COMMENTARY

15 November 2004
Urgent Plea from gp...a friend of BWUSA
The deadline to comment on Bush administration proposed changes to the
roadless rule is TOMORROW! If you are unfamiliar with the rule, it is a
Clinton administration proposal to prevent road construction and restrict
timber harvest on about 58 million acres of public land: no small
potatoes as a conservation move. In spite of more than 90% support the
first time we commented, and a majority of support in 49 states (stupid
Idaho), the Bushies want to whack the substance out of the rule like it was
an old growth cedar. This is really important, so please consider
sending an email to:
statepetitionroadless@fs.fed.us
Possible things you could mention:
* Request that the proposed change—undoing the Roadless Rule—be withdrawn
immediately. The proposed change must NOT be implemented.
* Demand that the original Roadless Area Conservation Rule, enacted by the
Clinton Administration, be fully installed, now. It should NOT be replaced
by this ill-conceived governors’ petition process.
* Let the Forest Service know that the lands in question belong to all of
the public—not just governors and local politicians. The proposed rule is an
abdication of the federal responsibility to manage these lands.
* Tell the Forest Service that Montanans and millions of Americans want
federal roadless areas protected, and not opened up for development. Let
them know you DO NOT approve of any rule alteration that would allow these
lands to be degraded in any way.
* State your support for wilderness designation for these inventoried
roadless lands. Urge your congressional representatives and the President
to fully support such designation.

Thank you!!!!!!!

###

Dept. of No Comment (extreme wing)
Tom Englehardt
TomDispatch.com, 11 November 2004

"'The marines that I have had wounded over the past five months have been attacked by a faceless enemy,' said Colonel Brandl. ‘But the enemy has got a face. He's called Satan. He lives in Falluja. And we're going to destroy him.'" (Lieutenant-Colonel Gareth Brandl, on his second tour of duty in Iraq and in command of one of the battalions "at the tip of the spear" of the assault on Falluja)

"The most important thing is our religion, not Falluja and not the occupation. If the American solders came to me and converted to Islam, I won't fight them. We are here not because we want to liberate Iraq, we are here to fight the infidels and to make victorious the name of Islam." (Abu Ossama, a Jihadi from Tunisia in Falluja)

"We must not be afraid to make an example of Fallujah… We need to demonstrate that the United States military cannot be deterred or defeated. If that means widespread destruction, we must accept the price… Even if Fallujah has to go the way of Carthage, reduced to shards, the price will be worth it." (Neocon former military officer Ralph Peters, And Now, Fallujah, the New York Post)

"'You're all in the process of making history. This is another Hue city in the making,' Sergeant Major Carlton Kent, the most senior enlisted marine in Iraq, told the forces. ‘I have no doubt if we do get the word that each and every one of you is going to do what you have always done -- kick some butt.'" (Pep talk reported by Rory McCarthy of the British Guardian. The Vietnamese former imperial capital of Hue was nearly destroyed during the Tet Offensive in 1968.)

"The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, told President Bush on Wednesday that his troops were ‘making very good progress' securing Iraq. ‘He said that things are going well in Fallujah,' Bush said, adding that his Iraq commanders had not asked for more troops." (Edward Harris, Associated Press)

The Tipping Point

And so we barge through another door marked "Open With Caution" and into yet another wing of our new age of extremity whose rooms now seem to extend in all directions forever. And this descent into barbarism is being reported to us in the anodyne language of embedded war reporters.

In the meantime, back in Bush's Washington, we seem to have drifted out of the Persian Gulf and down the Mekong River into the Land That Time Forgot (but that Americans can never quite get out of their brains) -- a.k.a. Vietnam. There's our President receiving reports from his generals on our "progress" in a country suffering the sort of regression that in a human being would leave you hospitalized, if not locked away for life. Shades of General William Westmoreland and President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Then, there are our fighting commanders offering pep talks invoking the glorious tradition of Hue, the former Vietnamese imperial capital which, in the bitterest siege of that war, was all but leveled; finally, there's our Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld back at his old stand-up lectern talking about how we're just possibly reaching the "tipping" point in Iraq -- where public opinion will shift over to us. (For those who remember, the long slide downhill in Vietnam was greased with such "points," including the famed "crossover point" when we would kill more of the enemy than they could replace, or as General Westmoreland put it famously at the National Press Club in November 1967: "We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view." It turned out to be the end of the beginning of the beginning of the end, if I remember rightly.)

