Lifted from Peterson’s comment to his own blog post Here…

Peterson now wants to help others that are referred to the clutches of Exodus. He invited all ex-gay survivors, as they call themselves, to a conference in opposition to the ex-gay movement. They can learn how one can be gay and nevertheless lead a godly life. Michael Bussee co-founded Exodus 30 years ago but came back out of it because he found the methods of the organization questionable. Today he participates in the ‘counter’-conference: “One day a young man came to me. He explained that he’d had anonymous sex and felt so guilty afterward that he mutilated himself. At that point I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t preach against homosexuality anymore if it causes such damage.”

Emphasis mine.   You folks who say "love the sinner, hate the sin"…?  There’s your love.

I’ve been meaning to post about this since I saw it last week, but I was on the road and I just don’t blog well when I’m flitting down the highway from one motel room to another.  But I figured last week that when I got around to it, I’d begin the post with something along the lines of…

I hate these motherfuckers!  We have goddamned freedom of the press in this country, and our newspapers resemble something out of the cold war Soviet Union…

CBS Evening News falsely described proponent of Iraq "surge" as former opponent of it

On the July 30 edition of the CBS Evening News, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin falsely described Brookings Institution senior fellow Michael O’Hanlon as "a critic" of the Iraq war "who used to think the surge was too little too late, [but] now believes it should be continued." In fact, while O’Hanlon has been critical of the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war, he supported the invasion and argued in a January 2007 column that President Bush’s troop increase was "the right thing to try."

Additionally, during the July 30 broadcast of Fox News’ Special Report, while introducing a report on a July 30 New York Times op-ed by O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, director of research at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy — in which they asserted: "We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms" — host and Fox News Washington managing editor Brit Hume suggested that O’Hanlon and Pollack were longtime Iraq war critics. Hume described the two as "[a] pair of longtime opponents of President Bush’s policies in Iraq." The same night, ABC’s World News anchor Charles Gibson began his show’s report on O’Hanlon and Pollack’s op-ed by describing the authors as "long and persistent critics of the Bush administration’s handling of the war." But in focusing only on O’Hanlon and Pollack’s criticisms of the "handling" of the war, the news broadcasts failed to note that O’Hanlon and Pollack were influential proponents of the Iraq war before the invasion, leaving viewers with the impression that the two were war opponents who have now become more supportive of the war.

Sweet, eh?  When you can’t find a critic of the war who supports the surge, you simply recast a couple old supporters of the war as opponants and…Voila!  Proof that the policies of president I’m The Decider are winning over even his toughest critics.

Glenn Greenwald dissects the shit pile that is our corporate news media some more… 

It is difficult to remember a media spectacle to match yesterday’s [July 30, 2007 -Bruce] grand pageant where Ken Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon were paraded across virtually every network and cable news show and radio program and heralded as "war opponents" and "Bush critics" who nonetheless returned from Iraq and were forced by The Truth to admit that we are Winning. For sheer deceit and propaganda, it is difficult to remember something quite this audacious and transparently false.

As was demonstrated yesterday, O’Hanlon and Pollack were among the most voracious cheerleaders for Bush’s invasion and, as the war began to collapse, among its most deceitful defenders. But it goes so far beyond that.

Even through this year, they have remained loyal Bush supporters. They were not only advocates of the war, but cheerleaders for the Surge. They were, and continue to be, on the fringe of pro-war sentiment in this country. And yet all day yesterday, this country’s media loudly hailed them as being exactly the opposite of what they really are. It was 24 hours of unadulterated, amazingly coordinated war propaganda that could not have been any further removed from the truth.

…

I spent yesterday and today reading through virtually all of the writings and interviews of these two Brookings geniuses over the past four years concerning Iraq. There is no coherence or consistency to anything they say. It shifts constantly. They say whatever they need to say at the moment to justify the war for which they bear responsibility. It is exactly like reading through the writings of Bill Kristol, Tom Friedman and every other individual who flamboyantly supported this disaster and — motivated solely by salvaging their own reputations — are desperate to find some method to argue that they were right.

Even though I write frequently about how broken and corrupt our establishment media is, witnessing these two war lovers — supporters of the invasion, advocates of the Surge, comrades of Fred Kagan — mindlessly depicted all day yesterday by media mouthpieces as the opposite of what they are was really quite startling. After all, there is a record as long as it is clear demonstrating what they really are.

