Against the Stream

Jeremiah's Jeremiads

Barack Obama yesterday decided that, after a four-day humiliation fest at the hands of Jeremiah Wright, that it was finally time to throw him under the bus. Usually, when that phrase is used, it means that a politician is unfairly jettisoning an inconvenient supporter. In this case, however, there's nothing unfair about it. Jeremiah Wright was the least supportive supporter a candidate could have!

For the most part, I've avoided the Wright story, except occasionally, because on the one hand I just didn't know enough about him or his thinking to have an informed opinion, and on the other hand, I couldn't really see what all the fuss was about. The whole episode stank of a manufactured controversy (as, indeed, it was). When Obama gave his speech in Philly last month calling for an understanding an honest conversation about race in the United States, I thought he had fairly effectively put the whole matter to rest.

And then, for some reason, Jeremiah Wright decided to insert himself back into the campaign by making a number of increasingly embarrassing appearances over the weekend. I caught a bit of his appearance on Bill Moyers on Friday, and thought he performed quite well. "Maybe he'll rehabilitate himself," I thought, "and definitively cease to be an albatros around Obama's neck." Then again, maybe not. It was really his performance at the National Press Club that was his final undoing, and Obama did the right thing distancing himself from Wright in the way he did. At this point, if Hillary Clinton secures the Democratic nomination for President, she ought to send a huge bouquet of roses to Jeremiah Wright, because it will be largely his doing.

On the other hand, many would say that it is the role of a preacher, particularly one who sees his role as a prophetic "speaking truth to power," to say controversial and inconvenient things in the presence of the powerful, and I would certainly agree. In the end, my problem with Wright was the unthoughtful and poorly informed substance of what he had to say, rather than the idea of a prophetic preacher offering, well, Jeremiads in the public square.

It's one thing to condemn a history of racism and bigotry in this country, and even to acknowledge the many and grievous sins of the United States government throughout the centuries. It's quite another, however, to make patently stupid statements such as that the U.S. government is responsible for the AIDS virus (and yes, I know that the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments ought to give anybody pause about just what can be done in this country). With all that could have been rightly said in critique of the United States, the fact that Wright (as well as, let's face it, his many detractors) chose to focus on such a transparently silly allegation boggles the mind.

In the end, Barack Obama has demonstrated far greater moral judgment and prudence than Jeremiah Wright has. And for all the good that Wright did here in Chicago throughout his long tenure at Trinity UCC, it is now time for him to step out of the limelight, and allow both his successor at Trinity and his former parishoner to do their jobs without him making it harder on them.

CODA

One last thing: On the subject of why Wright and Trinity UCC were so attractive to Obama, this passage from the New Republic sheds some light on what it was that distinguished Trinity and Wright from other Chicago Churches:

Wright earned bachelor's and master's degrees in sacred music from Howard University and initially pursued a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago Divinity School before interrupting his studies to minister full-time. His intellectualism and black militancy put him at odds with some Baptist ministers around Chicago, with whom he often sparred publicly, and he finally accepted a position at Trinity. ...

Wright remains a maverick among Chicago's vast assortment of black preachers. He will question Scripture when he feels it forsakes common sense; he is an ardent foe of mandatory school prayer; and he is a staunch advocate for homosexual rights, which is almost unheard-of among African-American ministers. Gay and lesbian couples, with hands clasped, can be spotted in Trinity's pews each Sunday. Even if some blacks consider Wright's church serving only the bourgeois set, his ministry attracts a broad cross section of Chicago's black community. Obama first noticed the church because Wright had placed a "Free Africa" sign out front to protest continuing apartheid. The liberal, Columbia-educated Obama was attracted to Wright's cerebral and inclusive nature, as opposed to the more socially conservative and less educated ministers around Chicago. Wright developed into a counselor and mentor to Obama as Obama sought to understand the power of Christianity in the lives of black Americans, and as he grappled with the complex vagaries of Chicago's black political scene. "Trying to hold a conversation with a guy like Barack, and him trying to hold a conversation with some ministers, it's like you are dating someone and she wants to talk to you about Rosie and what she saw on Oprah, and that's it," Wright explained. "But here I was, able to stay with him lockstep as we moved from topic to topic. . . . He felt comfortable asking me questions that were postmodern, post-Enlightenment and that college-educated and graduate school-trained people wrestle with when it comes to the faith. We talked about race and politics. I was not threatened by those questions." ...