It's not, as I've argued before, that Iraq and Vietnam are simple analogs, but that our leaders can't get Vietnam off the brain. It's the collective correlative of a guilty conscience for an administration otherwise completely lacking one; and filled, Colin Powell excepted, with people who were unwilling to have anything to do with the Vietnam War in their own earlier lives.

In the meantime, our re-embedded reporters return to the kind of docility and general boosterism that was the hallmark of the early Vietnam years. In our press, extremity only fits others. So our journalists can report on the barbaric extremity of enemy acts -- the beheadings, kidnappings, "hostage slaughterhouses" and the like -- in an appropriate way. But our role in the roiling extremity that is Iraq remains largely beyond them. It's cleansed from the very language they automatically employ. Nothing startling here, of course. This is, after all, but a "balanced" press version of American exceptionalism.

Recently the always interesting Anatol Lieven published a new book, America Right or Wrong (which I soon plan to read). It sports the subtitle, "An Anatomy of American Nationalism." While Lieven is identified on the book jacket as a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington D.C., the subtitle is a pure giveaway as to his un-American-ness. (The poor sap is a Brit, I think.) If he were an American journalist he would never have linked the word "nationalism" (a state of unreasonable zeal for one's own land) to "American." Americans, it's well known, are "patriotic" or, if driven toward the dreaded moniker "nationalistic," then "super-patriotic." It's well known here, just taken for granted, that only foreigners are "nationalistic," or worse yet, "nationalists."

Similarly, in Iraq, the FFs or "foreign fighters" are invariably Syrians, Saudis, Yemenis, Tunisians and other mad Muslims who slip across borders into places like Falluja to fight us. Americans, who boldly invade to liberate, cannot be FFs ever. Our good intentions evidently leave us implicitly at home wherever we go and whatever we do, though no one could deny that American troops are by definition "foreign fighters" in Iraq and, to judge by news reports, increasingly feel that way. (Here I issue a challenge: Any reader who can find a passage written by an American journalist in any mainstream news report in any of our major papers since the invasion of Iraq which refers to American troops as "foreigners" even once will get the Tomdispatch all-expenses-paid trip to sunny Abu Ghraib.)

Similarly, in a recent New York Times front-page story by Edward Wong and Eric Schmitt, large numbers of the rebels and jihadists in Falluja were said, both in the headline (The Insurgents: Rebel Fighters Who Fled Attack May Now Be Active Elsewhere) and in first sentence, to have "fled." ("Insurgent leaders in Falluja probably fled before the American-led offensive and may be coordinating attacks in Iraq that have left scores dead over the past few days, according to American military officials here.") Now, maybe they did flee, but assumedly neither those military officials, nor Wong and Schmitt were actually there to watch them fleeing. The only relevant quote in the piece, from a cell-phone interview with a "midlevel commander" of the insurgency speaks of "leaving" Falluja. Since the American offensive was long announced and coordinated fighting has broken out elsewhere in the Sunni areas of Iraq, it would be as logical to speak of the Fallujan fighters "redeploying" (as American troops brought to Falluja did). But flight, of course, implies cowardice.

Similarly, former American generals, now TV consultants, have flocked back onto TV to decry the rebels and jihadists for being so cowardly as to mix in with the civilian population (as guerrillas invariably do). They should, the implication is, come out and fight like men. No American journalist would ever claim, however, that American pilots in AC-130 gunships or jets attacking Falluja are cowardly, though they are obviously using another type of cover. War, of course, is like that. Each side tends to use the advantages it has. Guerillas not mixing with the population are likely to find themselves not manly or brave but dead, as many undoubtedly now are in Falluja, when facing American fire power in anything like the open or isolation.

