I forget sometimes how old I am. This may sound surprising to someone younger, or it might not. I don’t know. When I was a kid, I always assumed the adults around me knew how old they seemed to me. Most of them, certainly acted it. But I keep forgetting.
I’m 53, which isn’t all that old objectively. My body is in good health. I can see the age setting in on my skin, and in the increasing field of grey in my hair. But just I don’t feel all that old. And yet I find myself surrounded more and more by people who don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about. Standing in the line during my draft pre-induction physical is a memory as vivid to me now as when I first lived it (they told me to go back home and put on a few more pounds…and then a few months later the draft was canceled so I didn’t have to go back for a second exam). The race riots in the late 60s and early 70s. Watergate…Nixon giving his resignation speech. Seems like it happened only last week. The world before the Internet and personal computers. When the phrase "Made in Japan" denoted junk, not quality. The local head shop. The ERA battle. Underground comix. The unmitigated hassle of banking before direct deposit and ATM machines. Ma Bell. Black and white TVs with vacuum tubes inside. Duck and Cover. Cap guns. The invention of skateboarding. Meet the Beatles. Soda cans before they put the pop top on. Something keeps telling me I’m older then I think.
Today, Dreher has an extraordinary (oral) essay at NPR in which he recounts how the conduct of President Bush (for whom he voted twice) in the Iraq War (which he supported) is causing him to question, really to abandon, the core political beliefs he has held since childhood.
Dreher, 40, recounts that his "first real political memory" was the 1979 failed rescue effort of the U.S. hostages in Iran. He says he "hated" Jimmy Carter for "shaming America before our enemies with weakness and incompetence." When Reagan was elected, he believed "America was saved." Reagan was "strong and confident." Democrats were "weak and depressed."
In particular, Dreher recounts how much, during the 1980s, he "disliked hippies – the blame America first liberals who were so hung up on Vietnam, who surrendered to Communists back then just like they want to do now." In short, Republicans were "winners." Democrats were "defeatists."
On 9/11, Dreher’s first thought was : "Thank God we have a Republican in the White House." The rest of his essay:
As President Bush marched the country to war with Iraq, even some voices on the Right warned that this was a fool’s errand. I dismissed them angrily. I thought them unpatriotic.
But almost four years later, I see that I was the fool.
In Iraq, this Republican President for whom I voted twice has shamed our country with weakness and incompetence, and the consequences of his failure will be far, far worse than anything Carter did.
The fraud, the mendacity, the utter haplessness of our government’s conduct of the Iraq war have been shattering to me.
It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. Not under a Republican President.
I turn 40 next month — middle aged at last — a time of discovering limits, finitude. I expected that. But what I did not expect was to see the limits of finitude of American power revealed so painfully.
I did not expect Vietnam.
As I sat in my office last night watching President Bush deliver his big speech, I seethed over the waste, the folly, the stupidity of this war.
I had a heretical thought for a conservative – that I have got to teach my kids that they must never, ever take Presidents and Generals at their word – that their government will send them to kill and die for noble-sounding rot – that they have to question authority.
On the walk to the parking garage, it hit me. Hadn’t the hippies tried to tell my generation that? Why had we scorned them so blithely?
Question Authority. Yes. You cannot understand the 1960s, without first understanding the stifling, conformist 1950s. We saw it all go down, the communist witch hunts, Viet Nam, Watergate, and we took away from it something ironically enough, John Mitchall, Nixon’s Attorney General and a central figure in the Watergate conspiracy, once said to reporters…
"You will be better advised to watch what we do instead of what we say."
No kidding. Those are words that should be embossed in bold letters at the top of every ballot in every election. Never mind what they say…pay attention to what they do. And when they start hiding things from the voters, it should set off every alarm bell you have. At minimum, we can’t govern ourselves if we don’t know what the fuck our government is up to. Nixon was legendary for his secretiveness. But Bush makes him look like he lived in a glass White House.
Sometimes I forget how old I am. Not everyone remembers that past like I do. Barbara O’Brien puts Dreher’s experience into perspective for me…
The answers to your questions, Mr. Dreher, is (1) yes, and (2) because you were brainwashed. As I wrote here,
I noticed years ago that the rank-and-file “movement conservative” is younger than I am. Well, OK, most people are younger than I am. But surely you’ve noticed that a disproportionate number of True Believers are people who reached their late teens / early twenties during the Carter or Reagan years at the earliest. They came of age at the same time the right-wing media / think tank infrastructure began to dominate national political discourse, and all their adult lives their brains have been pickled in rightie propaganda.
Because they’re too young to remember When Things Were Different, they don’t recognize that the way mass media has handled politics for the past thirty or so years is abnormal. What passes for our national political discourse — as presented on radio, television, and much print media — is scripted in right-wing think tanks and media paid for by the likes of Joseph Coors, Richard Mellon Scaife, and more recently by Sun Myung Moon. What looks like “debate” is just puppet theater, presented to manipulate public opinion in favor of the Right.
In this puppet theater “liberals” (booo! hisss!) are the craven, cowardly, and possibly demented villains, and “conservatives” are the noble heroes who come to the rescue of the virtuous maid America. Any American under the age of 40 has had this narrative pounded into his head his entire life. Rare is the individual born after the Baby Boom who has any clue what “liberalism” really is. Ask, and they’ll tell you that liberals are people who “believe in” raising taxes and spending money on big entitlement programs, which of course is bad. (Read this to understand why it’s bad.)
Just one example of how the word liberal has been utterly bastardized, see this Heritage Foundation press release of March 2006 that complains Congress is becoming “liberal.” Why? Because of its pork-barrel spending.
But I want to say something more about betrayal. One piece left out of most commentary on the freaks (not hippies, children; the name preferred by participants of the counterculture was freaks) was how betrayed many of us felt. Remember, we’d been born in the years after World War II. We’d spent our childhoods dramatizing our fathers’ struggles on Normandy Beach and Iwo Jima in our suburban back yards. Most of us watched “Victory at Sea” at least twice. Most of our childhood heroes were characters out of American mythos, like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone (who seemed an awful lot alike). Further, some of the scariest times of the Cold War unfolded during our elementary and middle schools years. We grew up believing the Communists would nuke us any second. Our schools (even Sunday School, as I recall) and media made sure we were thoroughly indoctrinated with the understanding that liberty and democracy were “good” and Communism was “bad,” and America Is the Greatest Nation in the World.
