Just how far backwards we've fallen

Peter Berkowitz, at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, offers up the most serious case of censorship in the halls of liberal education that I have seen in a very long time. And a testament to just how illiberal we have become.

Academia Goes Silent on Free Speech

"Consider Yale. On Oct. 1, the university hosted Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard. His drawing of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban became the best known of 12 cartoons published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005. That led to deadly protests throughout the Muslim world. On the same day, at an unrelated event, Yale hosted Brandeis Prof. Jytte Klausen. Her new book, "The Cartoons that Shook the World," was subject in August to a last minute prepublication decision by Yale President Richard Levin and Yale University Press to remove not only the 12 cartoons but also all representations of Muhammad, including respected works of art.

The Westergaard appearance inspired protests. Muslim students condemned Yale's invitation to the cartoonist as religiously and racially insensitive, compared him to Holocaust deniers and white supremacists, and declared his art and utterances hate speech rather than free speech.

Students will be students. It is to be hoped that those who opposed Mr. Westergaard's invitation will learn at Yale that the aim of liberal education is not to guard their sensitivities but to teach them to listen to diverse opinions and fortify them to respond with better arguments to those with whom they disagree.

Mr. Westergaard's appearance did prompt a small faculty-led panel discussion on Oct. 7. It dealt mainly with Muslim reaction to the cartoons, though Prof. Seyla Benhabib said that in Ms. Klausen's position she would have withdrawn the book. But generally the faculty has been unmoved by Yale's censorship of Ms. Klausen's book, which suggests that lessons in the fundamentals of liberty of thought and discussion may be lacking on campus.

To be sure, Yale's censorship—the right word because Yale suppressed content on moral and political grounds—raised difficult questions. Can't rights, including freedom of speech and press, be limited to accommodate other rights and goods? What if reprinting the cartoons and other depictions gave thugs and extremists a new opportunity to inflame passions and unleash violence? Can't the consequences of the cartoons' original publication be understood without reproducing them? Weren't the cartoons really akin, as Yale Senior Lecturer Charles Hill pointed out in a letter to the Yale Alumni magazine, to the depictions of Jews as grotesque monsters that successive American administrations have sought to persuade Arab newspapers to cease publishing? And isn't it true, as Mr. Hill also observed, that Yale's obligation to defend free speech does not oblige it to subsidize gratuitously offensive or intellectually worthless speech?

These are good questions—to which there are good answers.

Rights are subject to limits, but a right as fundamental to the university and the nation as freedom of speech and press should only be limited in cases of imminent danger and not in deference to speculation about possible violence at an indeterminate future date. One can't properly evaluate Ms. Klausen's contention that the cartoons were cynically manipulated without assessing with one's own eyes whether the images passed beyond mockery and ridicule to the direct incitement of violence.

Even if the cartoons exhibited a kinship to anti-Semitic caricatures, it would cut in favor of publication: a scholar would be derelict in his duties if he published a work on anti-Semitic images without including examples. And finally, if Yale chooses to publish a rigorous analysis of the Danish cartoon controversy, which affected the national interest and roiled world affairs, then the university does incur a scholarly obligation to include all the relevant information and evidence including the cartoons at the center, regardless of whether they are in themselves gratuitously offensive and intellectually worthless.

The wonder is that Yale's censorship has excited so little debate at Yale. The American Association of University Professors condemned Yale for caving in to terrorists' "anticipated demands." And a group of distinguished alumni formed the Yale Committee for a Free Press and published a letter protesting Yale's "surrender to potential unknown billigerents" and calling on the university to correct its error by reprinting Ms. Klausen's book with the cartoons and other images intact. But the Yale faculty has mostly yawned. Even the famously activist Yale Law School has, according to its director of public affairs, sponsored no programs on censorship and the university.

Alas, there is good reason to suppose that in its complacency about threats to freedom on campus the Yale faculty is typical of faculties at our leading universities. In 2006, even as the police had barely begun their investigation, Duke University President Richard Brodhead lent the prestige of his office to faculty members' prosecution and conviction in the court of public opinion of three members of the Duke lacrosse team falsely accused of gang raping an African-American exotic dancer. It turned out they were being pursued by a rogue prosecutor. To be sure, it was only a vocal minority at Duke who led the public rush to judgment. But the vast majority of the faculty stood idly by, never rising to defend the presumption of innocence and the requirements of fair process. Perhaps Duke faculty members did not realize or perhaps they did not care that these formal and fundamental protections against the abuse of power belong among the conditions essential to the lively exchange of ideas at the heart of liberal education.

Similarly, in 2005, Harvard President Lawrence Summers sparked a faculty revolt that ultimately led to his ouster by floating at a closed-door, off-the-record meeting the hypothesis—which he gave reasons for rejecting only a few breaths after posing it—that women were poorly represented among natural science faculties because significantly fewer women than men are born with the extraordinary theoretical intelligence necessary to succeed at the highest scientific levels. Before he was forced to resign, Mr. Summers did his part to set back the cause of unfettered intellectual inquiry by taking the side of his accusers and apologizing repeatedly for having dared to expose an unpopular idea to rational analysis. Apart from a few honorable exceptions, the Harvard faculty could not find a principle worth defending in the controversy over Mr. Summer's remarks.

As the controversies at Yale, Duke and Harvard captured national attention, professors from other universities haven't had much to say in defense of liberty of thought and discussion either. This silence represents a collective failure of America's professors of colossal proportions. What could be a clearer sign of our professors' loss of understanding of the requirements of liberal education than their failure to defend liberty of thought and discussion where it touches them most directly?"

If we cannot count on a commitment to liberal education, thought, discussion, and debate on university campuses, where in the hell can we count on them?

We have taken a very dark and seriously wrong turn in the last decade. Our fears about being too liberal, which more than 200 years of experience should have taught Americans, by now, is not possible, have led us down a terribly ugly and small-minded illiberal path, following the lead of our repressive and illiberal brethren in the Middle East and Communist Cuba, China, and North Korea and all of the places in the world where force really is the governing philosophy.

It is bizarre, in the extreme, to watch the liberal world simulataneously take a more illiberal turn all in the name of battle with these illiberal regimes and actors and out of a seriously unhealthy fixation and obsession with making the world finally right with enough capacity to force it to be so.

That is the central obsession of the terrorists and illiberal regimes we are fighting

Why in God's name would we be adopting it as our own as we defend ourselves from the destruction wreaked by these cultures and their terrorist spawn?

Because we are scared. That's why. And it is our fear of our own shadows, not love for liberty that makes us weak.

Our liberty makes us strong. Because it reflects our courage and confidence. In ourselves and in humanity.

And it is the cruel and bitter face of power as a means to finally rid us of our weakness among Al Queda and the likes of Kim Jong Il and Robert Mugabe that are the truest reflections of weakness and obsession with power and with the dark impulses it is meant to suppress.

Weakness is our failure to face this obsession with our basest impulses.

Strength is our ability to face it and ourselves honestly. And to openly discuss all that fear that debilitates us and makes us believe that we are unfailingly weaker than we might otherwise be.

One thing is for sure. Our lurch into illiberalism, whether it come from the left or the right, is not a movement forward, no matter how much we might like to pretend to the contrary. It has neither made things better nor will it ever, in Iran or North Korea nor in the liberal democracies that should know better.

Because our progress is predicated on our liberty. It always has been and it always will be. No matter how much we bullshit otherwise.

Our biggest waste

I think the capacity to reason is wasted on homo sapiens. I have never, in my life, encountered a species with such infinite capacity for thought so stubbornly committed to weaseling out of using it. Except insofar as it can help them avoid doing so.

It is not that people are incapable of reasoning. It is that they willfully refuse to do so. For fear of overspending their severely limited capacity to ever admit they are wrong about any goddamned thing.

Perhaps the high road

After so much failure in manipulating the thuggish regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Shirin Ebadi suggests taking the high road.

How to Engage with Iran: A fellow Nobel Peace laureate offers some friendly advice, and a rebuke, to President Obama.

"SHIRIN EBADI, a 62-year-old Iranian lawyer who won the Nobel Peace Prize six years ago, is generally cautious and measured in her speech. She is a human rights lawyer who says that she does not involve herself in politics. She says that it's not her job to favor one party over another, as long as the government respects people's right to express themselves.

So it was startling this week to hear Ms. Ebadi say bluntly that the Obama administration has gotten some things backward when it comes to Iran. It's not that engaging with the government is a mistake, she said during a visit to The Post. But paying so much more attention to Iran's nuclear ambitions than to its trampling of democracy and freedom is a mistake both tactical and moral.

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad 'is at the lowest level of popularity one can imagine,' Ms. Ebadi said. 'If the West focuses exclusively on the nuclear issue, Ahmadinejad can tell his people that the West is against Iran's national interest and rally people to his cause. But if the West presses also on its human rights record, he will find himself in a position where his popular base is getting weaker and weaker by the day.'

Administration officials point out that they have not focused exclusively on the nuclear issue. President Obama has spoken out in support of democracy forces, and Undersecretary of State William J. Burns put human rights on the agenda during his meeting with an Iranian official in Geneva this month. Ms. Ebadi acknowledged that Mr. Obama has said 'that the voice of the people needs to be heard. But he needs to repeat the statement again and again, so that people in Iran hear him.'