But American exceptionalism -- the deep belief that our motives are uniquely pure, our goals singularly above reproach -- means that descriptions of our actions don't fit any of the language categories in which we put those we fight. This is essential to our war coverage -- and largely unexamined. When, for instance, our planes destroy or our troops capture a clinic or hospital, as we did in our first and second acts in Falluja, the reporting on this may be grim -- patients and doctors rousted from hospital rooms, thrown on the floor and handcuffed -- and yet because Americans have done this, there will be no mention of the Geneva Conventions which such an act almost certainly contravenes. (The Fourth Geneva Convention contains this clear passage: "Civilian hospitals organized to give care to the wounded and sick, the infirm and maternity cases, may in no circumstances be the object of attack but shall at all times be respected and protected by the Parties to the conflict.") Similar acts -- the dropping of 500, 1,000 or 2,000 pound bombs in major urban areas (sometimes to kill a single sniper) or the turning back of men trying to flee Falluja (because we have no way of telling whether they are civilians or fighters) -- lead similarly down a steep but unacknowledged path to Hell.

Last night on the prime-time news, a video was run of an American tank blowing the minaret off a mosque (where, again contravening the Geneva Conventions, one or more snipers were hidden). The only comment or commentary offered was a brief interview with an American soldier on the scene offering the completely understandable ground-level view that this was "no holds barred" warfare and his troops had to be protected. But, folks, we're talking about the so- called City of a Thousand Mosques. Imagine an al Qaeda sniper in the steeple of an American church or cathedral and how Americans might react.

Or let's imagine this: If American claims are accurate and (like the Russians before they went in and leveled the Chechnyan capital of Grozny), we did our best to get civilians out of Falluja, possibly a couple of hundred thousand of them, where did they go? Tens of thousands of refugees, homeless and desperate? Where are the articles about them? Who is thinking about what will happen when they finally return to a city in ruins, to homes that may no longer exist in neighborhoods that have been pounded into rubble in areas possibly lacking the most basic services or functioning hospitals? These are, as Naomi Klein points out on the Alternet website, the future "voters" of Sunni Iraq.

The decision by American strategists to "take" Falluja the second time around leads us directly into the charnel house of history. Unfortunately, even to think reasonably about what's unfolding in Iraq you need to leave the American press behind. Only elsewhere in the world are the obvious analogies to Falluja (or Iraq) today coming to mind. Take the Russian destruction of the city of Grozny from whose ruins so many years later guerillas still ambush Russian troops, as described by former Australian diplomat Tony Kevin in the Sydney Morning Herald; or the eerie and depressing parallels -- right down to the beheadings -- to the Algerian independence struggle against the French ("the first campaign in which poorly equipped Muslim mujaheddin licked one of the top Western armies") as described by Alistair Horne in The Spectator, the conservative British publication; or the Syrian destruction of the city of Hama as considered by Charles Glass in the British Independent.

Only elsewhere (or on the Internet) are you likely to find mention of the Geneva Conventions when hospitals are taken or mosques blown apart. Only elsewhere is the language of American war-making and war reporting questioned or the efficacy (no less morality) of bombing civilian populations in major urban centers considered.

The other day CNN had a report on the recent actions of the French military in the Ivory Coast. In the headline and the subsequent report, the French were lambasted for their "hypocrisy" in opposing our actions in Iraq and yet acting like the former colonial masters they are in the Ivory Coast. I assure you, however, that you can search the American press or television in vain for a single report that might link the word "hypocrisy" to the Bush administration for any of its actions. It's just not in our journalistic dictionary, and that dictionary ensures that, even as our leaders push ever further into the age of extremism -- remember, Alberto Gonzales, just nominated as our next Attorney General, oversaw the White House effort to create a legalistic framework for an offshore torture regime -- it's nearly impossible for American readers to grasp the extremity of the situation.

Depending on what news report you read, American troops have by now taken 50% or 70% or 90% of Falluja. The real question, though, is 50-70-90% of what? In the meantime, after initially upbeat reports, it looks like there will be significant American casualties in Falluja, which means growing anger and frustration, which means ever more extreme acts on the ground.

