Hagel's Homophobia: Will it Equal Crummy War Secretary?

I've not formed an opinion on Chuck Hagel as Secretary of War -- it requires top-notch administrative abilities, and because of the nature of the position the candidate has to possess a certain ruthlessness, at some level it's wise if the candidate is a real son of a bitch. In the past some have crossed this line and exhibited qualities more akin to Dr. Strangelove -- Donald Rumsfeld held the position twice & Dick Chaney and Caspar Weinberger had the job as did Melvin Laird and everyone's favorite dove Robert McNamara. Of then 17 men in the job since Vietnam, I've trusted the complete sanity of maybe 3 of them - Bill Cohen, Les Aspin, & Leon Panetta. The Job involves deploying our forces all over the world in some reasonable anticipation of where they might deter conflict & where they might be in a position to intervene in a way that is decisive enough to shut down conflict. 

It also involves advising the President when and where we should remain bystanders and allow conflicts to play themselves out because our involvement is highly likely to make things worse. During the genocide in Cambodia, George McGovern of all people advocated that we send troops, Bob Dole needled Clinton about sending weapons to the Muslims in Bosnia, and scores of people who'd voted against building our fleet of Apache attack helicopters suddenly wanted the fleet they never wanted to invade Rwanda. If you think we've already engaged in way too many military operations since WWII, you can subtract Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda from that long list - most likely because the War Secretary made a convincing argument that our involvement would only make those horrendous situation even worse than they already were. 

Mr.Hagel is accused and has semi-apologized for being against dont-ask-dont-tell and saying Ambassador Hormel was too aggressively gay to be Ambassador to Luxembourg. It's a stupid statement, first it's gratuitously anti-gay, and second any actor from central casting who could stay on script would do no worse than a"C" as our ambassador to Luxembourg because our relations with that country are about as untroubled as can be between sovereign states. Hagel knew that, which makes his anti-gay remarks basically pure. We almost elected a man President who ran on a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage nationwide, and who as a senior in prep school organized a gay-bashing posse. The President makes military policy, the War Secretary follows those orders. I'm gonna look more closely at Hagel's record, but I am satisfied that his anti-gay attitudes and remarks are far enough in the past not to disqualify him per se. If you are thinking about Bradley Manning, only the President can help him should he be convicted and harshly sentenced

Knitting Needle Factory

Sam Harris' new Blog argues that political correctness is holding our security efforts at the airport hostage. He hopes that the sham searches are “concealing more-ingenious intrusions into our privacy” He argues for profiling people who look like Muslim terrorists, since Muslim terrorists are who we are looking for – analogizing to the IRA and suggesting we would be silly to not profile people who looked Irish in any effort to stop IRA bombings. And indeed it is weird, very weird, that airport security is in the business of taking away the knitting needles of grandma in the name of defending the national security interests of the most powerful nation on earth. My argument will serve to get Mr. Harris out of a big jam; his profiling suggestions which are racist and otherwise silly, will herein be proved to be irrelevant to actual anti-terror security. See Harris Blog

What Sam misses is that we have not needed and do not presently need any security at the airport for passenger flights. That's right. Ever since September 11, when the passengers aboard United Flight 93 realized their aircraft was gonna be used as a weapon, we have been completely safe from this phenomenon. Huh? Every flight since that day where a terrorist has attempted to destroy or commandeer a passenger aircraft has been a total failure – the passengers know that in these situations their lives are worthless unless they immediately attack the terrorist and ensure the danger is nullified. This will continue to be the case, any terrorist who tries to take an aircraft will be inevitably met by suicidal passengers convinced they have absolutely no choice but to disarm or kill the terrorist(s) or inevitably forfeit their lives. This makes passenger flights utterly safe: they cannot be commandeered for use as weapons against anyone other than the passengers, and the passengers know it, and will always be willing to give their lives to stop the plane from being used as a missile.

No sane terrorists can believe they will be allowed to successfully use a passenger plane for an attack. Sane terrorists will now perforce seek a different weapon – one unguarded by a plane load of civilian passengers utterly willing to stop them. Airport security can ignore passenger flights safely and focus on commercial planes such as UPS aircraft and the like – planes that sane terrorists would seek to commandeer since if they succeeded in getting control of the plane they would indeed be in a position to use it as a weapon. Well, maybe. If terrorists took over a UPS plane, they'd also have to understand that discovery of the hijacking would automatically mean that the U.S. Air Force or other available military actors would not hesitate to shoot it down. The terrorists would have to act fast, taking the UPS aircraft quickly to its target before it was attacked by modern anti-aircraft weapons. In fact, since September 11, 2001 the only incidents on passenger aircraft have not been designed to commandeer the plane, but to blow it up. Both the “shoe” and “underwear” bombers were subdued by the passengers and flight crew before detonating explosives. Naturally it would be good if airport security could prevent any effort to kill travelers, but it is only efforts by terrorists to commandeer jet planes that actually present a national security situation and thus might require or justify extensively invasive security measures.