But in order to maximize the potency of their propagandistic Op-Ed, they proclaimed themselves to be "analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq" and — just like that — Americans hear all day about the magical and dramatic conversion of these deeply skeptical war opponents who were forced by the Grand Success they witnessed first-hand in Iraq, as much as they hate to do it, to admit oh-so-reluctantly that the Surge really is working! Well, if even these Howard-Dean-like War Opponents say it, it must be true. That was the leading "news" story all day yesterday.

Nice.  This is the kind of crap I was used to seeing in the state controlled press of totalitarian states like the Soviet Union.  But they all bought into the war…hell, they all bought into George Bush…early on, and now they don’t dare admit that they’ve brought an unmitigated catastrophe down on their country.  In an editorial titled, Iraq Hasn’t Even Begun, contributing editor to the Los Angles Times Timothy Ash writes…

So Iraq is over. But Iraq has not yet begun. Not yet begun in terms of the consequences for Iraq itself, the Middle East, the United States’ own foreign policy and its reputation in the world. The most probable consequence of rapid U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in its present condition is a further bloodbath, with even larger refugee flows and the effective dismemberment of the country. Already, about 2 million Iraqis have fled across the borders, and more than 2 million are internally displaced.

Now a pained and painstaking study from the Brookings Institution argues that what its authors call "soft partition" — the peaceful, voluntary transfer of an estimated 2 million to 5 million Iraqis into distinct Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite regions, under close U.S. military supervision — would be the lesser evil. The lesser evil, that is, assuming that all goes according to plan and that Americans are prepared to allow their troops to stay in sufficient numbers to accomplish that thankless job — two implausible assumptions. A greater evil is more likely.

In an article for the Web magazine Open Democracy, Middle East specialist Fred Halliday spells out some regional consequences. Besides the effective destruction of the Iraqi state, these include the revitalizing of militant Islamism and enhancement of the international appeal of the Al Qaeda brand; the eruption, for the first time in modern history, of internecine war between Sunni and Shiite, "a trend that reverberates in other states of mixed confessional composition"; the alienation of most sectors of Turkish politics from the West and the stimulation of authoritarian nationalism there; the strengthening of a nuclear-hungry Iran; and a new regional rivalry pitting the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allies, including Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, against Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.

For the United States, the world is now, as a result of the Iraq war, a more dangerous place. At the end of 2002, what is sometimes tagged "Al Qaeda Central" in Afghanistan had been virtually destroyed, and there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq. In 2007, there is an Al Qaeda in Iraq, parts of the old Al Qaeda are creeping back into Afghanistan and there are Al Qaeda emulators spawning elsewhere, notably in Europe.

Osama bin Laden’s plan was to get the U.S. to overreact and overreach itself. With the invasion of Iraq, Bush fell slap-bang into that trap. The U.S. government’s own latest National Intelligence Estimate, released this week, suggests that Al Qaeda in Iraq is now among the most significant threats to the security of the American homeland.

The U.S. has probably not yet fully woken up to the appalling fact that, after a long period in which the first motto of its military was "no more Vietnams," it faces another Vietnam. There are many important differences, but the basic result is similar: The mightiest military in the world fails to achieve its strategic goals and is, in the end, politically defeated by an economically and technologically inferior adversary.

Even if there are no scenes of helicopters evacuating Americans from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, there will surely be some totemic photographic image of national humiliation as the U.S. struggles to extract its troops.

Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have done terrible damage to the U.S. reputation for being humane; this defeat will convince more people around the world that it is not even that powerful. And Bin Laden, still alive, will claim another victory over the death-fearing weaklings of the West.

In history, the most important consequences are often the unintended ones. We do not yet know the longer-term unintended consequences of Iraq. Maybe there is a silver lining hidden somewhere in this cloud. But as far as the human eye can see, the likely consequences of Iraq range from the bad to the catastrophic.

Looking back over a quarter of a century of chronicling current affairs, I cannot recall a more comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster.

And Atrios writes of this…

This is the basic point, but it’s also something that has not penetrated the brains of the Very Serious People who rule our elite discourse. They fucked up. Lots of people died. Lots of people continue to die. Each of them, in their own little way, contributed to this "comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster," and most of them are unwilling and unable to face up to that fact. This is truly the era of Bush, where accountability is for suckers, and I’ve come to conclude that’s pretty much the dominant cultural fact of elite Washington.