For many of us, these feelings reached their apex during the Kennedy administration. I was nine years old when he was elected. He seemed to embody everything that was noble and good and heroic about America. I remember his tour of Europe the summer before the assassination. I watched his motorcade move through cheering crowds on our black-and-white console television and never felt prouder to be an American.
But then our hearts were broken in Dallas, and less than two years later Lyndon Johnson announced he would send troops to Vietnam. And then the young men of my generation were drafted into the meat grinder. Sooner or later, most of us figured out our idealism had been misplaced. I was one of the later ones; the realization dawned for me during the Nixon Administration, which began while I was a senior in high school. Oh, I still believed in liberty and democracy; I felt betrayed because I realized our government didn’t. And much of my parents’ generation didn’t seem to, either.
The counterculture was both a backlash to that betrayal and to the cultural rigidity of the 1950s. And much of “movement conservatism” was a backlash to the counterculture, albeit rooted in the pseudo-conservatism documented earlier by Richard Hofstadter and others.
Just so. I forget this. More and more people I live and work with every day now, came of political age during Carter. It always amazed me how they could idolize that cardboard right-wing conservative figurehead Reagan, who famously laughed at Bob Hope’s AIDS jokes during the re-dedication of the Statue of Liberty. But Carter’s handling of the Iran Hostage situation probably affected a good many of them the way it affected Dreher, and Reagan’s theatrical posturing as a force for American strength and values probably inspired them the way Bush’s did after 9-11, and never mind that the families of tens of thousands of "disappeareds" in south America might view it a little differently. You can’t trust a president who treats the lives of helpless impoverished people with indifference, if not contempt, to respect American lives any better. The conservative juggernaut Reagan helped usher into American politics has been an unmitigated disaster for American democracy, and we can see that disaster’s culmination in Iraq…in Katrina…in Bush.
Nixon and Reagan were both notorious for the grandiose trappings of luxury and royalty they attached to the presidency, prompting the columnist Mary McGrory to say of the Reagan republicans that they were "Free, free at last from the loathsome hypocrisy of the respectable republican cloth coat", ironically a phrase Nixon coined back when he was Eisenhower’s VP. Nixon’s nemesis on the editorial pages of the Washington Post, the political cartoonist Herblock, once averred that the proper degree of respect for the president was as public servant number one. Because in this democracy, that’s what the president is. But it’s a lesson lost to a lot of us now, because the right wing noise machine has deftly associated that basic principle of democracy with national weakness. Kings don’t suffer questioning by the peasants, and we have a president now who seems to really think the office he was elected to was king, and not public servant number 1. That’s no accident. It’s taken them years to get us here. But it’s starting to look as though one more Viet Nam might bring us back to democracy again. Maybe.
This is no hippy slogan. This is how democracy works. Ask the Watergate generation why this is so. Or just sit back, and watch it all happening again. I guess for some of you this would be the first time you saw it. But not just democracy, this is how Life works, unless you aspire to be nothing more then someone else’s sock puppet. If I could, I would put this on all our coins instead of the Christianist, "In God We Trust", that became de rigueur for American currency by a law passed in the 1950s.
There is a new movie out that I absolutely cannot fathom ever watching; Alpha Dog. As I understand it, the film dramatizes the true life kidnapping and murder of a 15 year old boy. I glanced at a review of it, which gave a few details. The victim was the brother of an older teen who owed a drug debt. Murder was not the original intent, only to make the brother pay up. The kid was taken to a house where he eventually began to enjoy the drugs and the scene and party it up a bit himself, not taking too seriously the situation he was in because his kidnappers were other kids not much older then he was. He thinks he is making friends with them.
But then the kidnapper talks with his lawyer and realizes the magnitude of the crime he’s committed, and step-by-step, feels backed into a corner where actually killing the kid looks like the only thing he can do. The review I read remarked on how uneasy you feel watching the whole situation unfold, watching that kid in the company of his kidnappers, enjoying their company, not taking too seriously the situation he’s in, hoping that what what you just know is going to happen won’t And then it does. I can’t watch that. Just thinking about it now as I type this, is stressing me out. I feel an urgent need to get that kid the hell out of there, by any means necessary. And I can’t. It’s too late. It’s many years too late. I think about how I was blissfully enjoying my own life, while this fifteen year old was in the company of kids who would eventually murder him and it just stresses me out. No way am I going to watch that movie.
On June 26, 2006 I initially left voice messages for Alan Chambers of Exodus International and another national ex-gay leader about inappropriate incidents that affected youth at an Exodus member ministry. I will not go into the details at this time, but I shared three specific situations that happened within the previous year. The shocking details of the third situation compelled me to contact Alan and this other national leader. In my initial messages I said that I would rather discuss this privately, but if they did not wish to talk, then I would initiate a public discussion.
Peterson Toscano, after all he’s been through in his life, is one of the most inwardly calm and decent people I’ve ever met. His style is not to be confrontational, but to speak to a person’s conscience, to their better nature, and try to work together with them to resolve problems. He would not be making this matter public if there was any other way. But Exodus doesn’t seem to want to address the issue. For half a year, he has been trying to get Exodus to agree to some basic guidelines for protecting the kids in their "programs". Now it looks like he’s just getting the brush-off.
The non-violent work that I do involves attempting to connect with people to create a "win-win" situation if at all possible. Building relationships, shedding assumptions, believing the best in people are all part of my Christian testimony. Joe Brummer outlines some of these non-violent steps in his most recent post. I don’t hate Alan or Exodus. I have used much restraint in hopes of seeing real change.
Some of us who feel we have been wounded by the ex-gay ministries and the anti-gay church may have sometimes wish to do them harm and to think the worse, to malign them the way that we feel they malign the LGBT community. For me Jesus’ teachings is that I should seek to do good and speak out against injustice but not exact revenge.
Perhaps some people would love there to be a major Exodus scandal. I want to see one avoided.
