A sad example of self-hatred

In today’s Boston Globe James Carroll writes a startling column showing the mind of the Christian pacifist left. I have read no better example than this of the mindset that blames America first and foremost for every evil in today's world.

He begins well enough, urging a more grown-up view of evil on this Halloween day:

But there is another way to think of evil, finding it in the juncture between individual freedom and social context. The story of Genesis posits the malevolent serpent, but what ruined Paradise was not the serpent but the option made in its favor by Adam and Eve. What follows such choice is always unforeseen, but its dynamic is inevitable: Choice leads to consequence, which leads to new and graver choice, which leads in turn to yet graver consequence, and so on. A train of action-reaction is set in motion that quickly outpaces the ability of any one person to slow it.

This phenomenon can take the form of the ''grooved thinking" of a bureaucracy or of the ''institutional culture" that trumps even the good intentions of those who operate within it. Every human choice is made inside a rushing current of prior choices, and the pressure is not good.

Fair enough. We all know that both poor choices (as well as choosing evil) have infinite and unforeseen consequences, and in our lifetime there is no shortage of murderous bureaucracies. But then James drives off the road:

Saint Paul spoke of the ''wiles of the devil," but his defining metaphor for evil was systemic, not personal. ''For we are not contending against flesh and blood," he wrote, ''but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness." For Paul, the enemy was not fallen angels, but ''sovereignties" which are hostile to humanity. He was talking about Roman tyrants and an uncaring imperial bureaucracy. He was talking about politics.

Systemic, yes indeed! Political, no, at least not in this context. This is the very sort of wacky exegesis that Carroll would mock should it be done by an uneducated fundamentalist. He is quoting Ephesians 6:10-17:

Finally, draw your strength from the Lord and from his mighty power. Put on the armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the tactics of the devil. For our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens. Therefore, put on the armor of God, that you may be able to resist on the evil day and, having done everything, to hold your ground. So stand fast with your loins girded in truth, clothed with righteousness as a breastplate, and your feet shod in readiness for the gospel of peace. In all circumstances, hold faith as a shield, to quench all (the) flaming arrows of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

There is no shortage of political text and subtext in the Bible, but this is a strange text to pick out as political. The New American Bible has a note here, which directly contradicts Carroll’s interpretation, as does the Jerome Biblical Commentary on Ephesians (which is not online). Carroll takes this misinterpretation and uses it to justify his own cultural self-hatred (emphasis mine):

An unprecedented American momentum toward war was unleashed in the 20th century, its destructive energy fueled by the heat of an unchecked nuclear arsenal. That momentum defines the nation now, and, for the first time in history, threatens the very earth. The principalities and powers are us. In the name of the fight against evil, good people established the ''sovereignty" of a militarized culture, laying bare the darkest mystery of all: What we construct to oppose evil involves us in it. Having armed evil with the nuclear bomb, we have made evil more sovereign than ever.

If only there were a devil to exorcise or a witch to burn. If only there were an axis of evil to oppose.

Is it any more responsible to see evil only in one’s own culture than it is to see it only in others? I think not at all. Rather, both attitudes show an appalling lack of perspective. Self-righteousness leads to xenophobia and war-mongering while self-hatred leads to pacifism in the face of evil.

It is inevitable that "what we construct to oppose evil involves us in it" because that is a result of the human condition, not something unique to Americans. Yet as humans, we cannot live without making such choices or passively without taking any actions. Furthermore, Carroll is breathtakingly arrogant in simply assuming the world at large shares his own dim view of his country. I am reminded of Frost writing in the 1920s:

…How are we to write
The Russian novel in America
As long as life goes so unterribly?
There is the pinch from which our only outcry
In literature to date is heard to come.
We get what little misery we can
Out of not having cause for misery.
It makes the guild of novel writers sick
To be expected to be Dostoievskis
On nothing worse than too much luck and comfort.
This is not sorrow, though; it's just the vapors,
And recognized as such in Russia itself
Under the new regime, and so forbidden.

If well it is with Russia, then feel free
To say so or be stood against the wall
And shot. It's Pollyanna now or death.
This, then, is the new freedom we hear tell of;
And very sensible. No state can build
A literature that shall at once be sound
And sad on a foundation of well-being.

The Soviet Union Frost wrote of may be gone, but there is no shortage of such regimes today, of which Carroll as an American has the good fortune to not be a subject. Would that more of humanity was so lucky. No doubt most who suffer under real tyranny (not just the vapors) would be grateful for a chance to build their life in Carroll’s Great Satan.