Our corporate news media served the voters up this disaster on a silver platter of dollar store bullshit, jingoism, and their drunken bar stool conceits.  They hated Bill Clinton, they hated the democrats, they hated the liberals, and most of all they hated the Dirty Fucking Hippies Who Made Us Loose In Vietnam.  Bush was their hero, their knight in shining armor, their exoneration.  Pusillanimous, pampered, petulant, with a abundant sense of his own entitlement to match his grotesque self righteousness.  He was their hero, the hero they all knew they were deep down inside.  And when terrorists killed over three-thousand Americans on 9-11, they figured their moment of glory had arrived at last.  Along with their hero, they were going to remake the nation…and the world…in their own image.

Well, they have. 

We gay folk have friends among the heterosexuals.  Never doubt that.  Never, never, never.  And because they are beautiful people…decent…good hearted…good people…they don’t really understand what it is we’re all facing.  They just don’t…

Tom Tomorrow:

Yet another example

Here (referencing this).

When I saw Angels in America, I thought the closeted gay Mormon character was a little too heavy handed, but in retrospect I’ve come to realize that Tony Kushner understood something about the world that I did not.

While on the road from Laramie, I tuned into Sirius OutQ and heard that John Edwards wife had made a speech about the need for hate crime legislation…

Edwards’ wife says local homicide illustrates danger of hate speech

Elizabeth Edwards said Saturday she is troubled by the suspected anti-gay beating death of a Sacramento man, and said the killing of Satender Singh demands renewed condemnations of hate speech in America.

Singh, a 26-year-old Fijian immigrant, died four days after he was attacked July 1 at Lake Natoma by an angry group hurling explicit gay slurs and racial remarks.

Edwards, campaigning in Sacramento for her husband, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards of North Carolina, said she was so affected by news of Singh’s death that she rewrote a speech on human rights she was due to deliver later Saturday in San Francisco.

“I thought we learned some lessons from Laramie and Matthew Shepard,” Edwards said in an interview, referring to the fatal 1998 beating of a gay college student in Wyoming that triggered an uproar over anti-gay violence.

Oh you did, did you?   Well I was just in Laramie lady, and I can tell you for a fact that they are busy trying to forget it ever happened.   Learn something?   Oh my goodness.   How to bury their fucking heads in the sand deeper maybe.

The first time I visited Laramie since the murder, I was driving through on my way back home to Baltimore.   I thought I’d swing through the town and see if I could find the place where Shepard was killed and pay my respects.   But without knowing exactly where it was, other then a general description of the site, it was hopeless and I had to give up.   So I drove through town looking for any sign, any acknowledgment, of what had happened.   Maybe a little poster in some window somewhere.   Maybe a little plaque.   Some notice somewhere, anywhere, that gay folks would be coming here to morn and pay their respects.   I found exactly nothing.

Okay, thinks I…next time I come, I’ll know the location beforehand.   So I did a small amount of poking around and found the spot where Shepard’s dying body was found and looked it up on a map.   Shepard was driven from The Fireside bar near the edge of the downtown part of Laramie, out to Snowy View Road.   I’d already read that the property owner had torn down the deer fence that Shepard had been tied too, out of pique that so many people were leaving flowers and tributes there.   But I figured I could still stand at the spot for a moment or two and morn.

It was not to be…

The road leading to the site is now marked with signs warning you that it is a private drive, not a public road, and that everyone should keep out.   That entire area is now off limits to the public.   You can’t get anywhere near the place where Shepard’s dying body was found anymore.

I suppose at some point, they’ll do something like build a condo right on top of the spot where it happened.   Or maybe a nice tennis court.

Over and over again in this struggle for our freedom and human dignity, I am put in mind of the words of Malcolm X.   He was not anything near the peacemaker that Martin Luther King Jr. was, but he knew what progress meant…

If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound, and America hasn’t even begun to pull out the knife.

Progress is healing the wound… Hate crime legislation, anti discrimination laws, same sex marriage…these are all good things, necessary things.   But real progress toward gay equality, toward that day when gay people can live side-by side with our heterosexual neighbors in peace and good will, won’t happen, won’t even begin to happen, until straight America is willing to begin healing the wound.   And not only are they not pulling out the knife, in Laramie, they’re still trying to make people forget it’s even there.