Do I wish them harm? Here’s what I wish. In a just society anyone who participated in forcing a gay kid into one of these places would be in jail, along with the other child molesters. That’s my wish. But the possibility of a scandal of this nature disturbs me so deeply that I have to step back from this fight periodically, for the sake of my own sanity. I think that’s why a lot of people hold this fight at arm’s length. It’s just too emotionally stressfull. You want to get those kids the hell out of there and you can’t. The law is against you. There’s nothing you can do but watch in a kind of growing gut wrenching horror. Ever since the Memphis protests, ever since I read that Refuge Rule Book Zach Stark posted, I’ve felt like I was watching a situation unfold, watching gay kids being put into camps run by men with no training other then religious dogma, no understanding of human sexuality, and no respect for the sexual nature of these kids, hoping that what what you just know is going to happen won’t And when it does, I am not going to be happy, I am going to be sick.
Peterson Toscano is one of the most decent people I have ever met. I hope his way of conflict resolution has the desired effect. I trust, since he actually knows more about this environment from first-hand experience then I’ll ever know in a lifetime, that he knows what he’s dealing with. I hope I am wrong: He believes there is a better nature within these people that can be reached. I think they’re rotten to the core. I think they’ve taken their conscience around behind the barn and killed it. I hope I am wrong. I hope I won’t see happen, what I just know is going to happen. But I don’t think even a sex abuse scandal will cause these people to reconsider what they are doing to kids. They’re on a mission from God, and God is never wrong.
People already know there is a potential for abuse here. This isn’t rocket science. And yet nothing is done, and kids are still being shoveled into it. Perhaps the reason for that is because the people involved in running these places Don’t Care. Exodus is not about helping people out of homosexuality…it is about fighting against gay civil rights. It’s about enforcing the pariah status of homosexual people. That is what Exodus is about. You may disagree, but that’s the only scenario where this behavior, this practical if not rhetorical indifference to the welfare of the kids in it, Makes. Any. Sense.
You think that any sane parent, even one that was vehemently opposed to homosexuality (I know…I know… It’s like being vehemently opposed to left-handedness…), would be disturbed to learn that their kids where being tossed into a mix of adults that included men who admitted to being sexual addicts and compulsives. You’d think that even these parents would be appalled to learn that some of these "former" sexual compulsives were staff members themselves, who could at any time get their kid alone somewhere on campus for a little private counseling. You’d think.
But then you watch these parents come and go in and out of Exodus "Love Won Out" conferences, you see them taking part in the larger anti-gay political agenda, and you listen to them mouth the same filthy lies about gay people we’ve all heard over and over thousands of times like a mantra of hate, and you realize that…yes…they probably wouldn’t care anyway. For a lot of these parents, I am convinced, these ex-gay camps aren’t a last resort to changing their kid’s sexual orientation at all. They’re punishment, pure and simple. What the religious right likes to call "tough love" and what otherwise decent people call child abuse. They want the kid to suffer, so they’ll never forget how much their own parents hate them for turning out to be faggots. Not necessarily suffer actual physical sexual abuse…no. Of course not. But the environment they’re being tossed into is primed for just that kind of thing to happen. It cannot be defused without gutting them of their mission, which is not to cure, but to enable the social and political abuse of these kids, and the adults they will grow into. You cannot enable the one, without some degree of indifference for the other. And it is of a piece with the indifference of the religious right to anti-gay violence in general. Here is Randy Thomas of Exodus, in an ad campaign against hate crime laws:
Of course, yes, many parents, not vehement about homosexuality, are simply terrified into sending their kids into these camps. They’re afraid for their kids, afraid because of the lies they’ve been taught by the religious right about homosexuals and homosexuality, afraid for their immortal souls. The last thing in the world these parents want is for their kid to be sexually abused while in one of these things. They trust in the people who run these camps, being righteous men and women of God. But the horrible nature of these places is that sexual abuse is in fact, what these places do. It is what they are meant to do.
We know instinctively that sexual abuse isn’t simply a matter of the physical act alone. It is a dagger plunged into their heart of the one who suffers it. We know this. And yet, we loose sight of it when it comes to what the ex-gay ministries do. We think of the child abuser as a monster, acting in pure selfish contempt and greed. We picture them as evil, vicious, brutal thugs. But greed has many faces. Consider for a moment instead, the victim. What do we often see in the victims of sexual abuse, and in particular, in the kids who have suffered it. Withdrawal. Guilt. Shame. Alienation. Self destructiveness. Guilt. Shame. A fear of sex and sexual intimacy that can work against any intimate human relationship they might attempt throughout their lives. Shame. Guilt. Shame. Shame. And shame. And what do we see in gay kids who have been taught to fear and loath their sexuality? Exactly the same things.
To methodically teach a gay kid to fear and loath their sexual nature is to do to them essentially what a rapist does to their victims, but without the physical act. And worse: because the child molester is universally condemned in our society and in human societies all over the world, but the people running these camps are held in high esteem as doing the work of God. For gay kids who internalize the message these camps do their damnest to put into them, there is no refuge from shame, not even the slightest comfort that what was done to them was a profound and unforgivable crime. To the contrary, the sense that they were to blame for what happened to them, is brutally re-enforced by the culture around them, particularly if they come from fundamentalist families.
What kind of people do this? Monsters? Perhaps. But not necessarily. There is hate, and there is greed. Sometimes they dance together. Sometimes they dance alone. Sometimes greed wears a face that seems compassionate and loving, until you realize that it’s the face of a vampire. There is love that is selfless and giving, and rejoices in the happiness of the beloved. And there is that greed that is selfish and needy and possessive and wears love like a mask, to hide a bottomless indifference to the damage it does.
Peterson has been trying hard to raise awareness of the potential for something worse then what he’s already discovered happening in these camps, and he’s made little headway judging from his post. He would greatly disagree with me on this I’m sure, but the problem as I see it is they’d have to care first, and you can’t care about what happens to kids physically without caring about what happens to them spiritually too. And the problem with that is it raises too many uncomfortable questions. Questions that call into doubt the very existance of these camps. Better not to ask them.