So here's an old Vietnam-era word that might have been worth bringing back as our Fallujan offensive began: "escalation." The widespread destruction in Falluja represents an escalation of our Iraq war. It represents an extremity of behavior (on both sides), horrific in itself, for which there will be a cost as yet unknown. As small-scale running battles, assassinations, and car bombings now shake Mosul, Samarra, and other cities in Sunni Iraq, we see yet more doors marked "Open With Caution," or even "Do Not Enter," before us, and yet more tanks and jets and angry soldiers, and more frustrated American commanders and strategists ready to barge through them.

What we need now is not our usual set of embedded reporters, but the artist Hieronymous Bosch back from the grave to paint us the necessary pictures. After all, we've already seen what the liberation of Najaf and Falluja look like. But what will Iraq look like after we've liberated Samarra and Mosul and who knows where else -- and the insurgency only grows?

11 November 2004
FROM FALLUJA, A REASON TO REJECT GONZALES
The New Republic
From Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's account in The Washington Post of a foreign jihadist's journey to fighting the United States in Falluja:

Abu Thar turned 30, and might never have tried to reach Iraq again but for the photographs that emerged of U.S. military police abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. Seeing the photos, his wife, also a religious student, urged him to leave everything and go to Iraq to fight jihad. She was pregnant with their sixth child.

"She told me, 'If they are doing this to the men, imagine what is happening to the women now,'" Abu Thar recalled. "'Imagine your sisters and I being raped by the infidel American pigs.'"

The U.S.'s descent to the depths of Abu Ghraib began with Alberto Gonzales's memos to President Bush that the constitution empowered him with the wartime authority to discard the Geneva Conventions.

10 November 2004
"It is not necessary to beat the child into submission; a little bit of pain goes a long way for a young child. However, the spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely ... Two or three stinging strokes on the legs or buttocks with a switch are usually sufficient to emphasize the point, 'You must obey me.'"
     -- James Dobson, from Dare to Discipline and The Strong-Willed Child. ...as Andrew Sullivan described him, "the social policy director of the Bush administration."
     --Courtesy of Talking Points Memo    [See more quotes from James Dobson]

'Can't Tell the Players Without a Program'
Principal Neocon Foreign Policy Team and Their Game:
Worldwide Value
Frank J. Gaffney, The National Review On-line
...among those who deserve credit for shaping this stunning triumph of American virtues and values are the much-maligned "neoconservatives" and their friends, who have been responsible for helping Bush design and execute his wartime agenda. Special recognition and thanks are thus accorded, for example, to: Vice President Dick Cheney and key members of his staff (including Lewis "Scooter" Libby, John Hannah, and David Wurmser); the National Security Council's Condoleezza Rice, Robert Joseph, and Elliott Abrams; the Defense Department's Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and William Luti; and the State Department's John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky, and Paula DeSutter. These people — and too many others — have helped the president imprint moral values on American security policy in a way and to an extent not seen since Ronald Reagan's first term.
The important thing now, of course, is not simply to acknowledge past achievements, but to build upon them. This will require, among other things:

• The reduction in detail of Fallujah and other safe havens utilized by freedom's enemies in Iraq — a necessary precondition not only to holding elections there next year, but to the establishment of institutions essential to a functioning and stable democracy;
• Regime change — one way or another — in Iran and North Korea, the only hope for preventing these remaining "Axis of Evil" states from fully realizing their terrorist and nuclear ambitions;
• Providing the substantially increased resources needed to re-equip a transforming military and rebuild human-intelligence capabilities (minus, if at all possible, the sorts of intelligence "reforms" contemplated pre-election that would make matters worse on this and other scores) while we fight World War IV;
• Providing, to the fullest extent possible, for the protection of our homeland — including the adoption of sensible policies on securing our borders and contending with illegal aliens, and by deploying effective missile defenses at sea and in space, as well as ashore;
• Keeping faith with Israel, whose destruction remains a priority for the same people who want to destroy us (and for the same reasons — i.e., our shared, "moral values") — especially in the face of Yasser Arafat's demise and the inevitable, post-election pressure to "solve" the Mideast problem by forcing the Israelis to abandon defensible boundaries;
• Contending with the underlying dynamic that made France and Germany so problematic in the first term: namely, their willingness to make common cause with our enemies for profit, and their desire to employ a united Europe and its new constitution — as well as other international institutions and mechanisms — to thwart the expansion and application of American power where deemed necessary by Washington;
• Adapting appropriate strategies for contending with China's increasingly fascistic trade and military policies, Vladimir Putin's accelerating authoritarianism at home and aggressiveness toward the former Soviet republics, the worldwide spread of Islamofascism, and the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America.

