What courage looks like

Ahmad Batebi, the 21-year-old student who was imprisoned and tortured by the Iranian government because this picture was featured on the cover of the Economist, has escaped to America.

Silent no more

For every thug, the world over, from America to North Korea to Zimbabwe to Iran, in every nation from every corner of the globe, who has rationalized their cowardice in the name of power, Ahmad Batebi is a living example and challenge to you of what courage really looks like.

Ahmad Batebi, now 30, was a student photographer attending a rare and brave student protest of the Iranian government in 1999 in Tehran. Amidst the protests and subsequent government crackdowns, Ahmad held up a bloody shirt presumably belonging to another student protestor who had been attacked, he claimed, by Basij paramilitary forces.

As a consequence of the international notoriety he experienced from that Economist cover photo, Batebi was sentenced to death by the Iranian government.

I want every thug who thinks that their machinations for power and brutality are novel or clever or otherwise respectable to take notice of the subsequent move by the Iranian government in response to the negative international publicity.

The government commuted his sentence for "creating street unrest" to 15 years.

Isn't that clever? You see, they weren't quite as tough or harsh as they might have been. They could have been so much tougher or harsher, you see. But, instead, they showed mercy on young Ahmad. And they only sentenced him to 15 years in prison for holding up that T-shirt.

As the Economist reports:

"During his interrogation he was blindfolded and beaten with cables until he passed out. His captors rubbed salt into his wounds to wake him up, so they could torture him more. They held his head in a drain full of sewage until he inhaled it. He recalls yearning for a swift death to end the pain. He was played recordings of what he was told was his mother being tortured. His captors wanted him to betray his fellow students, to implicate them in various crimes and to say on television that the blood on that T-shirt was only red paint. He says he refused.

He was sentenced to death for 'creating street unrest'. But after a global outcry, the sentence was commuted to 15 years in jail. He speculates that his high profile made it hard to kill him without attracting negative publicity. For two years, he was kept in solitary confinement, in a cell that was little more than a toilet hole with a wooden board on top. He was tortured constantly. Only when he was allowed to mingle with other prisoners again did he begin to overcome his despair.

He suffered a partial stroke that left the right side of his body without feeling. He needed medical attention. The regime did not want to be blamed for him dying behind bars, he says, so he was allowed out for treatment. Three months ago, on the day of the Persian new year, he escaped into Iraq. On June 24th he arrived in America."



I want every thug in America and across the globe to take stock of the ugly rationalization used by this government. Because it is the excuse used the world over to rationalize every power-hungry, vindictive, brutal, ugly impulse that has ever been callously indulged the world over, since the beginning of humanity. It is the source of humanity's ugliest rationalizations of its most ruthless, barbarous, vengeful inclinations since the beginning of its long recorded and unrecorded history. It is humanity's cruelest, most heartless, most sadistic and inhumane rationalization since its inception.

And those who rationalize such brutality, cruelty, and power-hunger in liberal societies are no better, in the largest picture, than these blood-thirsty mullahs, no matter what excuse they may offer.

Courage is not the impulse to impose such cruelty. Courage is the capacity to withstand such treatment, to come away alive undiscouraged, and perhaps emotionally stronger, for the experience, and for stronger values and ideas to prevail over their weaker, more cowardly, and more brutal brethren.

It does not take courage to inflict such treatment on people. It does not take courage to repress. It takes courage to stand up to such repression. And Ahmad Batebi's long, brutal journey is a testament to that kind of courage.

People have rationalized such ugliness since the beginning of humanity. It is the answer to the long-standing question of how humanity could have spent so much of its history in illiberal, undemocratic, and brutal and repressive conditions.

Because such illiberality, brutality, and repression was rationalized by societies, democratic and undemocratic, to cover for their cowardly, power-hungry, vindictive, and brutal ways. It is the same impulses that have rationalized every uncivilized, barbarous, cruel, mean-spirited, and cowardly policy that has ever made its presence on Earth. It is the same rationalization used by the Nazis. It is the same rationalization used by the Soviets. It is the same rationalization used by the Saddam Hussein. It is the same rationalization used by the Communists in Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, and China.

It is the same rationalization that has been used since the beginning of human history for force as a governing philosophy, for repression and brutality as the only means of containing those same impulses rationalized to govern them.

I want to say that again and be very clear.

The exact impulses that are rationalized to contain such brutality are the ones being used to rationalize force as a governing philosophy for such containment. Force, so the excuse goes, is the only impulse that can control such brutality. There is truth to the idea that force must be used to confront brutality when no other options exist. But its unending abuse is why liberal societies need a committed presumption against such ugliness when it comes to the use of force, the least necessary force or aggression possible. Because that fact of life is also, now and forever, the source of the corruption to which power tempts into perpetuity.

And it is that temptation that America and the liberal democratic world is giving into, during this political moment.

Courage is what it looks like for people like Ahmad Batebi to challenge such rationalizations and corruption from power, openly and despite punishments or rewards, not because of them. Cowardice is what it looks like to engage in such rationalizations and fail to take responsibility for them and our behavior in accordance with those rationalizations.

If Americans need someone to look to as an example of what courage looks like, it is not found, in its strongest form, at this moment, in any our candidates for President or in almost any of our elected leaders.

Courage is found in this one very brave Iranian young man who stood up for freedom when others were cowered by power.

For Ahmad and the thousands of brave young protesters like him, thank you for your courage. It is a light amidst the dark canvass of power and repression the world over. Thank you for being that light.

Montesquieu in action

"Democratic and aristocratic states are not in their own nature free. Political liberty is to be found only in moderate governments; and even in these it is not always found. It is there only when there is no abuse of power. But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go. Is it not strange, though true, to say that virtue itself has need of limits?

To prevent this abuse, it is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power. A government may be so constituted, as no man shall be compelled to do things to which the law does not oblige him, nor forced to abstain from things which the law permits."

Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, 1952, Book XI, Of the Laws Which Establish Political Liberty, with Regard to the Constitution

You think ideas don't make the world go round? Keep watching this Karl Rove testimony drama. It's Montesquieu and separation of powers in action.

Here's Karl Rove addressing the subpoena when it was issued.



Here's Debbie Wasserman Shultz threatening action from Congress.



And here's Catherine Crier, talking as a surrogate for John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, about arresting Karl Rove and trying him before Congress if he refuses to testify to the House.



But here's the funny part. Karl's right. This is resolved either by the consent of both parties, or it goes to the court.

Catherine Crier is right that Congress is a check on executive power. But Karl Rove is also right that the executive branch is a check on Congress, as well. Meaning, they both serve as checks on each others' power. Tie goes to the court, likely the Supreme Court, who will probably render a final decision on this question.

It's so funny watching so many people talk about the rule of law with so much certainty but with so little understanding of the rule of law, on this question, isn't it? Makes you wonder about the folks making such calls. If you haven't already had much reason to wonder, already.

The rule of law, like any idea, is subject to the whims and vagaries of politics and the obsession with power that it often entails. The Nuremberg Laws, in Germany, that compelled Jews to turn themselves into the state to be murdered, and Fugitive Slave Laws, in the United States, which required that Americans betray their consciences and turn in runaway slaves, are excellent examples of the rule of law being used to serve the purposes of those obsessed with power at the expense of conscience and morality. It has been used for such purposes since the beginning of humanity. That is why Montesquieu developed the idea of separation of powers, to check this tendency (not to eliminate it, which is impossible). In fact, it has repeatedly been used and abused in exactly this way during this political period, by both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans.

But the ideas of people like the Baron de Montesquieu, embodied in the U.S. Constitution, ultimately govern this question.

And thank goodness for that. Without such ideas, we would all be subject to the vagaries of power that despotic governments that Montesquieu was critiquing were wont to engage in. We are subject to those vagaries, now, in liberal societies, as well.

But it is our liberal values and the ideas they give birth to, not the rule of law, that ultimately correct for such vagaries.

If you doubt that, keep watching. There's still a lot of life to be lived.