This is all of a piece. Note that none of these places keep any follow-up statistics on their "clients". As Wayne Besen found out while investigating them for his book, Anything But Straight, they can’t tell you their success rate because they don’t know it themselves. They don’t know how many of their "clients" stay heterosexual. They don’t know how the bond between parent and child does after a kid is run through their "program". They don’t know anything at all about the sexual, let alone the emotional health of their "clients" one, two, three years or more after they’ve been in the "program". They don’t want to know. The anecdotal evidence after all, is bad enough. I’ve heard the stories first-hand, from kids who have lived it. And the recurring theme through all of it is that none of these places seemed to give a good goddamn what happened to them after they’d gone through their "program".
This isn’t rocket science. Following up should not only be easy, but for people who are acting out of love for the kids it should be imperative. They should be critically intent on knowing how well they are doing their job. Are the kids better for having been though the program, or not? Are we doing anything wrong? Could we do better? Yet, they don’t want to know.
This blindness to the sexual safety of the kids in their custody is telling, in precisely the same vein. You need to pay attention to this. The great crimes against humanity don’t happen because of people who shake their fists at God and hoist the Jolly Roger. They happen, because of indifference to the humanity of their victims. Elie Wiesel, who survived the extermination camps of the thousand year Reich, captures it perfectly here:
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The claim of the ex-gay camps is that they do what they do to kids out of love. To that, Peterson Toscano says taking steps to protect young people from abuse while in these camps is not only good business, but shows a genuine love for them. But there’s the problem.
Arline Isaacson of the Massachusetts Gay & Lesbian Political Caucus, said she believes political opponents such as Mineau are acting in good faith. But she said any campaign against gay marriage inevitably draws virulently anti-gay activists from out of state who will say hateful and destructive things. Groups such as Mineau’s have to take responsibility for that, she said.
"It’s naive at best to think it won’t happen," Isaacson said.
Are you nuts? Those people are about as much good faith as a used car dealer selling models pulled from last year’s flood. This guy has it Exactly right:
Tom Lang of Know Thy Neighbor.org, a sponsor of the vigil, said he’s skeptical of calls for civility in the debate because gay marriage opponents aren’t honest about the real reason they oppose gay marriage: "They don’t like gay people."
"The dialogue can’t exist unless they’re honest and they come clean about how they really feel about gay people," he said. "We’d like them to just admit it."
But of course…they won’t.
Mineau said his group isn’t against gay people, but rather for promoting the man-woman model of marriage as the best way for society to raise children.
"That’s what we should all be esteeming for," he said. "We shouldn’t try to deconstruct it."
Well let’s deconstruct you instead asshole. The man-woman model of marriage is the best, because homosexual relationships are inferior to heterosexual ones. We should all be esteeming for it because homosexuality is a choice and a bad one at that since it’s inferior to heterosexuality. And since the man-woman model is the best and a homosexual one inferior, that means that homosexual households damage the children in them. And since homosexuality is a choice that means that gay people are deliberately choosing to do damage to children. That is what you managed to say in just two short sentences. But without actually saying it outright, of course. And you’re not against gay people.
Good faith. Good faith. Any more of this good faith and the churches up there might as well start selling flood cars.
A San Diego judge has ruled there is enough evidence against a U.S. Marine for him to stand trial for murder with a hate crime enhancement in the slaying of a gay man in 2006.
…
Following his arrest, Hardy told San Diego police homicide detectives that he passed out at Catolico’s apartment and later awoke later to find Catolico trying to sexually assault him.
According to Hardy he felt violated and that “one thing led to another and I ended up choking him.”
One thing led to another…
Hardy’s attorney told the court that the murder was not a hate crime – but rather self defense – and that [the district attorny] had not established that Catolico’s sexuality had anything to do with the killing.
But, [the district attorny] countered that Hardy knew full well that Catolico was gay and had agreed to share his bed.
"He had time to think about it, and he formed a plan in his mind for the victim to lay on his stomach, and that’s when he decided to choke him out"…
[the district attorny] also told the court that following the murder Hardy went out for fast food, and then brought it back to the apartment and ate it while playing video games on Catolico’s computer.
Presumably with the corpse of the man he claimed had sexually assaulted him still in the bedroom. How does any sane person look at his, and believe that there was an assault to begin with? But you see this kind of thing over and over again in gay panic defenses.
MFI and VoteOnMarriage.org – the ballot question committee seeking to advance the Massachusetts marriage amendment – has endeavored to advance a campaign that refrains from name calling and does not denigrate individuals. However, as many political pundits predict, the same sex marriage debate, much like the abortion debate, will be with us for decades and MFI sees a need and an opportunity to work with leaders on all sides to promote justice in the way we discuss our differences.
"The tone and rhetoric around this public policy issue has escalated to a frenzied level, too often with shouting that does nothing promote understanding. Denouncing individuals as bigots does not bring people with honest differences together. We would like to work with our opponents to raise the quality of the dialogue," said Kris Mineau, president, Massachusetts Family Institute and spokesman, VoteOnMarriage.org
…Even as this initiative beings to take shape, MFI and VoteOnMarriage.org will continue to urge supporters of the marriage amendment to be respectful of human differences and always maintain a dialogue that affirms the dignity of every person.
You know how this works…right? We stop calling them bigots, and they get to keep calling us AIDS spreading child molesting family destroying abominations in the eyes of God.
Honest differences? There is nothing honest about these people. Nothing. And especially nothing honest about their calls for mutual respect and civility. Every time you hear something like this coming out of an anti-gay hate machine, you know they’re talking to the heterosexual majority, not the gay people they’re busy bashing. They didn’t place that press release in the local gay papers. This call for mutual respect wasn’t addressed to the gay people they’re trying to take the right to marry away from. This is window dressing for the big vote in a couple years. They need to convince just enough voters that voting to take away their neighbor’s right to marry doesn’t mean they’re jumping in bed with bigots. That’s what this is about. Nothing else.
Picture a bunch of white racists pleading with black Americans for mutual respect while arguing for segregated schools and neighborhoods. Picture a bunch of antisemites insisting they want a dialog about the Nuremberg laws that affirms the dignity of every person. It’s to laugh.