When the Personal Shouldn't Be Political
Declarations of "Faith" Becoming a Condition for Seeking Public Office
By GARY HART
NYT, 8 November 2004
Kittredge, Colo. — If America has entered one of its periodic eras of religious revival and if that revival is having the profound impact on politics that is now presumed, to participate in a discussion of "faith" one must qualify oneself.

I was raised in the Church of the Nazarene, an evangelical denomination founded a century ago as an offshoot of American Methodism, which, the church founders believed, had become too liberal. I graduated from Bethany Nazarene College, where I met and married my wife, who was also brought up in the church. I then graduated from the Yale Divinity School as preparation for a life of teaching religion and philosophy.

The Nazarene Church abhorred drinking, smoking, dancing, movies and female adornment, believed in salvation through being "born again" and in sanctification as a second act of grace, and resisted most popular culture as the devil's work. In doctrine and practice, it was much more evangelical than fundamentalist.

A neglected thread of church doctrine was the social gospel of John and Charles Wesley, the great reformers of late 18th-century Methodism. The Wesley brothers preached salvation through grace but also preached the duty of Christians, based solidly on Jesus' teachings, to minister to those less fortunate. My political philosophy springs directly from Jesus' teachings and is the reason I became active in the Democratic Party. Finally, in the qualification-to-speak category, I will seek to pre-empt the ad hominem disqualifiers. I am a sinner. I only ask for the same degree of forgiveness from my many critics that they were willing to grant George W. Bush for his transgressions.

As a candidate for public office, I chose not to place my beliefs in the center of my appeal for support because I am also a Jeffersonian; that is to say, I believe that one's religious beliefs - though they will and should affect one's outlook on public policy and life - are personal and that America is a secular, not a theocratic, republic. Because of this, it should concern us that declarations of "faith" are quickly becoming a condition for seeking public office.

Declarations of "faith" are abstractions that permit both voters and candidates to fill in the blanks with their own religious beliefs. There are two dangers here. One is the merging of church and state. The other is rank hypocrisy. Having claimed moral authority to achieve political victory, religious conservatives should be very careful, in their administration of the public trust, to live up to the standards they have claimed for themselves. They should also be called upon to address the teachings of Jesus and the prophets concerning care for the poor, the barriers that wealth presents to entering heaven, the blessings on the peacemakers, and the belief that no person should be left behind.

If we are to insert "faith" into the public dialogue more directly and assertively, let's not be selective. Let's go all the way. Let's not just define "faith" in terms of the law and judgment; let's define it also in terms of love, caring, forgiveness. Compassionate conservatives can believe social ills should be addressed by charity and the private sector; liberals can believe that the government has a role to play in correcting social injustice. But both can agree that human need, poverty, homelessness, illiteracy and sickness must be addressed. Liberals are not against religion. They are against hypocrisy, exclusion and judgmentalism. They resist the notion that one side or the other possesses "the truth" to the exclusion of others. There is a great difference between Cotton Mather and John Wesley.

There is also the disturbing tendency to insert theocratic principles into the vision of America's role in the world. There is evil in the world. Nowhere in our Constitution or founding documents is there support for the proposition that the United States was given a special dispensation to eliminate it. Surely Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator. But there are quite a few of those still around and no one is advocating eliminating them. Neither Washington, Adams, Madison nor Jefferson saw America as the world's avenging angel. Any notion of going abroad seeking demons to destroy concerned them above all else. Mr. Bush's venture into crusaderism frightened not only Muslims, it also frightened a very large number of Americans with a sense of their own history.

The religions of Abraham all teach a sense of personal and collective humility. It was a note briefly struck very early by Mr. Bush and largely abandoned thereafter. It would be well for those in the second Bush term to ponder that attribute. Whether Bush supporters care or not, people around the world now see America as arrogant, self-righteous and superior. These are not qualities of any traditional faith I am aware of.

