Jesse Lava's Blog

Hold your horses on Ridge

2009-08-22T15:05:53Z

I don't mean to be a wet blanket here, but near as I can tell, Tom Ridge has not admitted that the terror alerts were timed for political reasons during the Bush administration. He is saying that the Bushies once attempted to do it -- just before the 2004 election -- and he valiantly refused. It's a self-serving "admission" that acknowledges no instances in which the threat level was actually raised to serve George W. Bush's political needs.

Now I still suspect that politics were involved in the timing of the terror alerts. But that doesn't mean Ridge has conceded the point. To do so, after all, would be to admit complicity and culpability. And for now, at least, Ridge doesn't appear to be doing so.

Crossposted at jesselava.com.

Free-love conservatism

2009-08-10T14:05:34Z

Ross Douthat says Funny People is "the first Apatow film in which you get punished for your sins. In that sense, [it's] is the most conservative of all his movies."

Is that really what conservatism is about these days? Punishment for sins? If that's true, why is virtually the entire conservative movement against prosecuting those who've broken torture laws? And why, for that matter, do conservatives always fight efforts to increase penalties for corporations that violate consumer, labor, and environmental regulations? Heck, why do conservative administrations always refuse to enforce the corporate rules that already exist?

There seems to be a lag between how conservatives see their ideology and what their ideology has actually become. For conservatism is no longer about the things that its proponents would like to believe it's about. It's not about personal responsibility, or restraint, or accountability.

It is, rather, about free love. Not free love for everyone, mind you. Free love for the powerful. Free love for big corporations and political leaders.

This free-love conservatism isn't interested in establishing a set of rules and then ensuring all people pay the same price if they break those rules. It's interested in preserving power for those who've already got it. In this framework, freedom is a perk of privilege. And this framework is now the dominant one in contemporary American conservatism.

Sure, there are some honest conservatives out there who are less inclined to go along with the degradation of their political philosophy. Ross Douthat tends to be one of those good ones. But they are outliers. Generally speaking, conservatism now defends something that it pretends to loathe: consequence-free rule-breaking. At least when it comes to the rules that conservatives don't like.

If I could be like Ike...

2009-07-31T18:57:40Z

Reverend Ike is dead at 74.

If the only Ike you've heard of is that bald guy from the '50s -- or, perhaps, a certain adopted baby who lives in South Park, Colorado -- consider adding this new one to your memory bank. Based out of the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City, Rev. Ike was one of the nation's first popular televangelists. His message was "health and wealth" -- also known as the Prosperity Gospel. The first I ever heard of this theological perspective was at a Rainbow-Push conference. Speakers were railing against the idea prevalent among some black preachers (and others) that Christianity is more about seeking wealth for ourselves than about pursuing social justice for our community. In this scheme, God rewards good Christians with material riches. And if you're not rich, you must not be a good Christian -- or, put more delicately, there must be some sin standing between you and God.

The Prosperity Gospel represents a particular strain of evangelicalism now espoused by the likes of Creflo Dollar, Eddie Long, and T.D. Jakes. Perhaps the most famous proponent today is Joel Osteen. And this theology sure has millions of adherents. Still, it does seem rather, um, counter-intuitive for those who've read the New Testament. God's oft-stated preference for the poor doesn't seem to factor into this framework.

Consider this doozy of an assertion from Rev. Ike. Referring to the Jesus's famous contention that it's harder for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, Ike said this: "If it's that difficult for a rich man to get into heaven, think how terrible it must be for a poor man to get in. He doesn't even have a bribe for the gatekeeper." An amusing quip. A startling theology. And Ike literally sold this theology to millions across the country -- soliciting donations from poor people to finance his famously lavish lifestyle.

Nice work if you can get it. And Ike got it.

Crossposted at the What's the Matter with Kansas? film blog.

Science-based bellyaching

2009-07-10T18:33:11Z

Barack Obama's recent appointment of Francis Collins to head the National Institutes of Health should be uncontroversial. After all, Collins led the Human Genome Project, and he did it ahead of schedule and under budget. His own landmark scientific research led to the discovery of genes for cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease, among others. He is by all accounts a likable guy. The trifecta he offers -- a great administrator, a great scientist, a great personality -- is darn near unheard of.

