There’s nothing like breaking news on Gay Rights to persuade the Right to shelve all other serious business and howl at the moon. This past week’s somewhat unexpected movement on the military “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” rule is certainly no exception, since it carries the extra added attraction of the Obama Administration apparently outsmarting the Far Right. Granted, outsmarting the sociological Luddites who oppose allowing LGBT persons to serve their country in the military is a little like “shooting fish in a barrel;” nevertheless, the opponents of DADT repeal thought they’d won another round on the issue when the military branches were granted a year to “conduct a study on how the troops feel about “teh Gays” and how best to implement the policy change if DADT is repealed.

In the minds of conservative homophobes, that extra year is key because it would schedule the vote on repeal out beyond that magical date in November, 2010 when the US electorate is expected to recognize the folly of its ways and vote to re-establish Republican control of the Universe Congress; then when “God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world,” all such trashy socialist legislation will simply disappear.

Despite some Republicans’ (most notably Sen. John McCain) position that the administration’s DADT maneuver is somehow a sneaky, back room deal designed — to use one of their favorite phrases – to “jam this legislation down our throats” — while cavalierly ignoring the opinions of our troops — it is no such thing.

Here’s what has actually happened . . .

Foiled Again!

President Obama made a campaign promise to repeal DADT during his first term in office; public opinion (as measured by any reputable poll out there) is overwhelmingly pro-DADT repeal, numbers vary somewhat but all are in the 70%-80% range; military advocacy groups and bloggers report a consensus among active-duty troops and veterans and their families that it’s time to repeal DADT; the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen made an impassioned stand, before Congress, for repealing DADT and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is pro-repeal.

Not surprisingly, an amendment to repeal DADT was added to the 2011 Defense Appropriations Bill. The current amendment contains a widely endorsed compromise written such that, if passed, the repeal would not go into effect until after the Pentagon publishes, in December, the results of a survey on how service members and their families view the change, and until the president, the defense secretary and the Joint Chiefs of Staff certify that the repeal will not affect the military’s ability to fight.

This past Thursday, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted 16-12 in favor of repealing DADT and shortly thereafter the US House of Representatives voted 234-194 to repeal. Of course Republicans, who, while in the minority, have become ardent supporters of the slooooow approach to all things legislative, voted overwhelmingly and predictably against it. They cited statements by some military leaders that they need more time to study how a change in the law could affect the lives and readiness of service members.

They might have been referring to someone like Marine Chief General James Conway, who felt that Congress must not take action now because “the value of surveying the thoughts of Marines and their families is that it signals to my Marines that their opinions matter.”

Or, maybe they were thinking of Admiral Gary Roughead, Chief of Naval Operations who said that “our Sailors and their families need to understand clearly that their voices will be heard.” Evidently the Admiral has undergone a recent conversion on the subject because only a few months ago he had made the following public statement: “We’ve never assessed the force because it’s not our practice to go within our military and poll our force to determine if they like the laws of the land or not…That gets you into a very difficult regime.”

The most likely reason for delaying tactics, in my opinion, was put forward by Jason Arvak, on The Moderate Voice, who said:

“So since they know DADT is almost certainly on the way out, the real question for senior military leaders is to negotiate the best terms for its repeal. And what they want to protect more than anything else, as ADM Mullen’s comments indicate, is their ability to retain control over military personnel policies generally. If they fight a repeal that happens anyway, the loss of control would reverberate over the long term. But if they hold off implementing a repeal that is coming no matter what until they can say that they completed a study that endorses repeal, they can put themselves on the “winning” side. It’s a neat political sleight-of-hand that is a well-worn tool among Washington insiders — those who control policy implementation in a given area can position themselves to be the champions of a policy change that they know is coming rather than fighting it and being seen as defeated.”

“DADT will probably be repealed, but implementation will probably be delayed until the military makes a climactic endorsement of the policy change that’s coming anyway. The modern military is politically savvy enough to make itself the winner of the turf war in the process.”

Whatever their reasons, House Republicans are “preparing to mount a vigorous defense” of the policy; Sen. McCain is campaigning on threatening a filibuster, and righteous-wing Christian groups are pressuring conservative lawmakers to toe the party line.

And then the squadrons of flying monkeys arrive . . .

Tales from the Dark Side

If you are relatively sane and have no scientific or professional interest in exploring the “heart of darkness,” you may have very little knowledge of the more “imaginative” DADT policy positions I report on below – but that doesn’t mean they’re not out there in all of their irrational glory. Also, be assured that this is only the best they could do on short-notice; given time to ponder the issue over a three-day-holiday-weekend (memorializing the military, no less), we should definitely be in for a madcap treat next week.

For now, though, we have these delirious statements from the usual suspects:

Bryan Fischer, who holds the impressive title of “Director of Issue Analysis for Government and Public Policy” with the American Family Association, did a radio retrospective on other gays, in other militaries and predicted that no good could come from allowing gays to serve openly. Fischer cited the little known “fact” that the Third Reich was crawling with gays, (just not the effeminate ones; those were exterminated):

FISCHER: So Hitler himself was an active homosexual. And some people wonder, didn’t the Germans, didn’t the Nazis, persecute homosexuals? And it is true they did; they persecuted effeminate homosexuals. But Hitler recruited around him homosexuals to make up his Stormtroopers, they were his enforcers, they were his thugs. And Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough to carry out his orders, but that homosexual solders basically had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after. So he surrounded himself, virtually all of the Stormtroopers, the Brownshirts, were male homosexuals.

I’ll leave the “Hitler was gay” myth-busting to those who normally handle such topics . . .

* * *

Not to be outdone, the Family Research Council, provided their own predictions about the collapse of our military if DADT is repealed. Here’s what they anticipate, in a nutshell (appropriately enough):

Gay troops, emboldened by the repeal, will step up their customary practice of waiting for “lights out” and then tiptoeing through the barracks and fellating their unsuspecting straight comrades-in-arms while they sleep. Commanders, always sensitive to the acceptance and approval of their subordinates, will turn a blind eye to these midnight “panty raids” lest they be labeled homophobes. Eventually, straight service members will quit the military, out of fear and disgust, and nice straight boys, from good Christian homes, will be afraid to enlist.

Family Research Council is not just whistling Dixie, either. They have a full-blown 60-page report (ever wonder why Christian Right reports are so often 60 pages long? must be some biblical numerology there – or maybe anything shorter lacks credibility?) prepared by their own in-house policy wonk, Peter Sprigg. Sprigg, accompanied by a few good homophobes in uniform, carried his report, which he touts as “the first-ever study of ‘homosexual assault’ in the military” to Washington, DC and, before God and Congress warned that:

“the DADT repeal language currently under discussion with the agreement of the White House will turn the U.S. military into a terrifying free-rape zone where no heterosexual is safe.”

Spriggs’ credentials for carrying out such studies and arriving at such conclusions are (per his FRC bio):

“Mr. Sprigg has been quoted as a spokesman for FRC in many major newspapers, and he has been interviewed or participated in debates on all of the national television networks. He is the author of the book Outrage: How Gay Activists and Liberal Judges Are Trashing Democracy to Redefine Marriage (Regnery, 2004), and he was co-editor of the FRC book Getting It Straight: What the Research Shows about Homosexuality. Mr. Sprigg also edited FRCs agenda-setting booklet, 25 Pro-Family Policy Goals for the Nation.”

“Mr. Sprigg is an ordained Baptist minister. Before coming to FRC, he served as pastor of Clifton Park Center Baptist Church in Clifton Park, N.Y. Mr. Sprigg previously served for ten years as a professional actor and unit leader in Covenant Players, an international Christian drama ministry. Prior to his career in ministry, Mr. Sprigg worked in the government and non-profit sectors, including service as economic development assistant to the late Congressman Robert F. Drinan (D-Mass.).”

Quite the Renaissance Man . . . but one need only read portions of Spriggs’ “study,” which reads, in part, like an issue of Penthouse Forum, to get a bead on how credible the study is. Anyone who’s feeling particularly ambitious can read the official Department of Defense 2009 report entitled “Sexual Assault Prevention and Response” to understand just how far afield Sprigg strays from the facts to support his “first-ever study of ‘homosexual assault’ in the military.”

* * *

I suppose that with all the usual horror stories alreadypicked over, Cliff Kincaid, Grand Wizard of America’s Survival, was forced to get into the blood and guts of the matter and play the AIDS card. Kincaid’s entry consists of an absurd video catalog of every gay stereotype that ever was along with the requisite “written report” — 60 pages, I suspect – that warns that allowing “open and active homosexuals into the U.S. military could very well result in the spreading of deadly HIV-tainted blood throughout the ranks.”

Of course, all enlistees undergo mandatory HIV screening and are not allowed to serve if they are found to be positive. But that doesn’t stop Kincaid from extrapolating that of the 19,000 soldiers that the Pentagon reports are HIV positive, “most came down with the deadly disease through prohibited gay sexual conduct.” As we all know by now, there’s only ONE REAL way to contract AIDS . . .

* * *

As is my custom I have saved the best for last. Some might quibble that Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) is much too mainstream to include in the forgoing “Cavalcade of Wingnuts.” To those critics I say “au contraire.” For years now, Sen. Inhofe has been my unerring barometer on political issues large and small. When Sen. Inhofe makes his position known, I immediately move to the other side of the fence – no further questions asked. Nothing if not consistent, Sen. Inhofe can be counted on to play “mad devil’s advocate” with typical Inhofe-ian panache. Besides, on the occasion of this particular news event, Sen. Inhofe took himself off to “Focal Point,” the radio program hosted by the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer (see above) — where, as a blogger on Queerty noted, “rational thought goes to die” — to hold forth on the ramifications of DADT repeal in Inhofe-topia.

Inhofe was right at home with Fischer, though, because as Steve Benen, of Washington Monthly, pointed out:

“INHOFE’S VILE RHETORIC KNOWS NO BOUNDS…. Most reasonable people, especially those in positions of authority, would steer clear of someone like the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer. Even within the religious right movement, Fischer is known for stomach-churning extremism.”

The Senator’s basic position on DADT, as broadcast to Fischer’s radio audience, is that U.S. troops are too bigoted to be willing to fight and die for a gay comrade which might interfere with their ability to follow orders. As a result, gay soldiers would just be thrown to the Taliban for extermination. Here’s how Inhofe put it:

“For those of us — and I’m one of them — who have gone through the military, gone through basic training, and you stop and think — it just doesn’t make any sense. Second of all, it’s just not working. You have women, men, then you have a third group to deal with, and they’re not equipped to do that.

“And you know — you hear the stories all the time. A military guy — I happen to be Army, and Army and Marines always feel that when we’re out there, we’re not doing it for the flag or the country; we’re doing it for the guy in the next foxhole. And that would dramatically change that.”

Now that statement is a tad deceptive since Sen. Inhofe’s first-hand knowledge of “life in the foxholes” is actually non-existent. Inhofe’s service record consists of a “standard hitch” (1957-1958) in the Army, as a Private, during which he served (by his own account) as a court-reporter; he never left the States, let alone saw combat duty. I’ll cede that perhaps it’s possible that Inhofe might have developed an extraordinary bond with his band of brother court reporters but still, it’s not really seemly for him to parade his personal “stars and stripe” to support his ignorant premise. And then, of course, there is Inhofe’s clueless, but no less reprehensible, disrespect for the character of today’s military personnel inherent in his belief that “they’re not equipped to do that.” I daresay that if anyone is “unequipped” for the job at hand, it’s not our soldiers.

I’m sure that Inhofe prides himself as being a man of conviction who does not mince words — his record, after all, is a public one and here are a few highlights:

• Inhofe outraged federal employees on the day of the Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building by stating on National television that there probably weren’t very many casualties because federal employees wouldn’t be at their desks at 9:00 instead they would be off having coffee somewhere. AFGE (American Federation of Government Employees) responded that maybe that was how Inhofe ran his office.
• In March 2002, Inhofe made a Senate speech which included the explicit suggestion that the 9/11 attacks were a form of divine retribution against the U.S. for failing to defend Israel. In his words: “One of the reasons I believe the spiritual door was opened for an attack against the United States of America is that the policy of our Government has been to ask the Israelis, and demand it with pressure, not to retaliate in a significant way against the terrorist strikes that have been launched against them.”
• Inhofe claims that “Global warming is ‘the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.’” He didn’t hesitate to take himself off to Copenhagen for the Climate Change Summit, uninvited, where I suspect he believed his rhetorical (fact-free) denials would turn the tide of global opinion on the matter. He was briefly ridiculed, then ignored.
• On the occasion of the Abu Ghraib hearings, Inhofe made a spectacular fool of himself, best described, at the time, by Andrew Cockburn of CounterPunch:

“But the remarks of Senator James M. Inhofe (R., Okla.) were transcendent. They were like the remarks of no other senator on that very large panel. His basic position seemed to be that since some Iraqis had done terrible things it was outrageous for anyone to be questioning Americans for having done anything terrible to anybody. If we have Iraqis locked up and if we are torturing them, they must deserve it, and it’s a shame and a scandal that we’re giving the Department of Defense a hard time over this trifle when they’re out there protecting the flag and whatever. The fact that we have those Iraqis locked up is all the proof we need of their guilt, so they are only receiving punishment they’ve earned. <Q.e.d>. It was straight out of the Inquisition Handbook.”