Ms. Ebadi suggested that the nature of Iran's regime is more crucial to U.S. security than any specific deals on nuclear energy. Iran's people are not as wedded to the nuclear program as the regime wants outsiders to believe. A democratic government would be unlikely to build a nuclear bomb, she said, and even if it did, the weapon would not be a threat in the hands of a government that would not view America or Israel as enemies. By contrast, she argued, even a seemingly ironclad nuclear agreement with Mr. Ahmadinejad might be of little value: 'Imagine if the government actually promised to stop its nuclear program tomorrow. Would you trust this government not to start another secret nuclear program somewhere else?'

The courage it takes to say such things may be difficult for Americans to comprehend. Ms. Ebadi's husband, 67, and her brother and sister are called in for questioning every week, she said, and pressured to pressure her. Many of her clients are in prison, some now facing the death penalty. She herself intends to return to her homeland. But the events of the summer -- the prematurely announced election results, the shootings of peaceful protesters in the street and on university campuses, the rapes of imprisoned protesters, the ghoulish show trials of alleged traitors to the regime -- seem to have convinced her that she must speak out."

Perhaps honest discussion might do more good than we realize.

Perhaps our weakness has been being too scared to just live up to our highest liberal values.

This is what force looks like

Those who have been arguing for it's use as a governing philosophy should be proud.

How else better to get your way?

What democracy is for

Why the Democrats' Health Care Overhaul May Die

All I know is that I will avoid voting for as many Democrats as possible, out of this, in the next election and in as many elections to come as is necessary.

And if progressive ideologues doubt that this is a prevailing sentiment, in the face of polls that demonstrate stronger voter disapproval, I suggest they watch how those midterm elections go down.

Anyone wanna bet Democrats lose seats? How much?

And, more importantly, anyone wanna bet how much they deserve it, right now?

This is what we have democracy for. To get rid of assholes who could give two shits about how Americans want to run their our own lives.

I don't intend on taking that freedom for granted.

Our progress springs from our hatred

"Shout. Shout out his name."

George Bush.

Barack Obama.

John McCain.

Hillary Clinton.

Ronald Reagan.

Bill Clinton.

Republican.

Democrat.

Our progress springs from our hatred.

Love is weakness. Power is strength. Freedom betrays us. Force improves us.

Reason is for the weak, and patient, and naive.

Power is the only reason that counts.

Many people have reasoned this way. Much tragedy has been made down this road.

Most human tragedy has been made down this road.

But, somehow, more enlightened people have convinced us that this is the way of the future. Rather than a tragic vestige of our past.

When it serves their cause, that is.

And when hatred is confused with progress.

Which it has been many times. Always ending in tragedy. Always.

Perhaps this is the time that it restrains freedom for good.

Or perhaps it will fail as it has every time.

You tell me.

Is history a march of freedom?

Or a march of power?

You choose.

Why Madonna can bite me

Because Natalie Portman is my true love. The Love Doctor said it was so.

The Love Calculator

These are the results of the calculations by Dr. Love:

Ben Sutherland Natalie Portman - 92 %

Dr. Love thinks that a relationship between Ben Sutherland and Natalie Portman has a very good chance of being successful, but this doesn't mean that you don't have to work on the relationship. Remember that every relationship needs spending time together, talking with each other etc.

I've always had a thing for girls who support microfinance. Makes me all tingly inside.

And then there's this.



Thank you, Love Doctor.

If that ain't love, I don't know what is.

So how's all that stone-throwing workin' out?

Barbara Boxer finally says something, for the first time in a long time, that I agree with.

Barbara Boxer asks why we all have to be throwing stones



I'm just as baffled at President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize, without a peace deal to his name, as the next person. Seems kinda bizarre to award a peace prize to a guy who snubs the Dalai Lama so he isn't a bother to his buddies in China who are just a little too extreme for his tastes. Having said that, I don't have a problem, in the least, with the Nobel committee encouraging someone who is more genuinely committed to peace in a world full of sometimes foolish, sometimes hateful folks promoting warfare, aggression, manipulation, and, generally, an obsession with power and our worst instincts to rid the world of those very impulses. Including our President, ironically, too often.

But I do think America and the world might take a step back and answer Barbara's question.

How's all that stone-throwin workin' out? We got any progress up in here yet? Things gettin' better? Isn't all this progress a little overwhelming? Isn't it awesome how much better everything has gotten the bigger of pricks we've become?

In fact, isn't the most incredible sign of progress exactly what colossal pricks we've all become in the name of progress?

Isn't that what progress looks like, actually?

How shitty we treat one another?

We treat people shittier. Things get better for everyone.

At least that's what the Taliban and our pals in the Chinese Communist party say.

And since we are weak and they are strong, it only makes sense to follow their lead.

Because, really, when everything is going off in such flying colors, how can anyone doubt all this progress?

Victor Davis Hanson, or why power, and its obsession, corrupts

This is why Lord Acton said that power corrupts.

Victor Davis Hanson says Obama's too nice

Because it, and the obsession with it, makes people unbearable pricks. Because when they exercise it, or obsess over it, they often become so invested in defending their uses of it and advocacy for its uses, that they can so rarely ever admit when they might be wrong. Like Victor Davis Hanson.

Victor Davis Hanson is the right-wing version of Paul Krugman. He is clever. Too clever by half. And obsessed with power. And always right. Always. No matter how wrong he might be.

And that is why Lord Acton is one of the more honest founders of our liberal democratic heritage.

And why Victor Davis Hanson, like Paul Krugman, is a columnist who can't get respect. Except from the people who think he's always right.

Right...

"Capitalism: A Love Story": Michael's Moore's Grapes of Wrath

And Zombie Stripper is Jenna Jameson's Scarlet Letter.

Headline: Millionaire film director and grotesquely obese fat-ass puts the final nail in the coffin of capitalism and proves once and for all that everyone should care desperately about their health.

How could anyone doubt this guy?

I smell a Pulitzer!

Some peace of my own

I think I've decided that I really just want to find a woman, someone I can really trust and love, and hide away from the world, is the truth.

People are so shitty to one another, is the truth. Stubbornly so. And as long as they are, I just want to be away from them and it all. If people aren't going to stop being shitty, I just don't want anything to do with them, is the truth.

I just want one woman with a loving heart to talk about anything and everything that might be on my heart. And not have to worry about her being petty, or snarky, or shitty about people in the world. Because I'm beyond exhausted with all that shit.

I want a wife. And maybe some kids. And some peace in life.

And let everyone tear up this world and one another as much as they like, if they're not gonna stop. Don't stop, I say. And live in the shitty world you make. And no matter what excuses people make, the only force responsible for fucking things up was the force of everyone's own egos. And I just don't want anything to do with any of it, anymore.

Humanity can enjoy the shitty world of their own making.

I just want some peace away from it all.

Her feelings don't support our cause? Fuck her.

At last. The most honest and even-handed account of the Roman Polanski affair I have read to date. And what is at stake for those all-too-uninterested in the feelings or wishes of the person who actually experienced this horrible crime.

The War over Polanski

Brendan O'Neill's particularly keen insights, from The Australian, are shared here, under an unbearably dark cloud of shame, in toto:

"Should Roman Polanski be extradited to the US over his statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles in March 1977? It's an interesting legal question. But it's not the question that is driving the trans-Atlantic furore that followed the film director's arrest in Switzerland last weekend.

Instead, various prejudices and unresolved battles are being projected on to l'affaire Polanski, robbing it of its legal complexities and turning it into a proxy culture war in which clapped-out conservatives and disoriented liberals are hurling intellectual (and not-so-intellectual) grenades at one another.

Polanski, the Polish-French maker of some decent films (Chinatown, Rosemary's Baby, The Pianist) and some awful ones too (Frantic, The Dance of the Vampires), pleaded guilty in a Los Angeles court in 1977 to having sexual intercourse with a minor.

On March 10, 1977, then 44, he had taken Samantha Gailey, a 13-year-old child model, to the home of Jack Nicholson in Mulholland, California, where he said he was going to take photographs of her for the French edition of Vogue. After taking the photos, he gave Gailey champagne and a sedative and performed oral sex, intercourse and sodomy on her while she said: 'No, I don't want to do this.' The original charges against Polanski were 'rape by use of drugs, sodomy, and a lewd and lascivious act with a child under the age of 14'. As part of a plea bargain Polanski got it reduced to 'sexual intercourse with a minor'.

When he realised that even this charge could land him in jail, he fled the US.

But the newspaper commentary and feverish diplomatic activity that greeted his arrest in Switzerland have not been concerned with the facts of the case, the question of legal precedents or the issue of justice.

Instead, Polanski has been turned into a symbol. For conservatives, still convinced that the 1960s are the root of all evil, he is symbolic of the perversions allegedly unleashed by the naked, hippie, free-love liberations of the countercultural period, with his rape of a 13-year-old girl seen virtually as the logical end product of legalising drug use and encouraging people to be sexually experimental.