And this is why gay people are still being murdered every year in America, for no other reason then that they are gay.   Too many people hate us enough to kill us, to think of killing us as some kind of sport, or a rite of passage into manhood.   And too many other people don’t give a shit.   Hate, and it’s lover, Contempt, just keep doing their dance on our lives, their dance over our bodies.

That was why Matthew Shepard was killed, make no mistake.   ABC News can get away with helping the religious right whitewash that basic fact of the killing, because few people outside of the gay community will bother making the trip to Laramie to see the place where it all happened for themselves.   But last night I drove from about where Shepard was kidnapped to the place where his killers tied him to a fence, put their cigarettes out on his skin, and beat his skull open with the butt of a pistol.

You go out of the downtown section…you drive for blocks…past the university…past the outlying convenience stores…a few fast food joints…some liquor stores…out to the edge of town and beyond.   Into the rolling sage.   Into the darkness.   I know why they turned off onto Pilot Peak Road now.   Pilot Peak was their last turn off before the Interstate.   They had to make that left, or they would have been on the Interstate and from there it was either drive back toward town or drive for miles to Happy Jack Road.   So they took the left onto Pilot Peak Road and drove back into that sub division as far as they could.   Into the darkness.   Where no one would see.   Where their handiwork wouldn’t be discovered for a long time.

You take that drive…out of town…far away from the town lights…into the night…and you start thinking to yourself…This was a robbery? No way.   Just.   No.   Way.     There were two of them against one small, 112 pound boy and they passed plenty of nice, quiet, dark places where they could have taken Shepard, robbed him, dumped him, and driven off. Hell…they passed plenty of places where they could have just shot him dead and driven off without being seen.   You don’t drive that far out of town, into the middle of nowhere, just to rob a 112 pound kid.   You drive him there because you intend to spend a while enjoying yourself beating a faggot to death while he begs for his life and nobody can hear him scream for help, and you don’t want the body discovered before you’ve had a chance to clean up and get rid of the evidence.

That was always the plan, from the moment they got him into the truck.   If you doubt that, take the drive yourself some night, from downtown Laramie to Snowy View Road, and try to convince yourself that they only intended to rob him.

Lessons?   Lessons?   There is no memorial to Matthew Shepard anywhere in Laramie that I could find, the site of this beating is off limits to the public now, and thanks to ABC News, people are calling Matthew Shepard a Meth addict who knew his killers, and maybe even had sex with them once or twice.   And the killing goes on.   They’re learning how to live with the increasing stench of their own prejudices is what they’re learning.   Because that is still preferable to treating homosexuals as their neighbors.

[Edited a tad…]

[Update…]   The Good People of Laramie eventually did decide to erect a memorial after all. Ladies and Gentlemen, I hereby present you with the Matthew Shepard Memorial…bench.

This, for some reason, has been playing on my iPod almost constantly since I left Memphis…

I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh lord
Ive been waiting for this moment, all my life, oh lord
Can you feel it coming in the air tonight, oh lord, oh lord

Well, if you told me you were drowning
I would not lend a hand
Ive seen your face before my friend
But I don’t know if you know who I am
Well, I was there and I saw what you did
I saw it with my own two eyes
So you can wipe off the grin, I know where you’ve been
Its all been a pack of lies

And I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh lord
Ive been waiting for this moment for all my life, oh lord
I can feel it in the air tonight, oh lord, oh lord
And I’ve been waiting for this moment all my life, oh lord, oh lord

Probably because I saw something while I was there that rekindled a long smoldering anger. 

I found this from the Dixie Chicks just a few minutes ago over at Chronicles of an Ex-Ex-Gay… 

Forgive, sounds good
Forget, I’m not sure I could
They say time heals everything
But I’m still waiting

I should probably listen to some of their music…

Theory and experiment alike become meaningless unless the scientist brings to them, and his fellows can assume in him, the respect of a lucid honesty with himself. The mathematician and philosopher W. K. Clifford said this forcibly at the end of his short life, nearly a hundred years ago.

If I steal money from any person, there may be no harm done by the mere transfer of possession; he may not feel the loss, or it may even prevent him from using the money badly. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself dishonest. What hurts society is not that it should loose it’s property, but that it should become a den of thieves; for then it must cease to be a society. This is why we ought not to do evil that good may come; for at any rate this great evil has come, that we have done evil and are made wicked thereby.

This is the scientist’s moral: that there is no distinction between ends and means. Clifford goes on to put this in terms of the scientist’s practice:

In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous.