“Inhofe’s remarks were full of pomp and smugness; they were devoid of ethical sensibility. Listening to him was like listening to someone on his way home from a lynching 50 years ago: ‘They deserve what they get, whether or not they did what we said. They are what they are, aren’t they? If they weren’t, why would we have lynched them? Goddam right!’ If our enemies abroad were as interested in words as they are in photographs right now, Inhofe’s words would serve them as well as the Army reservists’ digital photographs from Abu Ghraib.”

Inhofe’s position on the torture investigations?

“I am outraged that we have so many humanitarian do- gooders right now crawling all over these prisons looking for human rights violations while our troops, our heroes, are fighting and dying.”

The world is very simple in Sen. Inhofe’s simple mind . . .

[tags]Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, DADT, Sen. John McCain, Sen. Jim Inhofe, Ad. Mike Mullen, Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff[/tags]

The Rand & Rachel Show

No matter what your politics, I think it’s safe to say that there is bipartisan agreement that Rand Paul just had possibly the worst post-election week in US political history – after winning the Republican primary for Kentucky’s US Senate seat by a “Randslide,” as some clever pundits have called it. Paul’s performance this week was the equivalent of running a world-record-breaking foot race, in the Olympics, and proceeding to fall and break one’s leg in four places doing a “victory lap.” Paul’s problem now is, of course, that he’s entered in a “must-run” race a few months from now, “broken leg” and all.

Paul may be the first 2010 mid-term political rookie to crash and burn on takeoff, but you can be sure he won’t be the last because the raison d’etre of the Tea Party movement is to replace pragmatic and, admittedly, sometimes hypocritical, greedy and self-promoting Washington “insiders” with fresh new “outsider” candidates who, once elected, will invade “Big Government” like flesh-eating bacteria. Once “Big Government” has been reduced to harmless shreds, the outsider Tea Party candidates, no longer needed because government is nearly non-existent, will be free to leave their government posts and return to being ophthalmologists or whatever non-political pursuits they left to go to Washington — and we’ll all live happily ever after. That’s the “what” of it; as far as the “how” of it the Tea Party isn’t yet quite crystal clear on that. And if the vague, directionless product of their recent “Constitutional Convention” is any indicator, a viable Tea Party platform is a long way off. It is that very lack of agreement (and structure) that throw the door open for Tea Party candidates, like Rand Paul, to “make it up as they go along.”

That isn’t to say that all Tea Party-ers, or their candidates, are simple-minded crackpots; Washington needs a shake-up and some “new blood.” There is more than sufficient evidence, lately, to suggest that our Congress has evolved into a dysfunctional organism completely in thrall to special interests and corporate power-brokers. Something must be done, because, clearly, we are slipping and it’s starting to hurt. But our only chance of making substantive changes that keep the US in play, in a rapidly changing world order, is, in my opinion, to stick with the “starters.”

No matter how horrible a season a major league baseball team is having, you’re never going to see management decide to sideline the pros (with their multi-million dollar contracts) and call up the farm team players to replace them all – just to teach ‘em a lesson. That’s because a sports team, like a government, is a never-completed “work-in-progress.” It’s too dynamic a system, there are too many variables and way too much prior investment in building a winning team for a responsible team manager to ever throw up his hands and yell “clear the decks, we’re going to start from scratch.” I’m not saying that you’ll never hear such a statement in the MLB world, I’m just saying that if you do, don’t believe it for a second. Either that manager will, in the end, effect some tweaks far-removed from the over-emotional, over-ambitious call for wholesale change – or get fired.

And yet that is exactly what the Tea Party’s clearest message, so far, communicates – a desire to turn government inside-out and start over – without a plan. I keep a finger on the pulse of the Tea Party by regularly reading what’s going on with ResistNet which is the “grassroots activist” portal of Steve Elliott’s Grassfire organization. For almost a year now, Grassfire has promoted the wholesale change-out of Congress under the catchy phrase “Flip this House.” There has also been quite the movement to get “just plain folks” to insert themselves into local politics by becoming precinct committeepersons – no experience required. These are positions at the bottom of the political party food chain that are so inglorious that they very often go vacant; the only prerequisite for assignment is a pulse.

J.T. Ready - Maricopa County's Republican Precinct Committeeman

As a measure of tea party success in the local precinct drive, Mr. Jason “J.T.” Ready is currently the Maricopa County (AZ) Republican precinct committeeman. Ready is 34 years old, active in mainstream conservative politics, and a high-profile, outspoken Neo-Nazi white supremacist who advocates installing land mines along our border with Mexico. Ready’s position on immigration reform, which he first shared with readers of NewSaxon’s online chat room, is this:

“The truth is that negroids screw monkeys and rape babies in afreaka [sic]. Then stupid white man who licks kosher jew rear lets negroids in. … Stop Negroid immigration and integration now!!! Nature will take care of the rest.”

While on the one hand, we have politicos mulling over the prudence of allowing Richard Blumenthal to run for the Senate after he exaggerated his military service record during the Vietnam War, on the other, we have J.T. Ready’s 2006 campaign for Mesa City Council finally unraveling when he offers to be the Master of Ceremonies of Mesa’s Veteran’s Day parade despite his having been drummed out of the US Marine Corps after his Court Martial. Apples and oranges, I know . . . Ready is not running for the US Senate – not yet, anyway. Despite his embarrassing showing in Mesa, Ready has vowed that he will continue to run for public office — he already has a campaign slogan:

“The Purity of the Aryan Race is the most precious resource Nature has to offer All of Humankind.”

As a blogger on DailyKos said recently:

“In most states being seen publicly with a Nazi would ruin your political career. In most states you would be shunned by your political party. But not in Arizona, and not in the Republican party.”

I’m not so sure that we can still confine the craziest of Tea Party networking to Arizona, lately the Tea Party has the “biggest tent” around. On the other hand, the Republican Party is showing signs of wear and tear from trying to herd Tea Party “cats.”

The Problem With Rand

Clearly Rand Paul was told to sit down and take a breath which resulted in his dubious (and politically damaging) distinction of being only the third person in media history to bail on a scheduled Meet the Press appearance (definitely a bush league, albeit necessary step). One of the reasons that Rand Paul was able to dig his whole so deep, so fast, is the very reason that the Tea Party (and Libertarians) loved him; he was a Washington outsider with an attractive, albeit inconsistent, ideology that he insistently wore on his sleeve. And, like other recently successful politicians, Paul is well-educated and articulate enough making him a darling of the notably incoherent Tea Party just dying to have a smooth talker of their own.

Unfortunately, the Tea Party has put their money on a “horse with no name” an “outsider” just like they were looking for; the problem is that the horse has no conviction nor track record. I know it’s a stretch to accuse such a rigid ideologue as Paul of having no conviction but witness his flipping and flopping like a flounder on the deck the minute his convictions were challenged. And if you look even closer you’ll see that Paul struggled, not at all as well as some others have, to discover practical applications for his brand of idealism.

Naturally, since ‘liberal leftist media she-devil’ Rachel Maddow was the one feeding Paul enough rope to hang himself, plenty of Paul supporters immediately cried foul. Sarah Palin, politics’ most infamous “Celebrity Apprentice,” produced this characteristically incoherent precis of the “Rand Incident” on Fox News:

“One thing that we can learn in this lesson, that I have learned and Rand Paul has learned now, is don’t assume that you can assume in a hypothetical discussion about constitutional impacts with a reporter or media personality who has an agenda, who may be prejudiced before they even get in the interview in regards to what your answer may be or the opportunity that they seize to getch ya. They’re looking for that ‘gotcha moment.’ That’s what it evidently appears to be what they did with Rand Paul.”

Reliable translators of Palin communiqués summarize her statement as being something like: “Hah! That lefty, Rachel Maddow doesn’t have much of a “fair and balanced” thingy going on.”

Anyone with a little more political savvy would have recognized that Maddow was actually providing Rand Paul with a (nationally televised) space in which to moderate, or at least explicate, his previous politically incendiary comments on the Civil Rights Act, made to NPR and the Louisville Courier Journal which left acres of room for explanation. Maddow is an avowed policy wonk whose primary interest is in the intersect between ideology and pragmatism and who is sometimes maddeningly fair (IMO) in all manner of policy discussions.

Rather than looking for a “gotcha moment,” as Palin suggested, I sincerely believe that Maddow was offering Paul a “getcha outta jail free” moment that he was too much of a rookie to accept. After the newly victorious Paul decided to follow up by airing his politically suicidal views just prior to the Maddow interview, Maddow really had no choice but to address the “elephant in the room.” Had she ignored it, she would have been accused of (and deservedly so) serving up a “softball interview” in deference to Paul’s having had announced his candidacy on Maddow’s program months earlier. Let’s face it, no one interested in making great political TV would purposely try to produce a 20 minute long groaner, painful to watch, like the Maddow-Paul interview. In the end, Huffington Post reported that Rand Paul, himself, stated that Rachel Maddow was “fair” to him but that the follow-on media coverage, in general, was not.

Of course, Paul the Elder dismisses the whole thing with a flip “they’re just jealous of his success,” which, as a parent, I am forced to let slide.

The Problem with Rand’s Politics

I don’t believe that Rand Paul is a bad man but I also don’t believe that Libertarianism, especially as packaged for the US market, is the cure for what ails us. Just like I don’t believe that being majorly pissed off at the government (that we have permitted to evolve into its current ugly state) is a great starting point for positive political discourse and action. Anger is a valid emotion and no will deny that the Tea Party is angry, or even that they have a right to be; but until the anger is spent and a more thoughtful, more constructive activism is nurtured by Tea Party leaders, we can expect little more from the movement than ugly public demonstrations and “Down with Everything” platforms that waste political energy and capital to no end.

We Americans are like well-intentioned weekend gardeners who can’t believe that weeds took over our vegetable patch while we played at the beach every weekend. And like those clueless gardener’s, if we get impatient with weeding, feeding and cleaning up our garden and decide, instead, to spray the whole damn mess with Round-Up – well, you get my drift . . . Mostly, we seem to lack patience and commitment; we are most comfortable with snap decisions, instant gratification and intellectual restlessness so it’s no surprise that, where we used to be world-class problem solvers, we no longer seem to have the stamina to carry out complex solutions. In politics “just saying no” has replaced negotiation, compromise and the search for “win-win;” let’s face it, it’s a lot less work to say “no.” Grassroots political movements lose interest when they realize that it could take decades and lots of hard work to achieve their goals. Our military sells us on “The Next Big Thing” strategy – counterinsurgency – with the caution that counterinsurgency takes time to work and that we have to be patient but that it will be worth it, resulting in fewer deaths and stronger allies. Nevertheless, within months of the counterinsurgency rollout, we are told that “guess what” this is going to take too long and that the absurd “easy, convenient Government-In-A-Box” designed to expedite counterinsurgency success, is as silly as it sounded.

Almost as silly as the notion that we can hastily and erratically dismantle the government that we have built up and expect a good result . . .

[tags]Rand Paul, Rachel Maddow, Sarah Palin, libertarianism, pragmatism, ideology, Tea Party[/tags]

Here’s a fun little mental exercise in National Identity that you might want to try the next time that you find yourself in a group of – oh, say—over a hundred people in America. The occasion isn’t important – wedding reception, graduation, bris, retirement party, Office Christmas Party, Bat Mitzvah – any social gathering will do. Wait for generalized boredom and/or inebriation to overtake the crowd, then ask everyone to join in a brief, harmless little game that you promise will be more fun than doing the Hokey Pokey.

Explain to the gathering you are going to give a brief description of a “social set” and that those who fit the description should remove themselves from the crowd at that time (they can repair to a hallway, the back of the room or another room, whatever. Proceed to ask the following social groups to detach themselves from the main group:

• Any non-citizens of the US (visitors, visa or green card holders, etc)
• Any first generation immigrants
• Any second generation immigrants
• Any third generation immigrants
• Any Mayflower descendants, DAR, SAR, etc.
• Any descendants of slaves

Now, unless, your event is being held on an Indian Reservation, I’ll bet you’ve pretty well cleared the room, right?

This is My Country

That’s because America is unique on Planet Earth, a nation made up almost entirely of immigrants, where human beings from all corners of the Earth were welcomed to come and contribute to an enlightened social experiment, unparalleled in Human History. At least that’s how the mythology goes . . . Early America was, in fact, a virtual “clean slate” of limitless natural resources (or so it seemed) and land for the taking (thanks to the genocidal tendencies of “the First Waves” who did their best to annihilate the indigenous people of America and marginalize any survivors by packing them off to reservations.)

As with all ambitious social engineering projects, the American story has, of course, not always been a happy one. According to some experts we have experienced four major waves of immigration and according to others, those waves have been accompanied by not terribly surprising ethnic, class and culture skirmishes between new immigrants and those who “got here first”, or who have become “Americanized” as some like to put it.

As a result, American identity is almost always composed of two elements — pride of origin and pride of place. Most of us hang on to some level of “emotional dual citizenship,” by which I mean pride and preservation of cultural tidbits from our ancestors’ countries of origin, “accessorizing” our predominant American character. But no matter how “Americanized” we become, we all carry a deep understanding that we are only a few generations, at most, removed from being something else altogether. And some of us don’t like to be reminded of that . . .

So it is that we are a nation of immigrants who are ambivalent, at best, about hosting more immigrants (like us). In the 21^st century, anti-immigration sentiment is exacerbated by the implosion of “The American Dream” and a nagging fear that there may, indeed, not be as much to go around as we once believed; add to that, the overheated paranoia about “strangers in our midst” engendered by The War on Terror and you get – Arizona.