But more than that, Trinity's less doctrinal approach to the Bible intrigued and attracted Obama. "Faith to him is how he sees the human condition," Wright said. "Faith to him is not . . . litmus test, mouth-spouting, quoting Scripture. It's what you do with your life, how you live your life. That's far more important than beating someone over the head with Scripture that says women shouldn't wear pants or if you drink, you're going to hell. That's just not who Barack is."

Capital Gains

Let's help spread the facts, shall we? Via Atrios:

With talk of raising the capital gains tax in the air, you're going to hear a lot of conservatives and mainstream media folks blather on about how much this kind of thing is going to be so bad for the "middle class" or "even working folk" because everyone is invested in the stock market through 401K plans, etc. But the capital gains tax rate will never apply to that money. More than that, any capital gains from those plans will be, upon withdrawal, taxed at the income tax rate which for most people will be higher than the current 15% capital gains rate. So wealthier people who have direct investments in stocks and whatnot get to pay 15% on their capital gains, while the rest of us in lowly 401K land will likely be paying a higher rate.

With a coda from Matt Yglesias:

But it's absolutely crippling to any effort to outline policy with any level of ambition to concede the idea that any tax that places any burden whatsoever on the non-rich is therefore unacceptable. It's fairly easy to design revenue measures that fall mostly on the rich, but extraordinarily difficult to design measures that exclusively snag people who fit a conventional definition of rich. It's true that a married couple composed of an NYPD detective who pulls lots of overtime and a NYC public high school teacher with a lot of seniority can have a joint income of over $200,000 a year but a tax hike on the $200,000k+ crowd is still, all things considered, an extremely progressive measure.

It was Oliver Wendell Holmes, after all, who said that taxes are the price we pay for getting to live in a free and prosperous society. And after all, the marginal tax rate of the average American is far below that of most others advanced industrial countries, so why do we whine about it so much?

The D&D Website: Soooooo Bad!

Michael Sigler at Dragon Avenue has a vlog about all that is wrong with WOTC's D&D website:

Why the D&D website sucks from Michael Sigler on Vimeo.

I'll admit, I gave up checking out Wizards' website a few years ago when they stopped offering really good "Web Enhancements" for D&D products (which were, by the way, excellent through the entire run of D&D 3.0). My declining interest seemed to correspond almost exactly to the decision to revise the game to D&D 3.5. Now that 4.0 is almost upon us, the site holds no interest for me whatsoever.

It's a shame though. I loved Dungeon and Dragon magazines, which no exist only in spectral form on the WOTC website. But I'll be damned if I'm going to navigate their ugly ass website just to find one or two interesting articles. And I'll be doubly damned if I'm going to pay for it.

Fortunately, no matter how far Wizards of the Coast falls, they can't take away my D&D books, so I can keep playing to my heart's content as long as I can find other players.

In Touch

Insight from Matt Yglesias:

Ultimately, one suspects that it would be really, really, really hard for anyone involved in politics professionally for as long as a John McCain or a Hillary Clinton or even a Barack Obama to be really and truly "in touch" with peoples' lives. Which is what brings us back to policy priorities. McCains are reducing the level of government services in order to pay for an indefinite prolongation of the war in Iraq, the extension of Bush's tax cuts for the highest-income Americans, a large hike in non-war defense spending, and a series of new tax breaks. Clinton and Obama are both, in somewhat different ways, offering more services paid for by returning to something more like the levels of taxation that so devastated the national economy in the 1990s.

