The Speaker of the House still thinks protecting and defending the Constitution is not a high priority:
“It was my belief that an impeachment of the Vice President or the President … would be very divisive in our country,... It should have come to [sic] no surprise when I became Speaker I said it again, and I continue to hold that view.”
In the Speaker’s special world, the unity and harmony we enjoy now, across the country and in Congress, is simply too valuable to tamper with.
In truth, the only divide impeachment proceedings will create is between those who honor the Constitution and its claims and obligations, and those who do not. Nancy Pelosi has chosen her side.
Failing to act to impeach Bush and Cheney makes her fully complicit in their crimes. By ensuring that unprecedented executive powers are passed on to the next president, she must also bear a full measure of responsibility for the future harm to the country such powers must bring. By turning a blind eye to the criminal conduct of the executive branch she has established a precedent that will make undoing this harm all but impossible.
Bush and Cheney have damaged the republic. Nancy Pelosi will be remembered as the person most responsible for making that damage irreparable.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Friday, January 18, 2008
The Shameful Success of the Surge
Military: 75% of Baghdad Areas Now Secure
Security did improve in Baghdad after the surge, and its residents used the lull to flee the city in unprecedented numbers. In a new poll of Iraqi refugees in Syria:
“... 78 percent said they'd come from Baghdad, which has been the focus of military operations since the U.S. troop buildup began last February. Thirty-five percent said they'd fled between July and October, when U.S. troop strength peaked.”
Former residents of Baghdad make up nearly 60 percent of the four and a half million Iraqis that have been internally and externally displaced by the war.
1.2 million residents of Baghdad have been internally displaced.
The emptied, ethnically cleansed neighborhoods of the city are no longer hot spots of violence. With this 'success,' it must be time for the displaced to come home? Not quite:
"It's a problem that everybody can grasp,.. You move back to the house that you left and find that somebody else has moved into the house, maybe because they've been displaced from someplace else. And it's even more difficult than that, because in many cases the local militias . . . have seized control and threw out anybody in that neighborhood they didn't like."
The surge has reduced violence. But the means employed to reach that end should be a source of national shame, not pride.
Security did improve in Baghdad after the surge, and its residents used the lull to flee the city in unprecedented numbers. In a new poll of Iraqi refugees in Syria:
“... 78 percent said they'd come from Baghdad, which has been the focus of military operations since the U.S. troop buildup began last February. Thirty-five percent said they'd fled between July and October, when U.S. troop strength peaked.”
Former residents of Baghdad make up nearly 60 percent of the four and a half million Iraqis that have been internally and externally displaced by the war.
1.2 million residents of Baghdad have been internally displaced.
The emptied, ethnically cleansed neighborhoods of the city are no longer hot spots of violence. With this 'success,' it must be time for the displaced to come home? Not quite:
"It's a problem that everybody can grasp,.. You move back to the house that you left and find that somebody else has moved into the house, maybe because they've been displaced from someplace else. And it's even more difficult than that, because in many cases the local militias . . . have seized control and threw out anybody in that neighborhood they didn't like."
The surge has reduced violence. But the means employed to reach that end should be a source of national shame, not pride.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Shibboleth
The next president will deal with issues arising in such areas as agriculture, energy, medical research, education, the environment that cannot be understood outside of the context provided by science. To formulate policy in these areas without attention to the consensus of expert opinion is to deliberately limit one’s understanding in a way that must inevitably distort both one’s grasp of the essential problems, and their solutions. Deliberately cultivated ignorance is disturbing, but even more disturbing is the disdain this displays for the proposition that, as rational beings, we ought to shape our views about the physical world in conformation with the discernible facts.
The current occupant, and several leading candidates for President of the United States, have expressed doubts about, or outright rejection of, the fact of human evolution. In the case of evolution, the discernible facts support the reality of human evolution to such an extent that to chose an inconsistent view one must abandon the pretense of regard for science and its core tenet that beliefs about the physical world must be shaped by facts, not the facts by beliefs.
Carefully cultivated ignorance is on full display in Mike Huckabee’s views on evolution:
"If you want to believe that you and your family came from apes, I'll accept that....I believe there was a creative process."
