The Morning After ... Blues

 As we write, the newsboys are standing on the corners shouting, "Wuxtry! Read all about it! Blue wave swamps billionaires' yacht! Getcha morning paper!"

Which is to say the the November 2025 election appears to be good news for the Democratic Party and correspondingly bad for the Republicans. This appearance is purely arithmetical, in the sense that it is attested by votes counted and estimated. While no doubt encouraging, it is by no means clear -- nor could it be at this preliminary stage -- that the results will actually conduce to strengthening the Democratic Party or weakening the grip of Trumpism on America.

Two of the most heralded victories of the moment, for example, are those of Zohran Mamdani in New York City and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia.  Neither of these is surprising in itself. Mamdani was the Democratic nominee in a city where Democrats enjoy a powerful historic advantage, notwithstanding the Giuliani years. Spanberger was the Democratic nominee in a state where governors must stand down after a single term, and are most often chosen from the party that does not hold the White House. (She was also running against a Black woman in the South.) So neither victory was inherently unpredictable.

The more interesting point, as pundits observed often during the campaign, is that these are two very different varieties of Democrat. New York's mayor-elect is conspicuously young for the job, at 34. Although born in Africa, he was raised in the cushiest and New-Yorkest of confines, among the Upper West Side's academic and artistic elites.  His politics certainly lean left, as reflected by his decade-long affiliation with the Democratic Socialists. He is a Muslim. Also -- and perhaps most interesting to both readers of this blog -- he worked on the unsuccessful 2017 campaign of our friend and seminary classmate, the Rev. Khader El-Yateem.

Spanberger is 12 years older than Mamdani. In matters of faith, she is something called "Protestant Unspecified," which we imagine means as religious as her constituents need her to be in the moment. Born in New Jersey but raised in Virginia, with a background in federal law enforcement and intelligence, she has cut a considerably more conservative pose. After the Dems' 2020 election losses, she famously argued that they had suffered because Republicans were able to accuse them of "socialism," as well as because of the poorly-phrased call to "defund the police." She went so far as to propose that no Democrat should ever use the word "socialist" again.

Clearly, these two Democrats are shaped differently, both by their life experience and by the constituencies they serve. While it is certainly true that America's two principal parties are by nature complex and often unwieldy coalitions, it is also fair to ask how easily these two leaders, or their respective supporters, will be able to collaborate on policy and governance.  This is not a new question; the co-existence of conservative Democrats and liberal Democrats is as old as the party. But in a time when Republicans are so very ascendant, and so very averse to be caught compromising with the other party, it will be impossible for Democrats to make headway except by working closely with each other, even when their convictions and constituencies differ deeply.

Looking for analogies on the other side of the aisle, we recall that the Paleo-Cons and Neo-Cons of old managed reasonably well despite some fundamental differences. Yes, the Tea Party was the bane of John Boehner's life, but he was also able to make common cause with them against the ACA, and even to promote the career of a TP leader.  More recently, though, there appears to be an impassible chasm between the radical Republicans aligned with President Trump and virtually the entirety of the party's old guard.  Even the late Dick Cheney, than whom few Republican leaders could be called more Republican, and whom this blog pilloried with zeal during his vice-presidency, cast his last vote for a Democrat. 

Put plainly, Republicans unwilling to endorse both Trump's extreme policies and his chaotic personal style find themselves as impotent at the moment as Democrats, if not more so. Democrats are feeling good indeed this morning, as well they might -- but their ability to continue feeling good, and above all to govern effectively, may come to depend on their ability to do what the Republicans currently cannot and do not need to: work closely even when they disagree.

Garbo Speaks

Justice Clarence Thomas has broken his seven-year silence in Supreme Court arguments.  More exciting yet, it was to disagree with the ventriloquist who controls him his friend and colleague, Justice Scalia.

Was it to ask some sharp question of an overreaching attorney?  To argue some fine point of law, or to shed light upon an obscure corner of the matter at hand?  Sadly, no.  It was to bash his alma mater.

In the course of an argument about whether a particular person had received adequate representation at his trial, Scalia proposed that, since one of the the fellow's attorneys had gone to Harvard and another to Yale , his representation must have been good enough.  And then, per the Wall Street Journal,

Amid crosstalk among the justices — all of whom attended either Harvard or Yale — Justice Thomas made a remark to the effect that if the lawyer went to Yale, the defendant must not have received competent counsel, according to several people present.

Oh, Clarence.  You really don't get this clubhouse jocularity thing, do you?  The idea is to poke fun at the other guy's school.

Thomas, the Journal reminds us, has long been publicly and viscerally hostile to the place that trained him for his profession.  In that sense, this was just a predictable jibe from an unpleasant and unhappy man.

On the other hand, however, this is a bit like the paradox of Epimenides, adverted to in Titus 1:12, about prevaricating Cretans.  If, that is, lawyers trained at Yale are good for nothing, and if Clarence Thomas was trained at Yale, then logically ....

Thomas has raised an interesting question here.  perhaps he will address it further the next time he opens his mouth.  On the current schedule, this should be about January, 2020.