Involuntary volunteerism

Jonah Goldberg echoes my concerns about compulsory voluntarism (is it possible for an idea to be more internally contradictory?) and intrusive and expensive welfare states and their impact on genuine and voluntary contributions of money and service.

Forced servitude in America

"It's funny that, when the right seeks to use the government to impose its values, the left screams about brainwashing and propaganda. When the left tries it, the right thunders about social engineering. But when left and right agree -- as seems to be the case on national service -- who's left to complain? As ever, the slipperiest slopes are greased with the snake oil of 'bipartisanship.'

After all, Obama's hardly alone. Sen. John McCain is a passionate supporter of Washington-led (and paid-for) 'volunteerism,' as is President Bush. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and John Edwards both campaigned for the presidency on compulsory national service.

Perhaps thanks to the JFK cult, which sees the refrain 'Ask not what your country can do for you ...' as an all-purpose writ for social meddling, even the idealistic hipster crowd is on board. Devotees of Rolling Stone and MTV, who normally preen like cats in a pool of sunshine over their alleged libertarianism when the issue is sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, see nothing wrong, and everything right, with involuntary servitude -- as long as we just call it 'voluntary.'

Volunteerism is good. But why does every good thing need to be orchestrated by government? Most people think that churchgoing is a good thing. Does that mean the government should fund churches? That's what they do in Europe and -- surprise! -- most pews sit empty.

Americans are vastly more generous with their time and their money than Europeans. According to social demographer Arthur C. Brooks, in 1995 (the last year international comparative data on giving was available), Americans gave 3 1/2 times as much money to charities and causes as the French, seven times more than the Germans and 14 times more than the Italians.

In 1998, Americans also volunteered 21% more than the Swiss and 32% more than Germans -- two countries with compulsory national service. And yet we're continually told we should emulate them so that America too can have a "culture of service."

But we already have a healthier culture of service without -- as Obama would do -- doubling the size of the Peace Corps or pushing another 250,000 into AmeriCorps.

Indeed, there's ample evidence that countries with intrusive and expensive welfare states stifle their citizens' spirit of charity and volunteerism precisely because people conclude that every problem should be solved by government. Merely paying your taxes substitutes for charity, and cleaning up roadside litter for two years absolves you from doing anything more.

Time magazine's Richard Stengel speaks for many who insist that American government must consecrate everything. 'The reason private volunteerism is so high is precisely that confidence in our public institutions is so low,' he wrote last year in praise of universal national service. 'People see volunteering not as a form of public service but as an antidote for it.'

Really? I would have thought that the world's most charitable and voluntaristic nation -- one with a tradition of service that predates the decline of confidence in public institutions by generations -- might see volunteering as a good in and of itself.

This is the real problem with national service mania: It seeks to fix what ain't broke. No, national service isn't slavery. But it contributes to a slave mentality, at odds with American tradition. It assumes that work not done for the government isn't really for the 'common good.'

'The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society,' Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously observed. 'The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.'

Moynihan was right, of course. But politics can change a culture for the worse too. Indoctrinating an entire generation with the idea that public service is something you do at the government's behest would not only steamroll the culture, it would help fewer people in the process."

He's right, of course. And from the Sentator's quotation, I never thought I'd find myself squarely to the right of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but I have to say that, generally, the conservative truth he cites is true and the liberal truth, at best, offers a short term answer when people are not being their brothers' keeper as well as is needed.

The idea that people and culture should be largely responsible for such matters is one that challenges many old-school liberals and conservatives, I am well aware. But it is a sign of a stronger culture and a stronger commitment to public and private good, not a sign of the apocalypse, left or right.

It'd be nice if American political leaders, as much as the American people, would step up in their commitment to that stronger vision of America and the world.

Until then, it's hardly worthy of us to pretend like our current efforts are really doing the job.

The food crisis and the law of unintended consquences

The New Republic, for the first time in a very long time, has a column worth citing, by Suzie Khimm.

How to feed the hungriest

"One real solution, as others have discussed, is agricultural development: getting seed, fertilizer, and machinery to farmers, and getting roads built so that these countries can feed themselves. This week, the World Bank announced that it would nearly doubled the money lent to such efforts in Africa, and Bank president Robert Zoellick has asked the G8 leaders convening next week to make similar pledges.

Unfortunately, it will be more difficult to muster the political will to look beyond short-term handouts and boost long-term rural development in starving nations. In this country, there’s the absurd boondoggle of the American food aid system, which demands that food be sourced in the U.S. and shipped on American vessels--a concession to powerful U.S. agribusiness and maritime interests. If food aid were sourced locally and regionally instead, it would create a big market incentive for agricultural development, ultimately alleviating the problem, or at least substantially diminishing its severity.

More broadly speaking, we also need to overcome the lingering paternalism that still colors our ideas about how to help the world’s hungriest--an attitude that assumes that the way to feed the wide-eyed children on television is by paying for their dinner tomorrow. There’s no doubt that emergency food aid is vitally necessary in the midst of the current crisis, and initiatives like the World Food Program have made aid efforts more sustainable. But the impact of America’s altruism would be many times greater if it were also directed to support less glamorous, screen-ready causes--such as, say, fertilizer.

The catch is that programs like international agricultural development are usually funded by governments, rather than private donors, and Americans continue to prefer voluntary private giving over mandatory public contributions. But the appeal to reconsider our conception of charity has to start somewhere. Give a man a fish, anyone?"

Khimm writes earlier in the article:

"For sure, the rural poor aren’t immune to the fluctuations of the international market: the upsurge in prices is destabilizing their countries’ economies, hampering government assistance programs, and hobbling international food aid efforts. (America’s food donations have been halved due to rising costs.)"

That is undoubtedly true, of course. But does it occur to anyone that, given the American and most peoples' penchant for voluntary private giving rather than mandatory public contributions, perhaps drops in food donations have also been due, as with the economic downturn) to a more repressive economic enviroment (moderately more trade protectionism, increased domestic regulation, a substantially increased Federal deficit and spending, increased and more public prosecutions of business owners and executives, the more frequent and pronounced use of public pressure to influence business activity and public policy, etc.)? Probably not, since everyone is going hog-wild with an approach that has produced so many poor results. What's one more, dumbasses must ask themselves?

Khimm is right about the bigger picture of international aid efforts (and similar reasoning warrants a transition to voluntary commitments in domestic welfare efforts, as well, in America and elsewhere). In fact, what she is articulating about powerful domestic industries using government power to further their own interests in such efforts is exactly one of the more serious concerns that Milton Friedman had of government-led market intervetion efforts. And it is pretty clear to me that the same self-centered manipulations is true of politicians, activists, and of all political actors (and all people, really) of all ideological and other stripes, until the consequences of such activity makes clear the failure of such manipulation.

As one Israeli diplomat described the origins of the nation of Israel, sometimes governments do all the wrong things before they hit upon the right thing. The same could be said of people, generally, really.

And the food crisis is but one more example in the long line of how even the most worthy causes are subject to the law that governs all humanity: the law of unintended consquences.

Maybe we should step back from the brink and reevaluate. If we want to do any good, that is.

"We need to finish the job"

This is exactly how I feel. And I am more and more ambivalent to who does it the more I have to watch this mindless election spectacle.



American politicians, in their mad and random grabs for power, have a way of producing apathy and cynicism, I must say.

And these folks serve as a valuable antidote to all that bullshit.

It's nice to have something worth believing in this Presidential election.

It's Fox News, bitch

I've never understood why so many liberals took Fox News so seriously as a threat to American democracy. It's like taking American Idol or the New Kids on the Block seriously as a threat to democracy. Ratings matter most to those who could give a shit about their credibility. Fox News, like professional wrestling, has more important things to think about than how popular they are.

And the Daily Show's John Oliver makes the powerful argument for why Fox News has defied the elites to demonstrate that popularity and journalistic integrity make for a big can of political whoopass.



Hot damn. Feel the integrity.



How does Fox News do it? Because they're just better than you. And tougher. And show a lot more cleavage.

