Do you think he Understands the Difference?
Pope Benedict XVI stressed the church's opposition to abortion and stem cell research in his first meeting with President Barack Obama on Friday, pressing the Vatican's case with the U.S. leader who is already under fire on those issues from some conservative Catholics and bishops back home.Pope. Leader of an international group of people who have
chosen to live according to the strictures of a particular mystical, metaphysical and philosophical belief system, predicated on an ancient text that is generally accepted outside the confines of the church as describing events that often have no basis in reality. Like membership in a club or union, the members of a church agree to abide by it's arbitrary rules and live within it's proscribed boundaries.
President. Elected as leader of a country or nation-state,
chosen by the people to represent EVERYONE in that country equally and fairly. To consider the real - world needs and aspirations of his constituency, regardless of their individual spiritual or philosophical beliefs or the demands and constraints of their chosen thought-leaders.
These are powerful men, with very large constituencies and responsibilities. And yet, they are not the same. They are FAR from the same. If Obama (or any elected leader of a diverse constituency, for that matter) allows himself to be influenced by the dogma and doctrine of a narrow group whose ideology is defined by mythology, he will be no different in his governance than Amedinejad. Obama was elected by the vote of the majority of Americans, and is obligated to balance his agenda so as it might serve the broadest measure of the citizenry.
By dint of the constraints of their beliefs and the dictates of the church leadership in Rome, Catholics are by the very nature of that self-identification constrained from various actions and activities, although it does seem odd that these are subject to some evolution over time. While they now can eat meat on Fridays, they are still prevented by threat of excommunication and eternal torment from divorce, contraception or abortion. And this is as it should be. Anyone is certainly entitled to enter into membership agreements that constrain their ability to choose their own actions in exchange for the perceived benefits of said membership. But people who choose to believe a different doctrine, or even who choose not to believe at all, must still be governed as equal citizens under elected democratic leadership.
I am an atheist, and Obama is my president too. He needs to lift his head, square his shoulders and tell the pope "you may instruct Catholics all over the globe, but I lead Americans, four fifths of whom are NOT catholics, so while I deeply appreciate your input, it would be profoundly undemocratic for me to follow that course". Of course, he also must send the same message to evangelical American christians, that they are completely entitled to live their lives in accordance with their interpretation of scripture, but they may NOT impose that scripture on Americans who do not choose it for themselves...
Sarah Smile
So what does the future hold for former part time governor and full time ideologue Sarah Palin? Well, it's a bright, if somewhat constrained future. Let's be clear about this. She is the queen of the 28%ers. The far right bigots, the tribal paranoids, the people who use the word "socialism" without ever bothering to look up what it means all love her. And when you are the figurehead for a political movement that constitutes by any reasonable metric close to 60 million people, people who will forgive you for any transgression and allow you any stumbling incoherence, you have a great opportunity not only to a life of cheering adoration but for great wealth.
Let's be clear. Sarah Palin offers the Republican party nothing. The base loves her, and will turn out with activists, phone banks and money. But she will bring not one single independent or fence-sitting voter over to her cause, for her message is so extreme and her qualifications so limited. She can raise money that they would have raised anyway, and bring out crowds that would have come out anyway, more out of Obama hatred than Palin love. She will keep their message on the front page, but with her political illiteracy, issue ignorance and odd, provincial cadence it won't be in the way they hope for.
Sarah Palin is a fool's choice for spokesman, and an even worse choice for political leader. As spokesman, she delivers nothing but derisive laughter and head-shaking confusion. As leader, she offers only a fair-weather leadership, and when things heat up and times get hard, well, we've learned her response this weekend. Only quitters fight. Fighters quit. Right. In the Republican black-is-white up-is-down world of political convenience and institutional incoherence, she offers a unique willingness to ignore not just reality, but logic in general.
So carry on, Sarah. Let your victim flag fly. Go proudly into that tiny, insular world of paranoid fear and hatred, rally the angry, scared white people to the cause of holding back the tide of history. Diversity and community is the future, so cling to fearful homogeneity and tribal animosities. Dwell in the past, glory in a time when anyone who wasn't a white man had no voice and no power. Of course, the fact that that was you, as a woman, is not to be considered. There is a constituency for your message of hate, ignorance and fear. But fortunately for the rest of us, it is small, regional and shrinking. And as you can only guarantee the ultimate failure of that message, you may actually turn out to have done some good...
Genuinely Stoopid Stuff
Waxman Markey.
Simple Cap and Trade.
Glenn Beck says it's either ignorant or treason.
Broun calls it a "Hoax".