Ron Paul simply rejects evolution, and doesn’t see what the big deal is:
". . . I think it's a theory, a theory of evolution, and I don't accept it, you know, as a theory, but I think it probably doesn't bother me. It's not the most important issue for me to make the difference in my life to understand the exact origin. I think the Creator that I know created us, every one of us, and created the universe, and the precise time and manner, I just don't think we're at the point where anybody has absolute proof on either side.”
Mitt Romney has expressed a qualified acceptance of “theistic” evolution: he accepts that human evolution occurred, but with God’s as it’s guide.
"I believe that God designed the Universe and created the Universe. I believe he used the process of evolution to create the human body." (Super-natural selection?)
McCain is murkier, he may or may not embrace a variety of ‘theistic’ evolution:
“When I stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon. I know that it was the hand of God...only God could have created that magnificence. But at the same time, I think that Darwin's theories are valid, and I think that natural selection and survival of the fittest are clearly scientifically based. But I also believe that in time before time, that there was a divine hand in creation.
. . .
I think that evolution should be taught. I think it's absolutely the most valid and scientifically based and proven conclusion that we can draw. But I respect the fact that some people believe in intelligent design and they should have their views vented also. But in my own personal opinion, I don't think they're contradictory.
Q: So do you believe in both?
Well, if you're saying that intelligent design is the earth created in seven days, then no. But I do believe that time before time there was a divine hand that brought this magnificent world and human beings into it.” (Emphasis mine. The theory of evolution is ‘valid,’ but 'a divine hand' brought human beings into the world, so humans did/did not evolve?)
Unlike other issues that divide the candidates, and ordinary Americans, that evolution occurred, and still occurs, is not something about which reasonable people may disagree. It’s not like the social security ‘crisis’ or the threat posed by Iran. On the question of whether or not humans evolved there is one answer overwhelmingly supported by observation and evidence.
Let’s be clear, the answer to the question “Did human beings evolve?” is unequivocally “yes.” Not so the answers to questions about how they did so. Reasonable people can and do disagree about the mechanics of evolution.
When confronted with overwhelming evidence that evolution occurs, these candidates blithely turn their back on the testimony of observation and evidence and instead embrace a belief about physical matters of fact inconsistent with both.
“I'm not sure what in the world that has to do with being president of the United States."
Says Mike Huckabee
What it has to do with being president, of course, is that it provides insight into the intellectual honesty of candidates, their grasp of critical reasoning, their basic understanding of science, and, specifically, how they may reason when required to make decisions informed by a consensus of scientific opinion.
If these men can overlook the overwhelming prevailing scientific consensus about evolution, what does this say about their grasp of and respect for scientific reasoning? If biology, anthropology, paleontology astrophysics, geology, genetics all say “evolution happened,” and you turn a deaf ear, it's not simply a matter of personal taste or individual conviction. To accept as true beliefs about the physical world inconsistent with overwhelming factual evidence is irrationality, not healthy self-expression.
Presidents, and the rest of us non-experts, have to make determinations about scientific matters based on the consensus of experts. We trust that consensus because of our understanding of how science self-regulates. We know that scientists routinely submit their claims to the scrutiny of fellow scientists and must adapt or abandon views this process reveals to be unsupported by the evidence.
What Huckabee and Paul in particular have shown us is a basic disregard for this process and its result: scientific consensus. When, as non-experts, they are required to make a determination informed by the consensus of scientific opinion they are perfectly willing to simply ignore it.
This suggests a capacity for self-deception, or mendacity or willful ignorance (“if you want to believe your family came from apes…”) or all three, that is disturbing in any individual, not only a president.
We know what it's like to have a President with these qualities. We may never recover from having one, we surely cannot survive two.
Richard Dawkins in a conversation with Bill Moyers:
MOYERS: What do you think happens to a society that tolerates the belief that the universe was created in six days?
DAWKINS: Well, I'm all for tolerance, but I'm worried about a society where a sufficiently large number of the electorate can actually swing the vote, not of course that the age of the earth actually affects current politics directly. But it shows such a divorce from reality. Such an inability to apprehend the real world in which people live.
… I really worry about the judgments that people will make in other fields, … When you think about how young the world is supposed to be, according to this view, it's 6,000... it's less than 10,000 years old. This means the entire universe began sometime after the middle stone age. I mean, what kind of a grasp on reality does that suggest?
Willingness to turn one’s back on scientific evidence and the consensus of scientific experts is a shibboleth, a test or criterion for determining membership in a group. In this case, the group is The Rational. By this test our current president and a disturbingly large chunk of the field of presidential candidates have shown a willingness not just to tolerate, but to actively embrace, irrationality.