As terrorists have not and will not attempt to grab passenger aircraft, there is no security interest in the type of security we have used on passengers. Profiling at the airport will not help stop terrorists for the singular reason they are no longer interested in incurring the high risk of failure involved in such an operation. Forget profiling at airports, there is no national security reason to search the passengers any more extensively then we were doing before September 11, 2001.

Moody Rush & Mad-Eye's 'Constant Vigilance'

I don't want Rush off the air. He's an asshole and I disagree with 99.9999 per cent of what he says, a stable figure that over the years has allowed me to be free to ignore his show and just use my imagination of what someone that mad and dumb and ignorant might say if he had the opportunity. Every now and then a comment penetrates my sphere of media consciousness and I'm never terribly surprised.

The "space" of first amendment freedom of discussion has got to be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open. I want this sort of culture to prevail for all of the ideas now considered absurd and misconceived with which I find merit and one way of assuring this can be case is if people with strange and transparently moronic ideas are afforded the same opportunity to rant and rave. If Nazis can hold a parade and march in Skokie, Illinois, then any group presently scorned by the general society that has a nugget of an idea I believe has a future cannot be denied their chance promulgate their creed.

Do I want Rush's program to suffer so that while he's free to speak he ain't getting so rich off it as he has being doing - sure. No one has a right to be agreed with or respected for what they say, they just have a right to say it. Ted Baxter the character who was the anchor of WJM on the Mary Tyler Moore show would tell his story of getting his start at some 1000-watt puny and insignificant radio station - would I be happy if Rush were reduced to a similar paltry audience - sure. But we shouldn't want him silenced, we need him in the mix - if nothing else he helps us identify magical-thinking neo-reactionary wingnuts in our population and Greenpeace and Oxfam, and the DNC don't have to waste their time and money sending them mailings appealing for contributions. Think of it as a kind of progressive "containment policy"

This contraception episode sprung on us by Santorum and now Limbaugh, has been enormously helpful. It's reminded a broad swath of women voters that the other half of the population has anxiety about them being full adults and citizens wholly in charge of the most precious item of private property any of us possess - our bodies

The enlightenment thesis of self-ownership was radical in the 17th & 18th centuries, and it's still radical today. We held the idea unconsciously as a foundational aspect of our moderate-liberal, liberal, progressive, socialist, social-libertarian (and even anarchist) world-views, and like all worthy parts of the human-individualist concept of liberty we cannot complain that its defense requires our vigilance

Taboo You

Jay Michaelson's article in Religious Dispatches "Why Rick Santorum Can’t Just Say: God Doesn’t Want You To Be Gay," makes a fascinating argument about the translation in the famous condemnation in Leviticus of male gay sex. Taboo  Among his credentials is that he is a Hebrew scholar so it seems plausible to take his theory seriously. The argument covers other passages in the Bible but still boils down to his claim that "abomination" is a mis-translation of the Hebrew word "toevah" which, after some machinations, he decides is better translated as "taboo."Abomination?

Michaelson seems to believe this is some sort of revolutionary improvement in the Bible's view of the sexuality part of being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered. An 'abomination' gets a dictionary rendition of 'something that causes disgust or abhorrence' while 'taboo' according to Webster's is (1)forbidden to profane use or contact because of what are held to be dangerous supernatural powers, (2) banned on grounds of morality or taste.

Abomination at least in modern usage comes down to something gross, while Taboo is forbidden or banned on grounds its profane or an immoral status. At least with respect to the proscription in Leviticus, it seems to me that matters have not been made tremendously more lenient, but in fact are if anything worse. To get things to come out slightly better, Michaelson defines Abomination as "conjur[ing] up images of things which should not exist on the face of the earth: three-legged babies, oceans choked with oil, or Cheez-Whiz" -- Leading some religious people  to regard "Homosexuality [as] unnatural, a perversion, a disease, an abomination." On then other hand in the Hebrew Bible the word "toevah" he says is used only in the context of practices and attributes occurring in foreign tribes or civilizations and thus, on that account, forbidden to the Jews. The Israelites are warned in Deuteronomy 18:9-12 "not to learn the toevot (plural of toevah) of those nations." They are warned about stuff like magicians, forture tellers, charmers, and witches. 