At some point, someone's going to have to give Fox their props and carve out another spot on Mount Rushmore for Roger Ailes.

For now, Fox has an audience of millions. And, if you laught at that, elitist, just ask Britney Spears how much a million is. She'll show you how counting and popularity compensate for being a laughing stock.

It's Fox News, bitch.



It's her perogative.

Stepping back for the big picture

I have to say that I very much admire the efforts of General David Petraeus in his capacity as Commander of the Multinational Forces in Iraq. He is one of the more thoughtful people to have at that command and one of the best prepared, intellectually, to handle that job.



There is a part of me that envies his willingness and capacity to focus on the smaller picture of achieving success, in the form of sustainable Iraqi-led security amidst the violence that plagues that situation, before stepping back for the big picture.

I am a consonant big picture thinker. It is my biggest strength, I think. It is also a tendency that has got me in much trouble, often.

I am not someone who easily walks away from a situation and says, "It's not my problem," or "It's not my job." It's just not in me. In no job or responsibility I have had in a very long time have I ever been able to shirk an ultimate sense of responsibility. I have watched many friends and colleagues do it. I have had many bosses who do it. The vast majority, by far, in both categories. I have watched many politicians, journalists, academics, activists and various public servants and observers do it. Probably the vast majority in that category, as well, in the bigger picture.

But I've just never been able or willing to think that way. I take responsibility for all of the most serious responsibilities that we and I face very, very seriously. I just don't think I'm seriously capable of anything else in my life, at this point.

Maybe that's a mistake. It's definitely unconventional, I know. But I do think we'd be better off if more people reasoned and thought like this rather than less.

In the last 3-6 years of my life, for the first time in my life, I've started to pull back, some, in my heart. At least, I've been more unsure of this commitment than at any point in my life.

The world has just gotten meaner in that time. We've rationalized our worst instincts. And, worst of all, some have had the audacity to call it "progressive."

But progress can't happen when we rationalize our worst instincts.

Progress is only what happens when we embrace our best instincts, and take responsibility for our worst instincts.

Everything else is bullshit and a lie. And it doesn't matter how many times we tell a lie. It never becomes true with repetition.

Hitler had to learn that lesson the hard way. Stalin did as well. Every most power-obsessed leader and follower in the world has had to learn that difficult and destructive lesson the hard way.

Castro believes he has escaped that lie. As does Kim Jong Il. As does Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As does Hu Jintao. As does Robert Mugabe. As does Myanmar's military leader Senior General Than Shwe. As does Sudanese President Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir. As does Ismail Haniyeh. As does Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. As does every dictator, terrorist, and thug who has ever walked the earth.

None of them have. None of them will.

Progress is not something we can thugishly impose on one another. Progress, as David Petraeus' career illustrates, is something that can only occur patiently, honestly, and with more decency and good will, over time.

Many have tried to define progress as the retreat of those who they engage in political warfare with and their ability to win ground for their causes, by hard or soft means, as Joseph Nye might put what he says now of soft power, in my correspondence with him, as not a more liberal commitment to the use of power - a commitment more consistent with our liberal and democratic values - but merely a social scientific term for less aggressive forms of manipulation and power.

But this is not only a dishonest view of progress and policy, a view that could fit the objectives of groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Nazis, and the Communists, as much as genuinely liberal and democratic progressive forces. It is a foolish notion of power and politics, which assumes that retreats signal final losses that they do not, in fact, signify.

Progress happens despite such setbacks, always, to anyone doing an honest reading of liberal democratic history. And no effort to rationalize such setbacks as actual progress have either made them so or convinced the vast majorities of liberal democratic peoples that they are, in fact, so, over the long term.

If you doubt that, I suggest you spend a small portion of your time studying Nazi or Soviet history, both of which were premised upon ideologies of progress, both of which convinced many people that such a premise was true, and both of which failed to stand the test of time that a more honest accounting would provide, over time.

Sometimes I wish I could just focus on the small picture, so that I could avoid the trouble that challenging sacrosanct notions of the big picture often creates for me. It would make my life easier, perhaps.

But it wouldn't be honest. And what I have to offer is too important to pull back from it, now, I think.

But it would nice. To just be a normal person who takes what life gives me, more, rather than someone wanting so much more from life.

This must have been how Hobbes felt. He was just trying to develop an idea of governance that would transcend the chaos created by power-hungry partisans that plagued his time. That is my same concern.

Though, knowing how few people actually know who Thomas Hobbes or Baron de Montesquieu or John Locke or even John Stuart Mill is, it is tempting to want to abandon it all and pursue something a little more lucrative and popular and less challenging and controversial.

But without challenge and controversy, and all of the serious disincentives to this work, there never can be real progress.

Everything else is a lie, at worst, and a half-truth, at best.

I want something better. For my kids and future generations. And for me.

And that is worth stepping back for.

Joseph Merrick, and what strength and courage looks like

If you have not seen The Elephant Man, before, I highly recommend it. It's David Lynch's and John Hurt's strongest film, I think.

I'm watching it, right now. It's the first movie I remember really making me sob as a kid. It's a very beautiful film.

"I am not an animal! I am a human being! I...am...a man!"

I cry harder, today, than I did then. It's a good sign for my humanity, I think.

Jospeh Merrick, referred to as John, in the movie and by others, because of a mistake in the book by Sir Frederick Treves, is what true strength, courage and dignity look like. I can't imagine living through the numerous cruelties and indignities he experienced and maintaining his gentleness of spirit.

It's more strength than I have ever known, that is for sure.

Too often humanity confuses cruelty, aggression, and power with strength. At times aggression and power are needed. But their abuse and use when they cause unnecessary hurt and tragedy is cruelty. Their rationalization, as Lord Acton wisely observed, has been the bane of human civilization. And the cruelty that is the fact of their abuse is one quality of the human condition that needs no excuse. As someone who has known and been responsible for cruelty, as much as aggression and power, I can say that with confidence.

Joseph Merrick reminds us what genuine strength and dignity really look like.



As John Hurt says in the special features, "Well, I would say that if you can manage to get to the end of The Elephant Man without being moved, I don't think that you'd be someone I'd want to know."

I'd want to know you. But I'm not sure I could respect anyone who took that attitude.

John Merrick took his life. It is an unfortunate tragedy for me. I wish I could say that I would have more strength in the face of the challenges he faced. I hope I would. But the strength it took him to face a life of such unparalleled cruelty and infringements on his dignity is ultimately unknowable to me.

Joseph Merrick's autobiography ends with this poem by Isaac Watts.

Were I so tall to reach the pole,
Or grasp the ocean with my span,
I must be measured by my soul,
The mind's the standard of the man.

I am blessed for having known something of him.

Our inadequacies and mine

I just had an email exchange, in the last few days, with one of my oldest and best friends, about Jesse Helms.

My friend and I were college roommates, student and coach on our college debate team (Carson was the strongest debate coach I ever had, by far), fellowtraveling liberals, and good friends.

We both came from a ideological background of young liberals who had, generally, grown up hating Jesse Helms for his unfailing bigotry, intolerance, and mean-spiritedness. Amongst liberals, Jesse Helms was everything that fueled liberal self-righteousness. He was everything that liberals hated amongst what they thought was common to conservatives, without them acknowledging it. He was stupid, base, narrow-minded, and nasty. And his polarizing attitudes and politics earned him the derision of liberals. And I was writing a friend who could share in my revulsion for this man and his legacy.

I still believe those things are true. Jesse got better by the end. He embraced more compassion with his advocacy of tripling the American foreign aid budget for addressing the crisis of AIDS in Africa. He never apologized publicly, that I heard, or took any real responsibility for his racism and homophobia. But he did move away from his racism, at least, hiring none other than James Meredith, the first black student accepted to the University of Mississippi, and I hope his repulsion for homosexuality and homosexuals. And he showed real compassion for the millions suffering with AIDS, disease, and poverty in Africa and much of the world.

More importantly, Jesse had many good qualities, all along, that liberals, like me, overlooked in their own revulsion for his hateful and small-minded attitudes.