For liberals he is a symbol of tortured European artistry who is being victimised by an ugly and prudish America. For US officials, Polanski symbolises European degeneracy and they fantasise that returning him to an American jail will be a victory for Reaganite decency over French moral turpitude.

For French officials, meanwhile, Polanski is a symbol of Europe's gallant recovery from its dark past (Polanski and his family, Polish Jews, were persecuted during the Holocaust), who is being tortured anew by 'the darker side of America, the side that scares us all'.

Just as Mia Farrow's Rosemary was a vessel for the devil in Rosemary's Baby, so Polanski has been turned into a vessel for all sorts of political jibber-jabber today.

It is striking how quickly the discussion of what Polanski, one man, did to Gailey, one girl, twists and turns into a discussion about competing moral values and even clashing national standards. For 60s-baiting conservatives, Polanski has long been a rotting symbol of everything that is wrong with that decade.

Both Polanski's experience of a terrible crime in 1969 and his execution of a crime in 1977 are held up as evidence of the darker side of the 60s and why a diet of sexual looseness, rock'n'roll and drugs is a Bad Thing.

In 1969, Polanski's wife Sharon Tate, a beautiful actress, was brutally murdered by Charles Manson's cult, the Family. Family members stabbed to death Tate and four others at Polanski's home in California while he was away; Tate was 8 1/2 months pregnant.

That crime, carried out by a tiny cult of weird hippies, has been cited by US conservatives as the neat conclusion to a decade in which traditional values had collapsed under the weight of a new generation that was less respectful than its 50s forebears; it was the 'dark side of the California dream', as one writer argued, a product of the 'political, social and cultural turbulence of the 1960s'.

The Manson crimes have been analysed more than any other serial-killing episodes in US history because they have been elevated from the realm of crime to the world of politics and morality, used by conservatives to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the collapse of traditional values in the 60s (instead it was all the fault of the Beatles, the Beach Boys, drugs and other things loved by Manson) and to depict sexual liberation and social experimentation as having necessarily brutal consequences.

Yet just as Polanski was a victim of alleged 60s excesses, so he was a rapacious product of those excesses, too. Any sympathy for Polanski dried up following his conviction for unlawful intercourse in 1977. This, too, conservatives argued, was part of the degeneracy of the American west coast in the mid to late-20th century; it sprang from a determination to 'push back the boundaries of sexual liberation', as one report said this week.

Some American law enforcers and right-wing commentators seem to imagine that having Polanski returned to the US will finally end the odious influence of the 60s on society. Under the headline 'Why we dislike the French' one conservative columnist asks how liberal Europe can 'support a child rapist'.

Yet if this attempt to write off 60s sexual liberation (some of which was progressive, some of which was solipsistic) on the back of Polanski's past is bad, then the defence of Polanski by European government officials and commentators is even worse.

They are motivated not by anything remotely related to legal norms or questions of justice but by a snobbish anti-Americanism in which Polanski (who is probably a bit of a creep) becomes recast as a paragon of European decency against hung-up America.

So determined are some liberal observers to use l'affaire Polanski to get one over on the US that they have even forgotten about their normal role of stoking up hysterical panics about pedophiles and have re-depicted Polanski's encounter with Gailey as just an over-exuberant heavy-petting session. European liberals rallied to Polanski's defence against what Frederic Mitterrand, nephew of the former French president and a friend of Polanski, described as a senseless and outrageous arrest that springs from 'the darker side of America, the one that scares us all'.

In short, Polanski is not merely being pursued under an old legalistic arrest warrant, the kind that exists for many fugitives, but is the European victim of evil America.

One French commentator says the US is 'acting out some kind of prudish revenge' against a 'great talent who never abided by American rules'. Here, Polanski's actions in 1977 are presented as a bit of rule-breaking and anyone who thinks he should be punished for them is clearly an un-arty prude.

But whatever you think of the arrest warrant against Polanski and the motivations of US law enforcers, it is not prudish to think that performing oral sex and sodomy on a drunk 13-year-old is unacceptable behaviour.

The difference between the liberal media reaction to Polanski and to Gary Glitter - the big-haired glam-rock star who in 1997 was discovered to have child porn on his computer - is striking. Where Glitter has been turned by the British media into a symbol of the pedophilic evil that is allegedly stalking our land, Polanski is presented as the misunderstood artist who is the real victim here, of a 'money-grabbing American mother and a publicity-hungry Californian judge'.

So keen are some liberals to mark themselves out as Not American that they are effectively saying: 'Polanski might be a pedophile, but he's our pedophile.'

But perhaps the worst aspect of the Polanski affair is the competition of victimhoods. It is testimony to the domination of the victim culture in society that Polanski haters and Polanski defenders have used the language of victimology to make their case.

For many American and British commentators this is all about Gailey, whom they have transformed into the archetypal victim of the alleged great evil of our time, child abuse. 'Remember: Polanski raped a child', says a headline in Salon online.

For European observers, by contrast, Polanski's actions can be explained by his victimised past, especially during the Holocaust. We have to understand his 'life tragedies' and how they moulded him, says one filmmaker.

Anne Applebaum, a US commentator who spends much of her time in Europe, says Polanski fled the US in 1978 because of his 'understandable fear of irrational punishment. Polanski's mother died in Auschwitz. His father survived in Mauthausen. He himself survived the Krakow ghetto.' (Applebaum fails to disclose that she is married to Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who is campaigning against Polanski's extradition.)

This spat in victimology confirms that the politics of victimhood dominates debate on both sides of the Atlantic, but in the Anglo-American sphere it is the victim of child abuse that is most sacrosanct, while in Europe it is the victims of the Holocaust who enjoy the most unquestioned moral authority, to the extent that Polanski's fleeing of the US can be excused as a latent reaction by a tortured man to the horrors of Auschwitz.

L'affaire Polanski has become a culture war that dare not speak its name, a pale imitation of the debates about values that have emerged at various times during the past 50 years.

As a result we are none the wiser about the legal usefulness of 30-year-old arrest warrants or contemporary extradition laws, as observers have instead turned Polanski into a ventriloquist's dummy or a voodoo doll for the purposes of letting off cheap moral steam."

It is tragically and tellingly ironic that in the obsession that has grown out of the legitimate concern for victims of childhood sexual abuse, that noone seems particularly interested with the feelings and wishes of the victim in this case, don't you think?

Tells you something about what such people really think about victims of sexual abuse. That they are an useless afterthought to, as Brenda brilliantly puts it, their "cheap moralizing" and self-righteous grandstanding, especially if their feelings get in the way.

The only reason to care about the emotional experience of the victim, in this case, for such folks, is if her feelings happen to support their cause.

And if they don't, fuck her, they reason.

She doesn't care about the feelings of the real victims, anyway.

Let that be a warning to all selfish rape victims

Samantha Geimer thinks it's all about her.

She "got over it long ago," she whines endlessly. "He did something really gross to me, but it was the media that ruined my life," she says, callously disregarding Roman Polanski's real victims. Everyone else.

Does Samantha not realize that it is was everyone else who got raped that night by Roman Polanski? Does she not recognize just how selfish she is trying to deny justice to the rest of us for what Roman Polanski did to her, that night? Some people can just never get over themselves.

What Samantha Geimer does not realize is that it was not her that was raped that night at Roman Polanski's hands. What happened to Samantha Geimer is really quite beside the point, frankly.

It is what happened to everyone else that night that really is what is important, in this case.

And if Samantha Geimer wants Roman Polanski to be forgiven for that terrible crime. Well, that is just tough titty.

Because it's not all about Samantha Geimer, now is it?

What it's really about is the real victims. Everyone else.

When will selfish rape victims ever learn to think about someone other than themselves?

What it means to be more genuinely liberal (when everyone takes liberty for granted)

The worst consequence for any know-it-all - and this is most certainly a case of "it takes one to know one," in this as in the case of almost every damn fool thing that comes to my attention in the world - is being seriously wrong on anything of import. Try an enormous hunk of your central professional and personal commitments in life. Then you'd know what it's like to be Paul Krugman.

Paul Krugman: We're Still Not Spending Enough

His dumbassery has become so obvious, I almost feel sorry for the guy. Almost.

Here's the skinny for the politically naive.

Paul is a professional economist and paid columnist and open manipulator. Paul Krugman's outlook is that if he can get you and me and everyone to constantly support more government spending, then we will support the needs of the poor and disadvantaged and all of the folks that both Paul and I care about, but which Paul can just not find it in his brain-so-chalk-full-of-himself-that-it-just-can't-ever-go-wrong to even consider that such a route might not be the best way to help such folks.

In the universe of Paul Krugman and his radical ilk, criticisms of public welfare, public education, public health care and other government sponsored programs of generosity-from-the-pockets-of-others are all one grand conspiracy against the poor, disadvantaged, and everyone in the world that Paul and his as-extreme-as-they-can-get kind pity in the world. Only the stupid or selfish or evil could possibly disagree with Mr. Krugman. Insert Nobel Prize-winning self-aggrandizing left-wing condescension here.