Michaelson writes "Deut. 12:31, 13:14, 17:4, 27:15, and 32:16 further identify idolatry, child sacrifice, witchcraft, and other “foreign” practices as toevah, and Deut. 20:18 says that avoiding toevah justifies the genocide of the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanaites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. So, toevah is serious, but it is serious as a particular class of cultic offense: a transgression of national boundary. It is certainly not “abomination.” Nationalism

Okay. Let's review. Toevah can justify genocide, but don't worry it's about nationalism, so queers can relax because unlike child sacrifice, genocide, and witchcraft, toevah doesn't call queer sex anything as crummy as an "abomination."

Deuteronomy it appears assumes the existence of charmers, fortune tellers, witches -- that is people with magic powers however limited in scope. The problem is that charmers and witches cannot do any magic, and fortune tellers don't exist because no one has knowledge of the future. The matter of justifying waring against and either exterminating or enslaving Hittites, Amorites, Canaanaites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites is slightly problematic. A god who commanded or tolerated such wars and exterminations would be evil and if they-he-it-she existed would be unworthy of worship much less obedience. How "toevah" can be so mild a notion, a mere social taboo, whilst when it comes to foreigners warrants genocide, slavery, and rape is a good example of why theology can so often be clever when hardly ever making any sense.

Maybe I'll learn more as I keep plodding through the Bible, but so far the inescapable conclusion is that it condemns something for which there is nothing wrong. It does condemn; and there's is nothing wrong with being LGBTQ. It cannot be squared, accommodated, fudged, finessed, lavenderwashed. It claims all sorts of nonsense. It is a reservoir of increasingly false empirical claims, and nonsensical moral/ethical claims. From the point of its plausibility and authority, it simply cannot make a difference whether "toevah" means abomination, taboo, or Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

Spinal Tap & Disaster Insurance

Appropriately, since it is MLK Day, our subject is what to do if the Republicans win and the Democrats are tempted to bail. As unexpected and dejecting shit always happens, we have to prepare for the Romney Administration. The key to survival of this debacle will be holding a majority in the US Senate. Historically, unlike Republicans who never vote for a new Democratic President's program, many many Democrats voted for the Reagan and the George W tax cuts.

So while the GOP has all these “contracts” that its candidates must sign – from putting Reagan on Mt. Rushmore, to never raising any tax for any reason if should the Republic be in mortal peril to vowing to fight gay marriage as if it were typhoid or  cholera. we need some nail-them-down-before-they-are-tempted-to-compromise-based-on-fear-of-the-prevailing-political-mood-of-their-constituents.

Proposal One: Read Our Lips, No New Tax Cuts For The Rich

I, ____________________, vow swear or affirm before my God, my Higher Being, or my Sacred Honor, that should the Republican Candidate be elected, take office, and propose a tax cut for any person or family making more than the then minimum wage income, I will refuse to vote for such a proposal. Further, should the proposal be embedded in any legislation with which I agree – such as funding for cancer research, purchasing new incubators for neo-natal care units in hospitals, funding to veterans learning to use their new prosthetic limbs, or any proposal which might even inadvertently transfer wealth to my state or district, I will not be shamed, cajoled, or otherwise manipulated to ever vote for any bill or amendment that has the intent or possible effect of lowering taxes on any individual or family making more than the then minimum wage.

Should, however, despite the policies of the Republican Administration, economic growth should reach an annual level of more than 5%, inflation fall below 3.7%, unemployment fall below 4.7%, I solemnly swear and affirm I will do everything within my power to drastically increase taxes on the wealthiest 5% of Americans as long as the money is earmarked to (1) reduce annual indebtedness or (2) make a net transfer of wealth to the bottom 20% of Americans, or (3) both

Second proposal: Only Romney's Massachusetts Judicial Appointments Are Acceptable

As a member of the United States Senate I will never vote to appoint anyone to the United States Supreme Court, unless (1) They are avowedly pro-choice and see a right of privacy and/or (2) Were nominated by then Governor Mitt Romney and confirmed to sit on his state's highest court, the Massachusetts Judicial Court. I will assert adamantly that if such appointees were good enough for Romney when he was Governor, they are good enough for the nation when he is our President.