Jesse Helms took American freedom, sovereignty and his opposition to the totalitarian Soviet dictatorship seriously. His advocacy of the cause of Soviet dissident, Miroslav Medvid, who was disgracefully returned to Soviet hands by President Ronald Reagan days before a American-Soviet summit, helped make far less likely that Medvid would face KGB retribution. Helms was a public and needed critic of the United Nations, both of its flaws and of real and potential incursions on American sovereignty and self-determination.

Helms took many stands that I agree with, today, generally for reasons very different than the Senator. I share his concerns about forced busing and forms of integration that attempted to force racist whites in the South, and racist blacks, for that matter, to overcome their racism, a task that force could not possibly accomplish. I also share his skepticism of government taking on unsustainable commitments to the welfare of Americans and people around the world that I think are better and would be more generously funded by private and voluntary donors, long term.

Whereas Jesse Helms often seemed to oppose such measures out of sympathy with the racism and small-heartedness of too many of his fellow North Carolinans and Americans, sentiments that, his apologists' protestations to the contrary, I believe he often shared, I oppose such measures based on what I think is a more realistic assessment of what people are and will be willing to do in changing attitudes in more compassionate and generous directions, to genuinely look out for the interests of their fellow Americans and human beings, in the most sustainable way possible, voluntarily and of their own free will, and to do so in the most honest, proactive, diverse, caring, generous, successful, and responsible ways possible.

So Jesse and I differ in some pretty substantial ways. Where much of Jesse's worldview was animated by his bitterness, pettiness, and opposition to those many things in the world he hated, I am primarily driven by my love for humanity and others and my genuine concern for their welfare and policies most likely to care for their welfare. I do think that is the most real difference between Jesse Helms and, I hope, many of his fellow Americans and citizens of the world, and much of the reason why I was offended by the authority he wielded in one of the most powerful representative bodies in the world.

Having said all that, I saw something else, these past few days.

I saw one of the clearest examples of the aphorism that I have worked to live by in my life probably more than any other.

It was an aphorism by a common hero of Jesse Helms' and mine. It was a great man who lived thousands of years ago who was persecuted and murdered for his commitment to his fellow men and women. And he had one of the most astute and powerful observations of the human condition of any I have known.

Jesus of Nazareth, in the years previous to 26-36 A.D./C.E., made what I regard as one of the most notable comments on the human condition of any I have ever heard. There are many variations on it. But the essence, as found in the King James biblical version, is this:

"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"

I've always said that Jesus' question was better aphorism than approbation. It's a better straightfoward observation of human nature than something to chastise our fellow human beings with. And I very much doubt that Jesus meant it as a chastisement, given that a genuine commitment to not passing judgment was a fundamental commitment of his life and teachings.

I am a soft atheist (I attend the Christian church I attended as a child, Unity Church, and find more in common with Christian believers than I find difference) and was a Christian youth leader as a young man. I am a spiritual ecumenical and a political indepenent, today. I am atheist as a technical matter; I don't believe there is enough evidence to warrant the existence of a supernatural being that runs the affairs of humanity. I have no particular stake in the legacy of Jesus of Nazareth as messiah, as the son of God, as a great leader, as a great man, or anything of the kind.

I just believe that he was a great man. And that this teaching he had to offer, along with his commitment to love, compassion, forgiveness and other central virtues of the human condition, are some of the most important and too often denigrated virtues that humanity has to offer.

It is a central commitment of my life to treat others as I would want to be treated. To love others as I would want to be loved.

And I realized over the course of the last few days that this has been a serious failing of mine, a beam that has sat in my eye for most of my life, while I concentrated on the splinters in the eye of Senator Helms.

Jesse Helms had ugliness to be repulsed by, that is for sure.

But that is the whole point of Jesus' teaching.

The bitterness, pettiness, and ugliness of others does not justify our own.

And I have been justifying my own bitterness, pettiness, and ugliness toward Jesse Helms my whole life in the name of pointing to the same in Jesse.

I am embarrassed by this blindspot. Not because I haven't experienced it before. I have experienced it a million times, before, of course. I am embarrassed because it was the very same blindspot that I so abhorred in Jesse as a young man.



And the truth was that I was being harsh with Jesse in the very same way that I felt he was harsh with the world.

And I am embarrassed that it took Jesse's death for me to see that.



It's one of the wisest observations about human nature that I have ever known:

We are more likely to see see the splinter in our neighbor's eye than the beam in our own. We are more likely to see the faults in others than the faults in ourselves. And we are likely to use others' shortcomings to rationalize our own. It is one of the wisest observations about politics, nevertheless people. And it is true of me as much as anyone else.

I'm sorry, Jesse. I'm sorry all I could see was your faults and not my own frailties. And, worse, that I used your weakneses to excuse my own.

Godspeed, Senator Helms. Rest in peace, Jesse.

What it means to be an American

Red Skelton reminds us what it means to be an American.



And Michelle Malkin, with whom I generally find more diagreement than agreement, posts this really beautiful video of Ray Charles' God Bless America.



Red gets to the heart of it, I think. To be an American means to be pledged to one anothers' freedom. Not to power over one another or even power over other nations.

It means to be pledged to freedom. Mine and yours. For all of us.

It'll be nice to live in an America, some day, where that is more true than not.

The Final Say

As Gawker put it, the final word in any argument.



You gotta admit. It's pretty goddamn cute. And disgusting.

Leveraging free speech

Geert Wilders has opened up a shitstorm. And good for him.



This is one of the more serious places where the glorification of pressure and leverage is going to break down. As Muslim and Arab "moderates" try to leverage the most cherished freedoms in liberal democracies, namely, in this case, the freedom of speech. The inside/outside game of so many radicals and collaborating moderates, here and abroad, is a fascinating, dishonest, and ugly spectacle, let me tell you. I'd admire it's cleverness more if so many people didn't get manipulated, hurt, and killed in its name. It is the rationale for radical Islam and its associated terrorism, after all. It's the rationale of every bully with too weak of arguments to persuade others of their better reasoning.

Jordan's Legal Jihad

As Stephen Brown from my favorite far right publication (I think sarcasm just literally dripped from my keyboard), Frontpage Magazine, writes:

"In a brazen attempt to stifle free speech in the West, a Jordanian court recently summoned twelve European citizens to answer criminal charges of blasphemy and inciting hatred.

Among those sought by the court is Geert Wilders, the Dutch liberal politician who made the anti-Islamist film, Fitna. Released last March, the Dutch MP’s production caused an uproar in Islamic countries, since it equated Islam with violence. Now a Middle Eastern court would like to prosecute Wilders for the 'crime.' (Ironically, a Dutch court dropped charges against him for inciting hatred against Muslims with his film the day before the Jordanian court issued its subpoena.)

The Jordanian court’s move is only the most ambitious attempt to silence debate about Islam. Until now, the preferred strategy has been to file civil lawsuits in western courts to intimidate critics. The latest version of what may be called the legal jihad is even more disturbing.

In one subpoena, issued in early June, the Jordanian court ordered ten Danish newspaper editors to travel to Jordan for the 'crime' of having republished the “Mohammad cartoons” last February. The cartoons, first published in 2005, were also greeted with disturbances in Muslim lands. Seventeen Danish newspapers republished the controversial cartoons as a response to the discovery of an Islamist plot to murder Kurt Westergaard. Westergaard, a caricaturist, drew the most famous of those cartoons in the form of Mohammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban, for which he is also included in the summons.

This new campaign of intimidation against the West is being mounted by a Jordanian organization calling itself 'Messenger of Allah Unite Us', which is made up of '...media outlets, professional associations, parliamentarians and thousands of volunteers.' This organization, according to one account, arose as a 'civilized response' to the Mohammad cartoons’ republication in 17 Danish papers last winter, after which it took the matter to a Jordanian court and successfully had charges pressed against the Danes, and later against Wilders...

