Festival of Incompetence

I honestly wish I had time to blog seriously, but unfortunately, I don't have the time. So, for example, right now I have the seeds of what I believe could be a solid post about the need to emphasize competence in government, but rather than lay out evidence and present a persuasive case and contribute in my small way to the nation discussion, I have to content myself with merely sketching.

Much has been made over the course of the last 4 years of Bush Administration incompetence, and there's no surprise there. However, what hasn't really been discussed is the remedy. No, I'm not really talking about impeachment, not directly anyway, but I am talking about taking some steps rhetorically and possibly, legislatively, to make incompetence a punishable offense. It should be anyway, but as this administration has shown time and again, the People, absent any nudging by the media or the opposition party, are willing to cut people in power a lot of slack.

As but two examples, take the recent assertion by Karl Rove's attorney that "...Rove had no idea the e-mails were being deleted from the server, a central computer that managed the e-mail," and the leak of Valerie Plame's identity to the press in the run-up to the war.

• In the case of the Plame leak, there is a statute called the Intelligence Identities Protection Act that criminalizes any act that "intentionally discloses any information identifying" a covert agent. Unfortunately, "intentionally" gives the Bush Adminstration a lot of cover, which is being used effectively by both the Vice President and Karl Rove.
• In the case of Rove's e-mails, there is the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which requires that "the President shall take all such steps as may be necessary to assure that the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of his constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties are adequately documented and that such records are maintained as Presidential records."

In both cases, it's clear that the Executive branch fucked up royally. However, in both cases, they are hiding successfully behind an incompetence defense, and this is what really needs to be addressed. We're talking about the President of the United States of America and his staff, not the night manager at Arby's; is "incompetence" really an adequate excuse for these people to escape the consequences of their actions?

And when did the conservative movement in this country, the movement of "personal responsibility" and "you'll go as far as your talent will take you" start settling for much less defending this kind of ineptitude?

When you're job is this important, shouldn't incompetence be just as criminal and just as disqualifying as deliberate acts of sabotage? The legislative remedy to this problem is to make no allowance for "mistakes". If Karl Rove was sufficiently afraid of the PRA, all he would have to do is make sure he saved every one of his emails; it's not that difficult.

Oh, and while I'm semi-on the subject, how is it we can even have these two simultaneous perceptions running around our national debate?

• Karl Rove is the genius who engineered sweeping GOP victoriees in 2000, 2002, and 2004...
• Karl Rove inadvertently deleted emails that he should have saved in violation of the PRA and only incidentally was using a non-White House RNC email server for 95% of his messaging, and only coincidentally do all of those emails appear to have something to do with one scandal or another, be it the firing of US Attorneys who did not sufficiently politicize their positions or the outing of a CIA operative whose husband was poking holes in your case for war...

Given that the first statement is almost universally accepted as true (even if Rove isn't a "genius", most people will still accept that he's a canny dirty-trickster, and that requires...well, being canny), it's almost impossible that the second one is true, so while the guy is innocent until proven guilty, let's all please accept that there is a massive case to be made against him.

The Dreadedness of the Dreaded Religious Right

The blogger Tristero at Hullabaloo has a seven-part (at least) series on, for lack of a better term, the Religious Right. He co-opts the word "Christianists", which I believe Dan alerted me to as an invention of Andrew Sullivan's. Still, everything comes back to the blogs these days, so it's not entirely absurd to think Sullivan stole it from Tristero. Anyway, Tristero's series is long and involved, but it's worth slogging through. Here are the links for the brave:

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII

Anyway, he mentions some tidbits that give you an idea just how powerful the RR is:

One other point. You may think Rushdoony’s ideas as to be beneath serious notice. Therefore, please note that a major funder of Rushdoony's Christian Reconstrucion, billionaire Howard Ahmanson, funded the “intelligent design” creationism initiative at the Discovery Institute (Ahmanson sits on the board). That's correct: Major funding for "Intelligent design" creationism is linked directly to the ideas you will encounter here.Ahmanson also funds the Claremont Foundation, a rightwing cultural thinktank, and funded the recall initiative of California's governor Gray Davis. These are only a few of the initiatives Ahmanson has taken to advance the rightwing, and often specifically Republican, agenda.