Objective analysis isn't what it used to be

In today's New York Times, an article entitled, "Behind Military Analysts, the Pentagon's Hidden Hand." An Excerpt:

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized. (Emphasis added).

There are mornings when I wake up with hope and optimisim about the future of our polity. There are mornings when I believe that the new media have our best interests at heart and want to provide the best information possible to the American public, so that we can make an informed choice about the issues of the day. But, far more often, there are mornings when I wake up, read a story like this, and find myself totally unsurprised.

The Unbearable Dullness of Superman

"Why Superman Will Always Suck." A few excerpts:

It almost goes without saying, but if your hero cannot possibly be killed in any instance which does not somehow involve an incredibly rare space-rock, then you've got one boring-ass hero. It's sort of like watching Neo fight all the agent Smiths in The Matrix Reloaded: we know our hero can't possibly die, and he doesn't act like he's in any danger whatsoever, so the entire fight is a foregone conclusion and the audience becomes bored out of their skulls.

I mean, yeah – we obviously go into most superhero stories more or less positive that the hero won't die, but they still entertain us because the hero doesn't know that. Spidey is always scared, even if only a little, that one of the Green Goblin's pumpkin bombs will be the end of him; Daredevil is fully aware that a well-placed projectile from Bullseye could kill him. As a result, these characters act with restraint and forethought; since Superman knows nothing bad can happen to him no matter what, he acts with no such subtlety. He flies headlong into every conflict, fists thrust forward, because he knows he's in no immediate danger. Thus, we know he's in no immediate danger, and we get bored out of our fucking skulls.

<SNIP>

Superman has no values of his own, so he's content to just uphold the values of the ruling class; this prevents him from becoming a dangerous vigilante a la Frank Castle, but it also means he has no legitimate opinions of his own where crime is concerned. In Paul Dini's storybook series on DC superheroes, Batman had to deal with gangland violence, Wonder Woman fights terrorism, and Superman tries to end world hunger. This is no accident – Superman is way too morally simplistic to deal with complex things like the "wars" on drugs or terror. In Batman: War on Crime, Bats comes up against a young boy holding a gun on him. Batman, understanding the complexity of crime and the reasons for its existence, talks the kid into dropping the gun and giving up a life of violence.

Superman would probably just use his heat-vision to melt the gun, then put the kid in prison where he'd become a hard-bitten thug who'd murder somebody a few months after getting out.

<SNIP>

Superman represents hope and indefatigable strength, and any attempt to complicate these issues would no longer make him Superman. By definition, Superman has to be boring and morally absolute because if he isn't, he ain't Superman. I mean, in Kingdom Come he's momentarily called to task for getting angry at the UN and threatening to kill the world leaders for killing Captain Marvel, but he's talked down from doing anything irrational within, like, two pages of initially getting the idea to fuck up the United Nations. Heck, Superman's arc in Kingdom Come isn't even anything deeper than "America has forgotten me and I them, and we need to restore faith in one another." Wow – real interesting. While you're doing that, Batman will be over in the corner, contemplating suicide.

Another Six Months

Via Matt Yglesias. War on the installment plan:

And Now a Word from Doug Feith

The man dubbed by Tommy Franks as the "fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth," former Undersecretar of Defense Douglas Feith, lives up to the label in the current Vanity Fair:

“This year I was really a player,” Feith said, thinking back on 2002 and relishing the memory. I asked him whether, in the end, he was at all concerned that the Geneva decision might have diminished America’s moral authority. He was not. “The problem with moral authority,” he said, was “people who should know better, like yourself, siding with the assholes, to put it crudely.”

Concern with human rights = "siding with the assholes." Torturing people and imprisoning them indefinitely without charge = "being a player." Ladies and gentlemen, you're U.S. government!