Citizens of western countries who criticize Islam, and are even willing to face lawsuits in civil courts their own countries for doing so, may now exercise restraint if they risk facing criminal charges in a Muslim country. Especially if the charge is blasphemy and it is being tried by a sharia court, which can impose a death sentence (The Danes and Wilders, a Jordanian lawyer said, are facing a maximum of three years in jail).

As well, critics of Islam who have outstanding warrants against them from courts in Muslim countries will have their freedom of movement restricted, since travel abroad will now be problematic. Wilders expressed this sentiment, saying he will be careful when he travels now. Such targeted individuals, like Wilders, will obviously have reservations travelling to a third country where Jordan could file an extradition application or may already have an extradition treaty in place.

But what is most disturbing is that an Islamic country would dare subpoena citizens of another state for an action not committed within its borders but in a land where no laws were broken. Besides being meant as a weapon of intimidation, this tactic also represents a frightening extension of Islamic law into the heart of western countries.

But perhaps most ominously, this incredibly brazen measure shows that even a small Islamic country like Jordan has no fear of Europe. And, indeed, no retaliatory response met the Jordanian court’s action against European citizens.

Europe’s appeasement is also evident in the second part of Messenger For Allah group’s anti-blasphemy campaign. This part calls for a commercial boycott of all Danish and Dutch products in Jordan and of anything associated with the two countries, such as airlines and shipping companies. The boycott campaign actually began late last February but was suspended due to the losses Jordanian importers were incurring that had large stocks of unsold Danish and Dutch products.

The boycott, however, was resumed June 10. One million posters containing the logos of banned Dutch and Danish products will eventually hang in Jordanian businesses under the title 'Living Without It.' The boycott will also be spread by television and radio ads, t-shirts, and bumper stickers.

Dutch and Danish companies were instructed they could get their products off the boycott list if they, essentially, betrayed their nations’ values and their countrymen. The affected companies, according to The Jordan Times, were told to denounce the Dutch film and the Danish cartoons in the media both in Jordan and in at least one publication in their own country, support the Jordanian legal action taken against Wilders and the Danish newspaper people as well as the creation of an international anti-blasphemy law.

Several companies have already complied. When informed of the stipulation that requires a denunciation be published in a Dutch newspaper, a spokesman for a Dutch food company that exports to Jordan said his company '…would print it if needed.'

But such groveling will only buy these companies a little time, as another Dutch company discovered. It had immediately distanced itself from Wilders and Fitna after the film’s release last March but still had products placed on the boycott posters.

The Dutch government did not fare much better in its appeasement efforts. One Dutch embassy official in Jordan said he was surprised his country was included in the boycott in the first place since his government had already printed statements in the Jordanian press distancing itself from Wilders’ film.

And, naturally, the Jordanian blackmailers’ demands have not stopped. Only last week, Dutch and Danish companies were told to put the boycott posters up in their own countries if they did not want their products blacklisted.

Perhaps to further intimidate Holland’s and Denmark’s populations, the Jordanians are also claiming their boycott campaign is causing these countries huge financial losses of over four billion Euros in four months. A Danish official, however, says that is ridiculous since his country only exported about $50 million worth of goods to Jordan in 2007.

The overall goal of the Messenger of Allah group’s legal and commercial campaign against the two European states, it says, is the enactment of 'a universal law that prohibits the defamation of any prophet or religion', especially of the Prophet Mohammad. Islamic countries are already pushing for such a law at the United Nations.

'The boycott is a means but not an end,' said Zakaria Sheikh, a spokesperson for Messenger of Allah Unite Us. 'We are not aiming at collective punishment, but when the Danish and Dutch people put pressure on their governments to support the creation of an international law, we are achieving our goal.'"

This is what is at stake, for those who romanticize pressure and repression as a governing philosophy.

The beauty is that it undermines itself, long term. Hence the passionate defense of principles like free speech in liberal democratic countries (those who advocate pressure and repression have to wonder, how, exactly, did repression of free speech for thousands of years fall apart if pressure and repression work so well? The answer is that brave people like Voltaire, the Baron de Montequieu, and the like happened, made stronger arguments, and inspired generations to embrace a liberty that had, till that point, been regularly abrogated).

Embracing and defending freedom and liberal values, as the British on-line video website, Liveleak, does in its airing of videos that openly debate this matter, is exactly what best embodies those liberal values.

Those values and the free speech that people like Voltaire and Montesquieu, Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison, and all of our liberal forefunners risked their lives and their liberty to guarantee for us, today, mean that films like Fitna, the Geert Wilders' movie that has attracted so much attention and derision, Wilders' critics, and all of those who enter the marketplace of ideas should have the freedom to air their views.



What is at stake is, "Are we going to look more like the radical Islamists, the Zimbabwe government, the North Korea's Communist leadership, and other repressive forces we are rightly opposed to? Or are we going to look more like Americans and embrace the freedoms we say we love."



During this political period, liberal democracies have chosen a direction closer to radical Islam and repression as a governing philosophy. This article makes clear what a dangerous trend that could be.

I hope, for our sake, we choose freedom. Because freedom is why I love America and the Western world, not something to fear.



Fearing freedom should be left to radical Islam.

The rest of us have an honest democracy to tend to.

"A proper debate"

The Economist gets at exactly the most pressing problem in the current race.

America at its best

"For what America's voters, and the world's fascinated spectators, have not had so far is much of a policy debate. Yes, there were bone-aching arguments between Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton as to whose plan for health care would work best. And yes, Mr Obama refused to endorse Mrs Clinton's bad plan for a gas-tax holiday. But on the whole, it has been a policy-light contest for the simple reason that there was very little to choose between the two Democrats either on domestic or on foreign policy. Small wonder, then, that the Democratic race focused on character more than content.

All that has now changed. With his victory speech in Minneapolis on June 3rd, Mr Obama took the fight to Mr McCain. Though there are a fair number of things on which Mr Obama and Mr McCain, admirably, agree (a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, the immediate closure of Guantánamo and a more multilateral approach to diplomacy, to name just three), there is a lot more that they disagree over.

The choice will be starkest over Iraq. Mr McCain backed the war in the first place, and he proposes to stay the course there no matter how long it takes. Mr Obama opposed the “dumb” war from the start and has pledged to withdraw all combat troops within 16 months, though he has lately wriggled a little on this commitment. Although most Americans now think the war was a mistake, polls suggest that Mr McCain's determination to see it through may stand him in better stead with voters than Mr Obama's determination to pull out whatever the consequences, especially since the tide of war seems at last to have shifted firmly in America's favour. In general, Mr McCain will offer a much more robust approach to security issues than Mr Obama—and that may help him.

That said, the war is clearly receding as a political issue, just as concerns about recession are growing. America no longer has a Hummer economy (General Motors is considering selling off the gas guzzler). And there are clear choices about how to fix it. Mr McCain offers orthodox supply-side solutions, stressing deregulation, free trade, competitiveness and the use of market mechanisms to cure the problems in everything from health care to education to pensions. The trouble for him is that America is already a pretty deregulated place, and many voters feel that globalisation has brought them much less than was promised (and bankers a lot more). Mr Obama offers a very different vision: more spending on education and training, an expensive expansion of health care to (almost) all Americans and better benefits for the unemployed. His problem will be convincing sceptics that his sums add up, though it may well be that voters, battered by falling house prices and rising oil prices prefer not to worry too much about that.

Both candidates have their flaws and their admirable points; the doughty but sometimes cranky old warrior makes a fine contrast with the inspirational but sometimes vaporous young visionary. Voters now have those five months to study them before making up their minds (and The Economist will be doing the same). But, on the face of it, this is the most impressive choice America has had for a very long time."

I'm not, at all, convinced that these two candidates are the most impressive choices America has had for a very long time. Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt, among others, are tough competition for strong Presidential leadership. Plenty of candidates who didn't win their parties' nominations or general elections, like Bobby Kennedy and Barry Goldwater, to name just two, who were fairly impressive choices in the rear view of history.