Gingrey says its just the same as North Korea and Iran.
Boehner says it will cost millions of jobs, Bishop says passage will be "tragic" as the death of Michael Jackson.
Really? Do any of these idiots know what they're talking about? Or perhaps more to the point, how stupid do they think we are? Yes, I understand they're counting on the disinterest and ignorance of the American electorate, but at what point will they actually get called on their lies and demagoguery?
Underneath the economic complexity of it's implementation, this is what we're arguing about: Industries that burn a great deal of fossil fuels have, up until this point, had access to a critical public resource for zero cost. The atmosphere. Although the environment belongs equally to all human beings, and it's degradation carries the same costs for all in terms of health and quality of life, it has for centuries been used as a dumping ground by industries around the globe. And yet the costs of this resource, upon which these industries depend for their profits, has never been valued, and the costs to human society have never been assessed. For global business to assume this resource has no value and to utilize it at no cost is ridiculous, and outside of the most basic understanding of how business works.
A so-called "Cap and Trade" bill, at it's root, is nothing more than a methodology for factoring the costs of the "negative externalities" of burning fossil fuels, while at the same time seeking a way to implement these costs without either excessively hurting the profitability of these industries and protecting consumers from the cost increases.
Of COURSE there are costs associated with recognizing the costs of greenhouse gas pollution, and while a Cap and Trade program does a pretty good job of mitigating the costs to both business and the poorest segment of the population, this isn't a sudden decision to "tax" greenhouse gas polluters. It merely brings the cost of burning fossil fuels into a more realistic realm, where it is not artificially subsidized with the lives and livelihoods of the human population of the planet.
And suddenly, when you have a realistic cost structure around burning fossil fuels and dumping the waste into the atmosphere where it has global consequences, other forms of energy, from renewables like wind and solar to alternatives like nuclear are not anywhere near as comparatively expensive and a more realistic mix of power generation can be implemented that is substantially less destructive to the future of mankind.
Waxman Markey isn't a solution. It doesn't begin to address the problem in the US, let alone globally. But it's a start. And the fact that American business is so greedy and so shortsighted that they are frantically opposing, along with their republican lackeys, the implementation of even a watered - down and limited beginning is appalling. They are essentially demanding the right to destroy the ability of the planet to sustain human life on it's current scale in order to ensure their own short - term profits.
I cannot even conceive of a deeper evil...
A Beautiful Life
Neda.
Tragedy wears the face of a beautiful young woman.
Ideology breaks hearts even as it bleeds out the innocent.
Horror is the eyes going slack, at the end of a young life destroyed.
Revolution is costly, and none of the lives lost will be forgotten either by those who love them, nor those who took them.
Agony carries the misery of the loss, never balanced by honesty nor truth nor fairness nor love.
Hope dwells in the tears of the masses, tears of loss, and tears from the gas.
Anger sits heavy in the breast, railing NO! against the pointless lies and self-serving violence of the leadership.
Power is found in guns and terror, but also in righteous beliefs and solidarity.
Strength can only be rooted in the love of family, the support of neighbors, and the caring of a world unwilling to let this crime stand.
Faith can sustain believers, but it is the children that create the space where a new world can grow.
Courage can be recognized, in the videos and the texts, but cannot be impelled and should never be expected nor demanded.
There is a purity in combat, not a glory, certainly not a promise for a bright future, but in the smoky chaotic violence of a moment forever frozen in time, our hearts are savaged and our souls are thrown to the cracked asphalt in the wild confusion of the shouts and gunfire, but in the very same way that everyone is tainted by the horror of the confrontation, in the high keening madness of a fight that leaves your life behind you, hopefully to be retrieved later when you have recaptured your sanity, you make decisions that, should you survive the revolution, you will describe to your grandchildren fifty years on, eyes glistening with the names of the fallen.
Later, when the roaring in your ears is quieted, and a somber silence lies across the field, the lonely broken dead lie crumpled, bled out, the ultimate cost for the ultimate conflict.
Neda.
Lost forever to her family and her friends, even as she is embraced by a world horrified and angered by her loss. And the awful, bloody irony that they took her life in order to undermine their OWN system.
Do not misunderstand. You can't define who is and who is not a combatant in a war zone. Who will live, who will die, who will win the day. The price paid is not measured by contribution, but merely by participation. And at the end, the dead offer the only real truth...