It's Not Justice, But ....

According to the lawsuit, one former inmate said he was forced to drink water until he vomited blood. Other allegations include rape, beatings, being slammed into a wall, and one man alleged he was subject to a mock execution at gunpoint. Many reportedly said they were forced to stand naked for long periods.

Yeah, that was Abu Ghraib.  Remember the good old days of the Bush Administration?

Military contractor L-3 does, if only barely.  As this Danger Room post reveals, L-3 contract employees were an active part of the highest-profile torture scandal in American history.  Some of them were named in the eventual Pentagon report, right alongside the soldiers they worked with.  But, while 11 soldiers were court-martialed (and we assume there were consequences for others), no civilian contractors were fired, fined, arrested, imprisoned or otherwise punished.

Nor have they yet.  But, in rather than continue defending itself against continuing legal action by 71 former inmates of Abu Ghraib, L-3 has paid out $5.28 million.

It's not a lot of money, when you consider how much these guys earn.  And a payment by the company  is not a legal judgment -- much less a conviction of the criminals our government paid to torture people.

But it's something, and we're glad it is.

Stubborn Things

Do you remember "the reality-based community"?  The phrase, horrible in its resonance, emerged from a press interview with an anonymous member of the Bush administration -- who used it as a slur against those who argued for political and military calculation based on facts, rather than pure ideology.  The phrase came to serve as a bitter example of how arrogance and fantasy were combined in the catastrophic excesses of neo-conservatism.

In the years since, as the world has come to terms with the singular destruction wrought by the Bush years, there has been a modest retreat from the strategy of inventing one's own facts.  Despite the liberal bias attributed to it by Stephen Colbert, reality has come to enjoy a bit more credibility.  Even the former Bushies -- Dick Cheney notably excepted -- have come to take a muted tone, generally expressing some regret for their most delusional decisions.

Well, says former intelligence chief Stephen Cambone, count me out!  According to Wired's Danger Room blog, Cambone, who served from March 2011 forward as Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, "shocked" the Aspen Security Forum recently by declaring that, far from an ill-considered foreign adventure sold to the general public and the international diplomatic community alike with a tissue of misdirection, misinformation and outright fabrication, the Iraq invasion was in fact "one of the greatest strategic decisions of the first half of the 21st century."

Now, at first we assumed Cambone meant "great" in the strict sense of "large," which the decision certainly was.  It committed a vast military force -- and a vast treasury -- to a vaguely-defined cause.  It created a region-wide political and humanitarian crisis, the latter particularly savage in the way it has endangered and driven into exile so many Assyrian Christians.  However stupid and expensive it may have been, this was indeed a big decision.

But no.  Cambone apparently believes that the Iraq invasion was a brilliant "victory" -- his word -- and is the spark that ignited the Arab Spring.  (We wonder whether anybody asked him about the Islamist undercurrent that has come to shape many of the Arab-sprung nations.)

Whatever.  It's a free country, the guy can say whatever he wants.  We can't imagine that anybody is listening; Danger Room has a list of juicy quotes from Bush and his team describing Iraq as their signal mistake, and warning successors not to repeat it. Still and all, it is sweet to know that even when the captains defect from their cause, a few bold foot-soldiers remain faithful, waving the banner and declaring their eternal opposition to the rule of facts.

Chuck Colson, RI [not too much] P

So Chuck Colson kicked off, at the age of 80.  The guy was living proof that, when F. Scott Fitzgerald said that thing about there being no second acts in American lives, he was full of pretentious malarkey.  (Drinking with Hemingway again, weren't you Scottie?).  Colson's second act was long and influential.

Needless to say, the press was quick to remind us all about the first act, as the guy who volunteered to walk over his own grannie if it would re-elect Nixon, and who served time for same.  And needless to say, our friends at GetReligion were quick to jump on the press for being stuck in the 70s, so deeply enthralled by the glamorous tale of Woodward and Bernstein that it couldn't see past Watergate to admire Colson's second act, as the pious prison reformer, the "towering figure" who "shaped the state" of modern evangelicalism.  Such and injustice!

They actually had us going for a while there.

Fortunately, Gawker just responded with a blistering diatribe by pseudonymous blogger "Mobuto Sese Seko."  It's not really journalism, in the conventional sense of the word; there's no pretense of balance or objectivity.  We can't even call it a think piece or an editorial.  It's pure, snarling, savage catharsis.  And it's just what we needed.

Calling Colson by a name we can't use in a family blog -- okay, fine, twist our arm:  God's Own Ratf*****r -- Seko speaks as much ill of the dead as we have ever seen.  As for the "towering figure" reshaping evangelicalism, he snorts:

His anti-gay, anti-liberal rhetoric—and unscientific and ahistorical demonization and smears—never veered from the toxic and odious, but one could hear it lustily reaffirmed by almost every GOP primary candidate this season. His Manhattan Declaration, that devout Christians should reject laws at odds with the Bible, is merely the most prominent articulation of unconstitutional Dominionist hogwash. Further, this kind of personal rejection of the rule of law is overwhelmed by a current GOP climate where it's been translated into a war on birth control for women, while public officials muse unapologetically about secession and nullification.