The ends justify the means for Paul Krugman and his likeminded friends on the left who believe that bullying and manipulating people into helping others really is not only the same as but, in fact, far superior to, helping others out of the goodness of one's heart. It is superior as much as Paul and company are superior to you and me, as well. And both are just as self-evident to Mr. Krugman and tow. He did win the Nobel Prize, after all. What else do you need to know about how much better he is than you?

It has never occurred to such folks that the problems cited in such programs just might be true. That welfare might encourage dependency and gaming of the system. That public education might be a mess very difficult to unravel exactly because it is run by the government as a matter of law rather than as a matter of autonomous responsibility by students, parents, teachers, and administrators. That public health care might suffer from serious problems, like rationing and lack of speciality care, as well as discouraging the kind of robust market that makes so much technology, prescription drugs, medical specialists, choices of insurance and medical providers and all sorts of advantages available that we enjoy and take for granted in a private health care market.

None of such criticisms could possibly be true, they reason. Because they come from nasty, selfish, mean-spirited conservatives. And everyone knows, or at least everyone on the left knows, that conservatives are only out for themselves and cannot be trusted. Ever. With anything. Certainly not with government. But really not with anything that might need a sound mind and body. Namely, anything.

I say this as someone who spent the bulk of my life as a man of the left, only to finally come to terms, in my young adulthood, that not a damn soul on the face of this earth has any or all of the final answers in the world. Including conservatives. And especially, right now, in America, since they are in power, progressives and those on the left. And, here in a few years when the right surges and retakes the reigns of government, especially conservatives and those on the right. And, really, especially anyone who breathes and has a pulse and might be tempted to seek out power based on the pretension to know everything and thus be able to make decisions for the rest of us who don't and prove once and for all what knuckleheads I and my ilk are and forever will be on this matter and all matters.

So. That's the way the game works on the left, and the right, among those who believe that manipulation, intimidation, and dishonesty is a better path than sincere engagement and understanding. Bully, guilt, and manipulate the public until they support your policies as long as you can get away with it. And when things go to shit, blame the other guy.

Fun game, isn't it? Kind of like Go Fish. Without all that honesty and decency.

And, for all kinds of bitter, mean-spirited, cynical reasons - and mostly because of all the lying - that position has been confused with what it means to be more genuinely and honestly liberal, here, as of late.

Liberal, meaning to love liberty, and to take seriously our highest and most noble values - generosity, compassion, selflessness, lovingness, decency, forgiveness, honesty, integrity, openness, and all the rest - is a value that is found in the best that conservative and progressive ideologies have to offer. And it is absent in all of the worst of both. In the stingy, mean-spirited, self-centered, hateful, spiteful, retributive, dishonest, corrupt, narrow-minded and small-hearted impulses among progressives, conservatives, and all people in the world. No ideology, nor any religion or any other grouping of any kind, has a monopoly on either wisdom in the world, nor its folly or ugliest impulses.

People of the left and right, like Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, and people of every religious and areligious persuasion, like Europeans, Africans, Asians, Middle Easterners, and Native Americans, and every variety of person on the earth, are all guilty of all of the worst impulses that the world has to offer. And they each also have much to offer of the best values, ideas, and contributions to the world.

And liberal values are the accumulation of the best that each of these traditions, ideas, values, contributions, and other offerings that each individual and each of these groups of individuals has to offer and the liberty that makes it possible for us to choose among these traditions, ideas, values, and contributions.

Without the freedom to choose which of these contributions is good or bad for us and our future, there is no way to know, honestly, which of each idea, value, contribution, and the rest is our best. That freedom is critical to our ability to know, better, what represents our best. Hence its centrality in our society and our value system.

Hence our liberal values. Our liberal education. Our liberal democracy. And our liberty, broadly.

So an economist of the left, even one with a Nobel Prize, who, at every step, demeans, eschews, bullies, manipulates, and otherwise weasels his way around and in limitation of our liberty is hardly liberal, by any honest standard. And neither is any group or individual who does the same.

A more honest liberal is someone who writes something along these lines.

The Wizard of Beck

David Brooks, a conservative in modern parlance, is without question a more committed liberal of this more honest, higher calling. In his values, in his person, and in this well-written criticism of conservatives who often profit from while taking for granted the best that free markets, freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and liberal values, and, namely, liberal education, has to offer.

David does not take them for granted. Not to the same degree, at least. He's smarter. He clearly did take his liberal education more seriously. And hence his stronger commitment to our strongest liberal values. I don't always agree with David on every matter. But he is more thoughtful and honest than either Glen Beck, whom he rightly criticizes in this piece, and Paul Krugman, who has clearly demonstrated himself, at this point, to be a less honest and more manipulative participant in our liberal democratic discussion.

The truth is our more honest and more genuinely liberty-loving people in America and the world tend to be our more decent-hearted, good-natured, thoughtful, and generally good folks in the world. If you're one of those folks who takes those values seriously, you can tell, generally, who else is and who else isn't. It doesn't take a brain surgeon. You can get a sense if they have a good heart or not. And you can listen for a moment to get a sense if they have a good head on their shoulders, as well. Noone knows it all. And the best folks not only know this about themselves, they cut plenty of slack to everyone else as well.

Such folks come from all sorts of backgrounds. Conservative. Liberal. Independent. Apolitical. Black. White. Hispanic. Native American. Middle Eastern. Protestant. Catholic. Jewish. Muslim. Buddhist. Atheist. American. North Korean. British. Chinese. French. Cuban. German. Iranian. All sorts of people are the more genuine and decent folks who embody our highest values.

And they tend to be recognized and rewarded in their fields.

Bill Gates. Warren Buffet. Steven Spielberg. U2. George Will. David McCullough. Steven Ambrose. Gordon Wood. James McPherson. Milton Friedman. Amartya Sen. E.O. Wilson. Stephen Jay Gould. Shirin Ebadi. Pope John Paul II. Mohatma Ghandi. Martin Luther King. Voltaire. Baron de Montesquieu. John Locke. Mary Wolstonecraft. Lord Acton. John Stuart Mill. Mark Twain. Etc., etc., etc.

And folks like Paul Krugman are not such folks. For whatever reasons, the Paul Krugmans of the world are convinced that such folks will never be able to persuade people to be more decent honestly. For folks like Paul Krugman, honest discussion and debate is for fools. Kind of ironic for an economist, someone who makes a living engaged in such debate and discussion, huh? But that's how he plays nonetheless. Paul, like many more dishonest participants in democratic discussions, will try to scare the bejeesus out of you and me, as long as it means getting his way. Because he is so convinced of how much smarter he is than you and me that he just feels like he doesn't have the patience to persuade us because we were never going to ever get as smart as him anyway.

It's a nifty way to think about people, don't you think?

Too brilliant for you and I to understand apparently. That's what they give those prizes for, Paul reasons. It's a Nobel thing. We just wouldn't understand.

Either that or Paul is just perpetually full of shit. And distorts much of his outlook around a manipulative worldview where average citizens just couldn't understand what it means to be as smart as Know-It-All Paul.

In other words. Paul is illiberal. He's not someone who trusts open and free and honest discussions where people are persuaded and their consciences are respected. Paul believes, as so many illiberal regimes and leaders and actors, including terrorists, around the world, that engaging you and me honestly is a waste of his time that will only leave his brilliance unrealized in the political world and all of us screwing up what he is better off taking care of himself, anyway.

It's just too brilliant, isn't it?

Too clever by half, obviously.

Honest liberals persuade honestly. That's the whole point, frankly, of a liberal society. The whole purpose of a liberal democracy is for people to be able to engage one another honestly and not try to intimidate one another to abandon their consciences because we have enough firepower to make it so. That was the entire length of our illiberal history. So to repeat it and call it liberal is really just kind of bizarre, at best, and dishonest, at worst.

Many, many, many people - left and right - take the explicitly dishonest route. Paul Krugman is one of those people, I believe.

And that kind of dishonesty should not now or ever be confused with something more honestly and genuinely liberal.

In fact, our failure to make that distinction is exactly what is responsible for much of our illiberal history. It is the reason that Lord Acton wisely observed that power corrupts. And it is the reason why all real progress in the world has led us on a path toward greater liberalism. Meaning more liberty. Not less.

So when folks like Paul Krugman manipulate us in a direction of less liberty, our bullshit detectors should go off with vigor.

Because it's a big fat lie to call a direction of manipulation and less freedom a path to progress. Because every point in history in every society in the world where that has happened, we have been taken down a path of much misery and unnecessary tragedy. And no progress whatsoever. Just more lies. To cover up the failure to make any real progress. If that sounds like the long history of the Soviet Union and the short history of Nazi Germany, you're beginning to get the point.

Real liberals value liberty. It's the meaning of the word. Anything else is dishonest.

Lots of that going around, these days.

And seeing through it, as Orwell warned, relies on our capacity for bullshit detection. Even when it is people on our "team" who are engaging in the bullshit.

My team is humanity, at this point. I'm an American. And a liberal, in that broadest sense. I'm a conservative and a liberal. A Christian, a Jew, a Buddhist, an atheist, and most things in between. I'm a white man in pigment, and a black man in my soul. And plenty of Asian, Native American, Middle Eastern, and everything I can get my hands on.