The current occupant, and several leading candidates for President of the United States, have expressed doubts about, or outright rejection of, the fact of human evolution. In the case of evolution, the discernible facts support the reality of human evolution to such an extent that to chose an inconsistent view one must abandon the pretense of regard for science and its core tenet that beliefs about the physical world must be shaped by facts, not the facts by beliefs.
Carefully cultivated ignorance is on full display in Mike Huckabee’s views on evolution:
"If you want to believe that you and your family came from apes, I'll accept that....I believe there was a creative process."
Ron Paul simply rejects evolution, and doesn’t see what the big deal is:
". . . I think it's a theory, a theory of evolution, and I don't accept it, you know, as a theory, but I think it probably doesn't bother me. It's not the most important issue for me to make the difference in my life to understand the exact origin. I think the Creator that I know created us, every one of us, and created the universe, and the precise time and manner, I just don't think we're at the point where anybody has absolute proof on either side.”
Mitt Romney has expressed a qualified acceptance of “theistic” evolution: he accepts that human evolution occurred, but with God’s as it’s guide.
"I believe that God designed the Universe and created the Universe. I believe he used the process of evolution to create the human body." (Super-natural selection?)
McCain is murkier, he may or may not embrace a variety of ‘theistic’ evolution:
“When I stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon. I know that it was the hand of God...only God could have created that magnificence. But at the same time, I think that Darwin's theories are valid, and I think that natural selection and survival of the fittest are clearly scientifically based. But I also believe that in time before time, that there was a divine hand in creation.
. . .
I think that evolution should be taught. I think it's absolutely the most valid and scientifically based and proven conclusion that we can draw. But I respect the fact that some people believe in intelligent design and they should have their views vented also. But in my own personal opinion, I don't think they're contradictory.
Q: So do you believe in both?
Well, if you're saying that intelligent design is the earth created in seven days, then no. But I do believe that time before time there was a divine hand that brought this magnificent world and human beings into it.” (Emphasis mine. The theory of evolution is ‘valid,’ but 'a divine hand' brought human beings into the world, so humans did/did not evolve?)
Unlike other issues that divide the candidates, and ordinary Americans, that evolution occurred, and still occurs, is not something about which reasonable people may disagree. It’s not like the social security ‘crisis’ or the threat posed by Iran. On the question of whether or not humans evolved there is one answer overwhelmingly supported by observation and evidence.
Let’s be clear, the answer to the question “Did human beings evolve?” is unequivocally “yes.” Not so the answers to questions about how they did so. Reasonable people can and do disagree about the mechanics of evolution.
When confronted with overwhelming evidence that evolution occurs, these candidates blithely turn their back on the testimony of observation and evidence and instead embrace a belief about physical matters of fact inconsistent with both.
“I'm not sure what in the world that has to do with being president of the United States."
Says Mike Huckabee
What it has to do with being president, of course, is that it provides insight into the intellectual honesty of candidates, their grasp of critical reasoning, their basic understanding of science, and, specifically, how they may reason when required to make decisions informed by a consensus of scientific opinion.
If these men can overlook the overwhelming prevailing scientific consensus about evolution, what does this say about their grasp of and respect for scientific reasoning? If biology, anthropology, paleontology astrophysics, geology, genetics all say “evolution happened,” and you turn a deaf ear, it's not simply a matter of personal taste or individual conviction. To accept as true beliefs about the physical world inconsistent with overwhelming factual evidence is irrationality, not healthy self-expression.
Presidents, and the rest of us non-experts, have to make determinations about scientific matters based on the consensus of experts. We trust that consensus because of our understanding of how science self-regulates. We know that scientists routinely submit their claims to the scrutiny of fellow scientists and must adapt or abandon views this process reveals to be unsupported by the evidence.
What Huckabee and Paul in particular have shown us is a basic disregard for this process and its result: scientific consensus. When, as non-experts, they are required to make a determination informed by the consensus of scientific opinion they are perfectly willing to simply ignore it.
This suggests a capacity for self-deception, or mendacity or willful ignorance (“if you want to believe your family came from apes…”) or all three, that is disturbing in any individual, not only a president.
We know what it's like to have a President with these qualities. We may never recover from having one, we surely cannot survive two.