The break happened not long after a boozy election-night wake for Blount, who lost his Senate bid to the incumbent Democrat, John Sparkman. Leaving the election-night "celebration," Allison remembers encountering George W. Bush in the parking lot, urinating on a car, and hearing later about how he’d yelled obscenities at police officers that night. Bush left a house he’d rented in Montgomery trashed — the furniture broken, walls damaged and a chandelier destroyed, the Birmingham News reported in February. "He was just a rich kid who had no respect for other people’s possessions," Mary Smith, a member of the family who rented the house, told the newspaper, adding that a bill sent to Bush for repairs was never paid. And a month later, in December, during a visit to his parents’ home in Washington, Bush drunkenly challenged his father to go "mano a mano," as has often been reported.
Around the same time, for the 1972 Christmas holiday, the Allisons met up with the Bushes on vacation in Hobe Sound, Fla. Tension was still evident between Bush and his parents. Linda was a passenger in a car driven by Barbara Bush as they headed to lunch at the local beach club. Bush, who was 26 years old, got on a bicycle and rode in front of the car in a slow, serpentine manner, forcing his mother to crawl along. "He rode so slowly that he kept having to put his foot down to get his balance, and he kept in a weaving pattern so we couldn’t get past," Allison recalled. "He was obviously furious with his mother about something, and she was furious at him, too
They put a whining rich man’s brat, full of self pity and a grandiose sense of his own entitlement into the White House. They picked him because they knew he appealed to a large swath of their base: small minded bigots also full of self pity and a grandiose sense of their own entitlement. Then, to their growing apprehension, he put his hands on the levers of the most powerful economy and military in the world and proceeded to act like a whining rich man’s brat, full of self pity and a grandiose sense of his own entitlement. Did they think he would stop now that he’s left a staggering trail of wreckage and lost American lives in his path? You don’t understand. The man who couldn’t even bring himself to say the words "shame on me" while reciting the old proverb, "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me" is not to blame. It’s never his fault. Nothing is ever his fault…
Nine days after Zelikow’s resignation the Iraq Study Group report was released. Informed correspondents of the Washington Post and New York Times related in conversation that Bush furiously called the report "a flaming turd," but his colorful remark was not published. Perhaps it was apocryphal. Nonetheless, it conveyed the intensity of his hostile rejection. Still, Scowcroft and Baker, like Vladimir and Estragon in "Waiting for Godot," waited for Rice.
…
The president had become enraged at the presumption of the Baker-Hamilton Commission even before its members gave him their report.
Rice was supposed to be the one to get Junior to see reality. But it seems she’s sized him up a tad better then the Wise Old Men of Washington. He’s going to do what he damn well pleases, and throughout his life everyone who has ever known him knows this one fact above all else: you’re either with him or against him. Loyalty to junior doesn’t mean you tell him what he doesn’t want to hear when he needs to hear it anyway. It means you flatter him, agree with everything he says and does, and most of all, take the blame for him when he makes a mess of things. Rice probably figured, correctly, that siding with the Wise Old Men of Washington now would incure junior’s wrath. Junior does not tolerate disloyalty.
Rice, who had fallen into radio silence, canceling a scheduled speech on "transformational diplomacy," finally intervened. When the U.S. military commanders in Iraq and U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad protested against a rush by the Iraqi government to hang Saddam Hussein, Rice overrode their objections and gave the signal to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to proceed.
Maliki’s management and subsequent defense of the gruesome circus surrounding Saddam’s execution disabused any illusion that he could act in the larger Iraqi national interest rather than as a political representative of Shiite sectarianism. He is to his marrow a creature of the Dawa Party, founded by Muqtada al-Sadr’s father, and his alliance with al-Sadr. While the intent of the surge is to revitalize the Maliki government, that government cannot and does not wish to be reformed. The problem is not merely that Maliki is a weak political leader, or that his political coalition wouldn’t permit it, or that his Iranian sponsors wouldn’t allow repudiation — all of which are indisputably true. The irreducible reason is that Maliki exists only to achieve Shiite control, and if he did not he would not exist. There is no other Maliki. Nor can Bush invent one.
But none of this matters. What an escalation will do is give junior time to do what he has done all throughout his life, pass the problem onto someone else. First there will be his troop buildup. Then it has to be given time to work. And by the time it’s staringly obvious to even a brick that it isn’t working, the next election cycle will be upon us. Bush can claim that he’s left a structure in place that will lead to success in Iraq and bring peace to the middle east…if only the new administration follows it. And then he’s out the door, and shed of the consequences. The blame for loosing Iraq will belong to the next administration, to someone else. At least, he can always say so. And so can his loyal base. Someone else is always to blame. But that’s not what you should be paying attention to…
The Wise Old Men of Washington…the power brokers…the insiders…and their ass kissing media sycophants…the ones who cherry picked him to be the republican nominee in 2000. The ones who figured he’d be their boy, appeal to the base, and usher in a permanent republican majority. They thought he would take the escape hatch they built for him. They thought he would take the chance they offered him to withdraw and save face. They thought he would listen to them. They really thought he would listen to them.
The president goes on TV to shore up support for his plan to escalate the war. But Americans generally want out of the war, which they now realize they were lied into getting involved in. Meanwhile the president is threatening the countries that border our war zone for allowing weapons and fighters to filter across their borders. It must be 1971 and we’re still in Viet Nam, yet somehow I seem a tad older then 17.
Apparently Ex-Gay-For-Pay Randy Thomas, membership director of Exodus, and staunch opponent of hate crime laws, is getting a bit tired of being harassed for what he is…
There is something to be said about having a public blog. I love to blog. I have made some amazing friends and had wonderful conversations over the years. I like posting pictures and artwork and discussing important topics (overcoming homosexuality only being one of millions of important topics.) Even so, having a personal "public" blog is also time intensive. Especially when you have so many people willing to harass you and your loved ones because they don’t agree with you. :) So, at this point, this blog is going to be completely private and posts will only be visible to my VOX neighborhood, friends and family…
Scott over at Reality Cubed has a pretty good retort up to all this, to which I can only add that it’s grotesque watching someone who played his part in a right wing propaganda offensive against hate crime laws, with gusto, bellyaching now about being harassed because, because, because they don’t agree with him. Honestly you pathetic gutter crawling maggot, I don’t give a flying fuck what your opinions are about homosexuals and homosexuality. Out of the lifestyle are you? Fine. Whatever. And for the record I don’t think people should be harassing you online, except I strongly suspect what you consider harassment is simply the kind of eminently expectable ill will people get in return when they keep spitting in their neighbor’s faces, and trashing their lives. Be nice if your kind would stop inciting religious passions against gay people, and then encouraging the police and the courts to keep looking the other way when they start taking it out on us violently though, wouldn’t it? Ask this Milwaukee Lesbian what being harassed feels like, you drooling moron.