I care about people. And the freedom that allows them to look after themselves and one another most reliably. And I care about them honestly caring for one another. And not this dishonest, illiberal bullshit we've been engaging in.

It's time to get honest about what it means to be liberal. To care about liberal democracy, liberal values, liberal education, and liberty, broadly. And the courage involved with being that sort of person and society. And to see, more honestly, the cowardice involved with illiberal values, illiberal societies and illiberal political players.

Players like Paul Krugman. And, more to the point, players like Osama Bin Laden, Kim Jong Il, Hu Jintao, Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe, Saddam Hussein, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, and all the rest. All of the people in the world who will use, rationalize, and infinitely manipulate for power in an endless race with more honest, decent people - more honest liberals - and their efforts to embrace and expand freedom as the means of good people living good and decent lives.

To be a liberal has nothing to do with ideology, at all, actually. To be a liberal means to love liberty. That is the etymology of the term. That's where the word liberal comes from. From the commitment to liberty as the basis for progress in a society.

And people who believe that freedom matters need to have the courage to live those values without fear of intimidation from these assorted thugs in the world.

To do so means to learn to stop acting like them. And to act more like ourselves. To embrace freedom and respect for the thoughts and consciences of others and to engage one another honestly, without intimidation and without thuggery. Thuggery is for thugs. And thuggery is neither honest nor liberal in any recognizable way.

We need to let thugs be thugs. And we need to embrace our more decent, compassionate, honest, liberal, freedom-loving ways.

And tell the weak-ass thugs of the world that we are not scared of their illiberalism or their bullshit. Nor do we have any interest in emulating it.

Because, though we may not always make the right or best choices, we do our best to use our freedom to make better choices, over time, and with a bit of patience, compassion, and understanding for ourselves and one another.

And we have every reason to be proud of that legacy. And to tell the various thugs of the world who lack that kind of compassion and patience and concern for their friends and neighbors that they can go can fuck themselves, thank you very much.

Because we like our freedom. And all the good things, as much as any of the bad things, that is does now and always will afford us, from here until the end of our short little existence on this lovable little planet.

And if they don't like that and they keep trying to push us around. We will push back. And we'll do it as nicely as possible. But no nicer. And if they don't like that, they can kindly eat shit.

We need to learn to be confident in our liberal values and our liberal democracy. And we will never learn to do so trying to behave like our more illiberal, more thuggish fellow-travelers in the world.

We need to lead. Because that is what liberal peoples do. And when they do so, with a genuine commitment to liberal values and all of the good that they produce, people follow. Liberal and illiberal. Because that freedom offers so much more than thuggery does or ever will.

And the proof is in the pudding, on that one.

Just take a look around you and all of the brilliant opportunities that that freedom makes available to you. And take about two seconds looking into illiberal societies like North Korea, Cuba, China, Iran, Syria, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, and any and all societies that do not take freedom seriously, except for the freedom of their rulers to oppress their people.

So be proud of being a liberal. It doesn't have a lick to do with being left or right or Christian or Muslim or American or Iraqi or any of the rest.

It has to do with loving liberty. And all of the amazing opportunities that freedom has made possible in this remarkable little world.

Enjoy it. There's a lot to love.

The advantage of cynics

When things go to shit. They don't really care. No sweat off their backs.

Perhaps that is the road to progress.

Not caring.

That way we're not too rattled when we fuck everything up.

Makes it easier to pretend that everything is getting better.

The wave of the future.

Pretending that everything is peachy keen when everything is an unmistakable mess.

How can you argue with that?

Orwellian

This has been the most bizarre period of American history I think I've ever witnessed.

Both political parties should carry a sign.

"We deliver so much progress, we have to keep reminding you that things are getting better."

Up is down. Richard Simmons likes girls. And less freedom equals more progress.

Bizarre. In the extreme.

Wake me when things aren't so utterly fucked up.

The law, piling 'em high and deep

The Economist has a refreshingly honest discussion of the unequivocal failure of America's drug policies, especially on the American/Mexican border, and the cowardice of those unwilling to face it. No matter how many people have to die.

El Paso's small step

"In January the city council in El Paso, Texas, decided to pass a resolution expressing support for its neighbour on the Mexican side of the border. In recent years Ciudad Juárez has become one of the bloodiest cities in the world, wracked by turf wars between Mexico’s vicious drug cartels. Beto O’Rourke, a young city representative, thought the resolution could say a bit more about America’s role in the violence. He added an amendment: the city of El Paso was calling for an “honest, open national debate on ending the prohibition of narcotics.'

The city council approved, on an 8-0 vote. That was unusual, says Mr O’Rourke, because normally they bicker over where to put a speed bump. But the resolution hit a speed bump of its own. The mayor vetoed it, saying that El Paso would be a laughing-stock. Silvestre Reyes, the city’s powerful representative in Congress, warned that if the council tried to override the veto it might be hard for the city to get its fair share of federal funding.

The mayor’s veto was sustained. But if the goal was to stimulate debate, the effort has not been wasted. This week the University of Texas at El Paso held a conference on the costs and consequences of America’s drug policy. Speakers pointed to the carnage in Mexico and the corruption and graft funded by a huge black market. They mentioned the hundreds of thousands of Americans in jail on minor drug offences, and the millions of children with at least one parent somehow yoked to the criminal-justice system. They spoke of the cost of enforcement, and the courts gummed up with trivial possession cases.

'To just deny that and say it’s all working—it’s morally wrong, it’s politically wrong, and some day it’s going to come back to haunt us,' said Howard Campbell, an anthropologist at the university. On the first day of the conference there were eight murders across the bridge in Juárez, including one beheading."

The situation on the Mexican border is unambiguous evidence for Milton Friedman's argument that the criminalization of drugs not only does not stem its demand and trade, but that it makes the trade far more violent, as those engaged in the industry enforce their own trade without the option of working with law enforcement.

There is simply no other way to interpret what has happened in northern Mexico in the last few years. And it is costing the lives of more Mexicans than Americans can ever claim to grieve dying in the World Trade Towers or any terrorist attack on our soil.

Americans have a strange and dishonest relationship with the law, is the truth. We violated it openly leading up to the American Revolution in our disgust with the British Government. And, today, Americans are pretending that they have respected it all along. Which just simply is not true. And American's drug use is but one of the multitude of examples of just how dishonest that posturing has been.

It just happens to be one example that is killing people regularly.

Why do bullies always lose?

Because they make everything go to shit. No matter how much they pretend otherwise.

What the bumblebees can do about it

The human race should remember from now into perpetuity that to the extent that it is a goddamned mess, it is because it has stubbornly chose to be so. And if it chooses to be so, that it is them, and not the sharks and the bears and the bumblebees that will have to live with themselves. Although, sadly, they will have to put up with their mess, too. And if they choose to believe that it can never be all that much better, then it most certainly never will. And there's not a damn thing that the bumblebees or anyone else can do about it.

And it is for all that they can feel secure in their stubborn pride. Congratulations, homo sapiens. There's noone else quite like you. And if they ever do succeed in being the first and only species to ever kill off their own ranks, if they're going to stubbornly refuse to use the decency and good sense that God gave them, Mother Nature should maybe cut her losses. And start over with a species not quite so likely to repeatedly tie together its own shoestrings.

"In the battle of images, tough and stupid always seemed to win."

It's been a long time since I've read something with which I could wholeheartedly agreed. Fareed Zakaria finally wrote that piece.

Obama the Gambler

"There is a phony realism brandished on the right these days that says no one will ever cooperate with America. Russia and China have their own interests, and any attempt to find common ground is naive. We might as well all hold hands and sing "Kumbaya." Now, of course countries have their own interests, which are often in conflict. But they also often share some interests. A central task of diplomacy is to explore those areas of agreement, build on them and thus create a more stable world. That's why we have treaties on everything from trade to taxation, adhered to by most nations for their collective benefit.

In fact, Obama's approach has already produced remarkable results. Russia and China, after long opposition, agreed last week to a toughening of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In a striking shift, Russia signaled that it may support tougher sanctions against Iran. The Obama administration's decision to cultivate a relationship with both countries, to listen to their concerns, is paying off.

Obama's outreach to the world is an experiment, and not merely to see if the world will respond. He wants to demonstrate at home that engagement does not make America weak. For decades, it's been thought deadly for an American politician to be seen as seeking international cooperation. Denouncing, demeaning and insulting other countries was a cheap and easy way to seem strong. In the battle of images, tough and stupid always seemed to win.

Obama is gambling that America is mature enough to understand that machismo is not foreign policy and that grandstanding on the global stage won't succeed. In a new world, with other countries more powerful and confident, America's success -- its security, its prosperity -- depends on working with others. It's a big, bold gambit. I hope it works."

"In the battle of images, tough and stupid always seemed to win."

Best line I've read in a long time. Truer than most people know. And one of the more profound and all-too-tragic forms of bullshit the world has likely ever known.

It is time to stop pretending to be like our terrorist enemies. It is time to be more like us. That is where real strength lies.

If we can only be willing to summon the courage it requires.