But these two candidates were the strongest two choices, I thought at the beginning of this race, if only for the most important fact of politics: they were the two most likely to have an honest and open-ended policy debate and discussion. Every other candidate Democrats and Republicans had to offer were either too power-obsessed, one of the most serious problems for political leaders and observers to bring to the table in a liberal democracy, or too full of sanctimony and self-righteousness to be genuinely capable of an honest, open-ended, pragmatic policy discussion. When your whole modus operandi in politics and in life is to prove how right you are all the time and never be open to your mistakes or failures, you are no use to anyone, not even to your own ego. Because you have become incapable of learning from your own mistakes and not just the mistakes of others. And far too many in both packs, in 2008, suffered this folly.

The strength that these two candidates bring, amidst this power-obsessed and all-too-mindless electoral season, is a more honest and open-minded and open-hearted commitment to the welfare of their fellow citizens than any of their competitors.

Now the question is: will they put those open minds and hearts to good use and have an honest debate?

And it is the candidates, and not the various advocates, who will have to bring leadership on this question. And the candidate who can both bring better policy ideas - John McCain, on balance, at least in regards to the war in Iraq, the economy, and health care, to my mind, at this point; Barack Obama's better proposals around diplomacy are an important strength that weigh heavily in my mind to his advantage - and greater leadership to the matter of engaging an honest and sober debate and discussion and bucking the pressure from all quarters to engage more dishonestly, with strong-arming rather than debate, will win my vote.

If both candidates cave to the pressure from both their own wings and various circles that they must work with on critical issues, especially the war and matters of international security and diplomacy, we will all be the poorer for it. And not least because Presidential candidates caving to pressure is hardly leadership. Leadership is having a strong and largely accurate vision and being willing to tell activists to go to hell as you make the really important calls. Candidates who do what they are told are not leaders. They are puppets.

And America is worthy of more than puppets to run her government. She deserves leadership.

A proper debate is a good first step.

On forgiveness

As someone looking to do good in the world and be a decent human being, for real, I take forgiveness seriously.

Honestly, I've always been pretty clear that all the talk about the "unforgiveable" was one long excuse for why people do not take the virtue of forgiveness seriously enough. Clearly, there are very painful and difficult traumas that people face all over the world. And forgiveness is most certainly not easy work.

But it is a central virtue in Judeo-Christian and amongst more universal moral values for a reason.

And I never understood why people who did not take such a virtue seriously thought that they should be seriously listened to on important moral matters at all.

Because the truth is that they shouldn't.

This is such a great story, in that vein, on so many different levels.

Acts of Reconciliation

"A couple of weeks ago, the 29-year-old won the top documentary prize at the Student Academy Awards in Los Angeles for "As We Forgive," her film about reconciliation in Rwanda between survivors of the 1994 genocide and its perpetrators. Previous Student Oscar winners include Trey Parker, Bob Saget and Spike Lee.

Hinson's film, begun as an MFA thesis at American University, captures victims' meetings with their freed attackers. A decade after the extermination of one in eight Rwandans, after the Hutus turned on the Tutsis and even some of their own, the two tribes had to learn to live together. (The government has released more than 60,000 convicts connected to the genocide to ease prison overcrowding, according to the BBC.)

In the film we meet Rosaria, who pulls up the hem of her dress to reveal mounds of raised scar tissue running down her legs. Hacked and beaten during the genocide, she now lives in a house built for her by Saveri, the man who killed her sister. Another survivor, Chantale, who lost 30 family members, meets John, the stooped gangly man who killed her father. He can't face her; her eyes are embers. 'Remember all your old neighbors,' she says. Yet the next day, Chantale begins working to build a house for another ex-con who confessed his crimes.

For Hinson, it was proof that the 'transcendent filters through every aspect of life' and also that the world is really messed up...

The story ultimately appealed to Hinson for its reversal of the genre's cliches. Instead of being a tale of African ruin and our reluctance to help, it was a 'tremendously hopeful' picture of people learning to forgive in circumstances, she says, in which we never could. Hinson liked to believe she herself had learned something.

Two weeks after leaving Rwanda, in August 2006, the belief was tested. Her ex-fiance called, 4 1/2 years after their breakup. 'I feel kinda crazy,' she recalls him saying. 'And I still love you.'

Tom is the guy's name. Today he says of the breakup: 'I was just terrified of that level of commitment. I had come from a family that had kind of a bad marriage.'

He reconsiders.

'Ninety percent of it was me just being a very lame guy. A child in a man's body. Just a guy with a lot to learn.'

He visited her a month later. He had gone to a nondenominational seminary in those silent intervening years, studied to become a priest and all the while 'worked with a lot of trauma victims, a lot of people who were recovering from some pretty hard stuff, rape victims.'

'I dealt a lot in the language of forgiveness,' he adds.

Tom had kept the first ring all that time. 'I couldn't get rid of it. It was that weird kind of remote possibility sense that maybe if I ever get my act together...'

He gave it to her, and a second one. He bent down on one knee in the old-fashioned way and asked the question. Not of nuptials, not at first. There was a more pressing matter.

'I said, 'Laura, do you forgive me?' And she said, 'Yes.' And getting married was almost the denouement, the anticlimax.'

Today Tom Hinson and Laura Waters Hinson live in the District, where several documentary companies are based and where he pastors at two Anglican churches. Laura graduated from American last year, and the Student Oscar got her thinking about moving to Los Angeles. 'It depends on what Laura wants to do in her career,' says the man who gave and took away and gave again.

'Our marriage,' she says, 'is built on forgiveness.'"

Desmond Tutu is actually the person who helped me see this more clearly. His work on truth and reconciliation has been so critical in his home country of South Africa, but also all over the world in places as diverse as East Timor and Iraq, to recover, as peoples and as individuals, from the most traumatic circumstances that life has to offer. In fact, such reconciliation efforts are critical to a political resolution of the most serious conflict that America faces today, our war in Iraq.

Recognizing this very important part of the political landscape is one of the many things that persuaded me of the importance of the arguments, coverage, and understanding of the situation by the military historian I regard as the most significant during this Iraq War, Frederick Kagan. Kagan, better than other military historians and those covering the war, understands the politics of the situation in Iraq and the United States and the role that our military efforts play in creating a more sustainable political situation and the way that the politics, in Iraq, America, and around the world, shapes the success or failure of our military efforts in that war.

To not understand the role of reconciliation after major hostilities, especially genocide and ethnic, religious, and other warfare, is to misunderstand the whole enterprise in a very serious way. Kagan's understanding of the role of this process in the situation in Iraq, in substantial ways, not just giving it lip service, was an important reason, among many, convincing me that he was one of the wisest of those offering coverage and advice of the war.

If you have not read Frederick Kagan's exceptional analysis of the situation in Iraq, I highly recommend any of his work on the Weekly Standard website.

Including his most recent piece, which affirms for me my continued commitment to John McCain in the next Presidential election, despite the doubts that have been raised in my mind by some conservatives pressing for an attack on or invasion of Iran.

Voting for Commander in Chief

Much of the problem over the course of this war that President Bush, despite many of his and his apologists' defenses to the contrary, that he misled - which I believe he did - the American people about the reasons for going to war, genuine confidence that he had and that was warranted in those reasons being evidenced and valid, and the degree of seriousness that he gave to legitimate concerns about engaging this war. The President and his apologists can play games with this matter all they might wish. It will not make these matters go away.

And the truth is that what is different about my own thinking on this matter and a substantial number of the Presidents' many detractors- 70% of the American people, by the most recent poll I saw; I really don't give two shits how you try to spin that vis a vis Congress or any or any other evidence of the lack of trust that Americans have in their President, right now, people have got to face up - is that I have forgiven the President his and his Administrations' many, many transgressions. I have not forgotten them. I have no intentions of holding them over his head or trying to nail him for them in any way, at all. In fact, I very much admire the President's commitment to seeing us through to a decent resolution of the situation in Iraq, despite his many mistakes. And I very much care substantially more about what is happening on the ground than I do in grinding any axes whatsoever.

