong thing with it. This guy didn't have that right.

Funny, but isn't this a federal crime? There are quite a few hackers around the country who are in jail for exactly this sort of thing.

Plame gets outed, which is a crime. Nobody gives a shit; the story has no legs, and we have criminal in the administration, somewhere, "undetectable". Now a GOP staffer commits standard-issue computer crime, for political advantage...Hatch has done the right thing by benching him, but will the same standards of prosecution apply? Or is this a "special case", because he really didn't "mean" to commit a crime?

All I can say is that if you have a staffer who has committed a federal crime and you want to bury the news, releasing that fact the day before Thanksgiving is probably a great way to do it.