Ghetto flatulence

Maybe there is no reason for my existence, at all. Because Matt Stone and Trey Parker seem to have it all covered.

South Park: Fatbeard

Better than anything I've ever told the kids. Definitely more likely to get their attention.

Perhaps a field trip to Somalia. Or career day with pirates. What doesn't teach 'em, might kill 'em. A win-win all-around for me.

I might just be in the wrong profession. At least if I want kids to listen to me. I'm pretty sure gangster rap is out of the cards, at this point. Given a full set of teeth and a less than substantial prison record.

Could be worse. I could be in Congress. If I never want anyone to listen to me, at all.

Good to know where I fit on the food chain.

Next time around, I'm telling fart jokes and wearing a gold chain. If I ever want to be taken seriously, that is.

Freedom matters (whether we want to acknowledge it or not)

The next time any progressive or conservative acts like freedom doesn't matter, or that it only matters for the causes they happen to favor, I want them to spend 3 minutes (9, if they have it) for a glimpse of what it looks like when people really believe that freedom doesn't matter. And that they can save the world, if only they had enough power.





This is not a new dream. It is an old nightmare. As old as homo sapiens have inhabited the planet. It has reaped much death and destruction.

And no real progress. Ever. Not even in the same leagues, really, with what free peoples have to offer.

We can take that for granted all we would like. But it is fact. No matter how much we might not want to face that fact. Because it doesn't square with our one most serious preexisting condition.

Our pride. The deadliest sin for a reason.

Because it kills more than all the rest.

It's time to end that legacy. Or at least end each of our contributions to that legacy.

By learning to take that freedom, and all the good and bad it has always had to offer and always will, more seriously than we take ourselves.

Pussies who call the President a faggot

Every conservative who puts forward this weak-ass argument forgets one very important fact.

The UN loves Barack Obama because he is weak

Beyond being a really poor understanding of world affairs and America's role in it.

For being so weak, the President just beat the living shit out of this guy's party.

What that says about conservatives who make this argument, I'd be curious.

But I'm pretty sure that if you're saying that the President is a faggot, that you just got your ass beat by a faggot. You fuckin' pussy.

Remember that, the next time you think about calling names, dumbass.

Because that pussy just owned your ass in the last election. And he'll give you a beat-down again if you don't have better arguments than that to offer.

Because independents like me, who swing elections, will be voting for the man who doesn't whine like a little bitch when his understanding is weak.

Progress, 21st-century-style

Can I ask kind of a dumb question?

What exactly has gone well since we started kicking ass?

Isn't that the straight-forward standard for progress?

That things start going better?

Where has that happened, exactly?

Good question, don't you think?

I guess that's what progress looks like the in the 21st century.

It's so radical, you can't even see it show up anywhere.

Good thing we're moving forward, huh?

Cause if things got any better, the world would just be a terrible mess.

And what would we do then?

The best we can manage (or why 3-year-olds should live without daddies)

Ex-NY Giant Burress gets 2 years in gun case

Thank goodness Plaxico Burress is off the streets.

Mr. National Football League thinks he can bring a gun into a night club, have it go off accidentally, and not be separated from his wife and 3-year-old son for one or two years?

It's getting scum like Plaxico off the streets that is finally gonna clean things up.

Just like last time. And the time before that. And the time before that. And every time since civilization began policing itself.

If kids like Elijah want to see their fathers, they need to start telling them to follow the rules and everything will finally fall into order.

That day should be coming soon.

Wait for it. It's coming.

Wait for it.

Wait for it.

Oh well.

If not, don't worry.

Noone is responsible. Ever.

Because that's the best we can manage, anyway.

President Obama and the assholes

Attention assholes of the world:

President Obama is not responsible for us being such assholes. We are.

Obama's Worldwide Star Power Finds Limits

"Obama began building expectations for peace in the Middle East in the first months of his presidency and raised hopes even higher with a June speech in Cairo in which he pledged that he could make things happen.

He asked Israel to ease its embargo of the Gaza Strip and freeze construction in West Bank settlements. He asked the Arab states to take steps toward 'normalization' of ties with Israel. He made restarting Israeli-Palestinian peace talks a top priority, announced plans to repair relations with Syria and said he would engage, rather than confront, Iran.

On Saturday, the White House announced that Obama plans to hold a three-way meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in New York on Tuesday. It will be the first meeting between the two since Netanyahu took office.

'It is another sign of the president's deep commitment to comprehensive peace that he wants to personally engage at this juncture,' special envoy George J. Mitchell said.

But progress has been slow, and the frustration has built on all sides -- among Israeli officials upset that he focused public demands on them; among Arabs, especially Palestinians, over his inability to wrest concessions from Israel; among human rights activists who say his idealism has not been borne out in action.

'I think there has been too little appreciation of realities and too much well-intentioned belief in the power of rhetoric and goodwill,' said Mark Heller, principal research associate at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University.

Rice countered that Obama has made 'significant progress on a wide array of issues' relating to the Middle East peace process, which she noted has been a difficult problem for 'every prior administration.'

But White House officials said they do not expect an agreement on settlements to be announced at the three-way meeting next week. The Islamist Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip has said that Mitchell's inability to negotiate that agreement with Israel proves Obama's shortcomings.

It is 'proof of the failure of the Obama administration in helping the Palestinian people,' Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said in a statement, reflecting a broad skepticism among Arabs about whether Obama's overture to the Muslim world would make a difference on the ground.

Israeli officials, meanwhile, have also expressed concern that his policy of engagement toward Iran is allowing too much time to pass without any steps to slow Tehran's nuclear program. Israel and other nations say they suspect that Iran is intent on building a weapon; Iran says its program is peaceful.

The United States has agreed to hold discussions with Iran and several other countries on Oct. 1, prompting fears in Israel and among critics of the administration that delay will inevitably result.

'It is not just here that the administration is starting to be mugged by reality,' Heller said. 'They used nice words and tried to engage . . . In the meantime, the scorecard on North Korea is not much better. On [Venezuelan President Hugo] Chávez it is not much better. We don't see reforms pushed in Cuba.'

'Process of Disappointment'

Writing recently in Le Figaro, one of France's leading daily newspapers, Pierre Rousselin, one of the paper's top editors, offered an assessment that might still be considered heresy in Europe: 'Barack Obama is not the Messiah.'

Obama's political struggles at home and his performance internationally have led some observers abroad to remark that a charismatic leader who seemed to be walking on water last year is only human, subject to the same bruising political battles as everybody else.

Several have noted that his effort to cultivate better relations with Russia has not produced concrete help from Moscow in the confrontation with Iran and that -- so far -- Israel has stiff-armed his plea for an end to Jewish settlements.

Obama has made good on his promises to begin winding down the Iraq war and to take steps to close Guantanamo. But at the same time, he has ramped up U.S. fighting in Afghanistan, a sore point with many Europeans and a difficult political issue for Obama's counterparts around the world. And despite shifting U.S. policy on climate change, the president is unlikely to see a global climate-change agreement materialize at the summit in Copenhagen later this year.

U.S. officials point to their success in getting Russia and China to back stiff new sanctions on North Korea as evidence of their success on the world stage.

The real test of attitudes in European capitals is likely to emerge in coming months, experts there say, particularly if Obama fails to make headway on his main foreign policy objectives or if the war in Afghanistan causes an unacceptable casualty rate among European soldiers attached to NATO's International Security Assistance Force.

'There's definitely going to be a process of disappointment that goes on internationally because U.S. interests are much more constant than many people recognize,' said David Bosco, a professor of international politics at American University and the author of a new book about the U.N. Security Council. 'But he remains quite popular abroad, and foreign leaders know that.'

Surveys consistently show that Obama remains popular among people throughout Europe. A new poll by the German Marshall Fund put his approval rate at 77 percent across Europe and at 92 percent in Germany.

'I'm not criticizing the previous administration, because they were equally motivated, but I think the view [of other governments] was that by cooperating too closely with the Americans at that time tainted them,' said one senior Obama official. 'So I feel there is a greater receptivity now to engage the United States because of some of the decisions made by President Obama.'

In Latin America, the aftermath of the coup in Honduras in June has prompted criticism of Obama's policies. Although the administration condemned the overthrow of President Manuel Zelaya and said it would not recognize the government that took power, it has been unable to restore him to power.

Obama's election was welcomed by some of South America's most influential leaders, among them Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. But as in other corners of the world, the initial warm relations have cooled as the United States has pursued a Bush-era policy that consolidates the U.S. military presence in Colombia, Washington's closest ally on the continent.

A Spotlight in New York

In his speech to the General Assembly on Wednesday, Obama will lay out 'his view of international cooperation in the 21st century and the need to move beyond old divisions,' Rice told reporters Friday.

Rice's predecessor, John Bolton, predicted that 'the greeting will be rapturous' for the new U.S. president. 'It's a triumph for Obama personally, but I have yet to see his personal popularity translate into concrete steps forward,' Bolton said.

Despite the warm greeting, the media's attention -- and as a result, the world's -- may be riveted on others.

Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, will be speaking shortly after Obama. In a preview of his speech Friday morning, Ahmadinejad told an anti-Israel rally in Tehran that the Holocaust was 'a false pretext to create Israel' and said confronting the regime is a 'national and religious duty.'

That kind of rhetoric will put the spotlight squarely on Obama's policy of engagement and the upcoming talks between U.S. and Iranian officials in Istanbul.

'I don't think there's much likelihood that there will be an interaction' between the two leaders, Rice said. 'There's no obvious venue in which that would occur, and certainly we have no meetings or anything of the sort planned.'

A day later, Obama will chair a meeting of the 15-member Security Council, where Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi , who gave a hero's welcome to the Lockerbie bomber, will be in attendance. An interaction between the two in the small council chambers could be awkward.

Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, predicted that Obama's visit to the United Nations will be welcomed by most of the world's leaders.

'Most of them want him to succeed,' Gelb said. 'Now they are looking for him to put up the goods.'"

If President Obama invites assholes who kill each other's civilian populations for better land deals to a peace conference and they decide to walk away so they can go kill more civilians to quench their bitterness and their lust for land and power, he is not responsible for those assholes warring on each others' populations. He can lead a horse to water, but he can't make them drink if they are intent on staring at their own ding-a-lings or more interested in making each other eat shit.

You know who is responsible for a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians? Israelis and Palestinians. And they want to keep dying and killing one another out of their bitterness and endless and hopeless quest for revenge, so fucking be it. Die motherfuckers. Until you can get straight that a peace deal with two independent states that do not shoot at one another and that can learn to share access to places of worship, water, and every other shared resource in the region that will need active coooperation for a peace deal to work.

You can't find it in your teeny-tiny little hearts to move forward and put that ugly, brutal past behind you and sign a reasonable and fair peace deal between future neighbors rather than hostile enemies.

Then keep dying. And America and Barack Obama are not responsible for your murderous and self-centered ways. You are. And the bodies will keep piling up until you face that fact.

Who is responsible for the coup in Honduras? The people who authorized that coup - the Honduran Supreme Court, namely - and the Honduran military who carried it out. And who is responsible for more honest democratic commitments there? The people of Honduras. We'll do what we can do to help. But if you want to be a banana republic and pretend like it's all good and "within the rule of law," so be it. And live with the consequences. But don't pretend it's really democratic or that Barack Obama is at fault for your backwards ways. You are responsible for your country. Or so everyone keeps telling Americans they want to be the case. When they don't want us around, that is.

Who is responsible for Cuba maintaining as a Communist backwater in a hemisphere where free market economies are taking off like hotcakes? Fidel Castro. And the Cubans and leftists everywhere who support this cocksucking, thuggish regime. President Obama might decide, with his limited time, energies, and priorities, to try to end what I, and I would imagine he might agree, is a foolish and counterproductive embargo that clearly undermines our efforts to help free the Cuban people. But if he doesn't, because he's kinda busy, if you didn't notice, Cubans are responsible for their own fate. We'll do what we can to help.

Who is responsible for the situation in Afghanistan, fundamentally? The Afghanis. We might help if they want it (if Americans don't give up on the effort, altogether). But, if they don't, we'll pack up and let them deal with their own mess, gladly. Less Americans dying is alright by me. Unless it will do some good. And that can only happen if Afghanis know that they, when it comes down to it, are responsible for their democracy and their fate.

Who is responsible for climate change? All of us. Which is why those of us who are skeptical of catastrophic scenarios need a more thorough debate and discussion about what efforts might look like, how urgent it might or might not be, and what can be done to get everyone genuinely on board, assuming the need for behavior change, rather than this dance of trying to compel their will and people fighting those efforts every step along the way. Especially when there might be good reason for them to be skeptical. Which I think there is, at least for the impacts of what looks like fairly modest warming.

I do not want hostile, swaggering, irrational states to have nuclear weapons. But that describes just about every state that has one (though clearly America and European countries are more trustworthy with them; especially as it concerns my own personal interests). Iran and North Korea, the former being a democracy, of sorts, are tricky because they do have a right to a reasonable self-defense. And the more we threaten and coerce them, the more ambitious they have become in their nuclear pursuit. Engagement would be a better route to a more honest discussion and some reassurance that we are not intending military force on their regimes, even as we are disgusted by their governments and their lust for power and its consequences for their people. If we are intent on using military force, it is perfectly rational on their part to pursue weapons to defend themselves. Hence, the need to stop threatening such. If we don't want more of the same, that is. And that policy, of threats and sanctions, if you notice, has resulted in a big doughnut hole in terms of a lesser likelihood of them chasing and developing nuclear weapons.

When we're being honest, that is.

And that really is the problem.

In all this flurry of power and its pursuit, what all the assholes in the world have in common is that the more they want the power, the less honest they become. About their failures. And about the failure of being an asshole making things better, in general. Anywhere. At all. Ever. Strength has its place. But abusing power is the most common and reliable impulse when people romaticize its use.

That's what Lord Acton meant. And he was right. No matter how soft you might think that makes him. Because he did not magically make you stop being an asshole. Which only makes sense since the only person who can make you stop being an an asshole is you. The best everyone else can do is contain you, and even that has its limits, for a short time until you get that figured out.

But it is people getting that figured out for themselves and people and peoples getting figured out that they are responsible for their own destiny that is the only real way forward.

Barack Obama never claimed to be the messiah. And he's not here to be crucified while we drop the ball in our own responsibility in our own messes.

If we want the world to be less violent, have less conflict, be more peaceful, decent, prosperous, free and the like, we've got to learn to stop being such assholes.

And there is precious little that Barack Obama or anyone can do about that.

Except ourselves.

What it means to be a liberal

There are very few Americans who know what it honestly means to be a liberal like Milton Friedman.



Whether we want to acknowledge the importance of our freedom or not, Friedman's ideas improved the lives of a substantial proportion of the world in the 20th and 21st centuries. The great irony of this century is that, in our cowardice, we decided to turn back the clock on the single most important contribution to our progress for the last two centuries: our liberty.

And Dr. Friedman was an unapologetic supporter of that progress and the idea that made it possible. And that, whether we want to get honest about it or not, is what it means to be a liberal. To be committed to liberty as the best means of enabling our progress.

We take all that freedom for granted because we have so much available, today. And people like Milton Friedman made that possible.

Thanks, Milton. Thanks for genuinely believing in our liberal values. And for believing in us.

Modern day Mark Twains

I was wrong. Mike Judge is hilarious. And Stephen Colbert makes me choke on my Cheetos. But Monty Python is definitely the wisest of the wise guys.



What a stupid, foolish lot we are, sometimes. We generally get things figured out, eventually. But makes us goddamned entertaining until we do.

A more honest liberal voice

What a more honest liberal voice had to say about what makes for honest governance.



"Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others...

...This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.

I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers.

Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again."

May we find a more honest voice again.

Real progress doesn't require government sanction

Gotta give props to Iranian protesters who are now, consistently, defying government bans on demonstrations critical of the government.

Thousands march in Iran opposition protests

Note to Americans and other liberal democratic citizens who take their freedoms for granted:

This is what progress really looks like. And it doesn't require jack shit from the government. This kind of courage is what it looks like when people value their freedom and the world it makes possible.

The truth is that we're just all kinda spoiled. Not really the same as progress, at all.

There oughtta be a law

Progress dictates we weed out the scofflaws. Don't know how we'll ever get any progress up in this place if nobody's gonna take the law all that seriously.

Proxy wedding means Marine's widow, baby unwelcome

"Hotaru Ferschke just wants to raise her 8-month-old son in his grandparents' Tennessee home, surrounded by photos and memories of the father he'll never meet: a Marine who died in combat a month after marrying her from thousands of miles away.

Sgt. Michael Ferschke was killed in Iraq in 2008, leaving his widow and infant son, both Japanese citizens, in immigration limbo: A 1950s legal standard meant to curb marriage fraud means U.S. authorities do not recognize the marriage, even though the military does.

Ferschke and his bride had been together in Japan for more than a year, and she was pregnant when he deployed. They married by signing their names on separate continents and did not have a chance to meet again in person after the wedding, which a 57-year-old immigration law requires for the union to be considered consummated.

'She is being denied because they are saying her marriage is not valid because it was not consummated — despite the fact that they have a child together,' said Brent Renison, an immigration lawyer in Oregon who has advised the family.

Hotaru Ferschke and the baby, Michael 'Mikey' Ferschke III, are staying for now on a temporary visa at the home of her parents-in-law, in the Smoky Mountains town of Maryville. Robin and Michael Ferschke Sr., who are fighting for their daughter-in-law to stay, have emblazoned their son's picture on everything from a blanket draped on the back of the couch to a waving banner on the fence outside.

The 22-year-old Marine radio operator met the young Japanese woman at a party while he was stationed in Okinawa. Though neither knew much of the other's language, something clicked.

'He called me after they met and he goes, 'Mom, I am in love,'' Robin Ferschke said.

The couple were together about 13 months before he left for Iraq in April 2008. He had proposed and they were trying to conceive a baby before he deployed, Hotaru Ferschke said.

About two weeks after he left, she found she was pregnant. He wanted to get married quickly so she could start getting health benefits as the spouse of an American soldier, she said.