So why are there scattered grumblings from scientists about this new appointment, with one scientist fretting that we're seeing the continuation of George W. Bush's "theocracy"? Well, Francis Collins is an evangelical Christian. Although he believes in evolution and opposes intelligent design theory, he's an evangelical all the same. Perhaps most relevantly, he has been loud and proud about his belief that religious faith can be reconciled with science. He's the guy that evangelicals cite when they want to prove they are scientifically serious.

Now I, for one, am not an evangelical. I'm one of those heretical liberal Christians. And I can understand why atheist scientists might lift an eyebrow when a fellow scientist -- a renowned one at that -- goes around talking about God. But my appeal to them is this: get over it.

We have a White House that seems concerned with science. It just appointed one of the preeminent public scientists of our generation to a key post. And everything in Collins's background suggests he'll approach his work with intellectual honesty, without letting religious beliefs interfere with his scientific work. Can't we just call it a victory and leave it at that?

Crossposted at the What's the Matter with Kansas? film blog.

A tale of two stories

2009-07-08T21:32:49Z

Crossposted from jesselava.com.

The Obama administration revealed yesterday that detainees could be left in jail even if a court of law acquits them of wrongdoing. In other words, the trials are pretty much for show; if the Obama folks don't get the outcome they want, they ignore it; if they do, they get to take credit for giving detainees due process.

This is a big deal. It should be receiving wall-to-wall news coverage. We shouldn't hold our breath waiting for that, but might we at least hope the coverage that exists will report the issue honestly?

Our hope would be fulfilled if we read the Wall Street Journal, which reports straightforwardly about the revelation:

The Obama administration said Tuesday it could continue to imprison non-U.S. citizens indefinitely even if they have been acquitted of terrorism charges by a U.S. military commission.

Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department's chief lawyer, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that releasing a detainee who has been tried and found not guilty was a policy decision that officials would make based on their estimate of whether the prisoner posed a future threat.

Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration argues that the legal basis for indefinite detention of aliens it considers dangerous is separate from war-crimes prosecutions. Officials say that the laws of war allow indefinite detention to prevent aliens from committing warlike acts in future, while prosecution by military commission aims to punish them for war crimes committed in the past.

Our hopes would be dashed, however, if we relied on the New York Times, which somehow covered the same event and came away with an entirely different take:

Obama administration lawyers said Tuesday at a Senate hearing that detainees prosecuted by military commissions should have some of the same constitutional rights as American citizens tried in civilian criminal courts.

Republicans on the Armed Services Committee argued that foreigners now detained on terrorism charges at the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, did not deserve those constitutional protections.

"So you are saying that these people who are in Guantánamo, who were part of 9/11 or committed acts of war against the United States are entitled to constitutional rights of the Constitution of the United States?" Senator John McCain of Arizona, the senior Republican on the panel, asked administration officials at one point.

David Kris, the chief of the national security division at the Justice Department, said detainees would not be granted all the rights of American citizens, but added: "I think, within the framework I just described, the answer is yes. The due process clause guarantees and imposes some requirements. That's the way I think I would put it.

Later, Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon's top lawyer, was more explicit: "I would say it's our view that the detainees would not, whether in the United States or anyplace else, do not enjoy the full panoply of constitutional rights that an American citizen in this country would enjoy."

Indeed, the Times story never even mentions the hot news item: that Obama is reserving for himself the right to decide whether to accept courts' judgments when it comes to detainees.

All of this is assuming, of course, that someone reading the Journal or the Times would find these pieces, which is no small assumption. Neither is receiving prominent real estate at their respective papers' websites. Indeed, the Times story is almost impossible to find; one has to go to the "U.S." section and scroll down to the bottom. It's nowhere to be found on the home page.

Is yet another potentially earth-shattering story about the Obama administration's disregard for transparency and civil liberties about to be ignored?

The more things change...