Part II: Judicial Nominees must have Post Magna Carta Understanding of Law

I will closely investigate and assess all judicial appointments and never hesitate to disrupt their approval by the Senate, if on balance it seems to me they are driven by a pre-18^th century understanding of the framers' intent.

The True Meaning of Our Creed

One Person, 17 minutes at a microphone, on a summer day in 1963

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation. Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check -- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges. But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. They have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone. As we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied, as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating "For Whites Only"

We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for  freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!
Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!
But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.
From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

Thrilla Against Manila

For what seems like forever, the GOP Presidential field has been engaged in debates. They had two over this past weekend before the voting on Tuesday in New Hampshire. They have not been lovefests. And the probable nominee has handled them well and is only getting better. Even Newt Gingrich's gambit of promising to challenge the President to seven 3-hour Lincoln-Douglas style debates underlined the public's sense that Presidential debates are stagey and contrived. Assuming that Romney does not wrap up the nomination after South Carolina and Florida, these debates are going to go on, and should one of Romney's challengers decide to compete all the way to Tampa, we can expect many more candidate “joint appearances” where one main theme will be attacking the President's accomplishments, leadership, philosophy, and foreign policy savvy.

If Newt can challenge the President to many 3-hours debates with no more structure than a timekeeper, I can't see why the President isn't entitled to challenge the several remaining Republican candidates to let him join their ostensibly GOP nomination debates. They are attacking him, can they really object to an opportunity to make their criticisms right to his face under circumstances where he's there to defend himself.

My worry is simple: the President is not a great debater. He's brilliant at giving a calm, composed, confident, and “presidential” impression – that is, he's fantastic at allaying political, ideological, and racial anxieties voters consciously or unconsciously harbor. This election isn't about voters' comfortability level with a young Black Senator; it's about the leadership qualities and accomplishment of that man. And frankly he needs some practice at defending his record. I happen to think that record is pretty damn fine on paper and exceptional compared to what I am able to imagine John McCain would have done instead.

On foreign policy, where we might have expected excuses and geo-political gobbledygook for maintaining the Bush troop levels in Iraq along with aimless incoherent failure in Afghanistan; instead there is a real draw down of troop levels in Iraq, a focused if not brilliant strategy in Afghanistan, and some quite intricate and cunning maneuvering to establish a situation where killing bin laden would not thereby threaten a fundamentalist revolution in Pakistan.

At home, the US government nationalized a major US corporation, operated it from DC, saved it from bankruptcy, and then turned it back over to its stockholders and private managers. On the verge of thousands of small and medium sized towns and cities experiencing having the local bank close up shop, the banking system, the monetary and financial circulatory system of the economic body was shored up and is now not at risk for a catastrophic failure. The stimulus package, lamentably ill-focused and shatter shot, undoubtedly saved millions of jobs and prevented a level of unemployment high enough to create a downward spiral of consumer confidence – the very intangible factor that has to become stronger not weaker for a real recovery to take hold. There is also the law that may well end up leading to a highly desirable and economically competitive state of affairs – all Americans having health care insurance. This idea was proposed by President Truman in 1947.

Some lovely liberal figures – Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, LBJ, Hubert Humphrey, Mo Udall, Mike Mansfield, Frank Church, Scoop Jackson, Ted Kennedy, Dale Bumpers, Paul Wellstone, Bill Bradley, Eugene McCarthy, Barbara Boxer, Walter Mondale, Mike Dukakis, Dick Gephardt, Jerry Brown, Dennis Kucinich, Barbara Mikulski, Hillary Clinton, George Mitchell, Bobby Kennedy, Al Gore, Geraldine Ferraro, Terry Sanford, Dianne Feinstein, Abe Ribicoff, Paul Simon, Nancy Pelosi, Pat Schroeder, Mario Cuomo, George McGovern, Ed Muskie, Joe Biden, and Bill Clinton – had failed to come through on Truman's idea.

Of course the Republicans would say no; and the politicos guarding the President so they can spring him like a caged tiger would never allow it. Plus it violates an absolutely religious rule in politics – when your opponent(s) are messing up or self-destructing, stay out of their way. I am sure that three hours alone on a sun-drenched state fair platform with Mitt Romney would be all it would take. I see no reason for the President to wait to take this guy down before Mitt wins the imprimatur of his party's nomination and the electorate gets so used to his flip-flopping that it gets less noticeable.