Intelligent Design, as you may or may not have seen, is a warmed over re-write of Creationism designed to give the appearance of scientific validity to theology which recently met with a satisfying court defeat in Dover, PA. It's good that it lost the case, but it's a testament to the power of the various octopus appendages of the RR that such junk even got that far. And this is really the kind of thing that I fret over when it comes to the RR. It's not just that they're assaulting the Constitution or even Enlightenment ideas; it's that they're assaulting the very concepts of reason and rationality, gradually and generationally eroding the capacity of the masses for critical thinking, thereby making the masses ever less able to resist their pernicious influence.

A few further notes on the question of their influence are:
(1) Monica Goodling, former senior counsel to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales who recently took the Fifth in the Congressional Hearings regarding the not-going-anywhere-and-possibly-the-downfall-of-the-Bush-Administration US Attorney purge scandal, was a graduate of Messiah College and Regent University (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/3/27/74143/0793). Regent U. is operated by Pat Robertson, and according to their site, 150 graduates currently serve in the Bush Administration
(2) "The Republican War on Science" by Chris Mooney has some examples of RR folks being appointed to key positions in the Executive Branch under Bush who immediately proceeded to politicize their offices and disseminate scientific and medical misinformation in the service of their religious agenda. For example, (http://oversight.house.gov/features/politics_and_science/example_breast_cancer.htm) the National Cancer Institute removed a note from its website which stated the accepted medical community consensus that there is no link between abortions and increased risk of breast cancer and instead added a note suggesting that whether or not abortion causes breast cancer is still an open question.

In short, though the number of regular citizens who could be counted as among the RR may still be pretty small, their influence on the levers of power shouldn't be underestimated. They are, as zealots by definition are, determined, tenacious, well-funded, and well-organized and efforts to counter-act their pernicious influence should be high on the list of things that need to get done in this country over the next 20 years.

The Most Sinister Commercial Ever?

This gem from Budweiser came out somewhere in the early- to mid-nineties (I remember, because I was dating Earth Mother, and she and I were done by 1996). It's only 30 seconds, please watch.




Now, I remember being immediately fascinated that the ad had gotten on the air, because it was so blatantly sexual as to be almost vulgar. I mean, come on, the "bottle" upended into the "hole" followed by "Do a little dance. Make a little love. Get down tonight." ...not to mention the music causing a rhythmic pulsing around the bottle, moving the earth, even. The intercourse reference could only have been clearer if they had shown the neck of the bottle sliding slightly in and out of the hole in time with the music, and I'm willing to bet that in early cuts of the commercial, the bottle did just that. Could anyone possibly miss it? I remember being flabbergasted when Earth Mother's sister-in-law, RN, confessed plainly that she had "never thought of it that way." Christ, if the commercial had consisted of a guy going to the store to buy some bud, then going home, pounding one, and screwing his girlfriend, it couldn't have been more obvious what the message was.

But the vulgarity of the commercial doesn't stop with its thinly camouflaged sex-act. The real master-stroke is the use of the ants. Can you think of any way that the Establishment could more nakedly mock the Working Class? The ant is the epitome of mindless and tireless work in service of another, in their case, the queen or maybe the colony, and while RN interpreted the commercial as "You work hard; you deserve to let your hair down a little, and Bud can help you do that," it's hard for me to believe that the advertising executives were unaware that the logical extension of that subtext is "You are an indistinguishable peon laboring tirelessly for the benefit of others, but it will help you forget about the emptiness of your lot in life if you buy our beer, get drunk, and fuck."

It takes something special to craft a commercial that is so contemptuous of the demographic at which it's directed and yet still works on that demographic without them being aware of the insult. It's like it was fun for Budweiser to openly taunt its clientele and dare them to even notice, much less care, that they were being derided.