2009-07-05T19:34:23Z

A new religious right organization is emerging from the tattered remains of groups like the Christian Coalition and Moral Majority. This organization -- calling itself the Freedom Federation -- purports to have a kinder, gentler face than its predecessors, which all too often came across like the Blue Meanies. But the group's agenda is anything but new. Indeed, it features all the familiar bugaboos: no abortion, no gay marriage, no porn or obscenity, no judicial activism (at least of the liberal variety), and no limits on religious expression "through our public institutions" (read: no prohibitions on Christian monuments in public buildings). All of that is fine, as far as it goes. If conservatives want to try their hand at reviving issues on which the old school religious righties failed to gain traction, bully for them.

What's disturbing -- to me, anyway -- is that the Freedom Federation's agenda actually goes further than those traditional yawners and includes additional items that come straight out of the Republican playbook. To wit: the group's Declaration of American Values supports a strong military, a flat tax, the individual right to use firearms, free enterprise, and the management of private property "without arbitrary interference from government." I have no idea where in Scripture these imperatives are supposed to come from. They are the mainstays of modern conservatism, not of biblical traditionalism. So even as the Freedom Federation claims it's not as partisan as its predecessors, its philosophy hews even more closely to that of the Republican Party and strays more from ideas that could plausibly be associated with Christianity.

To be sure, the new organization's agenda includes some rhetorical sops to the Matthew 25 vision of Christian responsibility -- for instance, acknowledging the "duty of all individuals and communities of faith to extend the hand of loving compassion to care for those in poverty and distress." But note that this call is made only to "individuals and communities of faith." It is specifically not made to government. So the traditional conservative view that poverty is to be battled though voluntary charity rather than through social justice remains alive and well at the Freedom Federation.

It's not surprising, then, that moderate evangelical voices such as Rick Warren and the National Association of Evangelicals -- voices that are far from liberal but acknowledge some public role for fighting injustice and have tended to avoid strident partisanship in recent years -- are not participating in the new initiative. Rather, we have the same old agenda, merged even more thoroughly with the Republican platform, accompanied by vague promises to transcend old partisan habits.

What's that line about lipstick, again?

Crossposted from What's the Matter with Kansas blog.

Holding the coats of killers?

2009-07-01T22:11:40Z

Crossposted from the What's the Matter with Kansas film blog.

Repentant religious righty Frank Schaeffer -- son of the legendary fundamentalist Francis Schaeffer and a former evangelical leader in his own right -- lays the blame for the recent uptick in domestic terrorism squarely at the feet of of our nation's conservative leaders. He recalls the biblical story of pre-conversion Paul (then known as Saul) holding the coats of people who were stoning a Christian to death -- and claims modern right-wingers such as James Dobson, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, and the NRA are doing much the same thing. "These coat-holders sow the seeds of hate with their words," he says, "then pretend horror when those words are taken seriously."

The right-wing terror machine has, indeed, been in full force lately. In addition to the litany of misdeeds I mentioned in my last post -- Tiller's murder, the Holocaust museum shooting, and the lesbian beatdown -- Schaeffer reminds us of the most gruesome act yet: the slaying of a man and his 10-year-old daughter (as well as the attempted murder of the wife/mother) in their home in Arizona. The family members were Mexican immigrants, a fact that the self-proclaimed vigilantes who murdered them apparently didn't like. There is undeniably a sick trend at work in this country.

Nevertheless, I wrestle with the extent to which we can legitimately accuse right-wing leaders of complicity in such acts. We do, after all, live in a democratic society. We have a marketplace of ideas. If one believes abortion is murder, he or she should be free to say so without being held responsible for the nutjobs who decide to kill abortion providers. Indeed, look at it from the other side: some folks on the left have accused George W. Bush and his neoconservative cohorts of being murderers themselves. Would the left therefore be responsible if someone assassinated Richard Perle? I'd hope not, and for that reason would like to extend the benefit of the doubt to our right-wing friends who despise liberal policies but would not condone domestic terrorism.

Then again, there is the pesky matter of how things actually play out in the real world. And the violence at issue is essentially coming from one side: the right. Notwithstanding extremely rare cases of eco-terrorism, we're talking about a phenomenon that reflects fundamentalism, racism, and nativism -- all outgrowths of right-wing extremism. If we're going to tackle the problem of domestic terrorism, conservative leaders need to condemn such violence frequently and forcefully. That is not their legal obligation, of course. Speech is free. But with lives on the line, it is their moral obligation.

