Archive for August 6, 2008

Who’d Have Thought It? The Justice System Works

Applying normal standards of due process to a detained terror victim received a surprising result – conviction. We have nothing to fear from using the normal justice system with terror suspects… so long as the evidence is there.

Military tribunals continue to lag behind civil trials for the review of detained terror suspects in terms of fairness and accountability.

Real & Imagined Religious Persecution: How the Religious Right Trivializes the Suffering of Others

Can it be really?  As the world stands poised to watch China pretend to be a peaceful-freedom loving “citizen of the world” during the Olympics, Judge Roy Moore, the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court jurist and conservative commentator who lost his seat for defying court orders to pull down his Ten Commandments display, seems likely to make an important and, indeed, liberal point: namely, that China has a long way to go -

Even positive signs toward more openness contain dark undercurrents of continued religious intolerance. During China’s so-called “Cultural Revolution” between 1966 and 1976, its Communist Party banned the Bible and confiscated all copies of it. So, the Chinese government’s announcement that it is permitting the printing and distribution at the Games of Olympic Edition Bibles that advertise state-sanctioned churches constitutes genuine progress. Yet, Olympics organizers have advised those traveling to the games not to bring more than one Bible with them and that “bringing in Bibles for distribution or propaganda” is strictly prohibited.

An important message, albeit the focus on persecution of Christianity is a little self-serving. China fundamentally has yet to understand “freedom,” and continues to fail to embrace the importance of democracy in powering the people of a successful nation onto the world stage.  While all eyes turn to China for the Olympics, it’s an important time to be making this point.  Media attention ought to become media pressure for change.

As I read the rest of the column, I hold my breath: could it be that WorldNetDaily has become a force for good?

Aaaaand release.  No, it could not be.  Rather than continuing to argue for expanded human rights, Moore turns the rest of his piece into a lament of the “persecution” of Christians in America:

However, such a God-given blessing can disappear at a moment’s notice if we are not vigilant to maintain it. Federal courts have issued an alarming number of decisions evincing a hostility toward Christianity over the last 30 years on everything from prayer in schools to the public display of the Ten Commandments and even restricting prisoner rehabilitation programs that use Christian principles. Several anti-Christian books by proud self-proclaimed atheists have hit the New York Times best-seller lists…

To equate the course of religious discussion in America with anything that could even resemble religious persecution in China – or imply that the former could become the latter – is the height of vanity, and trivializes the true suffering of an embattled people.  It’s like calling Messianic Judaism a new Holocaust: the inflammatory equivalence of debate and religious disagreement with violent persecution.

Moore should be ashamed of himself for appropriating the suffering of others to his own cause.  That the law denies American Christians the right to use the machinery of the state to proselytize is not censorship, and it’s not discrimination: it’s our Constitution, the very document that guards against real discrimination.  I grow increasingly weary of those who frame political defeat as legal oppression.  Perhaps Moore needs a monument to the Constitution on the steps of his (former) courthouse: maybe then he’d better understand the proper relationship between religion and democracy, rather than playing the martyr.

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Classifying Contraceptives as Abortions & Tangled Bank 111

PalMD of Denialism Blog and I have both written on the problem of the Department of Health and Human Services attempting to classify both The Pill, and RU-486, as “abortions” for the sake of certain federal laws.  Now Slate has joined the fun, mocking the Bush White House’s continued slide into scientific incomprehensibility and second-class status for women.

Look for more in this week’s edition of “Tangled Bank” (in verse!), and next week’s “Carnival of the Liberals.”

Lies, Misdirection, and Dishonesty in McCain’s Attack on Obama’s Tire Inflation “Gaffe”

The past week has poignantly illustrated the truth of this recent comment: “[John McCain] used to think it was more important to be right than President; he seems to have reversed that completely in 2008.” How true. To the new, over-spun, hyper-negative, Rove-powered McCain campaign, Obama can do no right – even when he calls for personal responsibility in solving the energy crisis.

By now, you’ve seen, or heard of this clip, in which Obama calls for Americans to inflate their tires & maintain their cars to save gas:

And you’ve also heard McCain’s response: relentless mockery, accusing Obama of misunderstanding car mechanics, to the tune of, “Silly elitist liberal professor! Automobile maintenance doesn’t affect mileage!”

McCain’s attack is triply wrong. The candidate attempts to wear three hats – first the auto mechanic, second the orator, and third the leader – and fails catastrophically at all three.

First: mechanically speaking, auto maintenance does affect mileage, and proper maintenance could cut down on America’s need for oil – significantly more than would the production of 200,000 extra barrels of oil, 30 years down the line. This is my problem with offshore drilling: McCain and others present it as the one-stop shop solution to America’s woes, when there are better, easier, quicker, enduring solutions all around. Even Paris Hilton understands the futility of drilling alone: why can’t Obama or McCain get that through their heads? Oh, wait. Obama can. But McCain needs the “oil only” talking point to appeal to the lowest common denominator, to the detriment of America, requiring him to lie on this point.  We’re already off to a good start.

But wait!  There’s more dishonesty ahead.  Rhetorically, the attempt to reduce Obama’s ambitious & comprehensive energy plan to one catch phrase – “conserve resources” – is doubly dishonest. As Matt has said, it’s a work of “malicious rhetorical synechdoche,” whereby the orator hopes to make the part stand for the whole, in an effort to obscure the whole. And it’s also a quote mine (forget hybrid cars – let’s go for hybrid dishonesty!). Obama offered his conservation advice not as a part of his energy plan (note that it’s not in his prepared remarks), but as a response to a question, about what individuals could do to help:

This is a message about personal responsibility, about what we can all do without waiting for Washington to feed us the answer, not an attempt to articulate conservation as The National Solution to the energy crisis, contextual clues that McCain conveniently ignores. Interestingly, you won’t find this vital context for Obama’s quote anywhere else: I checked. Nobody’s covering the sheer intellectual dishonesty of McCain’s attack, either as a quote mine or as malicious synechdoche. A lie by any other name…

But third, and most damningly, McCain’s focus on the alleged “gaffe” in the tire gauge line is a fundamental failure of leadership. By (dishonestly) attacking Obama for (allegedly) making conservation a key part of his energy strategy, McCain comes periously close to mocking the inclusion of conservation as a part of any energy strategy, and invites others to do just that. Unsurprisingly, Fox News (as we shall see) has jumped on the bandwagon, mocking those crazy conservationist liberals and essentially encouraging wasteful behavior, just when America can’t afford it. Obama’s call for personal responsibility in the face of an energy & climate crisis was a chance for McCain to show his quality and his “maverick” style by agreeing with Obama, and calling on each and every American to do their parts to save energy. But why settle for a moment of leadership and independent thought, when there’re political points to be scored by mockery? McCain is willing to go as far as cultivating the dangerous – and fundamentally un-conservative – myth that the government can snap its fingers and solve the energy crisis without personal sacrifice, just to get a vote.

Bottom line: the “tire gauge gaffe” is a distraction, and a particularly evil and dangerous one at that. By mocking conservation and playing down the true elements of either candidates’ energy policy, McCain makes the election more about spin than substance. Watch Hannity, Female Colmes Stand-In, and Gingrich debate energy policy, and see how Hannity deftly turns the issue away from policy, towards mocking Obama, just when the talk gets tough:

Hannity & Gingrich’s back-and-forth, to the detriment of real debate, offers a disturbing glimpse into a future McCain presidency: misdirection, spin, and lies in equal parts. In other words, Bush. All over again. Can any doubt that the respectable McCain of 2000 is truly dead?