John Yoo: War Criminal

I hope to see this man standing in the dock at the Hague one day:

More than five years after its composition, we finally see a copy of John Yoo's March 14, 2003 memo to William Haynes, then the Defense Department's general counsel. It was, as The New York Times and Washington Post report, a green light for military interrogators to use just about any technique the Pentagon deemed useful. Criminal statutes prohibiting torture stopped at the water's edge, because, Yoo wrote, "such criminal statutes, if they were misconstrued to apply to the interrogation of enemy combatants, would conflict with the Constitution's grant of Commander in Chief power solely to the President."

If anything is more frightening than the mere fact of the casual endorsement of torture by  Yoo, it is his vision of presidential authority, as noted at the end of the quote above. Yoo, and the other Federalist Society and Unitary Executive maniacs in the Bush administration believe that there is absolutely, literally no limit to the authority of the president during war time. No law, treaty, regulation, guideline or any other standard whatsoever can limit the president's authority insofar as he is acting as Commander-in-Chief.

This is, and I mean this without the slightest exaggeration, a recipe for tyranny. And, in fact, as TPM has been reporting, another Yoo memo effectively argues that the president's power is unlimited, both with regard to foreign AND domestic uses of power:

"Our office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations," the footnote states, referring to a document titled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States."

This, of course, provides the justification for the administration's warrantless wire-tapping program, about which we've heard so much in the ensuing years (and which was the impetus for the final straw on the back of my own personal camel in calling for the president's impeachment).

But, lest we lose sight of the fundamental horror of the administration's position on torture, let's return to what Yoo's torture memo actually states:

Yoo explains how even if a particularly brutal interrogation might "arguably cross the line drawn" by the law, "certain justification defenses might be available." Those are "necessity" (the "choice of evils," the evils being torture and a terrorist attack) and "self-defense" ("If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network. In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions.") Just about the only actions that were impermissible and indefensible in Yoo's eyes, it seems, were those motivated strictly by malice or sadism.

So, to be clear then: According to John Yoo, former Assistant Attorney General of the United States of America, writing a memo at the behest of the president of the United States of America, literally any act of brutality is permissible on the president's say-so, as long as the motivation for the act is not a desire to inflict the harm, but because the infliction of harm is one's job! Every employee of every government-sponsored den of torture throughout the world has now been given a free pass by John Yoo, just so long as they could claim they were simply "following orders."

How exactly is it that the United States can continue to claim moral authorit for the protection of human rights around the world?

Clinton's Base

Via Michael Berube, an excerpt from an article appearing in his hometown paper:

Of Obama, Duser said: "I'm not crazy about voting for a colored guy, but that's not why I don't support Obama. I'm not prejudiced. I just like Hillary."

A couple tables over, Jean Fetterman, a foster grandparent, said of Clinton: "Oh, I love her. She's a very intelligent person, and she has her husband who went through this."

She scoffs at the idea of voting for Obama: "I don't want to be a Muslim!" She looks dubious when told Obama is Christian. "Then why did he go see what's-his-name over in Iraq, that Lama?"

Michael goes on to comment:

Sigh. But there you have it– this is now Clinton’s base. This is why the Clinton campaign has been making such strange and credibility-destroying arguments in the past couple of weeks: because those arguments are "credibility-destroying" only among high-information voters. Here, by contrast, are the firewall voters; these are the people the campaign is talking to and depending on. People who might be convinced that Barack Arrogant Obama wasn’t really a real law professor like he says he was. People who can be convinced that Obama thugs are trying to prevent them from voting and participating in our great American democracy. People who think Hussein Obama X is Muslim and that Jeremiah Wright will burn this mother to the ground. And, not least, people who fear that Obama will turn them into a llama.

There are, of course, many people who continue to support Hillary because they genuinely think her the better candidate. But as Michael points out, they are not the ones to whom she's currently attempting to appeal. She's working the racist xenophobe angle as hard as she can. It's sad what desparation can do to a candidate. Sad.