If faith now drives our politics, at the very least let's make it a faith of inclusion, genuine compassion, humility, justice and accountability. In the words of the prophet Micah: "He hath shown thee, O man, what is good. What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" And, instead of "O man," let's insert "O America."

Gary Hart, the former Democratic senator from Colorado, is the author, most recently, of"The Fourth Power: A Grand Strategy for the United States in the 21st Century.''

6 November 2004
Understanding The Christian Roots of My Political Depression
By John Shelby Spong (Beliefnet Columnist, Author, lecturer, teacher, theologian, former Episcopal Bishop, Newark, NJ)
(Pre-election essay reprinted  from Bishop Spong's Newsletter - Courtesy of tk)
The Republican Convention in New York City forced me to face the fact that my feelings about the Bush Administration have reached a visceral negativity, the intensity of which surprises even me. So I decided to search introspectively to identify its source. Is it simply runaway partisanship? That is certainly how it sounds to many who make that charge publicly, but that has not been my history. I did not react this way to other Republican presidents like Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford or Reagan. My feelings are quite specifically Bush related.

I first became aware of them in 1988 when George H. W. Bush's campaign employed the Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis. This dirty trick was successful and the insinuation entered the body politic that to be the governor of a multi-racial state where all were treated fairly meant that you favored freeing black criminals to commit murder. Lee Atwater, mentor of Karl Rove, devised that campaign. The Willie Horton episode said to me that these people believed that no dishonest tactic was to be avoided if it helped your candidate to victory.

The next manifestation of this mentality came in the South Carolina primary in George W. Bush's campaign in 2000, when the patriotism of John McCain was viciously attacked. It appeared that five years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam was not sufficient to prove one's loyalty to America.

The third episode came when the operatives of this administration destroyed Georgia's Senator Max Cleland in 2002, by accusing him of being soft on national security, despite the fact that this veteran had lost three of his limbs in the service of his country. Each of these attacks brought defeat to its victims but they also brought defeat to truth and integrity.

In 2004 we have seen the pattern repeated. John Kerry, a veteran who served with honor and distinction in Vietnam was told in countless surrogate ads that his service was not worthy and that his three purple hearts and his Silver Star for heroism were cheaply won. For a candidate who ducked military service by securing a preferential appointment to the Texas National Guard, part of which was served in Alabama, this takes gall indeed.

Then Senator Zell Miller, his face contorted with anger, recited a litany of weapons systems that he said Senator Kerry had opposed. What he failed to say was that most of these military cuts were recommended by a Secretary of Defense named Richard Cheney in the first Bush Administration! The last time I looked, the Ten Commandments still included an injunction against bearing false witness.

Yes, other campaigns bend the truth but these tactics go beyond just bending, they assassinate character and suggest traitorous behavior. When that is combined with the fact that this party does this while proclaiming itself the party of religion, cultural values and faith-based initiatives is the final straw for me. I experience the religious right as a deeply racist enterprise that seeks to hide its intolerance under the rhetoric of super patriotism and "family values." For those who think that this is too strong a charge or too out of bounds politically, I invite you to look at the record.

It was George H. W. Bush who gave us Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, calling him "the most qualified person in America." Thomas replaced Thurgood Marshall, who had been the legal hero to black Americans during the struggle over segregation. Clarence Thomas, the opponent of every governmental program that made his own life possible, is today an embarrassment to blacks in America. To appoint a black man to do the racist work against black people is demonic.

Consistent with that pattern, this administration entered an amicus brief against the University of Michigan's Law School because in the quest for a representative student body that Law School used race as one factor in determining admissions. The strange 'Orwellian' rhetoric again was deceiving. "We want America to be a nation where race is not counted for anything and all are to be judged on merit alone." Those are fair sounding words until one factors in centuries of slavery and segregation, or the quality of public education in urban America which just happens to be predominantly black.

Next one cannot help noticing the concerted Republican effort to limit black suffrage in many states like Florida where it has been most overt, and to deny the power of the ballot to all the citizens of Washington, D.C. Does anyone doubt that the people of Washington have no vote for any other reason than that they are overwhelmingly black?