Russell Pearce: Righteous Dude of Arizona

Unless you’ve been purposely boycotting the media, you’ve probably heard something –pro and/or con- about the newly enacted Arizona law that basically makes it an Arizona-state crime to be an undocumented visitor or Economic Refugee (as I’ve recently been urged to call undocumented visitors) in Arizona. Arizona police officers have been enlisted to help sniff out such persons despite the fact that such work doesn’t exactly fit their traditional job description.

Legal debates have raged over the Constitutionality/legality of the new law since the day that Arizona’s Gov. Jan Brewster searched her soul and decided that racial profiling was something that Arizonans can no longer do without if they are to feel secure in their state. Some Arizona politicians charge that the Federal government is not enforcing existing immigration laws (to their satisfaction) so they have stepped up to take the law into their own hands. My first impression was that this was a piece of political grandstanding to pressure the federal government to do more for Arizona and that reasonable Arizonans would, in the end prevail in preventing the thing from going as far as it did. Obviously, that impression, was over-generous . . .

Arizona has a long and colorful nativist tradition, of the US border states its population is quite white and easily the most prone to racial hysteria and immigration conspiracy theories. The erstwhile state senator Russell Pearce, who introduced SB 1070, is definitely a “native son” and has been cutting a colorful swath through Arizona state politics for some time now; although he ran into the wall trying to find financial (and Party) support to get himself elected to the US House of Representatives, he has effectively clawed his way into a pretty influential position in the state house, despite the fact that, as The New York Times points out:

“The state senator who wrote the law, Russell Pearce, had long been considered a politically incorrect embarrassment by more moderate members of his party — often to the delight of his supporters.”

Back in April, a writer for The Economist said it best:

“Russell Pearce is the quintessential Arizona Republican. He wears stars-and-stripes shirts and has clips of John Wayne and Ronald Reagan on his website. He loves guns, his family, his Mormon faith, his country and the law, which he enforced for many years as deputy sheriff of Maricopa County. He jokes that being Republican, and thus not having a heart, saved his life when he got shot in the chest once. But his main passion is illegal immigrants, whom he calls “invaders”. He loathed them even before his son Sean, also a sheriff’s deputy, got shot by one. But now it is personal.”

Indeed, Pearce, is a walking, talking vendetta who “takes no prisoners” and makes no apologies for his bigotry outside of his stated mission to “Take Back America,” and here’s how he thinks it should be done:

“In 2006, he (Pearce) came under fire for speaking admirably of a 1950s federal deportation program called Operation Wetback, and for sending an e-mail message to supporters that included an attachment — inadvertently, he said — from a white supremacist group.”

Many critics have described Pearce as “obsessive” about immigration and as Stephen Lemons at the Phoenix New Times put it:

“Pearce is a racist law machine, pumping out statute after statute targeting the brown segment of AZ’s population.”

Russell Pearce and buddy JT Ready

Not to put too fine a point on it, Pearce has been spotted hobnobbing with White Supremacists and actually had to issue a public apology, in 2006, for forwarding a repellant article on immigration from a Neo Nazi website (Pearce alleges that he hadn’t read the article before forwarding it hither and yon but, if nothing else, it says something about where he spends “quality time” on the Internet). Despite Pearce’s protestations that he is all about “The Rule of Law” there’s this evidence to the contrary from his Wikipedia bio:

“In 1995, Pearce became the Director of the Arizona Motor Vehicle Division. Pearce was fired from that position in 1999 by then Arizona Department of Transportation Director Mary Peters after an investigation revealed that Pearce and two underlings had tampered with a Tucson woman’s driving record.”

Perhaps he mistook the Tucson woman for an “illegal immigrant” who, as such, would have “no Constitutional rights;” his exact words regarding public protests against his law were:

“They’re illegal and they have no right to be marching down our streets. They have no constitutional rights. They don’t have First-, Fourth-, Sixth amendment rights. They’re here illegally and they chose to be here illegally.”

Incongruously, despite all of his unabashed wing-nuttery, Pearce has finagled his way into the Chairmanship of Arizona State Senate’s Appropriations Committee and, as such, controls whose bills are financed – ergo, considerable power which he wields like a hopped-up potentate. One recent story in circulation described Pearce’s punishment of a colleague for having the temerity to challenge Pearce’s facts by removing him from his panel assignment. Not surprising then, that Pearce’s bill managed to win unanimous support from Arizona House Republicans, even from some moderates who had voiced misgivings about it. The New York Times reported on one such dissenter, State Representative Bill Konopnicki, Republican of Yuma, who:

“ . . . said that planned amendments to address legal and other concerns never materialized. In the end, he said, “everybody was afraid to vote no on immigration.”

“We are going to look like Alabama in the ’60s,” said Mr. Konopnicki, who is facing a tough election and did not believe voting no would change the outcome.”

“In the Senate, only one Republican, Carolyn S. Allen, voted against the bill, and she is one of the few leaving office because of term limits and not seeking another post. She did not respond to a message left at her office.”

Wanted: A Few Good Scapegoats

I’m not sure whether all of that says more about Pearce, and his ilk, or the wisdom of Arizona voters but, either way, it’s definitely a cautionary tale. Down through the generations, people of all colors and creeds have worked together and, in some cases, risked their lives to ensure justice for all in America. People like Mr. Pearce do an end run around our principles and sensitivities by declaring that: “Illegal is not a race; it is a crime.” But actions speak louder than words and Mr. Pearce has chosen to focus on one type of crime because it provides him with cover for his racist agenda. Pearce is far more interested in hounding Hispanics who are desperate for jobs than going after the law-breaking employers who create the magnet that motivates poor people to risk their lives for a lower-than-subsistence paying job.

Another danger that bullies like Pearce pose is that his antics embolden others to also try to inject their personal neuroses and paranoia into our public policy. Soon after SB 1070, passed a flurry of states rushed to jump on the bandwagon; many of those states, far from any border, can’t possibly have real or imagined immigration issues that would necessitate the kinds of ridiculous solutions that they are proposing. For example, an Iowa Republican, Pat Bertroche, running in the 3rd District Congressional primary, offered this bright idea in a statement to the Cedar Rapids Gazette:

“I think we should catch ’em, we should document ’em, make sure we know where they are and where they are going,” said Pat Bertroche, an Urbandale physician. “I actually support microchipping them. I can microchip my dog so I can find it. Why can’t I microchip an illegal?

“That’s not a popular thing to say, but it’s a lot cheaper than building a fence they can tunnel under,” Bertroche said.

And that from a guy who once took an oath to “do no harm.”

Now I’m not very worried that I’ll pick up my newspaper anytime soon to find this microchip legislation passing; the problem to my mind is that crazy talk like this, going on in Congressional chambers, can make more run-of-the-mill racist measures seem tame and somehow more palatable. SB 1070 is a real-life example of just that; I agree wholeheartedly with Archbishop Roger Mahony who called Pearce’s bill “the country’s most retrogressive, mean-spirited and useless anti-immigrant law.” Nevertheless, it is now the law of the land in Arizona.

Even an old-hand like John McCain, the senior Senator from Arizona, endorses Pearce’s bill as “a good tool to use” despite the fact that earlier in his career (when Republicans feared losing the Latino vote, more) he resisted demonizing illegal immigrants.

Following this week’s primary results in Kentucky, Rand Paul (where are all these doctors coming from?) voiced the opinion that if he had his druthers he’d exhume the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and excise the pesky piece about making private business owners put a lid on any of their racist tendencies if they want to play in the Great Society. Evidently, Rand’s libertarian principles see the First Amendment as protecting the right to express abhorrent views (although, he looked like he wouldn’t have minded shutting up MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow by any means possible.) Rand Paul defends the right of business owners to cater to specific classes of people (or, at least, I have to assume that this is bigger than race, in his mind and would include other familiar biases, like sex, age and sexual identity). For example, if I’m reading Paul correctly, he would defend a nightclub’s decision to exclude any patrons over 40 years old? That would go down well with the Boomers . . .

With all of that “political stuff” in the air, Sarah Palin had to weigh in with her bumper-sticker logic, saying things like:

“Today, we are all Arizonans” when Gov. Jan Brewer signed SB 1070 into law.

Or this “ringing endorsement” for Rand Paul offered up on Fox Business Channel:

“Seeing kind of that libertarian streak of his — that is what we need to balance out the leftist liberal overreach of government that’s in power right now,” Palin said. “Rand’s gonna be great, plus on social issues, right there, he’s got some great positions.”

Go Rand! Sis-boom-bah.

That’s troubling only because of the small army of political naifs who look to Palin for guidance on “the issues” and one day will be voting for replacing the Constitution with the Bible, mass deportations and a return to segregated lunch counters.

For those Americans who care, there is a way forward, a way to preserve “liberty and justice for all” and it was stated perfectly by Eddie Glaude, Jr. in a blogpost this morning on the Huffington Post, entitled The Souls of Some White Folk;”

“Some white folk are not too happy about the current direction of our nation. They want to take back ‘their’ government. They don guns in public. They hurl invective at their opponents. They pass draconian immigration legislation. They ban ethnic studies in school districts. They insist on a view of the United States that mirrors their own self-conception: white and deeply conservative.”

“What is required of us when confronting such voices is a loud renunciation: we must reject the view of whiteness this approach to politics presupposes. And we do so in the name of democratic principles that are consistent with our commitment to justice.”

“Freedom-talk without justice-talk is empty and, potentially, dangerous. [Rand] Paul and those like him would do well to remember this. Too many Americans, of all colors, have engaged in struggles to achieve our country in light of their view of ‘justice as a larger loyalty.’ That commitment has led many Americans to risk their lives to rid us of this insidious notion that ours is a “white” nation.”

“My hope and prayer is that the legacy of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, of government in the service of good, has allowed me to flourish and has also given room to that gentle whisper — to that hushed act of solidarity — to blossom as a profound commitment to justice and freedom for all.”

[tags]Arizona, Russell Pearce, SB 1070, bigotry, racism, illegal immigrants[/tags]

In the grand scheme of things, the United States, as a superpower, can be seen as the virtual “teen-ager” among the world’s older league of powerful nations. And, in that role, we do not disappoint, dealing with global diplomats and heads-of-state with much the same brash and bumptious behavior that has earned American tourists near universal contempt.

Like teenagers, too, we Americans have short attention spans and even shorter memory, we require instant gratification as well as fairly constant ego-boosting, and have little use for the advice of our elders or the lessons of history (even our own). Our proudest invention is a run amok military juggernaut hemorrhaging blood and treasure and endangering our survival as a nation, in the process. If money spent equaled power and success our defense budget — $700 billion proposed for 2010 – should provide unqualified victory in everything that our military undertakes. We live in a world in which we outspend every other country on Earth for military defense; as a matter of fact, the US’s military spending was at 48% of the world’s total military outlay in 2008. The US has the weapons capability to destroy any other country on Earth, or the entire plant, several times over, for that matter. Nevertheless, our military track record for the past six decades has been embarrassingly dismal. How is that possible . . . ?

Maybe it has to do with the fact that our foreign policies sound like something straight out of Marvel Comics. America has grown up with a self-congratulatory messianic complex. Not satisfied to merely enjoy the excellent niche that we have made for ourselves, we know, in our generous American heart of hearts, that the rest of our species will benefit greatly if they only come to a greater appreciation of our American Way of Life – and we’re willing to kill anyone who stands in the way of our missionary efforts. So it is that some of the goriest, most ruthless acts of human history have been carried out by those who believe that they have been singled out for greatness by whichever god or gods are in charge of such determinations.

That sense of “Divine Appointment” is bred in the bone of American patriots who have grown up on a tradition of promoting American principles by force, if necessary. That notion can be traced all the way back to the sainted “Founding Fathers,” so recently canonized by the Tea Party in their Constitutional revival meetings which focus on the Tea Party’s own somewhat remarkable interpretations of the select bits of the foundational document that they particularly resonate to . . .

The ink on the Declaration of Independence was barely dry before Alexander Hamilton, clearly impressed with his and his colleagues’ efforts, declared the document an act of God:

“written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature by the hand of the divinity itself.”

Furthermore, he looked forward to the day when America would be powerful enough to assist peoples in the “gloomy regions of despotism” to rise up against the “tyrants” that oppressed them.

James Madison, not to be outdone, saw the battle between “Liberty and Despotism,” as the “great struggle of the Epoch” with America, of course, leading the righteous into the light. For his part, John Quincy Adams considered the United States “destined by God and by nature to be the most populous and powerful people ever combined under one social contract.”

And that’s just the beginning . . .

Keeping the tradition alive, further down the line, were sentiments like those memorialized in the Republican Platform document of 1900, in which party leadership congratulated themselves on the outcome of the recently concluded war with Spain, saying that it was a:

“war fought for ‘high purpose,’ a war for liberty and human rights that had given ten millions of the human race a new birth of freedom and the American people a new and noble responsibility . . . to confer the blessings of liberty and civilization upon all the rescued peoples.”

And then, of course, there’s Henry Clay, one of the original War Hawks of the 12^th Congress who agitated for waging war on Britain (the War of 1812) to defend America’s republican “honor,” and believed that the United States belonged, naturally, at the “centre of a system which would constitute the rallying point of human freedom against all the despotism of the Old World.”