Congratulations Budweiser. This post's for you.

I Woke Up

I dreamt there was something in bed with me...us, my wife and I. It was small. Moving? The bedroom had a drop-ceiling, one of the tiles was gone. The thing in the bed, it occurred to me, was a rat. I kicked it from the bed. The room was very dark; in the ceiling, exposed by the missing tile, there was squirming. More rats. In the ceiling. The bed was alive with them. I didn't find it pleasant and thought it would be a good idea to get out of bed. They went into a frenzy, 6 or 7 biting me at once.

It woke me up.

Self-imposed Hiatus

I'm on one, so that I can concentrate better on that earning a living thing.

Victory by Default

Neither Doug nor Dan has responded to my last post, so I'm going to call that a victory for my thesis...which when I originally started was only as strong as "The Religious Right is bad for the country". I have no idea how I let myself get pulled into trying to argue that it's a threat to the existence of America as we know it. I mean, the case can be made, and I'm willing to try to make it, but it really wasn't my original thought.

My original thought was more on the lines of "The Religious Right promulgates ideas that are bad for America (frankly, for the very concepts of reason and rationality), and that they have become sufficiently politically strong that active steps need to be taken to resist them".


Whatever. I win until I hear different.

The Long Haul and the Arrow of Progress

For all of the no one following the comments in Religious Right: Credible Threat, it is clear that I can't skate through hoping that ballpark definitions will get us moved on to the second stage of proving or disproving my thesis - The Religious Right is a Credible threat to America - because Dan and Doug won't have it. Instead we're going to have to dig a little deeper into the premises. I am willing to do this, but let me just say, before we get into it, that, for my purposes, the ballpark definitions should suffice. We will probably spend an enormous amount of time describing and discussing minutiae about the terms I used in my original statement, eventually discarding most of those points as irrelevant until we finally agree that the mainstream, casual definitions of those terms were adequate and largely agreed upon, and that any confusion was caused by our arguing at cross-purposes.

So, on to the stickiness.

First, let me start off by admitting that I made a large mistake in the way I defined "this country". I concentrated on the founding documents hoping that the evolution of ideas, including the changing interpretation of the founding documents (Constituation, Declaration, Federalist Papers, even Common Sense, etc.) was assumed. A conversation on the evolution of American ideas of justice and its effects on American jurisprudence is exactly the kind of exercise that we could be lost in for several days, and I don't want to embark on that discussion at all, but if something like is the only way to move on, so be it.

So, Part I: The America We Live in and the America that We Want to Live In

America, as both a geographical area and as the amalgamation of the myriad currents of thought that characterize the people who live in it and who, by their actions and those thoughts, define it, is too complicated to be described in a 1,000 word blog entry.

Such a description of America is not necessary for a thoughtful evaluation of the proposition "The Religious Right is a Threat to America" to be entertaining and fruitful.

America has evolved greatly since its inception and, in its particulars, is very different from the America of 1776, which itself would be too complicated to describe in a 1,000 word blog entry.

Over its 230 year history, one current in the shifting waters of America's self-definition has dominated all others. There is an Arrow of Progress from 1776 to 2007 that has, without exception that I am aware of, expanded individual liberty. If there are exceptions, they are irrelevant, because the evidence of the Progress is evident everywhere.

So, America, for me, is defined as a coordinate on that Arrow of Progress.

I am not so concerned with the coordinate per se, but with the Arrow. America is a work-in-progress, but it has been making progress toward increased social justice, toward improving the quality of life for everyone, for 230 years.

So, my refined proposition is:
"The Religious Right would reverse the Arrow of Progress that defines America's evolution toward greater social justice."