Miers withdraws

There is no reason for celebration here.

Let the healing begin, but W will have to take a far more collaborative approach in managing his relations with the majority party in Congress. This is a GOOD thing, given that the White House thought up the Miers nomination on their own...or perhaps with a little outside help from Harry Reid.

If Reid actually did cause the Miers nomination he is a better strategist than Rove.

Rosa reminiscences

The passing of Rosa Parks sends 2 Globe columnists into some thoughts about how little things have changed in the half century since Mrs. Parks bravely and stubbornly refused to surrender her seat.

Joan Vennochi has a web-only column entitled ‘Rosa Parks and today's white youth’ about the Parks legacy and white suburbia. I liked the column very much. She notes:

But tough as it was to change the law, changing the habits, attitudes, and comfort level between the races is proving to be even tougher. The country has learned that you can outlaw segregation, but you cannot force integration or even friendship.

So after 40 years of ramming “diversity” down everybody’s throat, maybe now would be time to think of a more effective remedy for intolerance? But the folks who sponsored our cultural obsession with quotas measuring diversity seem unaware that 40 more years of the same may not change things much either.

In Derrick Jackson’s column ‘Mocking Parks's legacy’ he is rightly disgusted by the wide sponsorship of a rap music event (“Monster Jam”). The lyrics of these rappers would not pass any speech codes applied to white performers, or polite society, but given greater artistic license, rappers use more freedom to plunge into the gutter.

It makes you wonder what chance black people stand when Parks and her supporters risked their lives, and 50 years later, the livelihoods of an ever-more vulgar generation of young entertainers is wrapped around blaxploitation, sexism, and homophobia. Just as appalling, these N-word and B-word entertainers are considered so normal in American culture that the Monster Jam was sponsored by Project Bread, the antihunger organization, Filene's department store, Dunkin' Donuts, X-Box video games, Nikon cameras, D'angelo's deli, Scion cars, and the National Guard and US Army.

Derrick later takes a shallow and gratuitous swipe at the US armed forces sponsoring the event (give it up, Derrick!). IMHO, every one of the sponsors should be equally ashamed.

Kofi caught with his fingers in the cookie jar

From the Times of London:

THE United Nations withheld some of the most damaging allegations against Syria in its report on the murder of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister, it emerged yesterday.

The names of the brother of Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria, and other members of his inner circle, were dropped from the report that was sent to the Security Council.

The confidential changes were revealed by an extraordinary computer gaffe because an electronic version distributed by UN officials on Thursday night allowed recipients to track editing changes...

Mr Annan had pledged repeatedly through his chief spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, that he would not change a word of the report by Detlev Mehlis, a German prosecutor. But computer tracking showed that the final edit began at about 11.38am on Thursday — a minute after Herr Mehlis began a meeting with Mr Annan to present his report. The names of Maher al-Assad, General Shawkat and the others were apparently removed at 11.55am, after the meeting ended.

Priceless.

At present she is living in Vermont

New Hampshire's poet laureate has turned in her title after moving across the border into Vermont. The Globe's headline writer, perhaps aware of the irony, entitled the story 'N.H. poet defects to Vt.'

WSJ weighs in

Today's Wall Street Journal editorial does a superb job of covering all the bases with respect to the Miers nomination and places the blame where it surely belongs, on a politically deaf (meaning sans Rove) White House staff. Excerpt:

"Instead of dividing Red State Democrats from Senate liberals, the nomination is dividing Republicans. Pat Robertson is threatening retribution not against moderate Democrats but against GOP conservatives who dare to oppose Ms. Miers. Chuck Schumer couldn't have written a better script."

Miers and Bork

In Friday’s Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman joins Oliphant in support of Harriet Miers. Quick, somebody tell the RNC about this! Will the Globe editors support her next?

Also a letter to the editor serves as a fine example of leftish foolishness. I quote:

There is no doubt that Robert Bork was intellectually and professionally qualified. The objection to him lay in the ''character" department.

With Richard Nixon tangled in crimes, he made a deal with Congress to appoint an independent prosecutor. Archibald Cox, a man with impeccable credentials, was chosen. When Nixon could not control him, he decided, illegally, to fire him. Attorney General Elliot Richardson, to his everlasting credit, refused to do this dirty work and resigned. His next in command, William Ruckelshaus, did the same. Bork, third in line, did the deed.

At a time when the Republic was seriously under threat, Bork sided with the criminals.