So there.

Is Seko reaching when he draws a line from Colson to Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer?  Probably.  Okay, definitely.  But Colson was a key figure in the development of modern conservative politics, as well as of modern politically-active evangelicalism.  So if you aren't wild about either of those things, or the antics of their advocates, consider Seko's curt analysis:

Colson left a snowball on a hill, and there were no shortage of people willing to help push it down.

George W. Bush is Chicken

Dear Former President Bush,

Call their bluff! Otherwise, we're calling you a chicken.

Word on the street is that you have canceled a speaking engagement in Switzerland, out of concern that you might be arrested there for war crimes.

Those lame-o bleeding hearts at Human Rights Watch say they plan to submit a case against you to the Geneva courts on Monday. About the waterboarding thing, obviously. or as they call it, "torture." They say the complaint is going to run to 2,500 pages. But big whoop, dude. You've probably issued signing statements longer than that. High five.

Sure, HRW has pursued effective legal actions against Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet and Hissene Habre of Chad. But those guys weren't Americans. Frankly, we don't think the Swiss have the cojones to arrest you. One of their nameless bureaucrats even said as a former head of state, you would enjoy "a certain diplomatic immunity." Yeah, sure, Pinochet was a former head of state, but he was from Latin America, not the real America. Wrong side of the Rio Grande. Rules are different south of the border. You know what I mean, right?

But here's the thing. You back down this time, it's just gonna happen again. Next thing, you can't visit Spain, or Belgium. Not that you want to visit Belgium, obviously, but it's on the way to places. For all we know, Merkel is still sore about that backrub. If you don't nip this legal-action-for-torture baby in the bud, you won't be able to get off a plane anywhere. For that matter, neither will Unca Dick or his buddies 'Berto and "Squinty" Yoo and that guy with the beard, David Addingmachine. You gotta look out for the team, here, pal.

So call their bluff. Sure, it's a little risky. Sure, worst case, you wind up in prison. But, dude, it'll be a Swiss prison. That's gotta be more luxurious than the regular kind. Little chocolates on the pillow, and we're talking Swiss chocolates.

Come on, then. Go to Switzerland. Otherwise, we're all gonna think you're some kind of scaredy-cat mama's boy.

Yours,

The Egg

Speaking of the Dark Ages

Seymour Hersh is a great journalist. From My Lai to Iraq, he has broken some of the biggest stories ever reported about the American military. He has spent decades building up what seems to be an enormous network of sources in the military and intelligence services. That is all the more surprising since, if we had to attribute a bias to Seymour Hersh, we would unhesitatingly call it a liberal one. Still, a great journalist and a servant of the free society.

Who, at the moment, seems just a little kooky.

Speaking in Qatar this week, Hersh delivered what Foreign Policy calls "a rambling, conspiracy-laden diatribe ... expressing his disappointment with President Barack Obama and his dissatisfaction with the direction of U.S. foreign policy."

Nothing particularly kooky there. A lot of people (although not at the Egg!) are less than enthusiastic about the president these days. But here's the kooky part. He said that, both in the Cheney era and today, the wars in Asia have been conceived (on the part of American policy makers) in explicitly religious terms:

"We're gonna change mosques into cathedrals. That's an attitude that pervades, I'm here to say, a large percentage of the Joint Special Operations Command."

He then alleged that Gen. Stanley McChrystal ... and his [JSOC] successor, Vice Adm. William McRaven, as well as many within JSOC, "are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta." ....

"Many of them are members of Opus Dei," Hersh continued. "They do see what they're doing -- and this is not an atypical attitude among some military -- it's a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They're protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the 13th century. And this is their function."

First off, if that's true, they're incompetent. Because in the chaos created by our invasions, the Christian populations of central Asia have been pounded savagely. Far from protecting them, our troops have put them in significantly greater danger, and in Iraq may well have assured their eventual extirpation. Second, and needless to say, the Pentagon denies it all. And they sound pretty credible doing it, which is more than Hersh can say.

Now, there is some stuff that isn't kooky at all. When Hersh talks about a military in which religion is used as a tool for motivating the troops, he is on to something we have heard elsewhere, and often. Hersch goes on to say this:

"They have little insignias, these coins they pass among each other, which are crusader coins," he continued. "They have insignia that reflect the whole notion that this is a culture war. … Right now, there’s a tremendous, tremendous amount of anti-Muslim feeling in the military community.”"

We don't know whether it is true, but it does match up with other things we have seen. In case it needs saying, this is -- if true -- a bad thing for many reasons, ranging from military strategy to the First Amendment.

But. The Knights of Malta? Opus Dei? This is the stuff of conspiracy nuts, the same people who put on tin-foil hats to block the CIA transmission through their fillings. The actual Knights Hospitallers of St. John etc. are a charitable organization, and Opus Dei, while certainly sinister enough if one is a liberal Roman Catholic still nursing the dream of a new John XXIII, isn't that kind of sinister. (And of course, they've been a huge boon to the small guild of craftsmen making hair shirts. Joking.)