Day of Reckoning
Like the cylinder of a revolver smoothly rotating to place a live round under a cocked hammer, the last piece of the seemingly inevitable collision between an authoritarian leadership that has finally crossed a red line they never even knew was there and a seething young population who only want what other young populations want, not even anything so profound a true democracy but only to sing and dance and love in the springtime of their lives has fallen neatly into place. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khameini offered to his people a sermon today, in which he told them they must not only accept the blatant fraud imposed upon them even while they had faith that their system, limited and claustrophobic though it already was, was fair and did not fear a leader they could elect but who would never have real power, but to continue to merely stand on the street in silence was to invite beatings, arrests and even death.
It is entirely unclear how this will pan out. Perhaps, under the threat alone, the demonstrations will lose steam and fade away over the next couple weeks without further bloodshed. Perhaps the demonstrations will continue, and in the power of their numbers and their compelling silence the security forces will refuse to murder them, and something historic will happen. Perhaps in a brief, terrifying paroxysm of violence and horror the institutions of a state that finally chose to take off the mask and reveal itself to be the dictatorship it has denied being for so long will crush the "Tehran Spring" moment, ending for a generation the hopes of the population to make decisions about their own lives without intimidation from their government.
What does appear clear is that, after a week of posturing, maneuvering and shadow-boxing, the tipping point has been reached. Tens of thousands of Iranians will take to the streets on Saturday, seeking to be heard, asking only for the rights they have grown up believing they already had. And they have been warned - they will do so at their peril. In the recent history of authoritarian governments, it has frequently been the case that they only fall when they fall victim to their own lethal combination of hubris and paranoia. When they react to popular discontent with overwhelming violence and abuse of their power. When they force the people into an understanding that there is no longer anything to lose, and popular outrage turns into a bottomless anger more powerful than fear. Sometimes massive killing works, but it's always the last desperate gamble of a regime bereft of all credibility, seeking merely to cling to power for the sake of power, offering no reasonable explanation of their actions, only fighting and killing the only existential threat that ever ultimately matters - their own people.
The Americans who wave pompoms and shout from the sidelines when peoples are finally pushed past the point of acceptance, be it Georgians or Iranians, are wrong. We have no dog in this fight. These people aren't necessarily standing up for some kind of nebulous political philosophy such as the American political right has so toxically fetishized. They have been forced to acknowledge that their leadership has so degraded their personal liberty that they have no real future, no hope of living the life they desire, and their concrete demands are not for a political system, but for a chance to make a living, raise a family and live the way they wish. Understand, for this is important. They don't WANT to be Americans. They WANT to be Iranians. When even that became impossible, they went to the barricades.
Tomorrow we may find out what destiny has in store for them...
The Soft Bigotry of...Expectations
Measured objectively, it is fair to say that so far, Barack Obama has been a pretty good president. Not great, certainly, but orders of magnitude better than his foul, venal predecessor. Unfortunately, for both him and for us, it is not possible to view his presidency objectively. Indeed, everything he does or doesn't do must be viewed through the prism of the expectations set during his very long campaign.
We could not help but see him as a forceful agent of change, major if not radical change to the system and the way it works, so every day we see the status quo is a day we wonder what happened to the Barack Obama we THOUGHT we were electing?
We expected powerful leadership, and we are disappointed to see an odd, kind of weak passiveness in the face of a weakened and discredited political opposition.
We expected the promised transparency and we have seen the Obama administration double down on state secrets, reverse itself on the release of photos and documents and just this week refuse to release the White House visitor logs a la Dick Cheney.
We expected a strong voice on freedom and equality and instead got an administration out of step with the people it claims to represent, strongly supporting DOMA and refusing to even begin to engage on Don't Ask Don't Tell.
We expected a reasonable voice to end America's horrendously counterproductive wars and we get hedging and doublespeak on Iraq, a major escalation in Afghanistan even as we edge closer to open warfare with Pakistan and North Korea.
We expected a leader that would protect the middle class from economic predation, and instead we got an administration that seems to cower before the financial lobby, that didn't even show up on Cramdown and allowed a few political grandstanders to water down his stimulus bill.
We came to expect a powerful political force, willing to stand against the worst instincts and excesses of both parties with demands for common sense and real-world solutions. We got a president who won't even fight for his own cabinet nominees, who seems to lack the political vision to make use of overwhelming majorities in both houses.
Given the choice between Obama and McCain, it's impossible to actually regret the actions and events that brought us here. But I think disappointment and discontent is brewing, as the people are tired of a political leadership that refuses to serve their interests while talking openly of serving the interests of corporations and industries. The people are beginning to sense that something has gone horribly wrong when a young, brilliant, charismatic leader is elected and cannot seem to move the nation off its unsustainable path. When a trillion dollar military is not even worth discussing, but a trillion dollars over ten years on health care for American citizens is just "too expensive". When a few of the Bush administration's worst crimes are rolled back and the vast majority of their maniacal grab for power and wealth is embraced by what we had come to believe was the "anti-bush".