I think not, though I am no lawyer. I suspect that in this action Bork sided not with the criminals but with the law, even when (as in this case) the law served the interest of criminals. The special prosecutor is a part of the Department of Justice and thus part of the Executive branch of government. Thus I doubt very much that it was “illegal” for Nixon to fire him, though it certainly was impolitic; so impolitic that Richardson and Ruckelshaus both resigned rather than do it.

The firing of Cox caused huge loss of support for Nixon in Congress, which later was prepared to vote articles of impeachment against him, forcing his resignation.

Note to younger readers: At that time it was widely assumed (though this was later disproved) that the shame of facing impeachment was sufficient to force a US president to resign rather than be impeached.

Phenomenal and chronic hypocrisy

In Thursday’s Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi takes Massachusetts Senate president Travaglini to task for a Senate action adopting the legalization of slot machines at the state’s 4 horse tracks, and for his disguising this action as a way to fund larger health care expenditures.

Joan is 100% correct. This is a classic case of the pure rhetorical horse manure that is always used to promote gambling. Pardon me, “gaming”! Excuse me for using an archaic and pejorative term. Joan notes:

Backers claim that slot machines would generate roughly $350 million in tax revenue a year. Such estimates ignore warnings that slot machines and other new types of gaming are a direct threat to the state lottery -- and therefore, a threat to the financial stability of local government.

Indeed. The unfortunate and growing linkage between state lottery revenues and state and local government budgets has been noted before on this blog.

The pith of the state lottery is an unconscionably regressive tax that is administered through professional promotion of vice by an agency of state government. The “gamers” are not the only junkies here. Our state and local governments grow increasingly addicted to the revenue stream provided by the stinking lottery.

Joan should speak to the Globe’s editors about this topic. We would all be wise to recall that the formation of the state lottery was opposed mainly by nasty scolds on religious right, and vigorously supported by our so-called progressives including, I believe, the Globe’s editors. Fittingly the whole scheme was promoted to the electorate as a painless way to create better schools and colleges, since the lottery revenues would be “dedicated” to fund education, just as today we hear that future slot machine takings will be used to fund more health care.

The promotion of gambling by the progressives and politicians in Massachusetts is a case of phenomenal and chronic hypocrisy.

Bork Forks Miers

At OpinionJournal:

"There is a great deal more to constitutional law than hostility to Roe. Ms. Miers is reported to have endorsed affirmative action. That position, or its opposite, can be reconciled with Christian belief. Issues we cannot now identify or even imagine will come before the court in the next 20 years. Reliance upon religious faith tells us nothing about how a Justice Miers would rule. Only a commitment to originalism provides a solid foundation for constitutional adjudication. There is no sign that she has thought about, much less adopted, that philosophy of judging."

Read the whole thing.

Mitch Landrieu is right

The Governor and Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana, testifying before Congress yesterday about their request for tens of billions in immediate and long term Federal aid, bristled at references to the state government’s unsavory reputation:

"Louisiana does not have a corner on the market in terms of public corruption," said [Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu], adding that over the past decade, top officials in half a dozen states have been forced to resign.

Mitch Landrieu is right. Louisiana has not cornered the market for public corruption. However, it would be fair to describe the state as a “market leader”.

To bad soccer coaches can't write well

It does not appear on the website, but on page E9 in the sports section of today's Globe in bold print and in a callout box appears this quote attributed to Dedham High School's girl's soccer coach, Don Savi:

"They don't get to high or to low...They don't even worry about the record."

It's a pity that soccer coaches can't use the language better. :-)

Will Yankee values ever play in Virginia?

Oliphant’s column today entitled 'Will red values still play in Virginia?' begins like this:

FOR ALL THOSE progressives doing handstands on the Republican Party's alleged grave, Virginia is the reality check.

Karl Rove and Scooter Libby can come or go, hurricanes can make fools of government leaders, wars can go on forever without result, and gasoline can be priced somewhere near the stratosphere, but voters are still happy to consider voting against their economic interests and to flock toward candidates who claim to represent their ''values."

Perhaps, Ollie, these folks have trouble pulling the lever for a party they see as dripping with Yankee condescension.

Steyn 1, Globe nil

Mark Steyn singlehandedly outwrites the Boston Globe again today. His column in the Chicago Sun Times entitled 'Media utters nonsense, won't call enemy out' notes examples of the media's squeamishness at naming the religion (and thus the primary motivation) of the "militant insurgent rebels" who attacked last week in the Caucasus.