Ma nishtana?

2009-06-19T17:56:13Z

Crossposted from jesselava.com.

Krugman: "President Obama's speech outlining the financial plan described the underlying problem very well...Unfortunately, the plan as released doesn't live up to the diagnosis."

Is there a single major policy area for which this criticism of Obama would not be apt? The stimulus. The bailout. Executive secrecy. Torture and civil liberties. Potentially health care (we'll see). We get wonderful speeches, insightful analysis, accurate rhetoric about what needs to happen. Then we get the actual plans. And we go, "That's it?"

As the youngest asks the oldest on Passover, "Ma nishtanah ha lyla ha zeh mikkol hallaylot?" The question is often referred to simply as "Ma nishtanah." It means, "What makes this night different from all other nights?"

In other words: So what else is new?

One good caricature deserves another

2009-06-18T14:07:42Z

Crossposted from jesselava.com.

George W. Bush (via TPM):

"I told you I'm not going to criticize my successor," he said. "I'll just tell you that there are people at Gitmo that will kill American people at a drop of a hat and I don't believe that persuasion isn't going to work. Therapy isn't going to cause terrorists to change their mind."

So we're back to this, are we? Karl Rove's therapy meme? OK, OK. Fine. In that case, I've got a complaint of my own. I told you I'm not going to criticize Republicans. I'll just tell you that there are nice Arabs out there and I don't believe that summary execution of every Arab on earth is going to work. The Republicans' proposed concentration camps and holocaust, intended to wipe out the entire Arab race, aren't going to win hearts and minds around the world.

What? Isn't it permissible now to invent an outlandish caricature of our opponents and pretend it's real?

Me talk Jesus one day

2009-06-10T17:43:22Z

Crossposted from jesselava.com.

Of course Obama invokes Jesus more than Bush did. So did Bill Clinton. Why is that surprising?

Sure, Bush burnished his Christian credentials at key moments -- like when he said in a presidential debate that Jesus was his favorite philosopher -- but he didn't publicly brand himself strongly with the religious right very often. And even behind the scenes, his overtures to social conservatives were more exploitative than genuine.

Nevertheless, all but the most die-hard observers of faith and politics would be surprised to find out that Democratic presidents display their religion more prominently than Republican ones do. It seems that when Democrats talk Jesus, barely anyone notices or cares. When Republicans do it, it's evidence of their profound faith.

Why? Partly it's because many people -- liberals and conservatives alike -- assume that faith-talking Democrats couldn't possibly be being genuine about it. That's been changing lately, but the basic assumption is still out there.

Another reason, closely related, is that the religious right has dominated the public conception of what it means to be a Christian. Liberal Christians have to explain and defend their faith both to secularists and to conservatives. ("Yes, I'm really a Christian.") Indeed, a lot of people don't even know that the category of "liberal Christian" exists. Never mind that the greatest social movements of the last century (labor and civil rights) were driven in large measure by the religious left. And never mind that the greatest Christian theologians in recent memory (Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr) were both on the liberal end of things. It's just unfathomable to many people that Christianity and liberal views could have anything other than an inverse relationship.

Progressive Christians have an obligation to get the word out about our faith -- and to do it not just in the academy, but also in the popular mind. To be reticent about it is to do an injustice both to ourselves and to our God.

Anti-Israeli hypocrisy

2009-06-09T16:52:10Z

Crossposted from jesselava.com.

The other day I had a post entitled "Israel's hypocrisy" that took the Israeli government to task for assuming the right to play by different rules than everyone else. That remains my stance.

But there's more than one hypocritical government in the Middle East. So, too, are those that have been assailing Israel for expelling Palestinians from their homes decades ago even though 800,000 Jews throughout the Middle East suffered the same fate in the 20th century. An op-ed in today's New York Times calls this phenomenon the exodus that Obama forgot to mention. It's an important reminder that there's no single good side and no single bad side in the ongoing conflict between Israel and, indeed, the rest of the Middle East.

The ability of both sides to blame each other is partly what makes the conflict so intractable. But perhaps it might also make resolution possible. For if each side recognizes that it bears culpability for the oppression and bigotry and bile of the last 60 years, the seeds of peace might have a chance to grow.