Only when I touched these wells of resentment, did I discover how deeply personal my feelings are about the Bushes. I grew up in the southern, religious world they seek to exploit. I went to a church that combined piety with segregation, quoted the Bible to keep women in secondary positions, and encouraged me to hate both my enemies and other religions, especially Jews. It taught me that homosexual people choose their lifestyle because they are either mentally sick or morally depraved. I hear these same definitions echoed in the pious phrases of those who want to "defend marriage against the gay onslaught." Are the leaders of this party the only educated people who seem not to know that their attitudes about homosexuality are uninformed? People no more choose their sexual orientation than they choose to be left-handed! To play on both ignorance and fear for political gain is a page lifted right out of the racial struggle that shaped my region. Racism simply hides today under new pseudonyms. I lived in Lynchburg, Virginia, before Jerry Falwell rose to national prominence. He was a race baiting segregationist to his core. Liberty Baptist College began as a segregation academy. Super patriot Falwell condemned Nelson Mandela as a 'communist' and praised the apartheid regime in South Africa as a 'bulwark for Christian civilization.' I have heard Pat Robertson attack the movement to give equality to women by referring to feminists as Lesbians who want to destroy the family, while quoting the Bible to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment. The homophobic rhetoric that spews so frequently out of the mouths of these "Jesus preaching" right-wingers has been mentioned time and again as factors that encourage hate crimes.

I am aware that the former Chief Justice Roy Moore of Alabama, famous for his attempt to place a three-ton monument of the Ten Commandments in his Montgomery courthouse to the delight of southern preachers, is on record as saying that "homosexuality is inherently evil."

I lived through the brutality that greeted the civil rights movement in the South during its early days. Congressman John Lewis of Atlanta can tell you what it means to be beaten into unconsciousness on a "freedom ride." I remember the names of Southerners who covered their hate-filled racism with the blanket of religion to enable them to win the governors' mansions in the deep South: John Patterson and George Wallace in Alabama, Ross Barnett in Mississippi, Orville Faubus in Arkansas, Mills Godwin in Virginia and Strom Thurmond in South Carolina. I know the religious dimensions of North Carolina that kept Jesse Helms in the Senate for five terms. Now we have learned that Strom Thurmond, who protected segregation in the Senate when he could not impose it by winning the presidency in 1948, also fathered a daughter by an underage black girl. I know that Congressman Robert Barr of Georgia, who introduced the Defense of Marriage Act in 1988, has been married three times. I know that Pat Robertson's Congressman in Norfolk, Ed Schrock, courted religious votes while condemning homosexual people until he was outed as a gay man and was forced to resign his seat.

I know that the bulk of the voters from the Religious Right today are the George Wallace voters of yesterday, who simply transformed their racial prejudices and called them "family values." That mentality is now present in this administration. It starts with the President, embraces the Attorney General John Ashcroft and spreads out in every direction.

I have known Southern mobs that have acted in violence against black people while couching that violence in the sweetness of Evangelical Christianity. I abhor that kind of religion. I resent more than I can express the fact that my Christ has been employed in the service of this mentality. My Christ, who refused to condemn the woman taken in the act of adultery; my Christ who embraced the lepers, the most feared social outcasts of his day; my Christ who implored us to see the face of God in the faces of "the least of these our brothers and sisters;" my Christ who opposed the prejudice being expressed against the racially impure Samaritans, is today being used politically to dehumanize others by those who play on base instincts.

David Halberstam, in his book on the Civil Rights movement entitled The Children, quotes Lyndon Johnson talking with Bill Moyers right after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had passed by large margins in the Congress of the United States. This positive vote followed the arousing of the public's consciousness by the Abu Ghraib-like use of dogs and fire hoses on black citizens in Alabama. Klan groups, under the direct protection of Southern State Troopers and local police, had also attacked blacks with baseball bats and lead pipes in public places, which had been seen on national television. Moyers expected to find President Johnson jubilant over this legislative victory. Instead he found the President strangely silent. When Moyers enquired as to the reason, Johnson said rather prophetically, "Bill, I've just handed the South to the Republicans for fifty years, certainly for the rest of our life times."