But pretending like this has not seriously undermined our efforts to keep Americans alive, to secure Iraqis, and to promote democracy in this country, makes it more difficult to make the case to the American people that sticking with this war is the right thing to do rather than making it easier.

The President is forgiveable for his mistakes. The 70% of the American people who supported this war, up front, without debating or engaging one another, enough, about how to do it in a way that accounted for the challenges that we have faced in ways that could very well have avoided the thousands of unnecessary deaths of Americans, Iraqis, and others killed in this conflict, each one of them a tragedy, are forgiveable. And, tragically, even these butchers in Rwanda and all over the world are forgiveable for their crimes, (though justice and safety of the Rwandan people, must clearly be served, as well).

They, we, are all forgiveable, because it is the only way to see more clearly our way to a more honest understanding of this conflict and its eventual resolution and of the world and ourselves amidst the emotional clutter that bitterness and petty and even not-so-petty grudges bring. Unresolved feelings, in this vein, do not just plague us with misery until they are resolved. They also blind our vision, as we try to see past the pain in our own hearts that we refuse to acknowledge and make peace with.

The failure to forgive and let go of such pain has been, along with the repressive and brutal activities and policies of those who hang onto such bitterness, the bane of humanity's long history. All of the most remarkable ugliness and evil in the world has been rationalized on this premise. And our way forward, in this war, in policy matters, generally, and in the world at large is and always has been premised on the emotional and intellectual freedom that genuine and honest forgiveness and observations of the world, at large, offers.

The denial of that fact does not make the failures of understanding or choices we make out of that failure of understanding go way. It does not make the tragedies we are responsible for go away. It does not make any of the pain we experience or inflict go way. It only makes us blind to them.

And for that fact - our own blindness to the realities of an often painful and scary world; seeing shadows instead of sunlight, as Plato once wrote - we can and must, as a matter of necessity, be forgiven.

Because it is the only honest way forward.

And the honest way forward is the only direction that we, humanity, will or can ever accept.

What it looks like when everything goes right

Something to celebrate this Independence Day.



This is the way it should work. We do our best. It doesn't always work out this way.

But this is what we shoot for, when we're honest in our work.

In a world of dishonest politics, warfare, counterterrorism, and just life, here's to playing honestly and keeping people alive.

Happy Independence Day.

Jesse Helms (1921-2008)

The Wall Street Journal has the most poignant and magnanimous of the obituaries I have read for the late Jesse Helms.

Jesse Helms

"Since he had to go sometime, Jesse Helms would have liked the idea of dying on July 4. The main cause of his life was defending liberty, especially against Soviet Communism, and so we wouldn't be surprised if he held out to make it to the early hours of our national holiday before dying yesterday at age 86.

Helms was best known as the five-term North Carolina Senator who drove liberals crazy before his retirement in 2002. But his most important role in history arguably took place in 1976, when he and political ally Tom Ellis helped to resurrect Ronald Reagan's fading run for President...

As a Senator, Helms was a forceful anti-Communist, resisting Nixon's detente of the 1970s and promoting U.S. support for dissidents behind the Iron Curtain and freedom fighters in Central America. In one episode in 1985, a 22-year-old Ukrainian sailor in the Soviet merchant marine jumped ship near New Orleans and tried to defect. In a shameful moment, the Reagan Administration returned him to Soviet control days before a U.S.-Soviet summit. Helms took up Miroslav Medvid's cause, and the Ukrainian became a priest after the fall of the Soviet empire. On a visit to the Senator's office 16 years later, Father Medvid credited Helms's public agitation with saving him from KGB retribution...

Helms was a conservative populist, and his campaigns were not above demagoguery. He was a protectionist, reflecting the textile interests in his state. He sometimes abused the Senate's advice and consent power against Presidential nominees – a habit the left has now adopted. His critics have a point that he sometimes exploited racial tensions in the post-1960s South, but Helms himself was no racist and his famous TV spot opposing racial preferences in employment in 1990 barely ran in North Carolina.

Like the political shift across the South and West in the last decades of the 20th century, Helms's political rise was a reaction to the collapse of liberal governance. He sought to reassert traditional American values, and above all to defend U.S. freedom against Soviet tyranny. Like Reagan, he saw more clearly than liberals the moral dimension of the Cold War. Like Reagan, he was a hero of that war."

Wonkette remembers Jesse Helms less generously than I might.

Jesse Helms Finally Dead

"We interrupt your Fourth of July with some Breaking News: Jesse Helms was apparently still alive, and now he’s dead, hooray! He was a sour troll and a bigot, and it’s a testament to every rotten thing about this country that for a quarter century, he was one of the most powerful people in American politics."

Here's the full obituary by Wonkette editor, Ken Layne.

Jesse Helms: American Garbage

And this from the Economist:

Jesse Helms

"JESSE HELMS, the former senator from North Carolina, died today, aged 86. Many will not miss the cantankerous, obstructionist and generally racist Mr Helms. He supported segregationist policies throughout his career, worked against civil rights legislation, filibustered a bill to mark Martin Luther King day as a holiday, was a leading supporter of South Africa's apartheid regime, and ran one of the more racially divisive campaign ads in political history. Yet he claimed not to be racist.

When Bill Clinton nominated an openly homosexual woman as assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1993, Mr Helms recoiled. 'I'm not going to put a lesbian in a position like that,' he said. 'If you want to call me a bigot, fine.' He was a bigot...

It's a shame Fox News wasn't around in his prime. His opposition to communism was also of the "with us or against us variety" that has defined policy in the war on terror. In 2005, Jerry Falwell's Liberty University opened the Jesse Helms School of Government. There, at least, he will be remembered fondly."

But this?

'It's just incredible that he would die on July 4th, the same day of the Declaration of Independence and the same day that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died, and he certainly is a patriot in the mold of those great men,' said former North Carolina GOP Rep. Bill Cobey."

Whatever.

What I remember most about Jesse Helms, growing up as a young liberal, was that he was a bigot, on matters of race, homosexuality, AIDS, and all things that challenged his generally narrow worldview. He talked a big talk about freedom, but delivered much bitter, petty rhetoric and policy. Hardly the stuff of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

Jesse Helms was also a committed anti-Communist, a public U.N. skeptic, and sought some level of absolution from his vile past, I think, with his laudable, later-life efforts to raise money to alleviate the plague of AIDS in Africa.

Jesse and I shared a commitment to freedom, anti-Communism, and American sovereignty.

He also was the public figure in American political life that I most despised for much of my youth. Robert Byrd is a somewhat comparable figure on the left (with more notable ties to the Ku Klux Klan). But I' not sure anyone really matches the dubious stature of Jesse Helms. The idea that a man of Richard Lugar's integrity and thoughtfulness would have to play second-fiddle to someone like Jesse Helms on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has always seemed one of life's crueler ironies to me.

Jesse Helms was also a human being. A deeply flawed, mean-spirited, bigoted, bitter, petty human being. But a human being nonetheless. And someone who made some endeavors to make some amends in the final years of his life. He never said he was sorry. But he did try to make amends.

And, in the meantime, he is a man with friends and family and a man, like every man, who will be missed by those who loved him.

I have to say that the columns I have read that laud Helms' many accomplishments have seriously endeared me to him and his worthy causes, especially his stands for freedom and against Soviet Communism. I remember, as a young liberal, being very heartened and emailing many friends and family when I read that Jesse Helms had written a Washington Post editorial advocating a tripling of the budget to combat AIDS in Africa (a skepticism of which policy I understand better, today, sharing his ultimate compassion for such folks and believing in pragmatic government efforts to deal with a serious health crisis, but also wanting more of that money to come from private sources rather than forever from necessarily limited government coffers).

I was always someone who wanted to like and respect, Jesse Helms, even as I despised him, in my youth. The bigger-hearted reflections on the life and legacy of Jesse Helms have humbled me and my one-time contempt for this bigger-than-life American politician.

Rest in peace, Jesse Helms. You will be missed, all and all. May God and all of us have mercy on your soul.