Update: In retrospect this post may come across as a bit banal, or even saccharine, given my final point that "both sides need to blah blah blah." However, in the public debate on this particular issue, there don't seem to be that many folks that bother to call bullshit on both Israel and its Arab antagonists, however obvious it should be that neither camp has much intellectual consistency to boast of. President Obama, however, is doing that, in a way that no previous American president has -- while also insisting on empathy. It remains to be seen whether he'll have the stomach to maintain this posture, but so far, he should be commended for it.

Israel's hypocrisy

2009-06-04T16:02:19Z

Crossposted from jesselava.com.

Glenn Greenwald is right that if the Israelis are going to accept financial and military aid from the U.S., they shouldn't act indignant when we encourage them to undertake U.S.-friendly policies -- like ceasing the expansion of settlements in the Palestinian West Bank. But Israel's hypocrisy on this front runs even deeper than that.

Israel has been America's most vocal cheerleader as we've stuck our nose in the Middle East's business repeatedly over the last 20 years. The Israelis were right there with us when we went to war in 1991 to stop Iraq from annexing Kuwait. They were with us when we kept bombing Iraq throughout the 1990s. They were with us when we invaded and conquered Iraq in 2003 -- despite there being no precipitating act of Iraqi aggression. And they're now leading the rah-rah chorus to have us attack Iran. Yet Israel somehow has the stones to cry foul when President Obama gently suggests that it back off of its endless encroachment into Palestinian territory.

The hypocrisy truly boggles the mind.

If Israel wanted to be intellectually and ethically consistent, it would demand that we respond to its violations of international law by bombing Tel Aviv into oblivion. After all, that's been its proposal for how we deal with every other country in the Middle East. But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for consistency from Israel. Instead, we should use every bit of (legal) leverage at our disposal to stop Israeli rejectionism and foster a stable Middle East.

Update: Lest there be any misunderstanding, my comment about bombing Tel Aviv into oblivion is a reductio ad absudum argument. Obviously we wouldn't want to do that, which is precisely the point.

What are moral values?

2009-06-02T18:48:16Z

Crossposted from jesselava.com.

E.J. Dionne normally shows a pretty solid understanding of how important it is to expand the definition of "moral values" beyond conservative bugaboos such as gays and abortion. Yet in his column yesterday, which celebrates the decline of moral values as an operative issue to American voters, Dionne seems to employ precisely that outmoded definition:

In 2004, so many on all sides just knew that cultural and moral issues were the wave of the future. But a funny thing happened on the road to the revival tent. The crash of the economy has concentrated the minds of Americans on other things. Moral conflict just isn't what it used to be.

Citing a new Pew survey asking Americans about their priorities, Dionne says this:

The proportion responding with "moral values" fell by more than half -- from 22 percent in the exit poll (and 27 percent in Pew's own post-2004 election survey) to a mere 10 percent. Concern over the economy and jobs more than doubled, from 20 percent in the 2004 exit poll to 50 percent in the new survey. The other issues that gained substantial ground were health care and education.

The drop in concern over moral values was particularly sharp among older working-class voters who have been trending Republican for years. Moral issues, said Andrew Kohut, the president of the Pew Research Center, are "less pressing, especially to the populist conservatives who are feeling great economic pressures these days."

What Dionne fails to mention is that creating a fair economy that serves the interests of working-class people is a moral issue. So is health care. And education. The warped political lexicon of our time tends to equate morality with sexual traditionalism, but we should be working to change that. We shouldn't just accept it.

Every chance we get, we should be putting economics and other issues of day-to-day significance to people in moral terms. We should be clear that whether a poor kid gets to go to a high-quality school -- and whether a worker has power at work, and a family has good health insurance, and a senior citizen is able to retire with a modicum of dignity -- are all about our values as a nation.

Why is it so important to put things in such terms? The first reason is that it's accurate; there are moral dimensions to how our economy is set up and how well vulnerable people tend to fare in it. Our collective failure to address people's basic human needs is not primarily a technocratic issue; it's a moral one.