And the passion in Clifford’s tone shows that to him the word credulous had the same emotional force as ‘a den of thieves’

The fulcrum of Clifford’s ethic here, and mine, is the phrase ‘it may be true after all.’ Others may allow this to justify their conduct; the practice of science wholly rejects it. It does not admit the word ‘true’ can have this meaning. The test of truth is the known factual evidence, and no glib expediency nor reason of state can justify the smallest self-deception in that. Our work is of a piece, in the large and in the detail; so that if we silence one scruple about our means, we infect ourselves and our ends together.

-Jacob Bronowski “Science and Human Values” 1956

Jim Burroway over at Box Turtle Bulletin and Mike Airhart over at Ex-Gay Watch react positively to a blog post by Exodus affiliated minister   Karen Keen, about her experience attending some of the events at the Ex-Gay Survivor’s Conference.   Jim calls it “…a very lovely and grace-filled post.”   Mike says of it that it is an “…accurate, balanced and thoughtful account.”   Allow me to be the grouch here.   Accurate it may well have been.   Balanced, perhaps.   Graceful…well it depends.   It was certainly polite.   But I wouldn’t go so far even as to say it was respectful.   What it was, was patronizing.   There is a spiritual sense of the word ‘grace’ that speaks to unconditional loving and caring and unless you think that looking for better ways to put innocent people through unmitigated hell out of a thoughtless devotion to dogma amounts to grace I’d have to say grace filled, along with thoughtful it was not.   When people say things like this you need to take it seriously for what it is…

As we munch on bok choy and shrimp, Scott, Sonia and I listen to stories and concerns regarding ex-gay ministry. Our goal is not to criticize or argue, but to take the concerns seriously and learn how ex-gay groups can improve their ministries.

Emphasis mine.   She was there to observe the broken ones, and try to figure out some better ways of fixing them.   To take the concerns of the people she sat down to dinner with seriously is a mutually exclusive proposition to learning how ex-gay groups can improve their ministries, because if going into it the assumption was that the people she was sitting down to eat with were broken and needed fixing, then the degree to which their concerns needed to be listened to was limited from the get-go.   Clearly, the only thought she was willing to entertain throughout the course of her interaction with the people at the Survivor’s Conference was how to fix the fixing process.   But that the fixing process could not not itself be fixed because it was based on a flawed and disastrous premise was never, Could Never be considered…er…Seriously.   Which meant that she wasn’t so much listening to her dinner companions, as filtering what they were saying to her through the main preconception she brought to that dinner with her.   This isn’t somebody who came to listen.   But then she couldn’t.

When she says that the raw expressions she witnessed during the survivor’s chalk talk moved her more then she expected, I’m sure that was genuine.   But that’s not to say it moved her very much, because what it should have made her was ashamed.   Deeply, gravely, severely ashamed.   There, right before her eyes, were the raw, anguished torn from the gut expressions of the suffering those people needlessly endured at the hands of the likes of her, simply for being homosexual.   And even that was not enough to make her question change.   But it couldn’t have.   In the end, she writes…

I realize I was drawn to the Survivor Conference because I love these people. In some impossible way, I long for camaraderie and unity with ex-ex-gays with whom I have shared so many of the same life struggles and pain. Yet, at the end of the day our roads lead us apart, and I wish it wasn’t so. I leave the Survivor Conference knowing it will be my last ex-ex-gay conference. I feel an ache in my heart—the kind of sadness that comes when breaking up with a lover. Even when irreconcilable differences are clear, and parting is the most honest thing to do, the loss is still felt. I want to take my friend by the hand and walk her down the same life path I am traveling, but I know I can’t.

And in the comments at Ex-Gay Watch she elaborates…

Another clarification–when I talk about how the two groups (ex gay and ex-ex gay) are on separate roads that lead apart, I did not mean to infer that I will not engage in dialogue anymore. I am always open to hearing people’s thoughts and stories. I comment on this a bit in response to someone’s comment on my blog. What I was describing is that the two movements have different goals that cannot be reconciled. I am all for church unity, but there are some things that cannot be unified without comprising our own personal integrity.