President Obama, now is the time. It is not yet too late, but make no mistake, one can see "too late" from where we stand today. You must begin to stand up for what you claimed to believe in, you must begin to demonstrate a willingness to fight, even to make a few (more) enemies in the process. You have an unusual opportunity to change the course of history, and if, in the interest of some kind of political legacy you allow the self-interested rabble of congress and the media to cow you into passivity, silence and "compromise" that is not compromise, but surrender, it will all slip away. The people are becoming restless, and if you continue to demonstrate political expediency rather than political courage, you will lose everything. Popularity, power, opportunity. You are well on the way to proving yourself a fraud, another political hack who told a good story to acquire power. If that is how the Obama story plays out, we will all have lost.
Iran into a Little Trouble Over the Weekend
I suppose I should say something about the Iranian elections. Although there really isn't a great deal to say, as most bloggers and pundits seem to waver between sky-is-falling speculation and suggestions for somehow putting things right.
In order to even have the conversation, you need at the very outset to define who it is you are speaking for, and about. If you want to discuss the implications of the election and it's dubious outcome for American policy and in light of American interests, that's going to be a very different conversation than a discussion of the impact of the election on the Iranian people and regional geopolitics. Neither of which is as fascinating as a completely speculative discussion of not just
what actually happened, but
why.
But first, we need to try to decide what, at this point, we believe actually occurred. There are three possible narratives.
First, and least likely, the possibility must be considered that something unexpected happened and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad actually did win this election fair and square. There are no reliable polls in Iran, and Ahmedinejad's base of support is rural, so one must consider the possibility that the outcome was exactly as it should have been. However, enough experts have debunked this possibility, not to even mention what simple common sense tells us about the differential and how it was announced. If he had "won" by a much more scant margin, or even had to wait and "win" the runoff, there would have been fewer questions asked. But it appears that in their arrogance, the powerful people ruling Iran did not consider the popular reaction.
If we do not accept that possibility, the next likeliest scenario is that Ahmedinejad had become part of the powerful elites in government and the Revolutionary Guards and they set out to manipulate the election results on their own, outside of the purview and capacity of the clerical leadership. This is somewhat unlikely because of the absolute power the Ayatollahs wield, but if it happened it would be the scariest outcome, because then power would be vested in the hands of a dictatorial few who's agenda we cannot know.
The most likely explanation for what we saw in Iran over the last few days is that the clerical leadership had some deep reservations about Moussavi's ascent to power, and at the last minute decided to make certain that Ahmedinejad kept the Presidency. This seems to be the scenario that most people favor, and based on what we've been able to observe it is the description of events that most neatly fits observed reality, but it has one gaping flaw. Why? The Ayatollahs have the power, and they have kept that power when reformist politicians held presidential office before, in much more challenging times when Saddam was a real threat on their border. What could have caused them to decide it was necessary to risk the social turmoil, or even the possibility of a real change in government that this blatant action might lead to?
Until we can understand what it was about a Moussavi Presidency that was categorically unacceptable to the Mullahs we cannot really understand what transpired there. So we move on to the next question, the one that Americans always ask because EVERY global event is ultimately about us, is it not? What should we do? And of course, wisdom would cause the American leadership to recognize the limitations on any American reaction. Almost ANYTHING we can do would be counterproductive in light of America's unfortunate history meddling in Iranian internal politics for the last sixty years.
The US can register it's concern over the election, and can certainly support any internal Iranian calls for internal or international investigations. Beyond that, America cannot do anything helpful to the Iranian people or their nascent democracy movement. And there has been so much debate about diplomatic engagement with Iran over the last few years, certainly there will be calls for an end to the American diplomatic outreach to the Iranians that has only barely started. But for what? What can possibly be gained by further isolating the Iranian leadership.
The reason a nation engages diplomatically with other nations is to pursue HER interests, not the interests of the other nations. American interests haven't changed, and the only way America can pursue those interests is to engage with the leadership, no matter who they are, or how they came to power. If America is willing to share diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia or China, we cannot honestly claim to be squeamish about dealing with a non-democratically elected leader in Iran, can we?
Pope Benedict XVI stressed the church's opposition to abortion and stem cell research in his first meeting with President Barack Obama on Friday, pressing the Vatican's case with the U.S. leader who is already under fire on those issues from some conservative Catholics and bishops back home.