That is surely correct. Bush's polls popped after his convention. It is now his election to lose. The combination of super patriotism with piety, used in the service of fear to elicit votes while suppressing equality works, but it is lethal for America and lethal for Christianity. It may be a winning formula but it has no integrity and it feels dreadful to this particular Christian.

3 November 2004
Democracy Now!
This is an excerpt from what Ralph Nader had to say last night after the election

RALPH NADER: Look at our media. Have we ever had more stations and cable channels? Have we ever had less opportunity to speak in other than sound bites heading for a decade of sound barks? Look at our sovereignty, the principal mode of representing people, our nation state being undermined by W.T.O. and NAFTA; autocratic systems of international governance whose architects were the multi-national corporations and their law firms. Look at the level of poverty in this country; 40% of all households are really in poverty. The official figure is ridiculous. The official figure says if you're family of four according to the Department of Labor and you make $19,000 a year gross, you're not poor. 40% of our nation's households live poor in the richest country of the world that has more billionaires than any other country, whose 1% of the richest people has financial wealth equivalent to the bottom 95%. When you go into low-income areas of our country such as here in Washington, D.C., there is no rule of law. There is only rapacity, predatory behavior, anarchy. People can't even cash their checks without paying 5% to the cashing-in stores. Predatory lending, landlord abuses, lesser municipal services in the poorer areas, crumbling housing, libraries that fall apart, consumer exploitation, dumping grounds for shoddy merchandise, including dirty meat and poultry. And most of those cities were run by Democrats and the Democratic party for years. After November 2, it's not the end. It's just the end of the beginning. We'll continue out of the box between now and inauguration, to push those liberal groups who were so reticent in advancing their life's work like the anti-war groups in the last year and others to come to grips with their own introspection needs and that is the moment they go for the least worst that will be their fate. There will always be a least worst between the Democrats and Republicans, every four years, every two years. And least worst means that you exert no pull on the least worst, and, therefore, your own influence and your own impact is self-limited.

4 November 2004
Hold On a Minute...or a few days.

All right, keep your bookmark to BushWhackedUSA after all. We have received so many complimentary E-mails urging us to continue, that we are reconsidering our decision to retire from the scene. We’re not sure yet what form our efforts we’ll take, but we will be back in action soon. Also, while watching the Bush press conference this morning we were so impressed with his arrogant and condescending manner toward a deferential press that we recognize the importance of maintaining alternatives to the mainstream press.

One of the political critiques to emerge from the aftermath of the 2004 election is that the Democratic Party does not speak convincingly to the Protestant Christian segment of the population. This strikes us as a particularly false conclusion. It’s a mischaracterization and misunderstanding that could take the party, the government and the nation in a direction that would alter and, eventually destroy at least one pillar of the American political system. This critique asserts that Democrats have become a secularist party and that Republicans better represent and address the values of churchgoing Americans. Further, critics are saying the Democrats must find a way to effectively communicate with the religious right.

A close examination reveals something else, something uglier. The Democrats did not fail to speak to the religious right; rather, the religious right failed to listen. Conservative Christians habitually shut out the political dialog, because they have developed an especially corrupt and perverse moral ‘filter.’ This is the essential reason for what happened in this week’s presidential election.

The leaders, teachers and preachers of the religious right have assailed the allegedly immoral influence of a hedonistic, materialistic society and rested their case primarily on a need to transform through law the morality of the individual. All the while, they maintain that theirs is a modest and unimposing agenda to advance basic moral values. But to apply ‘individual morality’ to perceived social problems of abortion, homosexuality and the disintegration of marriage causes trouble. Fundamentalist Protestant evangelicals have diminished and subverted ‘social morality.’ Their ethic is perverse because it rushes in with law to correct perceived personal immorality while turning a blind eye to broad and pervasive social immorality. Public integrity, fairness, justice, equality and quality of life have all been subverted. It is this deficient and errant worldview that needs to be highlighted and condemned.

 Restated: the immoral ethic of many influential fundamentalist Christians and their followers requires serious attention and criticism. Forget all this talk of coming together. The last thing we need is compliant adaptation by the Democratic Party to the faulty, wrongheaded judgment of spiritually motivated bigots.