"Islamists who murder non-Muslims in pursuit of explicitly Islamic goals are airbrushed into vague, generic "rebel forces." You can't tell the players without a scorecard, and that's just the way the Western media intend to keep it. If you wake up one morning and switch on the TV to see the Empire State Building crumbling to dust, don't be surprised if the announcer goes, "Insurging rebel militant forces today attacked key targets in New York. In other news, the president's annual Ramadan banquet saw celebrities dancing into the small hours to Mullah Omar And His All-Girl Orchestra . . ."

The Globe does get an honorable mention for Joan Vennochi's column concerning John Kerry's unquenched presidential ambitions:

Kerry didn't slink off after defeat like Al Gore, and the Massachusetts political world is convinced he is running again. But people are braced for it, not joyously anticipating it.

Speak for yourself, Joan.

Restoring the Caliphate: A TQM Roadmap For Strategic Empowerment

I laughed at this to the point of tears.

Casting Our Pearls Before Swine

It is a strange week when I am in agreement with the thrust, if not the spin, of Oliphant’s columns. In a column entitled ‘A clumsy effort to spin Miers’ Ollie writes:

The original White House sales job was that the Miers choice was a welcome selection of a distinguished Texas lawyer whose gender only enhanced her status. That sales job was ineffective in avoiding a sudden explosion of conservative displeasure that Bush chose someone with no roots in and no ties to a movement to fashion a new judicial philosophy that stretches back at least to Ronald Reagan's election in 1980.

Correct again as unusual, King Thursday.

Elsewhere in his column Ollie refers to conservatives as “chagrined” rather than displeased. I would say “outraged” is a better word, given that Bush’s choice shows an absence of consideration for the importance of this nomination to the conservative agenda. Why the outrage? Because conservatism, to its adherents is viewed as a “movement” (well put, Ollie!), in the same sense that the political left speaks of the labor movement or the civil rights movement. Conservatism viewed as a movement is not seen as an inevitable historical development driven by a struggle between classes, genders, or religions, but rather a struggle for the acceptance of a few fragile values concerning human freedom, and belief in the intimate connectedness of religious, economic, and political freedom.

The Supreme Court, designed as the least responsive branch of our government, is the last branch to feel the impact of these ideas, which have been ascendant in our politics for decades (not to mention a few minor changes in Eastern Europe and Asia during that time). That lag has been compounded by a series of unfortunate prior nominations by Republican presidents many of whom faced a Senate confirmation process controlled by their political opponents. But Conservatives felt that now at last was the time for the lag to end. Then came Miers.

The best summation of this feeling I have read is by Dan Henninger:

For nearly 25 years, conservative legal thinkers have been building an argument that liberalism transformed the Court into an instrument of national policymaking more appropriate to the nation's legislative institutions. Roe v. Wade is the most famous of those policy decisions. And the most famous dictum justifying judicial policy innovation is Justice William Douglas's "penumbras formed by emanations"--from Griswold v. Connecticut.

Across these many years conservatives have been creating a structured legal edifice to stand against a liberal trend toward aggrandized federal power that began in the 1930s. Chief Justice William Rehnquist's "New Federalism," which devolves many powers back to the states, was one such example. Harriet Miers may share these reformist views, but her contribution to them is zero. Conservatives are upset because they see this choice as frittering away an opportunity of long-term consequence.

If instead the Senate had been given the chance to confirm someone who had participated in this conservative legal reconstruction and who would describe its tenets in a confirmation hearing, that vote would stand as an institutional validation of those ideas. This would become a conservatism worth aspiring to. In turn, Congress's imprimatur would follow the nominee onto the Court, into the judiciary and the law schools. A Miers confirmation validates nothing, gives voice to nothing.

Exactly. Here is the conservative opportunity of a decade, and the White House utterly squanders it for no reason except convenient cronyism. Conservatives now feel as though they have cast their pearls before swine.

No wonder we are furious.

An amazing world out there

H.D.S. Greenway finds signs of polarization in the UK:

"...even multiculturalism has come to be questioned in the anguish that has followed the [London] suicide bombings."

I'm shocked, shocked.

Raising the bar pretty darn high

From a letter printed in today's Boston Globe:

"Being gay implies that you are out, open, honest, and have a healthy perspective of your sexuality, that you understand and like who you are, and that if you were to be in a sexual relationship, it would be with a consenting adult of the same gender."

If "straight" is re-defined along similar lines, a lot of folks are going to be without an orientation to hang their hat on.

Studying a Strange Species

Sunday the Boston Globe began a multi-part series on leaders of the Religious Right with a profile of James Dobson. The Sunday article came only from email correspondence with Dobson, and it shows. I’d grade it a C-, because Dobson asks more valid questions in a few emails that the article answers, such as:

"Do conservative Christians have less of a right to participate in the democratic process than do secularists?" Dobson asked. ''I might remind my liberal critics that we enjoy a representative form of government. Each of us, even those who hold traditional values, is entitled by constitutional decree to participate in policy formation."