In fact, so far as we can tell, the religious wing-nut contingent in the US armed forces is largely run by neo-Protestant fundamentalists. (Here, here, here, here, for starters.) It is vocal and aggressive, but not especially well-organized. Less a conspiracy than a movement -- although a very wicked movement indeed.

But please do note our qualifiers here: If. So far as we can tell. The fact is that Hersh does not sound credible, and has yet to lay out any evidence. We suspect him very strongly of having turned an unfortunate emotional corner, much like the former Lutheran former theologian Bob Benne. But the other fact is that he has been, for many years, a reliable reporter of facts which might otherwise seem unbelievable. So let's see if he's got some now.

Bush's War on Christianity Continues

Of course, it is Obama's war now, at least in the sense that he has not yet ended the American involvement in it. But Bush started the war, for reasons which will be debated for decades to come, and so in that sense Iraq will always be his war.

And if it is not technically a war on Christianity, it is certainly a war in the course of which Christians have been systematically slaughtered with the express intention of creating a new nation in which they no longer exist. Substitute "Jews" for "Christians" and see if that reminds you of anything. In fairness, the analogy is imprecise -- the government hasn't orchestrated the violence. It simply declines to stop it.

The latest, according to Le Monde (above, in French) is from northern Iraq -- Karakosh, Nineveh, and in this case Mosul:

On Feb. 14, a kibbeh-vendor was killed in the city center. The next day, a seller of fruits and vegetables was targeted in his shop. The day after, it was two students on their way to the university who were victims of an armed attack that killed one of them. And the same day, the body of a schoolteacher was found in the street, riddled with bullets.

There's lots more like this. The family of a priest, murdered in their own home. Convents turned into emergency dormitories for families unsafe in their neighborhoods; the police standing by uselessly.

It has cost us more than $700 billion dollars so far, and this is the nation we have created. And yes, we are fighting against the bad guys. But we started the war.

Dick Cheney Works With Iranian Regime

Pet today's Times, top leaders of the Iranian reformist movement have offered confessions -- they conspired to topple the government, and they were trained to do so by foreign governments. And both Ayatollah Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad are great men and servants of the people. Allahu akbar.

These confessions, we are advised, probably resulted from "pressure tactics like sleep deprivation, solitary confinement and torture."

We fully expect that the reformists will be "expunged from the political process." Our only question is what the regime will do with them. They could be killed, of course -- but the eyes of the world are open just now. They can't very well be exiled, because seven out of ten (or maybe two out of ten, the numbers are murky) would just return to the fight. And these men are committed to the overthrow of the government -- they have said so themselves.

The only answer is to lock them up in some extrajudicial prison camp, administered by the government forces and beyond the purview of the courts or even the Red Cross. But where can the Iranians find such a wonderland? Well, we understand there are some empty beds at Guantanamo Bay.

Iranian Regime Doesn't Watch MSNBC

For days now, the streets of Tehran have filled with unhappy people protesting what looks very much like a fraudulent election.

And for days, US Republicans -- being safely out of office, and not having to worry about the consequences of their actions -- have berated President Obama for his failure to denounce the election, and take sides with the supposed reform candidate, Mir Hossain Mousavi.

But for days, Obama, and the rest of his administration (even Biden) have stayed on message. Like a longish yogic mantra, they have repeated that (a) it is not the business of the US to interfere in the internal affairs of another nation; (b) that American interference, in this case, would surely provide political cover for the regime as it cracked down on protesters; and that (c) there was no strong evidence that replacing Ahmadinejad with Mousavi would make a difference in US/Iranian relations, which are ultimately shaped by the clerics anyway.

And for days, MSNBC has rebroadcast the administration's mantra. (Just a thought, but are Rachel Maddow's ratings really good enough to justify running her show for 18 hours a day?)

But it turns out that the Iranian government doesn't actually need American interference to provide cover for a crackdown, especially not when it can simply lie, and claim that such interference has already taken place. Which it is now doing.

We hate to say this, but there may be an important lesson here for Obama and his team. Republicans learned long ago (from Reagan, if not McCarthy) that the age of mass media obviates reasonable discourse. In a rapid news cycle, among people with short memories, there is remarkably little political penalty for saying anything that sounds good, no matter how false, stupid or illegal. You can lie, bluster, and even threaten, without ever being called to account. (Although there are some limits: you can't claim military victory in a flight suit onboard an battleship.)

And the reverse is true: an exercise in self-discipline is wasted energy. If you want to do something mischievous, why not go ahead and do it, since your enemies will claim that you have in any case?

At least, these are the things we imagine Dick Cheney whispered into W.'s ear, late at night. He clearly got the advice somewhere, and followed it. And we all know how that worked out.

Newsflash: Cheney Takes Complete Responsibility for His Crimes

Gotcha.  Actually, he takes no responsibility.  And blames everybody else.