I could rattle on about related peculiar American beliefs like “Manifest Destiny” and the mistakes and excesses of many American statesmen and Commanders-in-Chief, directly attributable to their belief that they were acolytes in a divinely ordained mission; but, despite the patriotic hype and jingoism that pervades Life in America, I believe, at bottom we all have a queasy realization that we are a Jekyll and Hyde society – at best. We like to think of ourselves as peace-loving champions of human rights who do everything in our power to avoid war yet are frequently dragged into conflict to redress the wrongs that others commit. On the other hand we know, from experience, that our leaders will not hesitate to invent reasons to go to war (i.e., Gulf of Tonkin) with the best of intentions, of course; or even to unleash weapons of mass destruction on the innocent people of a sovereign nation to facilitate our opportunistic search for imaginary weapons of mass destruction.

Jesus Loves Me

For the most part, we are a nation of ideologues who believe that we, alone on Planet Earth, know the Truth and, with missionary zeal, we loudly and tirelessly repudiate any and all sorts of alternate truth. We walk among Earthlings but we are not of them . . . who wouldn’t sign on to that exalted position?

Despite our current President’s agile mind and rhetorical skill, he ascribes to the same old creed of American Hegemony that has landed us in so much trouble, so many times that it’s hard to keep count. Our adolescent stubbornness effectively prevents us from anything like learning from past mistakes so, as the philosophers say, “we are doomed to repeat them.” When Barack Obama talks about foreign policy he preaches the American Gospel in these handy soundbites: America must be the “leader of the freeworld” “battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good.” Obama believes and has said as much that America’s purpose in the world is to promote democracy, a notion expanded by the cringe-worthy sentiment that the “security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people.” Really . . . ?

With all of those grandiose visions dancing in his head, Obama has, much to the bewilderment of many of his supporters, embraced his roles as Commander-in-Chief and Wartime President with alarming gusto. He has increased defense spending and expanded military forces to ensure that the US has “the strongest, best-equipped military in the world.” He has doubled-down in Afghanistan and Pakistan, making Afpak “Obama’s War,” determined to be the first to walk out victorious from “the Graveyard of Empires.” He talks in manly terms about putting “rogue nations” and “hostile dictators” in their place by pursuing “muscular alliances,” and maintaining “a strong nuclear deterrent,” all objectives eminently worthy of his Nobel Prize-winning plan for America.

Unfortunately, one man’s vision is another man’s debacle and images of former glory and stirring rhetoric aside, the reality of our situation is sobering. Clearly, we have learned nothing from the past, skating glibly from the abject failure of “Vietnamization” to the equally hilarious, and mercifully short-lived notion of “Iraqification.” The American people, shell-shocked perhaps by our decades of commitment to Permanent War, have become complacent and dutifully rubber-stamp the funding of our global police actions, acquiescing to the routine bypass of Congress and any serious debate in the name of “National Security.” Besides, we’ve been assiduously schooled to believe that questioning our military adventures is tantamount to Treason, so we obediently stand by and dumbly witness atrocities carried out by the “troops” that it is our patriotic duty to support unconditionally. Welcome to Stepford . . .

Practice, Practice, Practice!

Reuters

We insist on making war even though our track record, over the last half-century documents the fact that we are really piss-poor at it. We couldn’t even manage to win the blamed War on Drugs, which was recently pronounced DOA, after 40 years, billions of dollars and tens of thousands of deaths. Recent news out of Afghanistan indicates that Gen. McChrystal’s pumped up Operation Moshtarak (Marjah) was a waste of time that only demonstrated how lame the COIN strategy is and how smart it will be to go to COIN-Lite (basically targeted assassinations with none of the time consuming hearts and minds stuff that is just so “last year;” the Kandahar Offensive/Operation/Process, or whatever they’re calling it this week, has been postponed until the fall because, lo and behold all the boots aren’t on the ground yet and won’t be until round about September (somebody really should have told the General that he wasn’t working with a full Humvee when he was busy hyping the big battle for June). Suddenly Gen. McC is admitting that “nobody’s winning, nobody’s losing” in Afghanistan which is a real kick in the head if you cling to the hope that “happily ever after” is scheduled for a year from now. Jeff Huber, one of my all-time favorite McChrystal analysts, parses the General’s progress report best, saying:

“When you’re the world’s sole superpower, and you’ve been bogged down for eight years by pismire adversaries who don’t have an air force or a navy or an army or even a defense budget, you’re not breaking even, you’re getting your heinie handed to you on a plate with a generous helping of grilled crow on the side. What could better symbolize our humiliating defeat than the recent spectacle of Barack Obama and Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton kissing up in public to Afghan sleaze peddler Hamid Karzai?”

On our performance in Iraq, there are those among us who have declared “victory” without getting overly descriptive about what that victory looks like. If “victory” means things like: a functional popularly elected government in place, a path to re-establishing a decent standard of living and resumption of services, a decrease in partisan violence – if those things matter, there is ample evidence that victory celebrations might be a little premature. In fact, the Iraqi government announced, today, their plan to get back to basics by building a 15 foot high wall around Baghdad (complete with moat,in spots). Oddly, no one seemed to see a need for such fortifications before the American Crusaders liberated Iraq.

Another compelling argument for folding our tents in the Middle East is that the longer we stay the stronger the various regional insurgencies will become because we just can’t seem to keep ourselves from handing out cash when we’re on a mission – it’s who we are. We don’t have a clue who’s friend or foe but we have utter faith in that key tenet of Americanism that says that “if you throw enough money at, it’ll get better.”

Ergo, we read reports like this one by Luke Mogelson, in The Nation describing an expensive (and potentially dangerous) failure of US policy in the much-touted Reconstruction of Iraq. The gist of the story is that much of the money that the US was pumping into “post-war” Iraq probably wound up financing and arming insurgents and militants, via fictitious inflated worker rolls, kickbacks and payoffs – as well as just plain not knowing “who’s who.” Here’s a snippet describing how that went down:

“Precisely how much money went to the insurgency remains unknown. Occupation business has been conducted largely in cash. All told, $12 billion—some 240 tons of bills—has been shrink-wrapped and shipped to Baghdad from the Federal Reserve Bank in New York City. At its height the CSP (Community Stabilization Program) was disbursing $1 million a day. “They would bring in money on pallets,” says Colonel Boston. “Where does that money go?”

Enough people with their boots firmly on the ground raised red flags and sounded alarms:

“It was just a sham,” says retired Lt. Col. Felix Boston, a member of a provincial reconstruction team deployed to Baghdad’s Kadhimiya district . . . militias that found safe haven there were still active in the insurgency, and USAID hoped to lure potential recruits away by enlisting them in the trash campaigns. Time sheets submitted to IRD (International Relief and Development, an American non-profit subcontractor to USAID which, in turn, subcontracted its work to local contractors listed thousands of Iraqis, each receiving wages from USAID. But according to several embedded provincial reconstruction team members, many of these workers were phantoms, never seen by the US Army’s Dagger Brigade during its regular patrols of the area. ‘The numbers were so inflated,’ says Boston. ‘They’d say 5,000, and there might have been a hundred people.’”

Finally, the commander of Dagger Brigade, encouraged a USAID rep to contact the head of the CSP to do something about the American handouts because:

“The dire consequence is that American soldiers are killed attempting to secure areas being destabilized in part by misdirected American dollars.”

The unconscionable response from the head of CSP was: “Talk to our lawyers. We’re not going to do anything about it.” So much for supporting our troops . . .

The reason that these events in Iraq played out the way they did is because the civilian functionaries involved are fast-trackers, aiming for the seats of American Power, and not inclined to let anything stand in the way of turning in an impressive performance. They are the “team players” drafted into the “industrial” piece of the military-industrial complex and they play hardball (and almost always win).

Here’s Mogelson’s account of the typically American “happy ending” to this story:

“During her glowing assessment of the CSP at the US Institute of Peace in November, Jeanne Pryor, the USAID deputy director for Iraq reconstruction, recited a litany of statistics and pointed out that the daily disbursement of CSP funds in Iraq often exceeded what entire countries receive from USAID in one year.”

“While militia members and insurgents may have fed fraudulent time sheets to IRD, they were at least patently fraudulent and made no pretense of truth. But IRD then fed those numbers to USAID, USAID fed them to the American people and eventually, inevitably, Ambassador Ryan Crocker fed them to Congress . . . Crocker appeared before the House and Senate to warn against a troop withdrawal and point out, among other gains, that CSP funds provided tens of thousands of jobs. Somewhere along the way the forged signatures had become real signatures; the phantom workers had become flesh-and-blood workers, young Iraqi men persuaded by American generosity not to fight us—an indicator of progress in a winnable war.”

It seems incomprehensible but, in my lifetime bracketed by Vietnam and Afpak, I believe that I have witnessed America getting progressively worse at conducting the wars that our economy now depends on. As David Swanson said, recently:

“We are now a nation that regularly bombs civilians, detains the innocent, and tortures suspects—sometimes to death.”

Recent low points in American statecraft — the Persian Gulf intervention, the intentional destruction of Iraq’s water-and-sewage facilities, the years of brutal sanctions on Iraq topped off by U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright’s infamous declaration that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions were “worth it,” the stationing of U.S. troops on Islamic holy lands, the unconditional support of the Israeli government, the support of brutal dictators, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the assassinations in Pakistan, the rendition, torture, Guantanamo ad nauseam – are a ringing indictment of our willingness to sacrifice our basic humanity in the pursuit of an American ideal that justifies any means to achieving our “divinely ordained mission” of democratizing the world – a monstrous notion no less chilling, to me, than the Global Caliphate of Islam, or any other past or future program of world domination.

Angelo M. Codevilla, a professor of international relations at Boston University and Vice Chairman of the U.S. Army War College Board of Visitors has written extensively on these issues for the Claremont Institute and has a lot of very worthwhile insights to offer – here’s a sample:

“What can explain the remarkable fact that U.S. forces, disposing of practically endless money, firepower, and mobility, became enablers of the people they had routed eight years before? What can turn overwhelming power into self-defeating impotence? Only ideas that insulate against reality. Self-evidently, neither of the options that our establishment lets into its digestive system-a long occupation with counterinsurgency forces, along with nation-building in a non-nation; or more remote-controlled pinprick drone strikes based on third-hand intelligence-is relevant to stopping the flow of dollars, guns, Wahabi missionaries, and suicide bombers into both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.”

“This is because the logic that flows from the heights of American universities through the bureaucracies and the war colleges, which transforms conscientious junior officers into nodding generals, forecloses fruitful options leaving only the choice between the futility of nation-building counterinsurgency and the deadly unseriousness of drone strikes and hit teams. Typical of our ruling class’s decisions, President Obama’s December 2009 Afghanistan plan committed to both: to nation-building while denying that he was doing so, and to remote strikes while holding out no hope of eliminating enemy strongholds.”

“The men and women who run our government and occupy the commanding heights of our society seldom miss the fact that their ideas have not yielded the results they expected. But their very status and authority blind them to the reason why: the false axioms of their own mis-education. Lacking intellectual diversity and flexibility, they double down on their bets and dig deeper in failure. Akin to coaches who lead good teams to loss after embarrassing loss at the hands of inferior ones, they should be replaced. But firing a ruling class is hard. Replacing it is still harder. Nevertheless, just as sports teams rebuild by bringing in new talent, by reemphasizing blocking and tackling, pitching, fielding, and hitting, so countries intent on renewal must begin by rejecting the fashions—and the fashionable—of the age, by going back to basics, and drawing solutions for new problems from statecraft’s perennial principles.”

Meanwhile, our President and our Secretary of State entertain the coarse, but useful, crook that they have installed to run the freshly minted democracy of Afghanistan and reassure him of the only outcome that he really cares about – rain or shine American financial support for the foreseeable future. Promises were made that we are “in it for the long term” and that the US will have a long-term interest in “making sure that Afghanistan is secure, that economic development is taking place and that good government is promoted.”

Wow, Mr. President, we could use some of that in our town . . .

[tags]Defense budget, Hillary Clinton, President Obama, Hamid Karzai, foreign policy, military failures, manifest destiny, American Exceptionalism[/tags]

Kirsty Wigglesworth / Associated Press

Two weeks into the aftermath of the latest breach of Homeland Security, I think I’m beginning to notice an unsettling pattern in our national response to such events. Paradoxically, that response spells good news for terrorists and, unfortunately bad news for American citizens. We have been told frequently since 9/11, often in quite melodramatic terms, that some “radicalized” Muslims become terrorists, driven to an irrational homicidal frenzy because they “hate our freedoms” so much. Wow . . .

As a lay person, with no foreign policy experience, I would have guessed something less ideological, more mundane, was driving that runaway train. Things like: having my country invaded and occupied; or having my wedding party shredded by machine gun fire; or having my brother Hamid disappear without a trace leaving a wife and eight children; or having to try to reassemble my child’s body for a proper burial – those are the kinds of gut-wrenching events I would have bet on. If the experts are right, though, there’s good news for terrorists in that our government is well on its way to obliterating many of those revolting “freedoms” that drive you to distraction. Give them a while longer and a few more bomb scares and the tables will turn — and Americans will have to hate you for your freedoms.