Randy’s the guy on the…er…far right…in the ad below, produced by Exodus in their offensive in late 2005 against hate crime laws protecting gay people from what happened to Angela Emanule above, and countless others, like James Maestas, who was beaten so badly in Santa Fe earlier in the same year Exodus produced this ad, that his lungs were burned by his own stomach acid.
Here’s Randy hobnobbing with Karl Rove…
And, just to remind everyone, here’s how Rove likes winning elections in swing states…
The gay kid wasn’t there, but the man managed to kill his 17 year old friend who was. And republicans sure do seem like they’re perfectly willing to live with the consequences of demonizing homosexuals for votes, so long as it keeps winning them elections. And you’ll keep helping them do it won’t you Randy? Like…by spreading the damnable lie that we think our lives are more valuable then anyone else’s. All that ad did was generate more hate toward gay people. But…that’s what it was for. You know what Randy? Your name was on the knife that killed Kristofer King.
THE WALT DISNEY CO.’S FAILURE to suppress access to controversial audio files from its ABC Radio affiliate KSFO is a textbook example of the impossibility of controlling the marketplace of ideas in the digital age.
Like a swarm of tiny locusts overwhelming a massive mouse, it was fascinating to watch the blogosphere unite in defense of the online media critic Spocko last weekend. Disney had sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Web site Spocko’s Brain and its ISP, 1&1, after the online muckraker taped segments of KSFO’s morning talk show, posted them on his site, and invited the station’s advertisers to listen.
What they heard was drive-time hosts endorse torture, insult Muslims and enact the execution of journalists. When some advertisers fled, the Disney legal department briefly killed the messenger with a cease-and-desist order, alleging copyright violation.
But less than 48 hours after Spocko’s case was brought to light on the progressive news blog "The Daily Kos," several new Web hosts, including YouTube, Blogintegrity and Firedoglake, stepped up to provide access to audio files from KSFO. Instead of one ISP to threaten, there were now many–basically challenging MouseCorp to sue all of them.
………………..
Disney is now left with the option of playing a virtual game of "Whack A Mole," as the Rodent Empire’s lawyers will need to slap citations against a series of sites as swiftly as they pop up. Plus, it may only be a matter of time before the mainstream media rides the story for at least one new cycle. That’s got to be Disney’s worst nightmare: 24 hours where "Disney" and "Hate Speech" are both part of the topic line.
The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. –John Gilmore
"Everything you know is wrong" – The Firesign Theater
I’m looking through my server logs and I see a reference to my blog coming from a site I’d never seen before…Why the hell are you here? Check out the Bad Science and Dead Racists tags for some good reading. Anyway…I was looking around and I found a link to this…of all things…
The Geocentrism Challenge
CAI will write a check for $1,000 to the first person who can prove that the earth revolves around the sun. (If you lose, then we ask that you make a donation to the apostolate of CAI). Obviously, we at CAI don’t think anyone CAN prove it, and thus we can offer such a generous reward. In fact, we may up the ante in the near future.
Scripture is very clear that the earth is stationary and that the sun, moon and stars revolve around it. (By the way, in case you’re wondering, "flat-earthers" are not accepted here, since Scripture does not teach a flat earth, nor did the Fathers teach it). [Bruce: Actually…I belong to the Flat Mars Society…] If there was only one or two places where the Geocentric teaching appeared in Scripture, one might have the license to say that those passages were just incidental and really didn’t reflect the teaching of Scripture at large. But the fact is that Geocentrism permeates Scripture. Here are some of the more salient passages (Sirach 43:2-5; 43:9-10; 46:4; Psalm 19:5-7; 104:5; 104:19; 119:90; Ecclesiastes 1:5; 2 Kings 20:9-11; 2 Chronicles 32:24; Isaiah 38:7-8; Joshua 10:12-14; Judges 5:31; Job 9:7; Habakkuk 3:11; (1 Esdras 4:12); James 1:12). I could list many more, but I think these will suffice.
This was copied from a site called Catholic Apologetics International, and seems to have since been pulled from it, as the page they’ve linked to is no longer found. But some digging around among the other links back at Why The Hell Are You Here? turned up this amazing little tidbit …
The non-moving Earth
& anti-evolution web page of
The Fair Education Foundation, Inc.
Exposing the False Science Idol of Evolutionism,
and Proving the Truthfulness of the Bible from Creation to Heaven…
– since 1973 –
Marshall Hall, Pres.
Questions from Daniel Ott and his audience will be seeking hard evidence from me
which proves that the Earth is neither rotating on an axis nor orbiting the sun.
You won’t want to miss this unraveling of the granddaddy of all conspiracies, and
what the Truth about the Non-Moving Earth issue means to every living person.
This site doesn’t appear to be satire. In case you’re wondering, they seem to be claiming that the stars we see in the sky at night are mostly reflections of sunlight off of ice crystals. Which explains for me a reference that’s always puzzled me in Jacob Bronowski’s wonderful book Science and Human Values. In Part 2, The Habit of Truth, Bronowski relates a story of how the great German scientist, Werner Heisenberg, was denounced by the S.S. He mentions a letter Himmler wrote defending Heisenberg, and suggesting that Heisenberg might be useful in a Nazi Academy he was planning to establish, "which Himmler proposed to devote to the conviction which he either shared with or imposed on his scientific yes-men, that the stars are made of ice."