The former Veep's current media blitz seems to be less about national security than about a defense -- naturally, a pre-emptive defense -- against the legal proceedings he must believe are coming down the road.  After all, he has said upfront, albeit belatedly, that "I do not believe, and I have never seen any evidence, that [Saddam Hussein] was involved in 9/11."  After years of claiming otherwise, this pretty much cedes any claim he might have to actual security expertise, not to mention sound judgment or basic humanity. 

So if he doesn't have any secret insider dope to help protect our country, what's Cheney blathering on about all the time?

Answer:  Why the mess he made is everybody else's fault.  First, he started by blaming the Obama Administration, which is just weird.  The new president didn't order the war, the torture, or the renditions.  He's trying to clean up the mess he was left with, and everybody knows that.  Cheney went on to blame then-CIA head George Tenet.   Now he's also blaming Richard Clarke.  And Heaven knows there's plenty of blame to go around the former administration, but here're the problems:   

(a) Tenet and the CIA have been pretty clear that their intelligence was always murky. Spooks always are, because it always is. House of mirrors, and all that. Could they have been more discriminating, and tried to make sure that a dimwitted president read it with all the usual espionage caveats?  Probably.  But they weren't the ones who decided to launch a war based on it, nor to present it to the public (and the UN) as if it were all more solid than it ever was.  

And (b) Clarke seems to have been the only one in the administration who was actually worried about al Quaeda before 9/11, and the only one who actually resisted the facile link of 9/11 to Iraq.  Could he have been more vocal about his concerns?  Sure.  He could have grabbed the president by the lapels and shouted "Listen to me, you idiot mama's boy," with spittle flying every which way.  That would have been 0.03 seconds before the Secret Service shot him dead.

No, those guys did their jobs.  The spies gathered intel, the antiterrorism advisor gave advice.  The only person who didn't do his job -- who exceeded it in every conceivable way -- was Cheney.  Because, after all, what is a vice-president's job?  To wake up every morning, read the paper, and check on the president's health.  Ask if there are any tie votes in the Senate.  Then go back to sleep. Imagine how much better the last eight years would have been had the vice-president actually stuck to the job description provided for him by the Constitution.  (Or, come to think of it, shown any other interest in the Constitution.)

So it's pretty clear that Cheney is breaching the customary protocol (of keeping your mouth shut while a new administration gets to work) not in any effort to enhance our security, but in an effort to distance himself from blame.  Within a few months -- or weeks, at this rate -- we fully expect him to say, in public, "Don't blame me; it was the President who commanded the troops."  And again, he'll be half-right.  That's how it would have worked in a well-ordered government.

Petraeus Backs Gitmo Closure

Gen. David Petraeus, anointed by the former Republican Congress as Allied Supreme Commander of Everything and Lord of All Our Future Political Aspirations, is personally committed to interrogation techniques consistent with the Geneva Conventions, and with closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Colin Powell is already on record as saying similar things.  So has Wesley Clark.  So did John McCain, before his recent (and typically dishonorable) flip-flop.

Do you see a pattern here?  Actual military officers -- the experts on effective conduct of war -- say torture is bad strategy and Gitmo has long since become counterproductive.  Meanwhile, chickenhawk draft-dodgers like Dick Cheney strut around saying the opposite, with (in Cheney's case) an ever-increasing air of desperation.

Wait! It Wasn't All About Real-Estate!

The synod assembly had sex and violence, too.

The sex part was almost perfunctory.  First, we were asked to  call upon the ELCA's Churchwide Assembly to begin steps toward a social statement on "Justice for Women."  It passed without dissent and without comment, except some unnecessary words from the original sponsor.  On one hand, you could say that this reflects a shared understanding that women are treated unjustly, in America as in most of the world.  Good for us!  On the other hand, though, it raises the question of how much need there is for a teaching document.  Shouldn't we just move on to doing things?  (Like putting new energy behind our Domestic Violence Task Force?  I'd swear we had one.)

But of course, women haven't been sexually exciting since the 1970s.  Err, that's not what we meant.  Sorry, honey.  We just meant that, in our recent experience, the real action has been all about the gays.

Going in, we had been offered two motions, which -- when you cut through the parliamentary language -- presented a simple choice.   First, we could signal our approval of the ELCA's proposed social statement on human sexuality, and ask the church to develop "resources" -- including liturgies -- for recognizing same-sex unions, and rostering pastors living in those unions.  Or else, second, we could do absolutely noting of the kind.

The two motions came from almost comically predictable corners:  one from the Manhattan Ministerium (with at least one certain abstention), another from the ALPB board of directors (or nearly so).  We'll spare you what little suspense there may have been:  the first resolution passed, thus mooting the second. 

We at the Egg are less interested in the resolutions than the debate.  We have attended these shindigs since 1992, and become accustomed to a certain pattern.  A motion is presented, and spoken to eloquently; it is opposed, also eloquently; it is defended, somewhat emotionally; it is attacked, passionately.  Up to this point, it has been a pretty good debate, churchly and even hinting at theology.  