Monday’s Globe has a much more complete profile of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Richard Land which I would call very close to “fair and balanced” (there is one unattributed reference to “hate-mongers on the religious right”, but otherwise the article seemed objective). Land’s first ministry was in the French Quarter to victims of sexual abuse, many of them gay. He is quoted:

"I love homosexuals, but I don't accept their lifestyle. Homosexual behavior is contrary to biblically acceptable moral lifestyle."

Sadly on this point Mr. Land speaks with greater acceptance, far more clearly, and more biblically than anybody in the Boston Chancery. Read the whole thing.

"Lovie" Howell speaks

Today's Boston Globe devotes OpEd space to a piece bemoaning the perilous retirement prospects for working women.

The stated author of the column is Teresa Heinz [Kerry].

She ought to know.

A Peerless Reporter

A meatless Friday Globe today, but...

Hiawatha Bray, who is likely the only Bush voter in the Globe newsroom, has a well written article today on a dispute between 2 companies serving the core of the global Internet. Hi gives a fine explanation of an obscure relationship among such companies called peering, which dates from the very early days of the Internet. Amazing that it is still around.

A triumph for scientific freedom

Today's Boston Globe has a wonderful column by Madeline Drexler about new Nobel Prize winners Drs Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, whose determination and objectivity overturned the conventional wisdom that stomach ulcers were caused by smoking, diet, and stress. Marshall on the reaction of the medical scientific community to his hypothesis:

...at an infectious disease conference in Belgium, a questioner in the audience asked Marshall if he thought bacteria caused at least some stomach ulcers. Marshall shot back that he believed bacteria caused all stomach ulcers.

Those were fighting words. The young physician from Perth was telling the field's academically pedigreed experts that they had it all wrong. "It was impossible to displace the dogma," Marshall explained to me in a jaunty, wide-ranging conversation several years ago. "Their agenda was to shut me up and get me out of gastroenterology and into general practice in the outback."

Drexler:

...if science is to advance, scientists need the freedom and the funding to let their imaginations roam.

Sure, Madeline, but you will be banished to the outback today if you let your imagine roam into the mystery of gender. Ask Dr. Summers.

A superb story of this work and its profound effects on medicine by Judith Hooper was published in the Atlantic Monthly of February 1999. Entitled "A New Germ Theory" (subscription may be required) it is well worth a read. It may change your perspective. It changed mine.

Remembering Who is the Customer

The RNC website today lists quotes of support for SCOTUS nominee Miers, with 3 of the top quotes from a new GOP favorite: Harry Reid.

Some way to restore credibility with the Party's base!
"That'll show 'em! How's this, Karl?"

I Need A Morning-after Pill

Certainly if Oliphant is pleased, then W has blundered irrevocably. Ollie writes:

"[Kansas Senator]Brownback and his conservative friends got the back of Bush's hand. Having essentially held their tongues -- and then their noses -- during the hearings on the Roberts nomination, their reward was an even blanker slate for the hole being left on the court by Sandra Day O'Connor."

Correct as unusual, King Tuesday.

And Michelle Malkin's sputtering rage leaves her with an excellent point, though oblivious to the concept of a of sentence:

"A small minority of readers say we should wait and see, trust Bush, and hold out hope that Miers is a stealth candidate. This last line of defense is truly pathetic. We have a Republican House. A Republican Senate. And a Republican White House. Why is it, after working so hard to put a president in power who promised to appoint conservative judges, that we have to settle for crossing our fingers and accepting a blank-slate Supreme Court nominee with an ideological paper bag over her head?"

I cannot believe that any Red State Senator will take a risk in order to confirm Harriet Miers. Will the Democrats step up? Yes, if they know what is good for them (that's a "no"). We could see the reverse of the votes on NAFTA and welfare reform during the Clinton Administration, where the party out of power pushed the cause through Congress (causes which later were cited by the President as his proudest achievements). But I doubt it.

My forecast (and hope) is that W is headed for a well-deserved trip to the woodshed.

Taranto's Headlines

If you are an Opinionjournal reader you know that Taranto has a funny mind when it comes to headlines. His take on this one cracked me up:

"The Clintons Waited Till Their Last Day to Steal Furniture"
Justice Roberts Takes Supreme Court Bench'--headline, Associated Press, Oct. 3