Richard Dawkins in a conversation with Bill Moyers:
MOYERS: What do you think happens to a society that tolerates the belief that the universe was created in six days?
DAWKINS: Well, I'm all for tolerance, but I'm worried about a society where a sufficiently large number of the electorate can actually swing the vote, not of course that the age of the earth actually affects current politics directly. But it shows such a divorce from reality. Such an inability to apprehend the real world in which people live.
… I really worry about the judgments that people will make in other fields, … When you think about how young the world is supposed to be, according to this view, it's 6,000... it's less than 10,000 years old. This means the entire universe began sometime after the middle stone age. I mean, what kind of a grasp on reality does that suggest?
Willingness to turn one’s back on scientific evidence and the consensus of scientific experts is a shibboleth, a test or criterion for determining membership in a group. In this case, the group is The Rational. By this test our current president and a disturbingly large chunk of the field of presidential candidates have shown a willingness not just to tolerate, but to actively embrace, irrationality.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Setting the Record Straight on “1-14”
As the nation prepares to remember “1-14,” the day a pretzel almost ended the Bush Presidency, there is word from Guantanamo that interrogators there have uncovered information which casts the events of that day in a new light. Recall the explanation White House physician Dr. Richard Tubb gave for the President’s cheek-first encounter with the floor: "He fainted due to a temporary decrease in heart-rate brought on by swallowing a pretzel." Despite the undeniable plausibility of this explanation, there were, nevertheless, suspicions that this was not an ordinary near-fatal pretzel accident. Such suspicions were gratifyingly confirmed this week when interrogators at Gitmo learned that the President's embarrassing "accident" was actually the culmination of an 18 month-long terrorist operation. Bored, under-employed Wednesday, January 2, 2008
If You Think Our Long National Nightmare Will End in '08, Think Again
Glad as I will be to see the worst president in American history take up brush clearing full-time, I don't for a second imagine that the nightmare into which he has sunk America will end when he does so.
If every illegal power he assumed for the executive branch persists, if his rank criminal behavior goes unpunished, the course of the country will still track as inexorably toward something ugly and fundamentally un-American.
None of the leading democrats recognize that we are at a tipping point in the history of the country. Past that point is ever more authoritarian government, cloaked in the increasingly substance-less forms of 'democracy.' The natural culmination of this process is a nation of flag-worshippers, focused on the now-empty symbols of democracy, deprived of the rights and freedoms that give them meaning.
If you think that merely electing a democrat will reverse this course, think again:
"If elected president in 2008, Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton would consider giving up some of the executive powers President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have assumed since taking office."
Apparently, she has considered it, and, in the case of signing statements at least, has decided against it:
"Democrat Hillary Clinton says 'in very rare instances,' she might attach a so-called signing statement to a bill reserving a right to bypass ‘provisions that contradict the Constitution.'"
Obama, Clinton and Edwards all embrace the idea that the executive may unilaterally determine constitutionality, and use signing statements to rewrite law already passed by the legislature. They insist, naturally, that their use of signing statements will be judicious, well-founded, etc., in short, that such power will never tempt them to abuse.
And while they now condemn Bush’s use of other powers he has assumed, who would care to wager that, once in office, they will not ‘discover’ that even these powers, when used properly, can be potent tools of freedom and democracy, and that it would be rash, even irresponsible, to abandon them?
A president possessed of tyrannical powers who, for whatever reason, doesn’t use them, or uses them with restraint, is as potent a threat to the Republic as Bush. The preservation and transmission of these powers imbues them with the authority of precedent. When they finally and inevitably come into the hands of one who will use them without restraint, how will they be stopped?
There is one way and one way only to wake up from the nightmare: Impeachment. It doesn't matter, as John Conyers insists, that "the votes aren't there." Impeachment isn't pointless unless successful. To seriously undertake the process is to say "we draw the line here" in a way that establishes a precedent future executives can't ignore.
John Nichols has summed up the situation better than I can:
"On January 20th, 2009, if George Bush and Dick Cheney are not appropriately held to account this administration will hand off a toolbox with more powers than any president has ever had, more powers than the founders could have imagined. And that box may be handed to Hillary Clinton or it may be handed to Mitt Romney or Barack Obama or someone else. But whoever gets it, one of the things we know about power is that people don't give away the tools. They don't give them up. The only way we take tools out of that box is if we sanction George Bush and Dick Cheney now and say the next president cannot govern as these men have."