They agreed on a proxy wedding, which has a long history in the military and in some other cases where bride and groom can't be in the same place for a ceremony.

Procedures for a proxy marriage vary by country. Some take place by phone while others require a proxy to physically stand in for the absent partner during a ceremony.

Japan doesn't require a wedding ceremony, and couples getting married only have to complete sworn affidavits proving they are legally free to marry and register at a Japanese municipal government office, according to the U.S. Embassy. Hotaru Ferschke said she and her husband got their proxy marriage simply by completing the paperwork and their marriage was final on July 10, one month before he was shot during a house search.

The U.S. military recognizes proxy marriages for couples separated by war and helps facilitate them. The Marines are paying survivor benefits to Ferschke and her baby.

Proxy marriages are legal in at least four U.S. states. One of the most famous proxy weddings in recent history was that between Ekaterina Dmitriev in Texas to Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko in 2003 as he was floating in the international space station.

Pregnant and alone in Japan, Ferschke tried to apply for permanent residency in the United States and was denied.

Kenneth Sherman, a field office director for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services who handled the Ferschke case, declined to answer questions from The Associated Press about it. In a letter to the widow, Sherman said he believed that U.S. law required the denial, although he found the situation 'personally distressing.'"

You know what bugs me? People who think they can fight for our country, have a child with someone they love, and then flaunt the very law that so clearly makes our progress possible.

Does this man's family really believe that this soldier's sacrafice somehow compares to the undeniable wisdom that so generously goes into crafting our legal path to political heaven?

Here we go engaging in all this sacrafice of our time to meet in legislatures, write emails, make conference calls and otherwise make progress happen up in this godforesaken cesspool of ignorance and lawlessness.

And this young soldier thinks it's all about him.

The nerve of some people.

When is America ever going to finally rid itself of all this self-centered so-called "sacrafice".

When they pass a law, that's when.

Pardon my abruptness. I have a Congressman to write.

Saying goodbye

All my friends know to play the last 15 minutes of The Life of Brian at my funeral.



I'd be alright with animated video tribute to The Crash Test Dummies' Superman Song, too, if it doesn't sound like too pretensious a request.



And if it does, then play something about self-important twits getting their due. Something along these lines, perhaps.



But I wouldn't mind having this played, as well.



Annie's got my number and my favorite break-up song. And my favorite melody for saying goodbye.

Some words of reassurance

This scene from Ken Burns' brilliant documentary, Mark Twain: Known to Everyone, Liked by All - captures much of the work I think humanity has to make any genuine progress.



And I love Twain because he understands, more than most, that does not and cannot happen because a thumb is placed firmly enough on our heads. To the contrary, this generally makes us more likely to fight efforts to do or be better. Often for good reason. Because big thumbs are generally attached to flawed and, too often, not so big people. Including my own great big, overdrawn thumb. Just ask my kids.

What Twain understood well, as a former Confederate and a young man prone to a conventional racism of his day and more avowedly committed, by the end of his lifetime, to ending racism than most people of his time - was that any important learning also involves unlearning.

And generally, among adults, more unlearning still.

And the most important thing that everyone has to unlearn, today, is that any of us has all the right answers. Now or ever. Or that any of them will be arrived at with just enough aggression. And that particular mistake, that aggression is the source of our solutions rather than the source of most of our problems, is the most important idea for us to unlearn, right now.

And no amount of force will ever do all that learning and unlearning for us. To the contrary, it is as often, if not more often, used to defend our mistakes - like slavery and racism, if we were to ever get honest with ourselves about the law and its uses and misuses - as it is ever to correct them.

And that is the reason that the wisest among us have liberal commitments. Commitments to liberty.

Because the one most serious thing in the way of all that learning is our own miserable and manipulative efforts to force one another to be something different.

Force has limited purposes. And no more. No matter what other romantic notions we might have on the matter.

And this period has been one long referendum on whether that dark romance is one that will animate us in perpetuity. Or be the long, ugly legacy that we finally put behind us.

And, interestingly enough, it is not my faith in how people are behaving, currently, that gives me confidence that we get this figured out.

It's that long history of fumbling forward, two steps at a time and one step backward, that convinces me that we will turn out alright.

We just need to get more honest with ourselves about what steps are forward and which ones are backward.

Some words of reassurance. We're not moving forward. Not until we figure out that moving forward means treating each other better. Not worse.

Not the hardest standard for progress to get our noggins wrapped around, I don't think.

Just some unlearning is all. And some appreciation for ourselves and our propensity to be jackasses, in the process.

Are we weak? Or are we strong?

The conversation I had with the kids, today, was the conversation we need to be having as a country and as a civilization, right now.

You know who obsesses about whether they're weak or strong?

People who are afraid they're weak.

We need to make a choice.

Are we weak? Or are we strong?

Because strong folks don't sit around and obsess about whether they are strong. They just are. I don't have to sit and obsess about whether I'm tough enough or not. I just am.

And I know, now, from much of my own past experience obsessing about whether I was tough enough or not, in my lifetime, that it's a fool's question.

Because those who are strong, just are. They don't need to obsess about that question.

The only people who obsess about it are people who are afraid they are weak. And, often because they are.

People like Osama Bin Ladan. Saddam Hussein. Kim Jong Il. The Burmese military junta. Robert Mugabe. Fidel Castro. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Hamas. Hezbollah. Stalin. Hitler. And all the other terrorists, despots, and weak-ass motherfuckers in the world. And, specifically, all the motherfuckers who end up the biggest losers in life every single fucking time. Without exception. All those motherfuckers eventually eat dirt. Every single time.

The question we need to answer is:

Are we weak? Or are we strong?

Because strong people don't sit around obsessing about whether they are strong or not. They just are.

And that is who we need to be.

Thinking for ourselves

I know she's only 10 years old and all the complications that come with a mature judgment about a matter like this.

But, given the circumstances - a mother who wants to home school, a father who wants her to attend public school, and a family court that must resolve their difference - would it kill folks to ask this girl what she might want for her education?

Under God: Judging Amanda

"If you've ever wondered why conservative evangelical Christians seem so concerned about the dangers of government intervention in our lives, read a recent New Hampshire family court ruling that 10-year-old Amanda -- who has been home-schooled by her religiously conservative mother since first grade -- must now attend public school.

The plaintiff (Amanda's father -- the couple divorced shortly after Amanda was born) 'believes that exposure to other points of view will decrease Amanda's rigid adherence to her mother's religious beliefs, and increase her ability to get along with others and to function in a world which requires some element of independent thinking and tolerance for different points of view,' family court Justice Lucinda Sadler explained.

The court agreed that Amanda 'appeared to reflect her mother's rigidity on questions of faith . . . Amanda's relationship with her father suffers to some degree by her belief that his refusal to adopt her religious beliefs and his choice instead to spend eternity away from her proves that he does not love her as much as he says he does.'

Millions of conservative evangelical Christians adhere to the same rigid and exclusive belief system about eternal salvation. Should we require them to attend tolerance classes? Should we court-order all of them to send their kids to public schools?

The Alliance Defense Fund, established to defend conservative Christians in such cases, has filed motions asking the New Hampshire court to reconsider its decision. 'A mother has a constitutionally protected right under the First and Fourteenth Amendments to make decisions regarding Amanda's schooling, religious training and other parenting issues without interference by the Court,' the motions state.

No doubt the court would not have interfered with the rights of these parents if they had been able to agree on Amanda's schooling. And fathers have constitutional rights, too. Family court-level justice is never easy and rarely clear-cut, especially when divorced parents are squabbling about how to raise the kid. When that happens, it becomes a judge's job to determine the best interests of the child.

But should any court determine which religious beliefs are emotionally, psychologically or socially healthy for a child? Would the court have ruled for Amanda's father if Amanda's mother was an open-minded, tolerant believer that God loves everyone and everyone goes to heaven?

And does the court have no confidence in the time-honored, sacrosanct tradition of teenage rebellion?"

I am consistently amazed at how progressives and others who claim to care about the independent thought of children in such situations seem to give scant concern, at all, for what they might think.

Seems to me that if you want people to exercise independent thought, as I do, you would want to give them the opportunity to exercise that thought rather than make decisions for them.

Or perhaps what many people mean when they say independent thought is that they want you to think independently, as long as you agree with them.

And that really is the crux of what is wrong with America today.

And this 10-year-old girl just learned a sad lesson about America.

When we say we want you to think independently, what we mean is that you are going to do what we say or else.

A little backwards, by any honest standard. And certainly not evidence of progress.

Progress is when, among other things, people are able to think and make choices for themselves and when their conscience and their choices are taken seriously as a matter of independent judgment.

And if what we are really interested in is Amanda's independent thought, perhaps we might start by respecting it.

Inspiring kids with real talent

Lovin' this.





Katherine Ng is the art world's version of the same phenonema.

Katherine Ng. A Hypothetical Analysis of the Twinkle in Stars (as told by a child to a teacher) (1994). From the 1995-96 exhibition Science and the Artist's Book.

People with powerful talent who just happen to bring it to kids.

Gotta love that.