Why, I wondered, would a blood drenched Nazi lunatic want people to believe the stars were made of ice? Well now I know. It’s necessary for an earth centric model of the universe. The universe just can’t be as huge as it is, and work in an earth centric model. So it has to be much smaller. Which means the stars can’t be so big, and so far away. They have to be much smaller, and huddled around the earth like a halo. So the stars must be a cloud of ice crystals, reflecting the light from the sun. That was what Himmler was wanting to prove, so he could prove the earth centric model, so the Nazis could throw out mountains of science that existed, and which was the result of free inquiry. That much of modern physics by that time had been done by European Jews was probably on his mind. But science, regardless of who is doing it, is anathema to totalitarians, who exalt authority over free inquiry, and the Nazis, contrary to a lot of claptrap about their so-called paganism, time and time again appealed to the bible, and to their own brand of biblical fundamentalism for justification.
It’s incredible to find people so afraid of the world as it is, that they’ll shrink back from it into this kind of delusion. Galileo blew this model apart when he took a telescope he made and pointed it at the heavens and saw with his own eyes that the earth centric model simply didn’t work, and Copernicus’ powerful insight had been right. You can buy a pair of binoculars nowadays that are far better then anything Galileo had in his day. But Bronowski, writing this time in his book The Ascent of Man, puts his finger on it…
Galileo seems to me to have been strangely innocent about the world of politics, and most innocent in thinking that he could outwit it because he was clever. For twenty years and more he moved along a path that led inevitably to his condemnation. It took a long time to undermine him, but there was never any doubt that Galileo would be silenced, because the division between him and those in authority was absolute. They believed that faith should dominate; and Galileo believed that truth should persuade.
And there it is. This is why the republicans and the Bush administration have been waging an unprecedented (for America) war against science and knowledge. When people say that the rush back into religious fundamentalism comes from fear of change and apprehension about where science is leading us, that may well be true in part. But it is not the whole. This is a fight over who is in charge, and at the core of it is the struggle for free inquiry. Does your life belong to you, or to some strongman dictator, to the man thumping his bible at you, to your local committee of some national authoritarian political party? Every time you ask a question, you challenge authority. That is what is wrong with asking questions. That is why science must be brought to heal. Because it sets a bad example.
Perhaps We’ll Be Able To Sell Our Wedding Rings On eBay
So here I am…watching the auction of a couple of really nice looking original Canon F1s, and two really nice 85mm f1.8 lenses on eBay. The F1 I bought back in 1971, after a summer of working behind the counter at Burger Chef, has only had to visit the repair shop once and is in great shape now, but I worry about what will happen if it ever needs another repair. So I’d like to get another spare F1 body. I love that camera…best 35mm SLR film camera ever made in my opinion…
They made them practically bombproof. Solid overbuilt mechanical guts, alloy frame, solid brass lens focusing helicoids, roller bearings, titanium foil shutter curtains, oversized film pressure plate, and that breach lock bayonet lens mount that never got loose. The thing was a tank compared to the Nikon F it was competing with when it first came out, and yet in operation it was as smooth as silk. Heavy and yet precise in feel. My friends used to call it the Brass Monster. But in almost 30 years of nearly constant use (at one time I’d wanted to become a professional photographer) it never once failed me. It’s been smacked by a horse, slammed by basketballs and players while covering my school sports, knocked down stairs, knocked out of my hands by angry protesters, taken into the bitter freezing cold, and baking hot conditions. I’ve probably run tens of thousand of feet of 35mm film through it. And only once, did it ever need to be taken to the doctor. That was in 2001 and it took them six months to find a part they needed to fix it. They did a great job…the camera came back restored back to absolutely great shape. But immediately afterwords that repair shop announced they would no longer be servicing any Canon FD series cameras.
So I worry what will happen if mine ever needs repairing again. I just don’t want to be without one of these. For my money, this is the perfect 35mm SLR. Simple, elegant, beautiful, over engineered, yet smooth and precise like a fine watch. I never work better then when I have one of these in my hands. And after all this time, that one I bought back when I was a teenager after months of flippng burgers has great sentimental value to me. So there I am prowling around eBay…looking to buy another backup body (I actually have two others, but one of those is more of a parts camera as it is missing a few pieces), and perhaps get a lens I still don’t have.
Mr. Romney’s supporters came armed with lists of friends and, in the case of politicians, their own contributors. A lot of internal planning had gone into the day, so the recipients of calls asking for donations of $2,100, the legal limit, were not surprised. And Mr. Romney was certainly not taking any chances. When it came time for him to make a fund-raising call, piped over the loudspeaker and in front of a crush of cameras, he chose to call his older sister, Lynn Keenan, at her home outside Detroit.
…"I’ve never done anything like this before," said Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay, in a break from her callers. "I start out by saying: `You won’t believe where I am! I’m at the Boston Convention Center with four or five hundred other people dialing for contributions for Mitt Romney.’ "
Meg is one of Mitt’s regional chairs for his finance committee, and apparently she’s doing a bang-up job for him. According to this link, Meg gives money to, among others, Orrin Hatch and…yes…George Allen. No macacas on her payroll I guess.
There is apparently no way to cancel your eBay account. Once you sign on, you’re in their system for life. In the meantime I’m trying to find a viable email point of contact, just to let them know that I’ll be shopping elsewhere for the time being, and maybe forever if Mitt’s anti-gay same sex marriage amendment succeeds in cutting off the ring fingers of gay people in Massachusetts. I’m probably better off shopping for used camera equipment at a real camera store anyway, like B&H in New York City. I’ve never bought anything from their used camera department that wasn’t in exactly the condition advertised. I can’t say the same about everything I’ve bought on eBay. That parts F1 I have being one example.
On the one hand, we’re fighting for, and winning in some places, the right to marry. On the other, there are still gutter crawling bigots out there who are perfectly willing to argue for their right to discriminate against gay people, right down to the level of basic goods and services…
UK Christians, Muslims and Jews are planning to rally outside Parliament Tuesday against new gay rights laws that they claim will force them to "actively condone and promote" gay sex.
According to BBC News, organizers say the Sexual Orientation Regulations would limit their right to live according to religious beliefs.
…
The legislation would ban discrimination in the provision of goods, facilities and services on the basis of sexuality.
The BBC reports that hotels could be prosecuted for refusing to provide rooms for gay couples and parishes obliged to rent out halls for gay wedding receptions.
Equally, gay bars would not be able to ban straight couples.