Limitless executive detention, rendition, torture, warrantless eavesdropping on Americans, destruction of evidence, withholding of evidence and obstruction of justice with sweeping claims of executive privilege, ignoring the law at will. These are some of the behaviors and powers we are set to legitimize and make permanently within the scope of acceptable executive authority, by handing them intact to the next executive. John Nichols again:
". . . we are defining what the presidency will be in the future today because we do know the high crimes and misdemeanors of George Bush and Dick Cheney. They have been well illustrated even by a-- rather lax media. They have been discussed in Congress.
If we know these things and we do not hold them to account, then we are saying, as a people and as a Congress, we are saying that we can find out that you have violated the rule of law. We can find out that you have disregarded the Constitution. . . . we can find out that you've done harm to the republic. But there will still be no penalty for that. If that's the standard that we've set, it will hold. It will not be erased in the future."
Impeachment is not about punishment now, its about course correction.
If every illegal power he assumed for the executive branch persists, if his rank criminal behavior goes unpunished, the course of the country will still track as inexorably toward something ugly and fundamentally un-American.
None of the leading democrats recognize that we are at a tipping point in the history of the country. Past that point is ever more authoritarian government, cloaked in the increasingly substance-less forms of 'democracy.' The natural culmination of this process is a nation of flag-worshippers, focused on the now-empty symbols of democracy, deprived of the rights and freedoms that give them meaning.
If you think that merely electing a democrat will reverse this course, think again:
"If elected president in 2008, Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton would consider giving up some of the executive powers President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have assumed since taking office."
Apparently, she has considered it, and, in the case of signing statements at least, has decided against it:
"Democrat Hillary Clinton says 'in very rare instances,' she might attach a so-called signing statement to a bill reserving a right to bypass ‘provisions that contradict the Constitution.'"
Obama, Clinton and Edwards all embrace the idea that the executive may unilaterally determine constitutionality, and use signing statements to rewrite law already passed by the legislature. They insist, naturally, that their use of signing statements will be judicious, well-founded, etc., in short, that such power will never tempt them to abuse.
And while they now condemn Bush’s use of other powers he has assumed, who would care to wager that, once in office, they will not ‘discover’ that even these powers, when used properly, can be potent tools of freedom and democracy, and that it would be rash, even irresponsible, to abandon them?
A president possessed of tyrannical powers who, for whatever reason, doesn’t use them, or uses them with restraint, is as potent a threat to the Republic as Bush. The preservation and transmission of these powers imbues them with the authority of precedent. When they finally and inevitably come into the hands of one who will use them without restraint, how will they be stopped?
There is one way and one way only to wake up from the nightmare: Impeachment. It doesn't matter, as John Conyers insists, that "the votes aren't there." Impeachment isn't pointless unless successful. To seriously undertake the process is to say "we draw the line here" in a way that establishes a precedent future executives can't ignore.
John Nichols has summed up the situation better than I can:
"On January 20th, 2009, if George Bush and Dick Cheney are not appropriately held to account this administration will hand off a toolbox with more powers than any president has ever had, more powers than the founders could have imagined. And that box may be handed to Hillary Clinton or it may be handed to Mitt Romney or Barack Obama or someone else. But whoever gets it, one of the things we know about power is that people don't give away the tools. They don't give them up. The only way we take tools out of that box is if we sanction George Bush and Dick Cheney now and say the next president cannot govern as these men have."
Limitless executive detention, rendition, torture, warrantless eavesdropping on Americans, destruction of evidence, withholding of evidence and obstruction of justice with sweeping claims of executive privilege, ignoring the law at will. These are some of the behaviors and powers we are set to legitimize and make permanently within the scope of acceptable executive authority, by handing them intact to the next executive. John Nichols again:
". . . we are defining what the presidency will be in the future today because we do know the high crimes and misdemeanors of George Bush and Dick Cheney. They have been well illustrated even by a-- rather lax media. They have been discussed in Congress.
If we know these things and we do not hold them to account, then we are saying, as a people and as a Congress, we are saying that we can find out that you have violated the rule of law. We can find out that you have disregarded the Constitution. . . . we can find out that you've done harm to the republic. But there will still be no penalty for that. If that's the standard that we've set, it will hold. It will not be erased in the future."
Impeachment is not about punishment now, its about course correction.
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