But then things get ugly:  slurs and innuendoes begin to fly.  A fat layman from Long Island tells us that we have betrayed God's Holy Word.  A black woman with a collar wags her finger and accuses us of insensitivity to racial minorities. Some well-intentioned woman in a denim wrap tells a story about her brother dying of AIDS.  Father Haddock tells us that we are all Stalinists.  Faces are red, tempers flare, and many of the next few speakers hyperventilate.

Oh, and in most years there are a series of substitute motions and amendments, including things like "a friendly amendment to strike everything after the word 'resolved.' "  Every vote is tense and ugly, with boos and catcalls.  We spend a lot of time on our feet being counted individually in the beloved "standing serpentine vote."  And then the pro-gay resolution passes, typically by about 70-30.

But this time, the debate was different.  A few of the usual speakers stood up, but they seemed lacking in passion.  Amendments were offered, then voted down with little debate.  We weren't called Stalinists, we didn't hear any heart-wrenching but off-topic anecdotes.  It was as though we went through all the parliamentary motions, but did so at top speed, rushing toward a foregone conclusion.

In seventeen years, Father A. does not believe he has ever seen an assembly so ready to commit itself.  Or so resigned to its fate, depending upon your perspective.

Yes, you say; the sex was finally good.  But what about the violence?  Glad you asked.  Going in, we were presented a resolution calling upon the President and DoJ to prosecute the people who developed the policies permitting (if not encouraging) the torture of prisoners in American custody.  It was a pretty damn good resolution, too, from the Egg's perspective. These are bad people -- yes, David Addington, we mean you -- who have shamed our nation and richly deserve punishment.  

But it may have overreached a bit, in the sense that churches calling for legal prosecution has a kind of Inquisitorial tone.  A substitute motion was offered from the floor (and we confess that, somewhat reluctantly, we helped create this one), declaring our solidarity in Christ with all victims of torture, and including all nations to come clean about torture so that reconciliation could begin.  To some observers, it looked toothless; to others, it looked a little more theologically-informed and a lot likelier to pass.  (Our personal sop-to-conscience was a tacit hope that the process of reconciliation might in some countries, such as ours, include legal action against the architects of torture).

Again, it passed.  But again, as with the matters of sexuality, the process was more interesting than the conclusion.  Because this time, the crazies did come out of the woodwork.  A layman defended waterboarding as "non-hurtful."  A retired military chaplain objected that we were not in solidarity with all victims of torture, which raises an interesting theological point:  Did Christ suffer only for the innocent?  Does the compassion of God -- and therefore of God's Church -- extend only to those who repent, or also to those who continue in sin?  The answers seem cut-and-dried to us at the Egg, but apparently not to our chaplain friend, who was in any event polite enough in his objections to eschew his customary coprological vocabulary.  A number of people attempted to argue that if torture had actually occurred, it was in the past and we had agreed not to do it any longer, and therefore shouldn't ask any questions -- a logic so convoluted and fallacious that it defies calm  analysis.

And then came the golden moment when Father Haddock rose to the mike, and argued that the resolution "attempted to criminalize political activity."  Never mind that, by amendment, we had specifically agreed not to ask for criminal prosecution.  Never mind that torture isn't "political activity," it is, by its nature, a military activity (and under military law, a crime).  Because you know what kind of people criminalize political activity?  Stalinists!  Yes!  There -- he said it.  We were all  bunch of Stalinists.

Never mind that Stalin organized torture on a mass scale, and was never made to answer for his crimes precisely because he commanded a political system that lacked the will to accuse its own leaders, and that this was just the opposite.  He'd said it, and we could go home satisfied, feeling that we had shown our voting members a good time as promised.

Anyway, the resolution passed as amended.  It must have seemed close, because there was a standing serpentine vote -- and thank heaven, because it doesn't really feel like a synod assembly without one.  But it wasn't really all that close -- something like 60/40.  Still, the debate had been exciting.

All of which leads us to the interesting suspicion that sex isn't really sexy anymore.  It may be that the arguments over homosexuality (like those over women which preceded them) have become so routinized, on their way becoming so nearly obviated by generational changes in the cultural discourse, that they have lost their capacity to inspire true wackiness.  Oh, there are still deep disagreements, and there will surely be lasting divisions, and to be sure there will always be work yet undone -- America still hasn't ratified the ERA, either.  But it may be that we have passed the stage at which the arguments are florid and theatrical, and at which their eventual outcome is in serious question.  (Just as we have passed the point at which Ronald Reagan could threaten that an equal rights amendment would require unisex toilets.)

So what does get the institutional juices flowing?  Apparently, crimes of violence committed by the government in its prosecution of a foolhardy war.   So is violence the new sex?  Or is sowing division among the churches just one more way in which Mr. Bush's war is analogous to Mr. Johnson's?

Jesse Ventura: "If I Waterboarded Cheney, He'd Confess to Murder"

We don't believe you, Jesse.  Prove it.

Please.