Thomas Cordrey, barrister and public policy analyst with the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship, told the BBC: "The debate in the Lords is a signal to the government of the need to acknowledge these regulations do not currently strike the correct balance between two competing rights. Christians have no desire to discriminate unjustly on the grounds of sexual orientation, but they cannot and must not be forced to actively condone and promote sexual practices which the Bible teaches are wrong."
Note the formulation, discriminate unjustly. Since when did bigots ever regard anything they ever did to the object of their hatred as unjust? Somehow, we always have it coming. And note also, that the complaints aren’t just about the possibility of having to rent out church space to gay people…something I would be against myself (but they don’t have a first amendment over there). They’re bellyaching about having to rent us rooms in hotels, or for that matter sell any goods and services at all to homosexuals.
Who would Jesus refuse to feed? Next time you hear one of these righteous people complaining that homosexuals are so mean and hateful, laugh in their face. If they had their way, we’d be living in cardboard boxes on steam grates, so they could be righteous.
Via The Christian Science Monitor…this from Peter Akinola, who it’s a safe bet fancies himself the Archbishop of the new church he’s busy carving out of the Anglican one. It’s really entertaining when they don’t know enough to keep their goddamned mouths shut…
Best known for his vocal opposition to homosexuality, Akinola has found support among US Anglicans, or Episcopalians, who opposed the 2003 consecration of a gay bishop and the church’s move to allow dioceses to bless same-sex unions.
Last month, two of America’s oldest Episcopalian churches – both in Virginia – voted to break with the US branch of Anglicanism over the issue and concerns about church leaders’ adherence to biblical authority. These churches, and several other smaller churches, joined the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, which is connected to Akinola.
"Homosexuality seeks to destroy marriage as we know it, unity as we know it, family life as we know it, so how can we endorse that?" asks Akinola. "That is completely outside what God planned for humanity. When God created man, he saw man was alone and added a female mate for him. Why didn’t he pick one of the baboons, one of the lions to make his partner? He could have done so. He didn’t,"
[Emphasis mine] Say…weren’t they saying the same thing about mixed race marriages not all that long ago in Virginia…?
David Brooks says Nanci Pelosi is some kind of hereditary plutocrat, like George W. Bush:
A snit in first class – Opinion – International Herald Tribune: I have a dream that [Nancy] Pelosi, who was chauffeured to school as a child…. I dream of a great harmonic convergence among the obscenely rich…. [But] I know that both Bush and Pelosi are part of an upper-income whirlwind of strife….
This week, witness Pelosi going on her all-about-me inauguration tour, which is designed to rebrand her as a regular Catholic grandma from Baltimore. Members of the middle classes never have to mount campaign swings to prove how regular they are, but these upper-bracket types can’t help themselves, and they always lay it on too thick…
Here is a photo of Nancy Pelosi’s childhood home in Baltimore:
Nancy Pelosi grew up at the far end of this block of Albemarle Street in Baltimore. San Francisco Chronicle photo by Michael Macor.
Here’s a photo of the Bushes’ summer house on Walker Point:
Daughters of ethnic Democratic mayors in the 1950s did get driven to school. But hereditary plutocrats they were not.
I live not far from where Pelosi grew up and I can attest to the fact that this is not a neighborhood full of "obscenely rich" people. It is Baltimore’s little Italy…thoroughly Baltimore working class. People live in the usual Baltimore row houses there, and yes, some of those row houses are very nice, but there are nothing near the palatial splendor you see in the Walker Point photo. Pelosi got driven to school because she was the mayor’s daughter, not because their family was filthy rich like the Bush clan.
But Brooks, without a doubt, knows this. What he’s counting on is that you don’t. He can just say…oh…she was chauffeured to school as a child, just like the silver spoon brat in the White House now. My next door neighbors drive their boy to the Friend’s School here in Baltimore every day and they live in the same working class Baltimore rowhouse neighborhood I do. Maybe Brooks thinks that gives them the same childhood George Bush had too. Maybe Brooks thinks that makes us all Obscenely Rich here in Medfield. On the other hand, maybe Brooks is just pulling the same kind of fast one that the book that made him famous, Bobos In Paradise is full of.
As I made my journey, it became increasingly hard to believe that Brooks ever left his home.“On my journeys to Franklin County, I set a goal: I was going to spend $20 on a restaurant meal. But although I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu—steak au jus, ‘slippery beef pot pie,’ or whatever—I always failed. I began asking people to direct me to the most expensive places in town. They would send me to Red Lobster or Applebee’s,” he wrote. “I’d scan the menu and realize that I’d been beaten once again. I went through great vats of chipped beef and ‘seafood delight’ trying to drop $20. I waded through enough surf-and-turfs and enough creamed corn to last a lifetime. I could not do it.”
Taking Brooks’s cue, I lunched at the Chambersburg Red Lobster and quickly realized that he could not have waded through much surf-and-turf at all. The “Steak and Lobster” combination with grilled center-cut New York strip is the most expensive thing on the menu. It costs $28.75. “Most of our checks are over $20,” said Becka, my waitress. “There are a lot of ways to spend over $20.”
The easiest way to spend more than $20 on a meal in Franklin County is to visit the Mercersburg Inn, which boasts “turn-of-the-century elegance.” I had a $50 prix-fixe dinner, with an entrée of veal medallions, served with a lump-crab and artichoke tower, wild-rice pilaf and a sage-caper-cream sauce. Afterward, I asked the inn’s proprietors, Walt and Sandy Filkowski, if they had seen Brooks’s article. They laughed.
I called Brooks to see if I was misreading his work. I told him about my trip to Franklin County, and the ease with which I was able to spend $20 on a meal. He laughed. “I didn’t see it when I was there, but it’s true, you can get a nice meal at the Mercersburg Inn,” he said. I said it was just as easy at Red Lobster. “That was partially to make a point that if Red Lobster is your upper end?” he replied, his voice trailing away. “That was partially tongue-in-cheek, but I did have several mini-dinners there, and I never topped $20.”
Let’s be civil here: David Brooks is a goddamned liar. He does it for money. Perhaps he believes in the republican party cause. Perhaps he has his own emotional stake in the American Kultar Kampf. But the first thing to remember about him, is that he lies for money. Really…that’s all you need to know about him.
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