Archive for September, 2011
Passing Observation
It all depends on who you kill (or allegedly kill). The line between getting a lethal needle in your arm and getting the Congressional Medal of Honor can be so slim.
More ArticlesNature & Politics: Is Fascism Coming to America? And If So, Dressed as What?But first, a simple rule for killers: If you are going to murder someone in the United States, don’t try to get the job done in Texas. Keep your captive alive in the car till New Mexico, which recently banned the death penalty, or press on to California, which retains the death penalty but makes [...] Reclaim Our History Sep. 16-30Special “Bubble” Issue! Sep. 16, 1992: Black Wednesday, UK: Conservative government forced to withdraw pound from European Exchange Mechanism, costing taxpayers 30 billion pounds in cash and reserves. George Soros makes $1 billion (US) selling the pound short. 2008: Failures of large US financial institutions, due to subprime loans and credit default swaps, rapidly devolves [...] Islam: Religion of Violence (According to FBI)Wired‘s “Danger Room” blog has a fascinating post up on a guy named William Gawthrop, a counterterrorism analyst for the FBI, who as recently as a few months ago was helping give FBI counterterrorism trainings which taught agents that “main stream” [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was [...] The Republican clergyI think Andrew Sullivan is right when he follows on Mike Lofgren’s widely read essay essay by again directly pegging modern Republicanism as a religious movement, and considers what that means:
It’s one thing, of course, to describe the beast, and quite another to consider how one responds to it:
This is why I think Rick Perry has had the upper hand thus far in the Republican “debates,” because the entire Republican field has not been engaging in debates of issues in any secular sense. The debates have instead been proving grounds for demonstrating piety to a rigorously enforced doctrine with almost no grounding in the real world. Michele Bachmann is a true believer, but Perry is a preacher. Logic and facts need not apply. Obama’s response thus far has been to offer compromises to a movement that does not compromise, and to argue facts with a movement that hates facts. Between now and November 2012, however, Obama’s audience isn’t that movement; it’s American voters. In a year when economic distress should doom his reelection chances, Obama’s best shot is to cast the election not as a choice between two competing visions of governance, but as a choice between democracy and theocracy. And a particularly nasty theocracy at that. He won’t use that framing, of course. But Obama has given Republicans every opportunity to demonstrate that they cannot compromise, because no deviance from dogma is tolerable, and that they cannot even accept yes for an answer, because they don’t negotiate with antichrists. While I am sympathetic to the critiques of Obama’s record that litter the progressive blogosphere, and I’m all for pressuring him to perform better in those areas where he can have an impact, that’s not really germane to what’s at stake in 2012. We’re not arguing better or worse policies here. We’re at war with a movement that wants to eradicate any of us who do not belong in their vision of a mythical, white, straight, individualist, evangelical Christian, never-was America. Ironically, as Sullivan notes, Obama is the most visibly Christian president since Carter. But he is not the right type of Christian for what is in fact a very narrowly defined movement, one that excludes most Christians (Obama has no chance; it also excludes all blacks, all Democrats, all people with advanced degrees, and all people with funny names). If Republicans had regrouped in a more rational way after the disaster of the Dubya presidency, Obama would almost certainly be a one-term president just because of the economic damage he inherited. Instead, they started casting out apostates and doubling down whenever their factually challenged dogma was questioned. The results were on painful display in Monday night’s Tea Party debate. Our task for the next year is to remind Americans at every turn that almost all of us are not pure enough to have any place in the theocratic vision of the United States on display there. The Republican nominee, whomever he or she is, will almost certain espouse such views for the next six or eights months in order to win the nomination. That’s plenty enough material for making the relentless case: A vote for Obama will be a vote against theocracy. For the alternative, I’ll close with Sullivan again:
A grateful nation remembersI’m a little late to the party on this–it took me a while to stomach looking through it–but I couldn’t help but notice that in Sunday’s print edition of the New York Times, the special section commemorating 9-11 features a host of full-page ads from the financial sector (natch – many of their offices were 9-11′s direct victims)…and also full page ads from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman, which weren’t exactly victimized by 9-11. As the tag line for the Lockheed ad says, “We are not defined by tragedy, but by how we carry on.” Indeed. Reclaim Our History: Sep. 1-15Sep. 1, 1989: White House staffers decide to purchase some crack cocaine so Pres. G.H.W. Bush can hold the illegal drug in his hands during a national address, but the drug dealer didn’t show up. On the second try, an undercover drug agent’s body microphone didn’t work. Today, trying for the third time, Bush’s team [...] |