Those Were The Days

Gary Trudeau dug this one up:

"Torture anywhere is an affront to human dignity everywhere... I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture."

-- George W. Bush, June 2003

GOP to Cheney: We Miss the Secrecy and Undisclosed Location!

The former Veep has crawled out from under his rock to lie about his own record fighting terrorism and make unverifiable claims about the policies of the new administration.  

Cheney needs to be told that there are a of of people in this country who wish he would just shut his prevaricating piehole and disappear.  They're called Republicans.

As the Bush Administration ran its disastrous course, Cheney's approval ratings (so we are told) were lower than those of either the President or the Congress.  And no wonder.  At a policy level, Cheney was most associated with corporate welfare for the energy companies and the torture of captives -- two ideas that repel any decent American.  Beyond that, his style -- the lies, the secrets, the constant sneer, cursing out Pat Leahy on the Senate floor, the treasonous betrayal of a CIA officer, the perverse claim to be part of no constitutional branch of government -- make him emblematic of everything Americans are trying to forget about the last disastrous decade.

And the Republicans -- those actually in government, and especially those hoping to get in -- are trying harder than anybody else.  They want to move on, and fast.  They clearly hope to ride the AIG bonus wave as long as they can.  After an eight year spree of financial mismanagement so vast it boggles the mind, they are trying (again) to reposition themselves as the party of fiscal restraint.  Never mind that their display of probity seems always to involve dwelling upon microscopically small numbers, without ever addressing the scary big ones. 

Cheney, in both his policies and his person, drove the Republicans into the wilderness.  And now, of all times, he comes roaring out of his cave.  So it is not surprising to hear his own party, quoted in The Hill, saying things like "Tending a legacy is best done in a memoir .... I would just encourage everybody who has left office to follow the tradition of the Founding Fathers — to write your memoirs, but to refrain from [criticizing].”  Between the lines, that means:  For the love of the Satan you worship, Dick, please shut up.

Here at the Egg, we find ourselves torn.  Listening to Cheney appalls us, to be sure.  But we are comforted by the thought that every word out of his mouth further damages the already wretched public reputation of the Administration he claimed to serve.  Every time he pisses on Obama for believing in the Constitution, or even on Bush for refusing to pardon Libby, he diminishes the likelihood of a revisionist reassessment, somewhere down the line, and claims that the Bush years somehow weren't that bad.  It almost happened with Nixon, there at the end.  Some people can actually get wistful for LBJ.  And we can't let that happen with Bush.

So, although we say it regretfully, we have to say:  Come on, Dick.  Do another interview.  Do it for the kids.

Not to Gloat, But ....

Dick Cheney is no longer the Vice-President of the United States.  We just needed to say it.

Torture is Not Mentally Healthy

Sounds obvious when you say it that way, doesn't it?  Not healthy for the tortured or the torturing.

And as a witness to this fact which, although obvious, seems to elude the Bush Administration and its remaining admirers (both the crooked ones and the stupid ones, which are what is left), the American Psychological Association has chosen to bar its members from assisting the military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay.

Apparently, this decision was a revolt by the membership at large of America's main psychological fraternity, against a gutless 2005 statement by its own leadership.  The APA is now more nearly in line with the American Medical Association and the American psychiatric Association.

Thus far, the ban lacks an enforcement mechanism.  If  it is added to the association's ethical code, however, they will be able to kick out violators.  We hope that it is, and that they do, post haste.

We Told Them So.

Over our toast with lemon curd this morning, the beautiful Mrs. A read aloud this nugget from Sunday's Times, regarding Henry Paulson, the former Goldman, Sachs chair, and present Bush administration Treasury secretary:

Even Mr. Paulson, for all his Wall Street experience and market savvy, occasionally appears flummoxed by the scale and complexity of the current crisis.

"Funny," she remarked.  "You and I are humble parish priests, and yet we saw this coming two years ago.  Why is one of the world's most powerful money-men flummoxed?"  

She was quite correct as to the fact; two summers back, flush with prenatal nesting hormones, we had briefly considered the purchase of a home.  Eventually, however, we decided not to buy, because it was clear to us that said home -- although attractive and so beautifully located that it breaks my heart to think of it -- had been dramatically overpriced by a market that was already weakening.  Although we could have obtained a mortgage, the terms would have included provisions for low initial rates followed by much higher ones within a few years, and that was plainly foolish.

In other words, two naive and unsophisticated potential buyers, armed with nothing but the facts available from the Times and a few visits to a realtor, could see the housing bubble beginning to burst, and could project from that the inevitable crisis which would affect both families that had accepted predatory mortgages, and banks which had bundled those mortgages into securities.  None of it made sense, even to us.

So how did the world banking community miss it?  And why are they "flummoxed" today?

This is just one among many recent instances of policy failures which appeared likely from the outset to even casual observers, but which have surprised the supposed experts.  