Integrity.     I happen to believe that the so called “clobber passages” of the bible don’t actually say what a lot of homophobes think they say.   But let’s assume for the sake of argument that they do.   So what.   In addition to calling on the faithful to put homosexuals to death, the bible also insists that the faithful not suffer witches to live.   Innocent people died once upon a time in Salem Massachusetts because of those passages, and you best believe that the people who put them to death did so in good conscience, and prayed afterwards for God to have mercy on the immortal souls of those poor devil possessed witches.   But it is not integrity to put theology above the observable and knowable humanity of the old woman whose head your are putting into a noose.   The word for that is fanaticism.

It is not at the end of the day that Karen Keen’s road diverged from that of the survivors.   It was at the beginning, at that point along the way where we all decide whether we will walk down the path before us with our eyes wide open or not.   That the survivors eventually came to the conclusion that their treatment at the hands of the ex-gay ministries was not only not working, but could not be made to work, and then that it was unnecessary to begin with, doesn’t mean that they had fallen back into “the lifestyle” but that at least after some horrific measure of pain and suffering they were willing, finally, to let the evidence speak for itself.   When you embrace a religious faith that insists its written dogmas have to count for more then the observable facts, more even, then your own first hand experience, more then the witnessing of pain and suffering, your personal integrity is the first thing you give up.

As Jacob Bronowski wrote in Science and Human Values…

The state of mind, the state of society, is of a piece.   When we discard the test of fact in what a star is, we discard in it what a man is.

Likewise, when we discard the test of fact in what a homosexual is, we also discard in it the human being that they, and you, are.   Integrity.

You have to think that there are people in Washington, almost certainly among the punditboro, now thinking to themselves that Nixon should have just pardoned the Watergate Burglars immediately…then he wouldn’t have needed to worry about burning his secret White House tape recordings because the investigations would have ground to a halt. 

But back then Nixon would have still had to worry about impeachment in a way Bush never will.  The republican party hadn’t yet sunk into the depths it has today.  Today, if Bush was caught stuffing money he’d just stolen from a bank into the g-string of a 12 year old pole dancer (of either sex) on the White House lawn the republicans wouldn’t impeach him.  If Bush walked out of the White House and shot a random tourist in the head the republicans wouldn’t impeach him.  There’s no way they’re going to let him be impeached over the Scooter Libby affair.

Joshua Marshall is probably your best online resource for understanding this story…

Many others will note this but I feel obliged to do so for the record. The real offense here is not so much or not simply that the president has spared Scooter Libby the punishment that anyone else would have gotten for this crime (for what it’s worth, I actually find the commutation more outrageous than a full pardon). The deeper offense is that the president has used his pardon power to shortcircuit the investigation of a crime to which he himself was quite likely a party, and to which, his vice president, who controls him, certainly was.

The president’s power to pardon is full and unchecked, one of the few such powers given the president in the constitution. Yet here the president has used it to further obstruct justice. In a sense, perhaps we should thank the president for bringing the matter full circle. Began with criminality, ends with it.

And…especially…this :

Another point I’m obliged to make.

Here on the Times Oped page you’ll see David Brooks column claiming that the information Joe Wilson brought before the public four years ago turned out to all be a crock, a bunch of lies. And we’ll let Brooks’ scribble be a stand-in for what you will hear universally today from the right — namely, that just as Scooter Libby was charged with perjury and not the underlying crime of burning an American spy, the deeper underlying offense, the lie about uranium from Africa, didn’t even exist — that at the end of the day it was revealed that Wilson’s claims, which started the whole train down the tracks, were discredited as lies.

You’ll even hear softer versions of this claim from mainstream media outlets not normally considered part of the rump of American conservatism.

There aren’t many subjects on which I claim expertise. But this is one of them. I think I know the details of this one — both the underlying story of the forgeries and their provenance and the epi-story of Wilson and Plame — as well as any journalist who’s written about the story. The Fitzgerald investigation is probably the part of it I know the least about, comparatively. (It is also incumbent on me to say that in the course of reporting on this story over these years I’ve gotten to know Joe Wilson fairly well. And I consider him a friend.)

And with that knowledge, I have to say that the claim that Wilson’s charges have been discredited, disproved or even meaningfully challenged is simply false. What he said on day one is all true. It’s really as simple as that.

Really.  The entire Wilson/Plame affair is a textbook example of how the republican party Mighty Wurlitzer operates, hand in glove with the Washington press and the Washington punditboro.  Never mind talk radio.  This was an inside job.  The beltway cool kids have been as unanimous in calling for Scooter’s pardon for obstructing justice in the case of outing a CIA agent as political retribution, as they were in calling for Clinton’s head for obstructing justice over a blow job.