Glenn Greenwald did a great job of encapsulating our current trend away from citizen’s rights in a recent article at Salon:

“The most recent liberty-abridging, Terrorism-justified controversies have focused on diluting the legal rights of American citizens (in part because the rights of non-citizens are largely gone already and there are none left to attack). A bipartisan group from Congress sponsors legislation to strip Americans of their citizenship based on Terrorism accusations. Barack Obama claims the right to assassinate Americans far from any battlefield and with no due process of any kind. The Obama administration begins covertly abandoning long-standing Miranda protections for American suspects by vastly expanding what had long been a very narrow “public safety” exception, and now Eric Holder explicitly advocates legislation to codify that erosion. John McCain and Joe Lieberman introduce legislation to bar all Terrorism suspects, including Americans arrested on U.S. soil, from being tried in civilian courts, and former Bush officials Bill Burck and Dana Perino — while noting (correctly) that Holder’s Miranda proposal constitutes a concession to the right-wing claim that Miranda is too restrictive — today demand that U.S. citizens accused of Terrorism and arrested on U.S. soil be treated as enemy combatants and thus denied even the most basic legal protections (including the right to be charged and have access to a lawyer).”

So. Somewhere along the line, our government has decided that it is better (easier?) to abridge human rights rather than defend them . . . and we, the citizens that our government are supposed to represent and defend, seem to be relatively unphased by it all, to the point of tacit agreement (or plain indifference).

Greenwald continues with this:

“There is, of course, no moral difference between subjecting citizens and non-citizens to abusive or tyrannical treatment. But as a practical matter, the dangers intensify when the denial of rights is aimed at a government’s own population. The ultimate check on any government is its own citizenry; vesting political leaders with oppressive domestic authority uniquely empowers them to avoid accountability and deter dissent. It’s one thing for a government to spy on other countries (as virtually every nation does); it’s another thing entirely for them to direct its surveillance apparatus inward and spy on its own citizens. Alarming assaults on basic rights become all the more alarming when the focus shifts to the domestic arena.”

As Greenwald points out, our relative calm about the abridgement of rights probably devolves on the notion that these abridgements will never affect us just the bad guys among us; and that limiting the rights of everyone will serve to keep the righteous safer. That mindset, however, depends on a tremendous (unwarranted) amount of trust in the powers that be to make just determinations. For example, today, if President Obama (or his successors later on) decide that you or I are behaving in a “terroristic” way, with a stroke of the pen the President can add you to “the List” to be assassinated, anywhere in the world. You will be Presumed Guilty – making the President, in such cases, the judge, jury and executioner.

If you believe that can’t happen to a US citizen, I refer you to the case of an American-born US citizen from New Mexico, Anwar al-Awlaki, who happens also to be a Muslim cleric who has produced prodigious amounts of writings, lectures and sermons which he distributes via the Internet. fingered by several suspected terrorists, during interrogation, of inspiring terrorist acts — in speech. Some have breathlessly referred to al Awlaki as “the bin Laden of the Internet” referring, I suppose to his Facebook page, blog and YouTube Account. Hardly “deep cover” but enough terrorist suspects found their way to his websites and cited him as their “inspiration” that he attracted the attention of national security types. As a result, President Obama has reviewed the allegations against al Awlaki, and signed his Death Warrant, bestowing the dubious honor on al Awlaki of being the first US citizen to land on the Chief Executives Targeted Assassination list. For his part, al Awlaki has prudently repaired to Yemen, his other home, but his days are probably numbered.

I, for one, don’t rest easier at night knowing that my government can execute a citizen, like me, based on secret intelligence, without formal charges and completely foregoing due process no matter where in the world I happen to be.

An interesting point about the current rather ad hoc nature of US justice is the interesting and irrational fact that, if the government wants to listen in on al Awlaki’s cell phone conversations, they have to persuade a court to issue a warrant; if, on the other hand, they want to murder him on a street in Yemen, they can have at it – no judicial review required.

Now That’s What I Call Terrorism

Campaign promises to the contrary, President Obama definitely seems to be warming to the Executioner role, particularly as practiced in the Drone Program which allows a Chief Executive to have his way without getting his suit or his conscience soiled and without getting constituents’ children killed by anti-aircraft fire. Evidently drones are the perfect weapon for the budding “targeted assassin” especially for those “hard to reach” non-combat zones where our military presence is not particularly welcomed. For example, Pakistan is one of the few countries left on Earth that isn’t host to a colony of US military bases and, as luck would have it, that’s exactly where the bad guys hideout – we think..

The initial permission to broaden the drone campaign, from a surveillance to an attack role, came during the last year of the Bush administration, but has been continued and expanded under the presidency of Barack Obama.

The drone program was initially sold to the American public as part of a carefully prepared exercise in “targeted killings” aimed against high-ranking leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The supposed appeal was that these were “surgical” operations that allow us to take out bad guys without harming civilians. Drones had the added attraction of being remote-controlled and unmanned which kept our own pilots out of harm’s way. What could be better?

Obama has exponentially increased the use of Predator Drone attacks in Pakistan (to questionable effect) and, simultaneously, loosened restrictions on their use.

According to a recent LA Times article:

“Instead of just a few dozen attacks per year, CIA operated unmanned aircraft now carry out multiple missile strikes each week against safe houses, training camps and other hiding places used by militants in the tribal belt bordering Afghanistan.”

“There have been 34 missile strikes so far this year, at least two every week, according to figures compiled by the New America Foundation. This compares to 53 for all of last year and 30 during the last year of the Bush administration.”

“Intelligence officials report that the size of the drone fleet being deployed over Pakistan has doubled since Obama took office in January 2009.”

Reports have recently surfaced in Wired and again, the LA Times, that to expedite the Drone Program even further the CIA is now operating under new rules that allow it to target suspected “militants” in Pakistan based upon “pattern of life” analyses, without even ascertaining their identity. The new rules have transformed the program from a narrow effort aimed at killing top Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders into a large-scale campaign of airstrikes in which few militants are off-limits, as long as they are deemed to pose a threat to the U.S. For the most part, these days, they acknowledge, the names of those assassinated with Hellfire missiles fired from Predator and the larger Reaper drones are never known. Which sounds to me to be more “wholesale killing” and far less targeted than we were led to believe.

“Pattern of Life” analysis, for the uninitiated, is a fancy name for “if it looks like an insurgent, walks like an insurgent, and shows up in an insurgent neighborhood” — bombs away. If these analyses actually find valid targets that’s quite a feat from a few days sky surveillance, maybe some local “hot tips” and probably more than a little “gut feelings” on the part of the remote controllers. It would be interesting to quiz these same drone operators about what a “normal” Pattern of Life for a resident of Waziristan looks like.

As with any new technology, the Drone Program is not without its critics which make it a little difficult to gauge its success, as yet. For example, Pakistan the country playing host to our current “targets” is a little conflicted and has, on occasion, raised quite a stink about the loss of life involved in the program. You might have noticed that most articles written about drone strikes in Pakistan include this curious disclaimer (word-for-word):

“Pakistan officially protests the missile strikes on its territory as violations of its sovereignty, but it is believed to aid them. The U.S. rarely discusses the unmanned-drone-fired strikes, which are part of a covert CIA program.”

And then, too, there’s the allegation that Pakistan has made rather frequently that drone strikes are killing far more civilians than militants. Pakistani officials have charged that the overwhelming majority of the victims of the CIA missile attacks are civilians, most of them women and children. Pakistan has placed the number of civilians killed at over 700 last year alone. And, technically, that’s not in a combat zone . . .

Of course the far more detached reports coming out of the CIA claim that only a handful of civilians have been slain in the missile attacks, despite admitting to not knowing the names of the more than 500 people it admits to having killed.

According to the New America Foundation, of the up to 247 people reported killed in attacks carried out so far in 2010 only seven have been publicly identified as “militants.”

Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You

Ironically, all of this drone program revelation hit the press only a few days after Congress hosted hearings on the legality of drone attacks, in general, where legal experts warned Congress in their testimony that both those who order these attacks and those who actually execute them could be prosecuted for war crimes.

“Only a combatant—a lawful combatant—may carry out the use of killing with combat drones,” Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor from the University of Notre Dame law school, testified at the April 28 hearing held by the National Security and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.”

“The CIA and civilian contractors have no right to do so,” she continued. “They do not wear uniforms, and they are not in the chain of command. And most importantly, they are not trained in the law of armed conflict.”

“David Glazier, a professor from Loyola law school in Los Angeles, California, concurred with this opinion, stating that CIA personnel are “clearly not lawful combatants, [and] if you are not a privileged combatant, you simply don’t have immunity from domestic law for participating in hostilities.”

“The American Civil Liberties Union issued a letter to President Obama in conjunction with the congressional hearing, noting recent reports that this administration had targeted a US citizen living in Yemen—the American-born Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki—for assassination by means of a drone attack.”

“The letter expressed “profound concern about recent reports indicating that you have authorized a program that contemplates the killing of suspected terrorists—including US citizens—located far away from zones of actual armed conflict. If accurately described, this program violates international law and, at least insofar as it affects US citizens, it is also unconstitutional.”

* * *

Frankly, my country’s War on Terror scares me to death . . .

[tags]Predator Drone, Reaper, Pakistan, Waziristan, Anwar al-Awlaki, al Qaeda, war crimes, due process, targeted assassination[/tags]

I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood in a small “steel town” in what is now referred to dismissively as the “Rust Belt.” We were a motley crew of immigrant mutts and Post-War DPs (Displaced Persons), as we called them, to draw a line between “established” second generation immigrants (mostly Irish and Italians, in our town) and those just catching their breath after running for their lives (lots of Germans, Eastern Europeans and Russians). Like academics, immigrants, left to their own devices, establish their own pecking order based largely on tenure.

The one thing that we all had in common was large families and a perpetual shortage of cash, which we made up for by total commitment to the Cult of the American Dream. We might be strapped today but we all fervently believed that Easy Street was right around the corner. The money-management mantra that we grew up with was “Don’t throw good money after bad . . . “ which, translated for the younger generations, was a homespun caution against continuing to spend money on something that has already failed. And heaven help any fool who was deluded enough to actually borrow money to support “throwing good money after bad . . . “

Which brings me to my main topic which is: How/when did the American taxpayer’s role in our government’s spending decisions become so diminished and inconsequential that our hard-earned tax contributions can be diverted to “throw good money after bad” at rapacious corporations, which are given a pass on their own tax responsibilities; or to bankroll the misguided, very expensive foreign adventures of feverish neocons? Aren’t we the very ones who proclaimed that taxation without representation is tyranny? Looking at our foreign and domestic policy decisions, of late, I certainly don’t feel very well represented. Furthermore, I have little to no confidence that a trip to the ballot box will materially change anything. I got sucked in by that one the last time around . . .

Coming, as I do, from my own peculiar fiscal background (and without the benefit of an MBA) I know that something has to give, sooner or later, to keep a national budget like ours from imploding. I also know, from my own political background that, if a decision has to be made between guns and butter, butter will quickly become only a fond memory — notwithstanding Julia Child’s advice that “If you have enough butter anything is good.”

What keeps me awake at night, though, is: how does it happen that a large number of what appear to be relatively rational, fairly well-educated, moderately privileged elected officials who can’t seem to agree on much of anything else, can get solidly behind the unifying principle of a blank check for defense spending (that doesn’t really “defend” anything)? Maybe we should start calling it the Department of Offense . . . ?

No More Budgetary Sleight-of-hand at the Pentagon (Pres. Barack Obama, 2/25/2009)

President Obama is about to go through the motions of a Congressional vote on his most recent defense supplemental appropriations of $33 billion for the “surge” in Afghanistan, but that horse has already left the gate – troops have been surging for months on that “unapproved-as-yet” invoice. For you chart enthusiasts out there, remember when you’re looking at the Federal budget that that “lion’s share” slice labeled defense is far from the whole story. The rest of the budget is a virtual Easter Egg Hunt of defense spending charged to someone else’s tab, like the State Department, Justice, etc. If you want to make yourself really crazy try to figure out what the CIA’s budget is for any given year – I dare you.

Now we are poised to throw an additional $33 billion at the War in Afghanistan despite the fact that a majority of Americans don’t believe Afghanistan is worth it, according to a recent Washington Post – ABC poll. And despite the fact that, now, even the Pentagon doubts we can pull off anything that looks like a success in Afghanistan, per their report released on April 26, 2010 along with similarly pessimistic recent statements to the press. The Pentagon is critical of Gen. McChrystal’s ambitious strategy, for the timeframe and point to the Marjah Campaign, which was supposed to serve as a counterinsurgency test case, as a failure.

Furthermore, Gen. McChrystal has been forced to walk back his previous promise that he will not proceed against Kandahar unless he has the support of the Kandaharis – because he clearly doesn’t. The much ballyhooed Kandahar Offensive has been serially downgraded, in recent months, to an Operation, then, most recently – to a Process (whatever that means, in military terms).

The conventional wisdom bandied about over this issue is that maybe we don’t like the wars we’re involved in, maybe they’re not even going very well; but, now that the troops are there, we have to support them, don’t we? Very few, even hard-liner Peace-niks, can stomach the thought of our brave boys and girls doing without in a war zone. So the money keeps gushing without even tripping so much as an alarm buzzer in the (selectively) Anti-Government-Spending Tea Party.