For example, beginning the in the mid-1970s, it was pretty obvious to Father A., then a schoolboy in short pants, that an economy based upon fossil fuels was not viable over the long term.  There were three reasons, both obvious and widely discussed at the time:  (a) carbon emissions (or as we said in those days, "air pollution"); (b) a finite supply which could not keep pace with a rapidly escalating demand; and (c) the political instability of the region from which much of our petroleum was purchased.  One need not have been a child during the oil embargo to have seen all this clearly, but it may have helped.  But all you really needed was a subscription to the Mother Earth News, which ran monthly articles on the fiscal virtue of energy derived from the sun and wind.  Father A. recalls a college course on environmental physics in which, after examining the evidence (all of it available in a textbook by then) and doing a few basic equations, the only policy question left was whether to ditch petroleum in favor of solar or in favor of nuclear.

So if a teenager knew that stuff thirty years ago, why is the government still not stepping up the plate with some serious R&D funding for wind farms and the like?

By the late 1980s, well ahead of the curve, Father A. -- by then, an adventurous young man with a proclivity for visiting exotic places -- had observed the popularity of light trucks fitted out as luxury cars in Haiti and Central America, and predicted the later rise of the American SUV.  But, already having thought through the environmental and financial implications, he always knew the craze would end abruptly, and that the market for used gas-guzzlers would shrivel to nothing.  So he feels no pity for the US auto industry, which -- already in peril -- chose to stake its fortune on the dumbest vehicle it possibly could.

The list goes on.  Iran-Contra didn't surprise anybody who had paid attention to (a) the Reagan Administration's support for Central American death squads and insurgencies, as well as (b) Reagan's own strained relationship with facts.  Airline deregulation hasn't worked out so well, either.  We've always argued that federal subsidies for highways over railroads are perverse, and suddenly we're not alone on that, either.  

Now, in all fairness, we have sometimes been wrong.  Despite our prediction, Bush I's Gulf War is generally considered a success, by everybody except the soldiers with a mysterious illness for which no cure is known, and the land itself, now littered with depleted uranium.  

But the big one, still, is Iraq.  In the months preceding the US invasion of Iraq, a great many people, both in the United States and outside it, argued forcefully that the war would be a mistake.  These arguments followed several main lines:  (a) America had been attacked by stateless terrorists based in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Sudan, so we needed to focus our attention on those people and those places; (b) a war in Iraq would be a drain on America's financial resources and the human resources of the military; (c) the status of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was unclear, but a significant minority doubted their existence, and UN inspectors -- the people with the most detailed first-hand information -- practically begged for more time to do their work.  (Does anybody even remember Hans Blix and Scott Ritter anymore?)

The Bush Administration either ignored these concerns, or responded to them with deceit and misdirection.  A link between Iraq and 9/11 was widely adverted, most notably by Dick Cheney, the member of the Administration likeliest to become fabulously wealthy if a war ensued.  Congress was assured that the adventure would be brief ("Six days, maybe six weeks, I doubt six months") and self-financing.  Colin Powell stood before the UN and showed maps, photographs and scary white powder, all meant to somehow "prove" the existence of the WMDs that didn't exist.

Now, we at the Egg don't claim to be prophets.  (Nor are we knee-jerk peaceniks; ask us about Afghanistan sometime).  When we worried that the pending invasion would be a mistake, we were not by any means a lone voice crying in the wilderness.  Millions of people in hundreds of cities all over the world took to the streets in protest, making the same statement.  Pope John Paul II sent his special envoy, Pio Cardinal Laghi, to ask Bush personally not to begin a war, which would be a "defeat for humanity" and neither legally not morally just.

But the war happened anyway, and it is a mess of historic proportions, one which -- along with our financial woes, and the rise of our Asian competition -- bids fair to reduce America's prosperity at home and influence abroad, quite possibly signaling the beginning of the end of American hegemony.

And so our question is:  Aren't these people experts?  So why -- if a paunchy cleric with neither economic nor scientific training can routinely predict the failure of an American policy -- are the supposed experts who run our government and our large corporations routinely unable to do so?  And if they aren't experts, why do we let them run things?

Bush Administration Electrocutes US Troops

We knew the guyed liked the electric chair, but come on.

Per the Times, electrical work done by Halliburton's KBR subsidiary at US bases in Iraq, long since revealed to be defective, is more thoroughly incompetent than originally understood.  We knew, for example, that 13 soldiers had been electrocuted so far; we did not know that wiring in one Baghdad building was so inept that soldiers received shocks in their own quarters every single day.  

The details are sketchy, but internal KBR and Pentagon documents suggest that both parties have long been aware of the fact that the Administration's favorite contractor was, through sheer incompetence, endangering the lives of American soldiers.

One graf reminds us of the bigger picture:

The reports of shoddy electrical work have raised new questions about the Bush administration’s heavy reliance on contractors in Iraq, particularly because they come after other high-profile disputes involving KBR. They include accusations of overbilling, providing unsafe water to soldiers and failing to protect female employees who were sexually assaulted.

Oh, that's right.  American citizens are paying through the nose so that these guys can electrocute and poison our soldiers and rape their own employees with impunity.