There’s a tendency, even among too many people of good faith and good politics, to shy away from asserting and admitting this simple fact because Wilson has either gone on too many TV shows or preened too much in some photo shoot. But that is disreputable and shameful. The entire record of this story has been under a systematic, unfettered and, sadly, largely unresisted attack from the right for four years. Key facts have been buried under an avalanche of misinformation. The then-chairman of the senate intelligence committee made his committee an appendage of the White House and himself the president’s bawd and issued a report built on intentional falsehood and misdirection.

No one is perfect. The key dividing line is who’s telling the truth and who’s lying. Wilson is on the former side, his critics the latter. Everything else is triviality.

Garrison Keller was right: they’re republicans first and Americans second.  Not just the men in power, but their courtiers in the news media and the punditboro.  When they tell you that the break president Junior gave Scooter Libby is no big deal they are looking you right in the eye and lying through their teeth.  It is exactly as Joshua Marshall says it is: "…the president has used his pardon power to shortcircuit the investigation of a crime to which he himself was quite likely a party, and to which, his vice president, who controls him, certainly was."  And that crime wasn’t a blow job in the White House, it was damage to our intelligence gathering abilities, done for the sake of silencing a critic, sending a warning to others, and bringing the intelligence community to heel.  When you see one of these gutter crawling thugs solemnly saluting the flag this Forth Of July, and speaking of the patriotism, and their love for America, remember it.

The prosecutor in the Plame case, Fitzgerald, issued the following statement regarding Bush’s commutation of Libby’s sentance…

We fully recognize that the Constitution provides that commutation decisions are a matter of presidential prerogative and we do not comment on the exercise of that prerogative.

We comment only on the statement in which the President termed the sentence imposed by the judge as “excessive.” The sentence in this case was imposed pursuant to the laws governing sentencings which occur every day throughout this country. In this case, an experienced federal judge considered extensive argument from the parties and then imposed a sentence consistent with the applicable laws. It is fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals. That principle guided the judge during both the trial and the sentencing.

Although the President’s decision eliminates Mr. Libby’s sentence of imprisonment, Mr. Libby remains convicted by a jury of serious felonies, and we will continue to seek to preserve those convictions through the appeals process.

Bush, through his press secretary, has indicated he may pardon Libby outright.  Look for that to happen if Libby keeps loosing his appeals.  Expect the Washington press to rejoice if he does.

Some years ago, long before I’d ever ventured out into the Internet, I wrote an essay on my own coming out to myself experience, to post on a gay FidoNet echomail board.  It’s been through many iterations since…mostly to edit unclear or awkward passages and add a bit of clarifying text here and there.  I’ve taken it down from my web site here for the moment, while I give it an update.  But I’ve posted it in response to many arguments I’ve had over the years with online bigots. 

I saw early on that the personal computer enabled us as a people, for the first time in human history, to tell our own stories to the world, in our own words, completely bypassing the traditional gatekeepers of culture.  Ever since I’ve been taking every opportunity to tell these little slice of life stories out of my own life, and encouraged other gay people to do the same.  If we don’t tell our stories, the only people who will are the ones who hate us…the ones who cannot see the people for the homosexuals.  For generation upon generation, the haters were the only ones who were allowed to speak on the subject of homosexuality.  Our voices were silenced, often brutally, so their lies could be told without any fear of being contradicted by the truth of our lives.  No more.  For all the same reasons the totalitarians in China couldn’t massacre thousands of their own people in Tiananmen Square on a Sunday evening, and then tell the rest of the world Monday morning that it never happened, the homophobes can no longer insist that Homosexuals Don’t Love, They Just Have Sex and expect everyone to just nod their heads and accept it as a given. 

But insist they will, because that’s all their cheapshit hatreds allow them to see.  My own personal favorite example of that, happened when I once again posted my coming out to self story on a Usenet message board, in response to a bigots assertion that every homosexual that ever lived got that way because they were molested as a child.  I said I wasn’t…I said that the first sex I’d ever had was with another guy about my own age, and that I was in love, and I reposted my essay, which reads in part…

Slowly and deliberately we drew ourselves closer together.  One summer afternoon we arranged to go hiking.  There was a place we’d both never been to that we wanted to explore.