David Swanson, writing for TomDispatch.org, sheds some light on the Obama Administration’s apparent determination to “soldier on” in this no-win situation:

“Early in 2009, President Barack Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan with 21,000 “combat” troops, 13,000 “support” troops, and at least 5,000 mercenaries, without any serious debate in Congress or the corporate media. The President sent the first 17,000 troops prior to developing any plan for Afghanistan, leaving the impression that escalation was, somehow, an end in itself. Certainly it didn’t accomplish anything else, a conclusion evident in downbeat reports on the Afghan war situation issued this month by both the Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon.”

“ . . . Even as Congress voted overwhelmingly for a massive war and military budget in December, some representatives did speak out against further escalation and the funding needed for it.

“While all sides in this debate agreed that such escalation funding would need to be voted on sometime in the first half of 2010, everyone knew something else as well: that the President would go ahead and escalate in Afghanistan even without funding in place — the money all being borrowed anyway — and that, once many or all of the new troops were there, he would get less resistance from Congress which would be voting on something that had already happened.”

Another point to keep in mind is that these incomprehensibly large numbers of dollars that we have become numb to committing to — according to the Congressional Budget Office, Congress has already approved $345 billion for war in Afghanistan, not to mention $708 billion in Iraq – are only the up-front costs of war:

“ . . . As economists Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz demonstrated in The Three Trillion Dollar War, their book on the cost of the Iraq war alone, adding in debt payments on moneys borrowed to fight that war, long-term care for veterans wounded in it, the war’s impact on energy prices, and other macroeconomic impacts, the current tax bill for the Iraq War must be at least tripled and probably quadrupled or more to arrive at its real long-term cost. (Similarly, the cost in lives must be multiplied by all those lives that could have been saved through other, better uses of the same funding.) The same obviously applies to the Afghan War.”

Stop the Madness – please!

Greater minds than mine have quite eloquently made the case that these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and probably soon to include Pakistan and/or Iran) are illegal and immoral and are ruining our economy as well as our stature as a world power. Throw in the facts that our mission is murky, our chances of succeeding at anything much are slim and that our national security is more threatened than it has ever been and it’s very hard to fathom why we’re still there, let alone escalating.

Too many of those that we have elected to represent us skate right on by those obvious, weighty reasons to vote down the supplement to escalate in Afghanistan, offering instead a wink and a nod and the cringe-worthy intention to hold off committing to a “yes” or “no” vote until they see what political goodies might tag along, on the bill, as sweeteners (i.e., bribes).

So it is that the US Marines will continue to burn through 800,000 gallons of diesel per day, at the Pentagon’s “fully loaded” cost of $400 per gallon, for at least another year. If things go as well (not) as they are going in Iraq, we’ll probably be in both locations considerably longer.

According to an article in the Huffington Post:

“At the Pentagon, “there’s been a renewed focus on Iraq lately,” said the senior military official there. He said all options were being considered, including later delays (of troop withdrawals), adding that “we need to get out in an appropriate way … not completely tied to a timeline.”

Funny . . . I don’t remember “appropriate ways” being all that crucial getting into the Iraq war . . .

In conclusion, for anyone who thinks that getting our troops out of Afghanistan will put an end to the insane spending there, we have Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s promise to the visiting Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, to never “neglect” Afghanistan again.

“This commitment, Mr. President, will endure long after US combat troops have left because we have learned the lessons of the past,” insisted Clinton, who frequently cited 9/11 during the announcement.”

Talk about throwing good money after bad . . . underwriting Afghanistan’s day-to-day operations, “long after US combat troops have left” sounds almost as reckless as waging war there.

[tags]Afghanistan, Hillary Clinton, Hamid Karzai, Supplemental spending bill, Department of Defense[/tags]

I can remember, vividly, the first time that I learned of the curious psychological concept of “emotional contagion.” It was, for me, an “Aha Moment” that put the incomprehensible 1960’s and ‘70s, with which I was (not entirely successfully) trying to cope, into slightly better focus. For those who are unfamiliar with the term (but probably quite familiar with the social phenomenon, itself), emotional contagion is the tendency to catch and feel emotions that are similar to and influenced by those of others. It is emotional contagion that makes human group dynamics tick along a vast spectrum of emotions; from a crazed lynch mob to an anti-war peace march, emotional contagion plays a role in human group-think.

Faced with another incomprehensible American epoch, I’ve decided to dust off the old text books and look for some comfort, or at least some sense in the context of emotional contagion. The ability to transfer moods appears to be innate in humans; anyone who has raised a child knows all about this innate ability. That knowledge of human behavior has been used to great effect in “persuasion” of all kinds from advertising to political propaganda. Want someone to buy your ridiculously over-priced anti-aging cream? share your fear of becoming pathetic human detritus as a result of wrinkling and age spots. Want someone to vote you into the Oval Office? share your fear of a national security breakdown if you are not elected to keep us all safe. A daily barrage of similar appeals to emotion are a familiar fact of American life.

One fine point having to do with emotional contagion that escaped me in my youth, though, is particularly useful in trying to understand the crazy (and quite unattractive) fits that our country is going through in 2010. That point is this most excellent distinction, made by Erich Fromm, that a higher cognitive development, autonomy, is necessary for human empathy but not for emotional contagion and, as most of us can attest, there is a pronounced variable of empathic capacity among humans. As with so many of our human reactions there is a primal element underlying a higher-functioning, thinking element; clearly, we are not yet so highly evolved that the higher functions always prevail.

* * *

With all of that in mind, it is a quite interesting conundrum that our generals and politicians are grappling with at the moment and some of the solutions that are being signaled are undesirable to say the very least. I have to assume that, by today, 99% of Americans are at least somewhat familiar with last week’s events in the Big Apple.

During the course of a fairly humdrum day on Times Square, a Muslim immigrant (no less) street vendor alerted NYPD that a van was double-parked, idling and smoking up his turf. Investigating officers discovered that the vehicle, a van, contained an odd assortment of potentially incendiary devices (propane tanks for gas grills, fireworks in a can, along with a footlocker full of (non-volatile) fertilizer. Now before any patriots get their panties in a wad over my making light of the danger to Manhattanites – a number of whom might have been incinerated, had this been a real car-bomb – I would emphasize the fact that this was NOT a real car-bomb. It was an ass-hat collection of things that might look remotely like a car-bomb to uniformed beat cops, on initial inspection.

Immediate suspicion fell on a skinny, middle-aged white man caught on camera changing his shirt in Shubert Alley. When the vehicle’s VIN number was traced, however, authorities discovered that it had recently been purchased by a young man from Connecticut who was born in – OMG — Pakistan.

In a cinematic race-against-time, Faisal Shahzad was apprehended on a flight departing JFK for Dubai, which event kicked off a bout of political hysteria.

Let the Games Begin

By the time the Sunday Talking Heads were “on air” there was talk of expanding to a ground war in Pakistan and “modifying” Miranda Rights for terrorism suspects. Sheeeeesh . . . .

Attorney General Eric Holder met little to no resistance from Jake Tapper (standing-in for George Stephanopoulos) on This Week, when Holder pronounced that:

“Well, we’ve now developed evidence that shows that the Pakistani Taliban was behind the attack. We know that they helped facilitate it. We know that they probably helped finance it and that he was working at their direction.”

It never occurred to Tapper to “get the story” on the evidence that led to Holder’s statement despite plenty of unclassified, well-publicized reports to the contrary. Like these:

• Gen. David Petraeus, earlier in the week, telling us that Shahzad was apparently acting as a “lone wolf”
• The Pakistani Taliban publicly disowning him – several times
• Ample evidence of his utter ineptitude as a bomber that firmly contradicts any notion that he was “trained” in Pakistan (or anywhere else where effective car bombs go off on a regular basis)
• Mounting evidence that Shahzad’s life was falling apart – his house was in foreclosure, his wife took his two kids and left him, he was being hounded by bill collectors and was forced to go, “hat-in-hand” to his well-to-do relatives for financial help (which probably has more to do with his annual trips to Pakistan).

Then, on 60 Minutes, we had Secretary of State Clinton banging the drum loudly and matter-of-factly reversing our diplomatic stance toward “our Pakistani allies”:

“We want more. We expect more. We’ve made it very clear that if, heaven forbid, an attack like this that we can trace back to Pakistan were to have been successful, there would be very severe consequences.”

Surely, Clinton’s words on Sunday night were a reprise of a message already delivered to “our Pakistani allies” who pledged their allegiance, on Sunday morning, by carrying out a helicopter gunship assault on insurgent hide-outs in the Orakzai tribal region, killing 23 militants, according to local officials.

So now we have to choose between the “emotional contagion” of: the “Pakistanis are training each other to blow up Times Square so let’s pound them into oblivion” appeal or a more measured (and sure to be dubbed “sissy”) approach of gathering evidence and facts so that we can understand what we’re truly dealing with.

Certainly current events can be twisted to support the “Carpe Diem” approach that our politicians and military seem to favor. How fortuitous for the “Pakistan Problem” to rear its head just in time to deflect attention from our fool’s errand in Afghanistan, our tiresome hounding of Iran, or our loosening grip on global power and respect, generally.

Enquiring Minds Want to Know

Try, for a minute or two, to detach from the fear and loathing that might well prevent you from ever attending another Broadway show and let’s just look at the facts dispassionately . . .

• During the period of time that the suspect was thought to be a 40 year-old white guy, there was far less hysteria despite the fact that the net effect, if that car bomb had gone off, would have been the same regardless of the bomber’s racial background (it just wouldn’t have been a credible excuse for a war on Pakistan).
• We are expected to believe that the suspect, Faisal Shahzad, went to considerable trouble and expense, at a time that his life was in a shambles, pursuing an education in bomb-building. Does anyone really believe that Shahzad was such a prize that the Taliban was providing him with an all-expense-paid educational grant to learn the ancient art of car-bombing? Most American teenagers, without benefit of a Taliban education, could build a more effective car bomb than Faisal Shahzad did (I daresay, I could) despite his supposed intensive Taliban training. And, too, most American teenagers would have the presence of mind to not leave the keys to the getaway car in the vehicle rigged with the bomb . . .
• And then, of course there is the bomb, itself, consisting of propane tanks without the caps removed, rendering them useless as bombs; a fuse, of sorts, fashioned from firecrackers specifically manufactured so that they can’t ignite each other in a chain reaction, and a foot-locker full of non-volatile fertilizer.
• A far more compelling argument can be made that Shahzad was just a loser who, faced with having to return home to Mom and Dad, without his family and in financial ruin was at least hoping to go back as the mastermind Times Square Bomber.
• The Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-i-Taliban) were, at first, tempted to take credit for the commotion in Times Square but, when they realized what a joke Shahzad’s bomb attempt was, they quickly made several public statements praising his bravery but, at the same time, confirming that they didn’t have a clue who he was let alone take credit for training him.
• On May 6, McClatchy newspapers cited “six U.S. officials” who stated that “no credible evidence has been found” that Shahzad “received any serious terrorist training from the Pakistani Taliban or another radical Islamic group.”
• In fact, Tehrik-i-Taliban has never attempted, nor do they seem to be interested in, carrying out terrorist attacks on foreign soil.
• Some American reports have suggested a link between Shahzad’s father, a former military officer, and a radical Taliban leader. But, according to Pakistani police, they questioned Shahzad’s father about his son’s activities, but he is not a suspect in the case. And nothing has come out of Islamabad confirming any connection between the Senior Shahzad and the Taliban.
• And the far-fetched story of Shahzad being located when his cell phone was detected by a secret spy plane? The rather more mundane fact is that, at the last minute, immigration officials recognized Shahzad’s name on a passenger list and contacted the FBI.

Some of us may really, really want Faisal Shahzad to be taking orders from the Pakistani Taliban but most of the evidence doesn’t support that scenario very well. Of course, if one isn’t required to produce any substantive facts, well . . . Bombs Away.

UPDATE: The New York Daily News published poll results of their readership, this morning, in answer to the question: Will the recent bomb-scare keep you away from Times Square in the future? The answers:

• Yes. I refuse to go there – 15%
• No. Clearly the NYPD has it under control -73%
• Not sure yet – 11%

Good for you New York City!

[tags]Faisal Shahzad, Tehrik-i-Taliban, Pakistan, Times Square, Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder[/tags]

Who's Your Daddy?

In a world that has elevated hypocrisy to an art-form, an unprepossessing, virtual unknown emerged this week as the solid frontrunner for the 2010 Superheroes of Hypocrisy Title. By day, George Rekers is a 61-year-old father of three; a Baptist minister; co-founder, with James Dobson, of the Family Research Council – the lobbying arm of US Christianity; a professor of psychology at the University of South Carolina; a sex therapist specializing in teenage gender identity “issues”; an officer of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH); and a prolific author with a bad back. That’s enough to keep two men busy. But, lo and behold, when Daddy gets his ticket punched and slips out of his mild-mannered “Professor George” persona he’s a wild man worth every inch of that Superheroes title.

Professor George’s “closet” is bigger than a walk-in and needs to be, because that’s where he likes to spend his quality time with rent boys younger than his own kids. Not for Professor George, the quick grope in a public restroom or sexting with Congressional aides – no, Professor George is a stylish man of means who knows how to do things right. Professor George took his rent boy on a ten-day tour of Europe, a sublime getaway for man and boy, that might have been a totally fabulous performance except that the good Prof didn’t quite “stick the landing.” George Rekers (gotta love that name) was “caught on camera” coming down the stretch on his triumphal return to Miami International Airport with his rent boy – er, travel assistant – still in tow.

Rekers is an old hand at his chosen lifestyle, though, and immediately flew into damage control mode . . . which makes for entertaining reading because Rekers is no ordinary closet-case; this Extreme Gay Makeover has constructed his entire life around secretly embracing and publicly denying his gender identity. Every waking minute of Rekers day is spent on some aspect of homosexuality. He has two websites dedicated to counseling teenagers who are troubled by gender identity issues – one is called “Professor George” (gimme a break) and the other is called TeenSexToday.com that promises that readers who submit questions can “count on me to be logical, ethical, and scientific in my answers.” Right. This is Rekers’ favorite subject and favorite age group – color me cynical but this is just a front for a cyber-peeping Tom.

Rekers was recently paid a handsome $87,000 to serve as an “expert” witness in a case to determine whether the state of Florida’s ban on gay adoptions was legal (the judge ultimately ruled against the state). Reker’s testified that gay couples should not be permitted to adopt for the usual fact-free homophobic pseudoscience reasons. For whatever reason, while he had the microphone, Rekers also decided to throw Native Americans under the “no adoptions” bus. At the end of that trial, Judge Cindy Lederman singled out Rekers’ testimony for Dishonorable Mention thus:

“Dr. Rekers’ testimony was far from a neutral and unbiased recitation of the relevant scientific evidence. Dr. Rekers’ beliefs are motivated by his strong ideological and theological convictions that are not consistent with the science. Based on his testimony and demeanor at trial, the court can not consider his testimony to be credible nor worthy of forming the basis of public policy.”

The usual suspects have dealt quite expertly with the more salacious details of Rekers’ “Roman holiday” which leave little room for doubt about the true nature of Rekers’ tryst – in other words, I, happily, do not need to go into detail over what did and did not occur. For me, and other Hypocrisy Epicures, the juiciest tidbits lie in how the cornered hypocrite chooses to extricate him/herself from a world of trouble.

At 61, Professor George has set himself up pretty well, none of his lucrative gigs – ministry, expert witnessing, screed publishing, teen sex therapy etc. require any “heavy lifting.” The only thing that could put a dent in his little homo cottage industry would be exposure as a cynical, hypocritical charlatan making money giving advice to others from a thoroughly self-delusional background. That could mess up everything . . .

So it is that the good professor has decided to go the absolute denial route – and, as he thinks of even better excuses, he piles them on as he goes. He started, of course, with the lame story that his hunk-y “rent boy” was selected for his baggage handling skills. Professor George isn’t getting any younger and his doctor warned him to do no heavy lifting. Since the Prof was interested in “renting a boy” to lug his bags all over Europe, rentboy.com was the logical place to look, right? Now, I defy anyone reading this article to spend just a few minutes trolling through the rentboy.com site and come back and tell me (with a straight face) that you never would have guessed that those boys were gay male prostitutes. Our “expert witness” claims that he was fooled, indeed he claims it wasn’t until halfway through the trip that he guessed that his travel assistant was a male prostitute.

How unreasonable is it to expect that a man who has dedicated his life to counseling teenagers on gender identity and offering therapy to “cure” unhappy gays, would immediately recognize rentboy.com for exactly what it is?

After the media responded with a collective snort of derision, Reker amended his position on his Facebook page (which is predictably MIA, at the moment) in this way:

“If you talk with my travel assistant you will find I spent a great deal of time sharing scientific information on the desirability of abandoning homosexual intercourse, and I shared the gospel of Jesus Christ with him in great detail.”

“My hero is Jesus Christ who loves even the culturally despised people, including sexual sinners and prostitutes. Like Jesus Christ, I deliberately spend time with sinners with the loving goal to try to help them.”

From having Jesus as his hero, Rekers made the leap to litigant declaring that he would be suing the Miami reporters who wrote the original Rekers story for defamation. Which just goes to show that Rekers is living in his own nasty little world where being gay is grist for the “defamation” mill. The juridical trend, these days, is that calling someone “gay” is not defamatory. Such rulings have been made in many states; although I wouldn’t recommend testing it, yet, in states like Texas, Arizona or Arkansas.

Fair Weather Friends & Family

As usual in such cases, former associates “vote with their feet” lest they get some of this doody on them. The CEO of Family Research Council was quick to point out that he never heard of Rekers and that when he did a little digging he found that it had been decades since Reker played an active role in FRC.

NARTH, for its part, weighed in with this:

“While NARTH is focused on the science of homosexual attraction, personal controversies often deepen the existing cultural divide on this issue. Such is the case in the recent news stories concerning one of our members, Dr. George Rekers.”

“NARTH takes seriously the accusations that have been made, and we are currently attempting to understand the details behind these press reports. We are always saddened when this type of controversy impacts the lives of individuals, and we urge all parties to allow a respectful and thorough investigation to take place.”

“NARTH continues to support scientific research, and to value client autonomy, client self-determination and client diversity.”

In closing, I’ll say that I honestly feel bad for George Rekers. Not because he appears to be gay – I’m gay and surrounded and supported by a mixed gay and straight community of gifted and loving friends; and, despite Professor George’s dire warning about gays’ parenting abilities, I raised a son who is brilliant, successful, heterosexual and who has presented me with an equally marvelous granddaughter. My life is rich and full and ultimately very satisfying. The reason that I feel bad for George Reker is because I seriously doubt that the life that he has built to “fix” his gender identity crisis and live a lie is cold comfort to him today.

Nothing exposes the vacuity and hypocrisy of Republican politicians like a fresh terrorist arrest. The apprehension of The Times Square bomber, one Faisal Shahzad, a newly naturalized US citizen born in Pakistan, has inspired the Right to dust off their melodramatic (and inaccurate) views on how to best deal with terrorists. Among their knee-jerk reactions to the current administration’s handling of person’s suspected of terrorist acts, one of their most emotional objections has to do with the reading of Miranda Rights before interrogating terror suspects.

The usual politicized anti-terrorist grand-standing that has been trotted out several times over the past year has been considerably complicated, this time around, by the fact that Mr. Shahzad is, indeed, an American citizen (the real kind, not the Richard Reid shoe-bomber kind) apprehended on US soil. Mr. Shahzad’s US citizenship has so complicated things, in fact, that several GOP Congressmen have suddenly found themselves at odds with Glenn Beck, whose self-proclaimed role of “Defender of the Constitution” has forced him to come out on the side of human rights for a change.

Here’s a sampling of comments on the arrest of Faisal Shahzad:

According to Politico, who asked Rep. Peter King whether Mr. Shahzad deserved Miranda rights, King’s answer was: “I know he’s an American citizen, but still . . . ’’

But still? I guess Rep. King is in favor of a more ad hoc judicial system than the one we’ve been using all along. One where circumstances, or public opinion, change the level of rights to which a suspect is entitled.

Sen. John “Hang ‘em High” McCain had this to say to CBS News about reading Shahzad Miranda rights:

“Don’t give this guy his Miranda rights until we find out what it’s all about.”

Sounds like McCain needs a little basic law refresher – the whole point of Miranda is that a suspect understand his/her rights before being interrogated, not “arbitrarily somewhere along the line after we get the good stuff.” McCain doesn’t seem to be aware that information gained before Miranda rights are read is routinely ruled inadmissable by American courts. In his rush to judgment, McCain is actually advocating a course that could weaken the US case against Shahzad. Being a military man, McCain might actually prefer to see Shahzad tried by a Military Tribunal which would eliminate the need for Miranda Rights. However, that won’t be happening unless the famous Military Commissions Act of 2006 is amended; as written, only noncitizens can be tried by a military commission.

Never to be outdone, Sen. Joe Lieberman decided to go even further right than McCain or King by proclaiming, on Fox News that:

“It’s time for us to look at whether we want to amend that law to apply it to American citizens who choose to become affiliated with foreign terrorist organizations, whether they should not also be deprived automatically of their citizenship and therefore be deprived of rights that come with that citizenship when they are apprehended and charged with a terrorist act.”

There’s so much that’s utterly ridiculous and untethered-to-fact in that statement that, in the interest of space, I can’t go fully into it here. Suffice it to say that the Gentleman from Connecticut believes it would be a good idea to strip citizenship from anyone suspected of certain crimes, or even for hanging out with the wrong crowd. Due process be damned!

Despite all of the foregoing sturm und drang, the actual issue at hand is far simpler and, aside from its usefulness in scoring political points among the ignorant and ill-informed there is little to no real foundation for launching a debate on the prudence of “Mirand-izing” terrorist suspects.

Before I lay out a few “facts” on the Miranda Rule, I’d like to remind everyone that these are the elected Representatives, whose salaries we pay, to legislate on our behalf. If their comments, above, are any indication of their fitness to carry out their duties – God help us all!

If It’s Good Enough for Cagney & Lacey . . .

So. Unless you live in a media-free zone, and/or have had the presence of mind to stay out of trouble with law enforcement, you have some idea what the Miranda Rule is about. Most folks have received their Miranda education from police procedural TV series, reality shows like Cops and movies. The cops in such dramas are forever spouting “you have the right to remain silent . . . etc., etc.” It is the audience’s cue that the wheels of justice are groaning into action, it is the well-recognized handoff, on Law and Order, between the “cop” cast and the “DA’s Office” cast. By now, everyone knows that cops scowl and whisper Curses! Under their breath when suspects demand counsel before talking. The whole phenomenon has become so entrenched in American culture that it has its own euphemism “Lawyering up.”

In a nutshell, Miranda v. Arizona (1966), like Roe v. Wade in its own right, is one of the most popularly recognized Supreme Court case rulings in American history, (most Americans without legal training can name 1 or 2 Supreme Court rulings, on a good day). It came about because Ernesto Miranda’s conviction for rape was overturned, by the Supreme Court, because he wasn’t properly advised of his rights before he confessed to the crime. Miranda was eventually retried and convicted then stabbed to death four years later. The Miranda due process rights inform a suspect, in a uniform way, of their right to remain silent, that anything they say may be adversely used, and that they have a right to an attorney. Miranda was one of several criminal justice reforms handed down by the Earl Warren Supreme Court.

As with any slice of “real life” that finds its way into the culture via theatrics, the American general public’s understanding of the actual Miranda Rule is sketchy and overdramatized. One of the biggest misconceptions that bubbles to the surface whenever the debate over Mirand-izing terrorists comes up is that Miranda should only be applied to US citizens; furthermore, if a terror suspect happens to be a US citizen, maybe not that US citizen. Miranda affords due process rights to any person falling under US jurisdiction, citizens and non-citizens alike. The general idea is that America is a nation of laws that uphold basic human rights; while we expect non-citizen visitors to our country to abide by those laws while in the US, we, in turn, guarantee that we will provide them with the protections under that rule of law while they are under US jurisdiction. That’s a fact, not debatable.

Lest anyone argue that Miranda is a new age idea or a piece of Lefty judicial activism that departs from the Founders intentions in writing the Constitution, here’s what James Madison had to say on the matter:

“ . . . it does not follow, because aliens are not parties to the Constitution, as citizens are parties to it, that whilst they actually conform to it, they have no right to its protection. Aliens are not more parties to the laws, than they are parties to the Constitution; yet, it will not be disputed, that as they owe, on one hand, a temporary obedience, they are entitled in return to their protection and advantage.

“If aliens had no rights under the Constitution, they might not only be banished, but even capitally punished, without a jury or the other incidents to a fair trial. But so far has a contrary principle been carried, in every part of the United States, that except on charges of treason, an alien has, besides all the common privileges, the special one of being tried by a jury, of which one-half may be also aliens.”

Somewhere in time (1896), between Madison and the Warren Court, the Supreme Court ruled in Wong Wing v. U.S. that:

“Aliens might be deportable for their speech (see here for more on that question), but they can’t be otherwise punished for it, nor can they be criminally prosecuted in the civil justice system without the normal constitutional protections”

(h/t Volokh)

The Right of the Accused are not a sentimental or emotional issue to be applied ad hoc, it is settled law.

There’s Always an Exception

There is one exception to Miranda and that is the so-called “Public Safety Exception” handed down by the Supreme Court (New York v. Quarles), subsequent to Miranda, for situations where a threat to public safety compels the police to question a criminal suspect immediately. That case dealt with a situation in which a suspect arrested on suspicion of rape was found to be wearing an empty shoulder holster while being handcuffed at the scene. Police immediately asked him where the weapon was and the suspect pointed to a pile of empty boxes in the supermarket where he had been apprehended. He was then read his Miranda rights, which he waived, and admitted that the gun was his. The Court ruled that allowing the gun to be left at the scene would have presented a time-sensitive threat to public safety that trumped the reading of Miranda.

According to Attorney General Holder, that is exactly the way the FBI conducted its interrogation of Shahzad; he was questioned for a time, under the Public Safety Exclusion, to ascertain that there were no other imminent attacks that he knew of and was then read the Miranda Rights which he chose to waive.

Another weird misconception that trolls through this debate is the notion that reading Miranda Rights somehow bestows those rights and that not reading Miranda somehow withholds the rights of a suspect. That’s just downright wrong. The reading of Miranda Rights does not invent or bestow rights in any way, it simply advises the accused of his/her inherent rights, as guaranteed by the US Constitution, to anyone accused of a crime under US jurisdiction.

My suspicion is that Republicans are not so much ignorant of the law as they are counting on the American public’s varying levels of ignorance of or indifference to the law, as well as their emotionality and suggestibility. The debate on reading terror suspects their rights is just irresistibly low-hanging fruit. It’s a two-fer for the GOP, not only do they get to beat their chests over how tough they are on terrorism but, at the same time, they get to suggest how badly we need to exorcise the ghost of Earl Warren and make sure that no more bleeding heart, judicial activists are ever appointed to the US Supreme Court again.

In my opinion this is the slipperiest of slopes far more of a threat to “national security” than some of the boogeymen that have been paraded in front of us to make political hay. Back in November of last year, Tommy Crocker wrote an opinion, for opiniojuris.org, of Sen. Lindsey Graham’s unsuccessful attempt to forbid federal court trials for 9/11 suspects; Crocker states the warning about such ill-conceived moves. far better than I could, in the final paragraph of his article entitled, “Does Anyone Deserve Constitutional Rights?”

“There seems to be implied or underlying claim about moral desert. This thought appears in a statement attributed to Sen Lindsey Graham, who sought (and failed) to have Congress forbid federal court trials of 9/11 suspects. He claimed that “terrorists don’t deserve the same constitutional rights as U.S. citizens.” Why not? Any person we seek to punish criminally for heinous acts against U.S. persons, places, or interests “deserves” the protections afforded by a society dedicated to the rule of law. Since Sen. Graham advocates the use of Military Commissions, he is not claiming that terrorists don’t deserve any legal protections—just not robust constitutional ones. If this is correct, then for me it is an entirely new claim that does not depend on issues of military necessity, territoriality, trial pragmatics, or national security. It depends on a judgment that persons accused of terrorism deserve something less than robust criminal procedure protections. It also has a remote and troubling relation to national security.

“To go down this path is to go down the path of varying human rights protections based on moral judgments about who deserves them. On this score, we make no further distinctions than to say that if anyone deserves them, we all do.”

[tags]Miranda Rights, terrorists, Faisal Shahzad, Eric Holder, Supreme Court[/tags]

Just when you begin to think that, with a bit of political soul-searching and a committed re-dedication to our foundational principles, it might yet be possible to get this American “ship of state” back on course after the “perfect storm” of the last decade – something like Arizona happens.

Unless you’re living in a bubble, you will have heard by now of the passage of Arizona’s “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” introduced by state Sen. Russell Pearce, passed by both houses of the state legislature, and signed into law by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, on Saturday.

Arizona police can now stop and question anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant. If the person cannot confirm their status, they can be arrested. According to the “letter of the law” race or national origin cannot be the sole factor constituting “reasonable suspicion,” but it doesn’t prohibit race or ethnicity from being one factor. As Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) stated upon reviewing the new law: “it’s just replete with the type of broad descriptions that invite discrimination, that invite racial profiling, that invite violations of constitutional rights and civil rights.”

No matter which side of this issue you find yourself on, you’ll have to admit that no one really expects that Arizona police will be pulling over blond, blue-eyed babes suspected of over-staying their “au pair” visas.

The new law forbids authorities from releasing anyone found guilty until the full sentence is served, forces them to pay court costs and an additional fine of at least $500 for the first offense, and $1,000 for a second or subsequent conviction. Any second violation of the law would be reclassified as a felony.

SB 1070 additionally targets day laborers by making it a Class 1 misdemeanor for anyone to “pick up passengers for work” even if out of public view; making clear it would penalize anyone seeking work at a day labor site, and also those contractors who hire them. Clearly the geniuses that concocted this law didn’t appreciate the fact that they were inviting powerful opposition from the corporate sector that profits greatly from a steady stream of cheap labor from across the border.

I suspect that no one involved anticipated the broad-based blow-back that began even ahead of the Gov. Brewer’s signature. From the Department of Justice, which simply can’t ignore the screams of agony coming from the general direction of the Constitution, to the police forces expected to conduct dragnets to fill up their already bulging jails and prisons, to students withdrawing from Arizona’s universities and all the way down the line to tourists who find the law repugnant and want nothing further to do with the state that enacted it – this single event has unified more diverse groups of Americans, more quickly than any other national event in recent memory.

The response has been so inescapably loud and vehement that even those politicians that might be expected to support Arizona’s position have been running for cover and shamelessly waffling when caught.

“It’s What’s In Our Souls”

As always in America, however, there is a small “Ignorance is Bliss “ contingent who are willing to proudly defend our right to racial profiling.

One such is Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-CA) who spoke over the weekend at a Tea Party in Ramona, CA, calling Arizona’s new law “a fantastic starting point.” It’s fearsome to imagine where that “starting point” might lead . . .

When asked if he “backed deporting natural-born American citizens who are the children of illegal immigrants,” Hunter responded:

“’I would have to, yes. And we’re not being mean. We’re just saying it takes more than walking across the border to become an American citizen,’ he said. ‘It’s what’s in our souls.’”

It may well be what’s in Hunter’s “soul,” but, fortunately it’s not what’s in our Constitution. Since Hunter is being paid by the taxpayers to be a professional legislator, he might want to brush up on the 14th Amendment, and any other important bits he might have missed that day.

The 14th Amendment states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States….” Immigration status of the parents is not a consideration for their children’s right to citizenship. Most of us U.S. citizens came by our citizenship in just this way — by this constitutional right of birth.

Like most political loose cannons, Hunter is fortunate to have an “elitist intellectual” on his staff to “get his back” in such circumstances. Hunter’s man happens to be spokesman Joe Kasper who said, on Thursday, that “the congressman’s position is that U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants should stay with their parents unless there is a legal guardian who could take care of them.”

Ah, perfect. That Joe’s a spin-meister extraordinaire. In just a few words he converted Rep. Hunter from a not-terribly-bright xenophobe to a champion of Family Values. Obviously, a liberal education can still come in handy. “It was a short answer to a complex issue,” Kasper said. “His terms have been very specific on this topic and it wasn’t reflected in the answer.”

The only “benefit of the doubt” that I’m willing to extend to Hunter is that it’s possible he was simply pandering to the feverish racist element of his Tea Party audience. Not likely, though, since the Hunter family has made a name for itself for building walls, ostensibly for making better neighbors.

Hunter’s father, Duncan L., is a fourteen-term Representative of California (one compelling argument for term limits) who was responsible for writing the legislation that built the first border walls between the U.S and Mexico over 15 years ago and supported the recent building of 700 more miles of border walls in 2007 – 2008.

It doesn’t seem to have held Hunter, Sr’s political career back that he was the architect of a complete and utter failure in the realm of Immigration Policy. Billions of dollars and a huge blot on the beautiful landscape of our country have changed absolutely nothing about any problems associated with illegal immigration. Except, perhaps that more border-crossers die these days because they are now diverted into dangerous desert and mountain crossings. Latinos are still coming for the jobs we offer . . . and voters are still voting for the politicians that promise to keep them out.

As John Carlos Frey wrote recently, in the Huffington Post:

“The U.S border patrol states that 99% of all undocumented immigrants are coming to the U.S. for a job. It is a lie that more fences will deter migrants. It is a lie that they are coming to have children. It is a lie that stripping citizenship rights will stop illegal immigration. If Mr. Hunter really wanted to solve the issues of immigration he would look at the demand for illegal narcotics in the U.S. that funds and fuels smuggling and violence at the border. He would look at the demand for cheap labor on U.S. farms, factories, and service industries. He would look at the tenets of NAFTA, CAFTA and the Peruvian free trade agreements. He would look at poverty, corrupt governments, the visa systems and need for family reunification. It is shameful that the best a U.S. Congressman can do is strip U.S. citizens of their right of birth and tear up the U.S. constitution, a document he is sworn to uphold.”

Aside from the obvious attention-grabbing substance of Hunter-the-Lesser’s position, an easily overlooked bit of his full statement has grabbed my imagination and won’t let go, it is this piece:

“We’re just saying it takes more than walking across the border to become an American citizen. It’s what’s in our souls.”

I’m sure that Rep. Hunter has some sort of clear idea of what is “in our souls” that makes us American citizens. I’m just as sure that there are as many answers to that question as there are Americans, which is to say, who are we to say that the same “soul stuff” is NOT in the soul of someone who walks across the border. Are we somehow nobler and more deserving citizens if our great-grandparents crossed the Atlantic in the cargo hold of a ship to escape famine or religious persecution? Or sought asylum from a murderous regime in their country of origin? Or were shipped in to build our railroads cheaply? Can we honestly say that those who are motivated to risk their lives to cross from Mexico into the US are somehow “less than:”

” your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

. . . the homeless, tempest-tost”

Did we deliberately install that Statue of Liberty “Mother of Exiles” extending “world-wide welcome” “from her beacon-hand,” in New York harbor to encourage only European immigration?

Mixed Bag, Mixed Blessings

And then, of course, there is the bigger question of what, indeed, is in the “soul” of an American.

Are we really among the most fortunate inhabitants of Planet Earth to live in a country that sets the “gold standard” for democracy and tops the World’s most important parameters of success in just about every quantifiable category? Or are we actually stubbornly delusional boosters of a largely unfounded mythos?

Americans, if you ask them, will unabashedly admit to a sense of superiority. It has been there since day one; as Howard Zinn once pointed out, Governor Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony described

“establishing a city on a hill, to serve the world as a beacon of liberty.” Unfortunately, as Zinn sees it, there has always been a related, similarly poetic “assumption of divine agency” in the minds of Americans that puts God’s stamp of approval on anything that our government does — to include the genocide of America’s indigenous people who represented a huge inconvenience in realizing our Manifest Destiny.

As a result, the US government usually considers itself exempt from moral and legal standards adopted by other nations by dint of our belief that we the standard-bearers of all things morally and legally enlightened. To illustrate that point there are plenty of recent examples that do quite nicely:

• Our refusal to sign the Kyoto Treaty
• Our refusal to strengthen the convention on biological weapons
• Our refusal to join the 100-plus nations that have agreed to ban land mines (one that we’re currently getting an up close experience of)
• Our refusal to ban the use of napalm and cluster bombs
• Our refusal to submit to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court
• Our egregious flouting of the Geneva Conventions in the “War on Terror”

A great illustration of how other nations react to our smug indifference to their (real) efforts to make the world a better place is this, once again, from the late Howard Zinn:

“There is a growing refusal to accept U.S. domination and the idea of American exceptionalism. Recently, when the State Department issued its annual report listing countries guilty of torture and other human-rights abuses, there were indignant responses from around the world commenting on the absence of the United States from that list. A Turkish newspaper said, “There’s not even mention of the incidents in Abu Ghraib prison, no mention of Guantánamo.” A newspaper in Sydney pointed out that the United States sends suspects—people who have not been tried or found guilty of anything—to prisons in Morocco, Egypt, Libya, and Uzbekistan, countries that the State Department itself says use torture.”

As so often happens, we are now showing signs of turning in on ourselves and hacking away at our own Constitution. We ascribe to a national image of being “the Land of Opportunity” built on the virtues of hard-working, ambitious immigrants, unhampered by oppression or prejudice. Where anyone, regardless of race or creed, has an equal opportunity to succeed and realize the “American Dream.” Anyone who is less than successful has only herself to blame and simply hasn’t worked hard enough; not getting ahead in the Land of Opportunity is a personal failing.

Our history, of course, from the beginning, belies that pretty picture with a steady string of events in which “equal opportunity” had to be hard fought for and won — from slavery, to Women’s suffrage, the Civil Rights movement and the ongoing battle for LGBT Equality. Notions from the Enlightenment might have influenced the crafting of our written Constitution but there is a sizable gap between what was intended and how we construe it in our day-to-day lives.

As Bonnie Honig observed in The Boston Review:

” In short, although we may . . . sometimes persecute people because they are foreign, the deeper truth is that we almost always make foreign those whom we persecute. Foreignness is a symbolic marker that the nation attaches to the people we want to disavow, deport, or detain because we experience them as a threat. The distinction between who is part of the nation and who is an outsider is not exhausted nor even finally defined by working papers, skin color, ethnicity, or citizenship. Indeed, it is not an empirical line at all; it is a symbolic one, used for political purposes.”

The fact of the matter (as well as the heart and soul of it), as David Cole explains is this:

“As a constitutional matter, basic rights such as due process, equal protection, and the freedoms of speech and association are not limited to citizens, but apply to all “persons” within the United States or subject to U.S. authority. The Constitution does restrict the right to vote to citizens, but that restriction only underscores by contrast that the Constitution’s other rights apply to all ‘persons.’ These are human rights, not privileges of citizenship. At the time of the framing, they were seen as divinely decreed natural rights; in today’s world, they are the core of what we understand as international human rights, owed to all persons by virtue of their personhood, irrespective of their identity or the political character of their government. The Supreme Court has stated that the First and Fifth Amendments acknowledge no distinction between citizens and foreigners residing in the United States, and as recently as 2001 the Court reaffirmed that ‘the Due Process Clause applies to all persons within the United States, including aliens, whether their presence here is lawful, unlawful, temporary, or permanent.’ Moreover, the very fact that noncitizens lack the vote only makes it all the more essential that they receive judicial protection, as they cannot rely on the political process to consider their interests. [My emphasis]

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once summed up this problem in American Politics, saying: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

For all of those reasons, politicians should tread carefully on this issue, because, after all is said and done We — all of us — are “We the People . . . “

[tags]Arizona, Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, Gov. Jan Brewer, illegal alien, immigration, Duncan L. Hunter, Duncan D. Hunter, 14th Amendment, Howard Zinn, David Cole, Bonnie Honig[/tags]