Religious Right: Credible Threat

Last month or so, Dan asked me to make my case that the Religious Right is a threat to the United States. His contention was not that the Religious Right was good, but rather that, while an "embarrassment" and a "nuisance", they weren't sufficiently influential to merit the epithet "threat" . While considering how to make my case (and with the help of a little cross-examination by Doug), I became overwhelmed by how much of the debate Dan and I have left undefined, so before I make any case, I'd like to refine what the case is, just so's we can have a good platform to wrestle on. Who knows, once we've done that, Dan and I may even find that we agree.

So, here is a breakdown of my thesis, "The Religious Right is a threat to this country", as I understand it.

1) When I say "the Religious Right", I am talking about a group of pundits, politicians, and political organizations - as well as the ordinary members of the electorate in their sway - who attempt to influence policy within the United States with the intention of turning their specific, Christian morality into the law of the land.

2) When I say "this country", I am referring to the set of Enlightenment ideas (as I understand them) that the founders had in mind as they declared their independence from Britain and as they debated, wrote, and signed the Constitution that was ratified by each of the United States and is accepted as the legal foundation of those United States. Chief among those beliefs is the idea of Liberty, the idea that an individual has the right to do whatever s/he wants as long as those choices don't infringe on the rights of others, that consenting adults are best at determining what behavior is best for them.

3) When I say "threat", I am saying that I think the agenda of the Religious Right - banning abortion, keeping the morning after pill off the shelves, attempting to limit sex-education to abstinence-only, banning gay marriage - is antithetical to the ideas set forth in the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and the Constitution, not the least of which is that the strength of this country, of a Democracy, is a free, independent, well-informed citizenry.

Now, if Dan is in agreement with those premises, then I would say this:

Any national movement whose aim is to enact legislation which is fundamentally at odds with the principles on which its host nation was founded and which, if enacted, would fundamentally change the nature and character of its host nation is, by definition, a threat to its host nation.


Now, I think that's a pretty good case, and I'm not anticipating any argument with it, but let me just say at this point that I'm certainly open to debating any of what I've written above.

However, if there is no argument with what I've said above, that the agenda of the Religious Right is inherently threatening to Enlightenment Ideals and that those Enlightenment Ideals are, in my opinion, essential to the character of the US as we know it, then let me allude finally to my post title and recast the terminology of the debate: I think, for the purposes of this argument, that my position is better represented by the phrase "Credible Threat" and Dan's position is more accurately represented by the phrase "Empty Threat".

And if all of that is kosher, then I ask Dan to weigh in on what it takes to make a Credible Threat. Perhaps some examples of Credible Threats in other areas?

We await Dan's response via comment or his blog...

Time Magazine Should Redefine its "Man of the Year"

I realize this is way-old pre-Christmas news, but shouldn't Time Magazine redefine their criteria for choosing a Person of the Year? I have been scooped, so let me link: The Wussification of the Time "Person of the Year"

For those not interested in link-following, the crux of the article is that Time Magazine has been willfully disregarding their own criteria for "Person of the Year" for the sake of sales for a good long time. The most glaring example of this occurred in 2001. Consider their definition of the Person of the Year: The person, group, or idea who, "for better or worse, has most influenced events in the preceding year". Now think of 2001 and tell me if you were thinking of Rudy Giuliani. Exactly. Osama bin Laden was far and away the correct choice for 2001's Person of the Year, and Time copped out, because they knew it would be unpopular.

The article concentrates on the Person of the Year choices from 2001 to 2006, and perhaps that is when the cop-outs began to happen with predictability, but word on the street is that Time lost many subscribers after giving Ayatollah Khomeni the title in 1979.

I don't have a problem with Time making good business choices. They are, after all, a business. However, business or not, a news outlet should demonstrate some minimal standard of integrity. What does it say about Time when they can't even respect a definition that they themselves chose?

So, half of the blame to Time and half to the 2006 Person of the Year: You. If only you prized the truth above knee-jerk patriotism, you might have canceled your subscriptions in 2001-2 and Time might have had a reason to start making principled choices again.

Steal Your Own Sunshine

"More More More" sample or not, low budget video or not, I love this song: