Against the Stream

Anti-Death

Amy Sullivan has some smart thoughts over at Washington Monthly. I'm gathering my own thoughts, which I will with luck post later today:

Now that Terri Schiavo has died, I'd like to raise a question--not a political question, but a moral one. I've been bothered by the way religious leaders discussed her situation and the way that the Pope himself has framed his own slow, painful journey toward the end of life. In both cases, the loudest voices have seemed to promote a position that is not pro-life so much as very, very anti-death.

A cradle Baptist, I was taught in the church that while we were not to hasten death, neither were we to postpone or fear it. The ending of a life was sad for those who remained, but a joyous event for the one who died. As one of my friends put it this week, If all of these folks believe Terri Schiavo was a Christian, shouldn't they want her to slip from this life to be embraced by the arms of God? I understand that this is a particular kind of religious belief, not shared by all, but it is a belief to which most of the leaders you've seen on tv over the past few weeks subscribe. And yet the implication of their fight has been that death is something to be held at bay using all available means, that any quality of life is better than what may come next.

A Sensible Republican

Sen. John Danforth, an Episcopal priest, has a few sharp words for his fellow Republicans in today's New York Times:

The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active. It is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement.

When government becomes the means of carrying out a religious program, it raises obvious questions under the First Amendment. But even in the absence of constitutional issues, a political party should resist identification with a religious movement. While religions are free to advocate for their own sectarian causes, the work of government and those who engage in it is to hold together as one people a very diverse country. At its best, religion can be a uniting influence, but in practice, nothing is more divisive. For politicians to advance the cause of one religious group is often to oppose the cause of another.

Take stem cell research. Criminalizing the work of scientists doing such research would give strong support to one religious doctrine, and it would punish people who believe it is their religious duty to use science to heal the sick.

During the 18 years I served in the Senate, Republicans often disagreed with each other. But there was much that held us together. We believed in limited government, in keeping light the burden of taxation and regulation. We encouraged the private sector, so that a free economy might thrive. We believed that judges should interpret the law, not legislate. We were internationalists who supported an engaged foreign policy, a strong national defense and free trade. These were principles shared by virtually all Republicans.

But in recent times, we Republicans have allowed this shared agenda to become secondary to the agenda of Christian conservatives. As a senator, I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems to be the other way around.

The Cost of Compassion

Poking my head above water for a moment to draw your attention to this article:

The parents of Terri Schiavo have authorized a conservative direct-mailing firm to sell a list of their financial supporters, making it likely that thousands of strangers moved by her plight will receive a steady stream of solicitations from anti-abortion and conservative groups.

"These compassionate pro-lifers donated toward Bob Schindler's legal battle to keep Terri's estranged husband from removing the feeding tube from Terri," says a description of the list on the Web site of the firm, Response Unlimited, which is asking $150 a month for 6,000 names and $500 a month for 4,000 e-mail addresses of people who responded last month to an e-mail plea from Ms. Schiavo's father. "These individuals are passionate about the way they value human life, adamantly oppose euthanasia and are pro-life in every sense of the word!"

Privacy experts said the sale of the list was legal and even predictable, if ghoulish.

"I think it's amusing," said Robert Gellman, a privacy and information policy consultant. "I think it's absolutely classic America. Everything is for sale in America, every type of personal information."

Indeed.

Paul Wolfowitz: Not as Bad As You Thought?

Kevin Drum, while rightly criticizing Paul Wolfowitz, offers this reflection:

Lots of people favored the Iraq war, after all, but how many of them displayed such convincing evidence of their appallingly poor judgment on such a wide range of topics in such a public venue? Do we really want a guy like that running anything, let alone the World Bank?

And yet....here I have to confess something: I'm not a Paul Wolfowitz hater. I'm not a fan, mind you, but then again, I'm not a fan of anyone George Bush is likely to nominate to head the World Bank. At the same time, Wolfowitz has always struck me as a bit different from the rest of the neocon/hawk fraternity. Guys like Kristol and Cheney and Rumsfeld, for example, talk a lot about democracy but mostly use it as a thinly disguised excuse for installing friendly pro-American leaders in countries that just happen to have lots of oil. Wolfowitz, conversely, really seems to believe this stuff.

I think Kevin may be right. But I'm not sure it makes it any better. The fact that Wolfowitz is willing to used armed force to install some version of democracy throughout the world, apart from being internally contradictory, simply makes his zealotry that much scarier. One would think a believer in democracy would seek to achieve it using democratic means.

Intelligent and Educated

In the absence of clever things to post myself, I'll simply point you to the clever things other people are posting. This comes via Atrios:

"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture." -- Pastor Ray Mummert, on his desires to muck up teaching evolution

Here's the original context. Yes, indeed, the Cult of Bush is on the rise:

"Christians are a lot more bold under Bush's leadership, he speaks what a lot of us believe," said Mummert.

"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture," he said, adding that the school board's declaration is just a first step.

"It took 30 or 40 years to eliminate God in school, it will take probably 30 or 40 years to get him back. You take a little step first, a little bite, then another little bite and another," said Steve Farrell, a nursery keeper, who dreams of the return to prayer in class.

All's Quiet on the Western Front

Well, not really. Things are crazy, actually. What with Holy Week last week and a new quarter starting today, I'm a bit strung out. This is promising to be a pretty gruelling week for me. So, it might be light blogging.

There's certainly a lot out there in the world to blog about. If I get the chance, I'll try to articulate some well-developed thoughts on some issue of great importance. But as I seldom do that anyway, I can't imagine a busy week will result in much.

"At long last sir, have you no shame?"

Kevin Drum asks whether there are any depths to which the Republicans won't sink these days:

BUNNING WATCH....Via Max, here's the latest tax scam from congressional Republicans. I'll lay it out in easy steps:

• In 1983 Congress voted to make up to 50% of Social Security benefits taxable. This tax applied only to high income recipients and the revenue was earmarked for the Social Security trust fund.

• In 1993 Congress increased the share of benefits that was taxable to 85%. The taxes on the additional 35 percentage points of income were earmarked for Medicare.

• Last week, the Senate voted to repeal the 1993 law. This means that after-tax benefits will be effectively increased for certain people

• Which people, you ask? Via Citizens for Tax Justice, here's the answer: The average benefit increase for people making under $50,000 per year is $12. The average benefit increase for people making over $200,000 per year is $2,431.

End result: rich retirees get higher benefits and Medicare gets less money.

The answer, apparently, is no.

Partisan Epistemology

Slacktivist, clearly having more important things on his mind than my pleas for more Left Behind posts, makes some very insightful comments today on the great fallacy of "objective journalism."

The Schiavo case demonstrates the problem of partisan epistemology. We now have "red facts" and "blue facts." Newspapers -- hoping not to upset either faction of their potential circulation -- have no intention in taking sides in such disputes. Thus two competing sets of claims, two very different sets of facts, two opposing narratives, are treated as equally valid. News reporters, unlike sports reporters, feel no responsibility to check the scoreboard, or even to acknowledge that there is a scoreboard. They tend to deny the possibility that a scoreboard might even exist.

In the case of Terry Schiavo there is such a scoreboard, and what it tells us is nowhere near as murky and ambiguous as the AP's Q&Q or CNN's vapid, incurious coverage would suggest. The facts of the matter have been hashed out, again and again and again, in court.

Congress and President Bush, like the absurd hypothetical Gonzaga fans above, would prefer that the facts were other than they are. They have, therefore, declared by legislative fiat that the scoreboard be reset to zero and that the game be replayed. Here, however, the sporting analogy breaks down. If the Red Raiders and Bulldogs were to replay their game, the result might be different. But the facts of the Schiavo case will not change, no matter how many times these facts are replayed and reviewed.

Smarter people than I have noted the big problem with the way "objectivity" is understood in journalism these days. Commonly understood, "objective" means "conforming to things as they truly are." But journalists have come to interpret the term to mean "neutral among competing positions." The problem with this approach is that it means that anyone craven enough to insist on a position that is obviously contrary to fact gets treated as credible just because they've got a position.