And now for something completely different

And an oldie but a goodie.



Some fine reminders that Independence Day and the Declaration of Independence were about freedom, not power.

One day, I hope, I can share with my kids that America has, largely, lived up to her reason for being.

Freedom on the Fourth of July

If you have not read the Declaration of Independence, I recommend it.

The Declaration of Independence

We've read it in class several times, now. We talk about what it means. And despite my kids' limited interest and, more often than not, limited developed reading and academic abilities, I hope they recognize, at least someday, the courage that it took for a rag-tag bunch of colonials to take on the most powerful government and military in the world, to assert their right to govern themselves and their own lives.

Freedom is a precious thing. Even as we all take it for granted and romanticize power and countries and cultures that don't have the kind of freedom we enjoy in America. It is fundamental to everything we have and are, today. Even as we behave like it is responsible for all of our bad behavior and our misery. What freedom offers us, better, is the honest opportunity for us to be responsible for ourselves and our own behavior, good and bad. Even as we, like all peoples since the beginning of time, would often prefer to shirk such responsibility.

Independence. Of thought and conscience. Of expression and action. The freedom to govern ourselves and the direction of our lives.

That is what I celebrate today. And the first nation on earth to be conceived on the principles of freedom and democracy.

Ours' is a nation nor a people conceived in perfection, or on claims to that mantle. Ours' is a nation conceived on the premise of independence and self-governance, and the ability to improve with that commitment over time.

This is a day to reflect on those principles and to reflect on the liberal democratic values that make possible everything that we cherish, even as we persistently take them and their fruits for granted.

Today should be a day to remember that freedom is not something to be afraid of or treated as an afterthought. Freedom is fundamental to virtually everything good that free peoples lay claim to.

Today is a day to embrace that.

Hypocrisy and the rationalization of power

I write something nasty about Dana Milbank, and then he goes and proves his shit.

Not So Quiet on the Third Front

"The administration, for its part, seems eager to convince Iran that President Bush is crazy enough to sanction an attack. In the Rose Garden yesterday, Brett Baier of Fox News asked Bush how confident he is that Israel won't launch a military attack on Iran before the end of the year. 'I have always said that all options are on the table, but the first option for the United States is to solve this problem diplomatically,' came Bush's mild reply.

ABC's Martha Raddatz invited Bush to 'strongly discourage Israel' from such an activity. The president declined. 'I have made it very clear to all parties that the first option ought to be to solve this problem diplomatically,' he said.

Neither did the State Department offer discouragement. Spokesman Sean McCormack, at his daily briefing, said the matter of an Israeli strike isn't 'under our control.' When it was pointed out that the U.S. controls Iraqi airspace, through which Israeli warplanes would travel to hit Iran, McCormack declined to answer a 'hypothetical question involving military planning.'

As in most things involving the Bush administration, clarity can be found in the name Cheney -- in this case the vice president's daughter Liz, speaking last week at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 'I think the Iranians have to believe that we will use force if necessary, and I'm concerned because you had statements for a period of time there from people like the commander in Centcom, who has since been relieved, suggesting that force was off the table,' she said.

Liz Cheney further recommended doing 'everything we can to dispel this idea that, somehow, we don't have the capacity militarily to take action,' and she said it is crucial to make Iran realize, 'despite what you may be hearing from Congress, despite what you may be hearing from others in the administration who might be saying force isn't on the table, that we're serious." As for an Israeli strike on Iran, she said: 'I certainly don't think that we should do anything but support them.'

Cheney may soon get her chance. Last month, Israel held a major military drill that was widely seen as preparation for an attack on Iran's nuclear program. Around the same time, three prominent Israeli officials made public comments about the likelihood of an attack. Then came Seymour Hersh's article in the New Yorker reporting an increase in U.S. covert activities in Iran, along with Iran's threat to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, through which a large chunk of the world's oil passes. This week, ABC News featured an unnamed senior defense official talking about 'an increasing likelihood' of an Israeli attack by the end of the year.

In front of the cameras yesterday, Mullen tried to warn about the military problems such an attack would set off. 'This is a very unstable part of the world,' the chairman said, 'and I don't need it to be more unstable.' With troops already stretched thin in Iraq and Afghanistan, he acknowledged that 'opening up a third front right now would be extremely stressful" on the U.S. military. The chief warrior therefore appealed for "other elements of national power to change Iranian behavior, including diplomatic, financial and international pressure.'

But Mullen, informed by his discussions with Israeli military officials, did not offer much reassurance that an Israeli strike could be avoided. Iran, he said, is 'still on a path to get to nuclear weapons, and I think that's something that needs to be deterred.'

Might Iran have enough nuclear fuel to build a bomb by the year's end?

'I don't want to address that,' the chairman said.

Is Israel operating on a shorter time frame than the United States?

Mullen said past discussions 'indicated that they were.'

Is there a danger that all the bluffing could cause an actual war?

'It is high stakes, there's no question, in this part of the world, and I guess I'd just leave it at that.'"

The remarkable thing about all of this bluff and bullshit is that it has clearly, by an objective measure, made it harder, not easier, to get this situation resolved. Iran wasn't pursuing nukes as ambitiously 5 years ago, when this standoff first began. We started pressuring. They got more committed.

And no matter where pressure fails, its self-righteous advocates will always claim victory anytime we see any breakthrough anywhere, because of course if you spread your bullshit broad and wide, there's got to be somewhere you can claim victory, right? Even when everything else is going to shit.

Why do they do this?

Partly because Washington runs under a pack mentality. Everyone is always right, all the time. And when they are wrong, they would rather be wrong together then step out of line. Especially when they believe their career is at stake. Even if everyone is wrong. That's the beauty of that kind of pressure.

And much of that last fact is a matter of cowardice on the part of political leaders and observers to acknowledge failure when blame-shifting to someone not you is so much easier than taking responsibility (these are the same group of folks who lecture the rest of the country and world on responsibility for their actions, remember).

When groupthink operates, as Pat Roberts warned the country in his assessment of the rush to war in Iraq, independent and thoughtful judgment is sacraficed.

And is exactly the kind of environment that this constant drumbeat of pressure, no matter how often and long it fails, creates in Washington and around the world.

Much of this, at the bottom, is about a sad and general failure of most folks to face the failure of repression and force as a governing philosophy, especially among countries and cultures proporting to be liberal and democratic, meaning free and equal, and the matters of conscience and independent judgment that are fundamental to liberal values, the value we place on freedom and democratic engagement, and fundamental to the failures of repressive governments and cultures and repressive policies in liberal and democratic countries and cultures.

We will have to face up, just as we would have to face up to a Israeli-Palestinian peace process, no matter how many strikes on Arab and Palestinian targets take place, because facing up to those realities is the only way out.

I guess the silver lining in this period is that it will be a definitive defeat for repression. There will be no real opportunity for those to advocate repression to claim victory, anymore. Because the failures will pile up so high that, eventually, if we want to get past them we will have to embrace more genuinely liberal and democratic policies, meaning policies that honestly respect freedom and self-governance.

Until we live up to those values, we will fail. Guaranteed. Because you can't guarantee freedom and democracy, when you are disrespecting them in reality while praising them rhetorically. It just doesn't work that way. No matter how many rationalizations of power we engage in.

We have engagement to do on this question of Iran and nuclear weapons. There are important issues to get resolved that nuking their facilities will just never resolve, anymore than assassinating terrorist leaders actually ends terrorist threats when the underlying issues, like Palestinian occupation, go unresolved.

And until we live up, we will never be able to honestly claim to be the guarantors of freedom and democracy. There is no way to bullshit our way around this one. Though we are a creative bunch while we desperately try, aren't we?

It is our hypocrisy, our rationalizations of power, and, most importantly, our failure to take liberal democratic values, the values of freedom and self-government, seriously enough that are responsible for our failures.

It is a tailspin that we are stuck in, right now. But it is not a tailspin we can stay stuck in forever.

Because forever is an awfully long goddamn time to fail.