The second reason is strategic: even if the term "moral values" isn't scoring high on polls today, it will again one day. And it's our job to help change the debate to remind people that if they want moral governance, they should be thinking about social justice. Besides, regardless of the poll numbers, social movements rarely succeed solely by appealing to people's self-interest. Movements need to be a vehicle for people's sense of shared values -- a feeling that something bigger than they are is at stake. Ceding the term "moral values" to conservatives makes the effort to build a progressive social movement that much harder.

Dionne gets this, but he missed the boat yesterday. It's all too easy to slip into a familiar rhetorical frame -- even for those who often rail against it.

The abortion doc wasn't the only target

2009-06-01T15:50:35Z

The fact that abortionist George Tiller was murdered while at church was almost certainly not incidental. The suspect in the slaying is Scott Roeder, a right-wing zealot who has served time for possessing bomb components and recently went on pro-life message boards speaking in religious terms about the need to stop Tiller. In fact, he specifically suggested protesting Tiller's church and "asking questions" of the congregation's officials. By carrying out the assassination at church, Roeder was making a point.

Indeed, it's not too much of a stretch to say that Roeder's target wasn't just Tiller; it was also liberal religion in general. He clearly thought there was something wrong with a church that would have an abortion provider as a member. And he wanted to make that point vividly.

Roeder's not the only one, either. Remember the right-winger last year who opened fire in a Unitarian Universalist church, killing two people? He said later that he was glad he did what he did, and encouraged others to do likewise in order to protect the country from the scourge of "the liberal movement."

There is a strain of lunacy within the right wing that really is willing to resort to murder and fear to intimidate political opponents. As far as I know, there's nothing quite comparable on the other side. So for all the whining we've heard from fundies who insist there's a "religion penalty" in America and that evangelicals (usually referred to simply as "Christians") are somehow victims of discrimination (first few Google hits here, here, and here), liberal religion is what's under attack. And that's literal: conservative Christians are killing liberal ones in the name of religion.

For now, it's a fairly limited phenomenon. But it's real. We need to stand up for liberal religion.

This post first appeared at jesselava.com.

The GOP's open deceptions

2009-05-24T16:58:18Z

In today's interview with Deborah Solomon, Republican communications guru/hack (take your pick) Frank Luntz is transparent about the disingenuousness of GOP message-making:

Your new 28-page memo, "The Language of Health Care," was sent to Republicans in Congress and recommends that they speak about health care reform in ominous phrases. For instance, you suggest that they refer to "a Washington takeover."

"Takeover" is a word that grabs attention.

Is it a correct description of the president's plans for reform?

We don't know what he is proposing. We want to avoid "a Washington takeover."

But that's not at issue. What the Democrats want is for everyone to be able to choose between their old, private health-insurance plan and an all-new, public health-insurance option.

I'm not a policy person. I'm a language person.

Here, Luntz -- the guy who coined "death tax," "energy exploration," and other messaging gems for Republicans -- openly acknowledges that the proposals that Democrats actually offer are irrelevant to how the Republicans should portray them. He sees it as simply not his job to understand or accurately describe the Democratic policy agenda. His job, rather, is to find any messaging frame that will be effective in getting Americans to believe that Democrats are the bad guys. To Luntz, the job of political figures is not to have an honest debate and let the public decide the winner, but rather to engage in a contest to manipulate as many people as possible into siding with them.

By any reasonable definition of democracy, Luntz shows contempt for it -- and, as one of the Republican Party's top message makers, he does it with striking nonchalance. That's scary.

Now don't get me wrong; there are message manipulations on the Democratic side, too. When I worked on Democratic campaigns, I sometimes felt like the rhetorical war between the two camps was a bit removed from the reality of each side's issue positions. I thought the other guys were far more guilty of it than we were, but I wasn't an unbiased observer, and regardless, it did happen on our side. I can think of a few recent examples in which Democrats overblew a Republican transgression for political gain -- like the Dubai ports deal.

Still, I honestly cannot think of an example on the Democratic side today that compares to the Luntz example above: a major policy difference in which we just completely misrepresent what the other side is proposing. I'm not saying such an example doesn't exist, but I can't think of one.

This post originally appeared at jesselava.com.