I think it was Paul Krugman who noted that if the Republicans started arguing that the sky was pink, the New York Times would report it as "Color of the Sky: Views Differ."

Are You Now, Or Have You Ever Been ...

Michael Berube is back, after having apparently re-written three chapters of his new book over the weekend, in order to beat up on Horowitz some more. Before I quote from his post, I've got to know the answer to two questions: 1) What's the unicode number to put those little accents over the "e"s in your name? and 2) How on earth are you able to write so much, so quickly?

But, onto Berube's comments. Here's the money quote:

Now, let’s get serious here, once more with feeling. “Discover the Network” is an attempt to delegitimate and slander everyone to the left of Joe Lieberman, an attempt to construe all criticism of the Bush Administration– even that of George Clooney– as tantamount to treason.  David himself says as much:  “It should be obvious that even the otherwise innocent Barbra Streisand shares negative views of the Bush Administration and its mission of liberating Iraq with anti-American jihadists like the aforementioned [Abu Musab] Zarqawi, even though we are sure that she deplores some of his methods.” By that standard, anyone with negative views of the Bush administration or the war in Iraq is an ally of Zarqawi.  This mode of argumentation– construing liberal dissenters as supporters of terrorists– is not merely unreasonable; it is, I submit, altogether inappropriate for people living in republics and democracies.

It’s one thing to associate Brian Becker, Ramsey Clark, or Lynne Stewart with political Islamists; these people truly have gone around the bend, and are making what amounts to a red-brown alliance between the far far left and the far far right of Islamism.  It’s quite another thing– an indefensible thing, at least by the standards of decent people– to suggest, as this database does, that there is a “network” linking people like Katie Couric to Mohammed Atta, Zacarias Moussaoui to Roger Ebert.  So this “network” deliberately and systematically confuses the distinction between people who criticize Lynne Stewart and Ramsey Clark and people who support them, and this fact alone renders the very idea of a “network” incoherent. 

To associate me (or Roger Ebert or Ted Kennedy or Ruth Bader Ginsburg) with such fringe far-leftists is to partake of precisely the same “logic” as that of the fringe far-left itself:  for Becker and Clark, the enemy of their enemy is their friend, and they welcome figures like Milosevic or al-Sadr, because anyone who opposes the U.S. must be all right with them.  In so doing, they forfeit their moral authority to oppose totalitarianism, torture, and terrorism throughout the world.  (And I invite everyone on the Right to join me in opposing all three!  Anyone?) Likewise, in “Discover the Network,” anyone who does not support George Bush and the war in Iraq is part of a “network” that extends to al-Qaeda.  It’s the same fundamentalist logic, and it entails the same forfeiture of moral authority.

It shouldn't be surprising to discover that I agree with Michael about this. There's a sort of transitive logic that takes place in all such arguments: A-->B, B-->C, therefore A-->C. Now, this works well for certain kinds of math problems, but it's absolutely irrelevant to human relationships.

An example. For, oh, roughly a decade or so, I've kind of been taken with Laura Linney. I think it would be kind of cool to meet her. It turns out that I know I guy who used to be a teacher at the prep school where she used to be a student. Isn't that cool? I'm, like, two degrees of separation from Laura Linney! So, what does that do for my odds of ever actually getting to meet her?

Absolutely nothing.

The same thing goes for all of these allegedly "networked" folks that Horowitz is connecting to one another. The fact that Katie Couric or George Clooney can be made to connect with little java-script arrows to Mohammad Atta or Ayatollah Khomeini tells one absolutely nothing about their relationship. If it weren't for the influence that Horowitz is currently wielding with his ABOR stupidity, this wouldn't even be worth addressing. Horowitz's utter hack-ness ought to speak for itself. But certain parties find it politically expedient to trot out this garbage in an effort to shut out all vestiges of dissent, and so we must come back and state the obvious again and again and again.

God's Gift to the GOP

My friend John e-mailed me this gem from the New York Times today:

"One thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America," Mr. DeLay told a conference organized by the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group. A recording of the event was provided by the advocacy organization Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Thanks, John.