At a shop where I once worked one of the guys there described, a little too graphically for my taste, the loss of his virginity.  A guy never forgets his first woman, he said.  Actually he didn’t say woman he made a reference to a woman’s organ.  What I’ll never forget that day when I was 17: the moment he put his hands on me.  That gentle tentative touch was electric. 

I woke up that instant from the dream of childhood.  We laid down and took each other all that green warm golden afternoon across the threshold, into the land of adults.  My gym teacher’s ravings and everything else I’d ever been told about what homosexuals were and what it meant to be one disappeared in my first passionate embrace of another male.  And after, breathless and exalted, we looked into each others eyes for, I don’t know, minutes, hours…  To this day I can still remember quite vividly things like the sounds of birds calling each other in the trees above us, the scent of his skin, the feel of his hands on me, the sunlight drifting over his hair in the warm breeze…

I had been an instrument sitting idly on the maker’s shelf, watching curiously the work around me, hearing the first tentative notes of the others along side of me, and not knowing that I too had been created to make this music until that moment when the maker took hold of me, and I felt myself lifted up, and I sang.

Sure as the sun rises in the east, the very next day that gutter crawling bigot posted back, accusing me of putting pornography on the message board.  I’d written a story he said, about "two pervs feeling each other up."

I was gratified to see that I wasn’t the only one reading that message board, who thought the man in question was nuts.  But you need to pay attention to this: All I’d said was that he touched me, and Instantly this man read that as we were feeling each other up.  I never actually described the sex we had, because that detail wasn’t important.  I was writing about my state of mind, about how it felt to be in love for the very first time, and to find yourself one lovely summer afternoon in the arms of the one you love.  And this prize pervert took what I wrote about being in love, and his twisted little mind turned that into some graphic and satisfyingly disgusting homosexual sex scene that he could not take his eyes off of.  And he had to make sure no one else could either.

I’m thinking about this, as I read Michael Medvid’s little Townhall blog post, regarding the change in policy toward gay inmates in the California prison system…

The very idea of “Gay Conjugal Visits” for prisoners sounds like a bad joke, but officials of the California penal system are to worried to laugh. Because of the state’s new “civil unions” law, the gay convicts who linked themselves to partners before incarceration are now entitled to scheduled sessions of intimacy, just like their married counterparts. This means that prison staffers who spend their time in desperate efforts to prevent behind-bars gay conduct, including rape, must now assist selected prisoners with trysts involving their “domestic partners.” This absurd innovation exposes the true nature of the so-called gay rights agenda: it’s not about equality, it’s about governmental promotion of behavior that many Americans still consider disgusting and immoral. Gay conjugal visits should cause the public to look past platitudes about love to focus on the raw actuality of male-male eroticism. Is this practice – with all its hygienic, physiological harm—really deserving of governmental (and prison system) support?

Now…read this part again:  Gay conjugal visits should cause the public to look past platitudes about love to focus on the raw actuality of male-male eroticism.  Sure Michael.  Sure.  Just like the sight of a gay male couple walking down the street holding hands makes you focus on the raw sexuality of their relationship.  Just like the sight of a gay male couple sitting together at a restaurant peacefully eating lunch, content simply in each other’s company, makes you focus on the raw sexuality of their relationship.  Just like the sight of a gay male couple standing bored out of their minds in a grocery store checkout line makes you focus on the raw sexuality of their relationship.  And that’s because you don’t see human beings when you look at homosexuals Michael.  You see monsters.  The monsters your cheapshit bar stool prejudices have always told you they are.  Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…

They have Sex…they have Sex…they have Sex…they have Sex…they have Sex…!!!!!

Anyone whose mind functions normally might otherwise be able to see the sense in this new prison policy.  First of all, if opposite sex couples can have them, then it’s just a simple matter of human decency to allow it to same sex couples as well.  It may actually serve to Reduce the incidence of prison rape, by lowering the sexual tensions inside prison.  It can serve as an incentive toward good behavior.  And helping to keep couples together while one is in prison, means that when they are eventually released, they still have something to go home to.  Or would you rather dump them back out on the streets with nothing at all left in their lives Michael?   Oh never mind…of course you would.  The emotion of love registers inside your dark little heart about as much as a candle in a blizzard, doesn’t it Michael?  That gray, sterile, brutal toxic human wasteland where love never was, and can never be, and where no inhumanity is impossible, is your beloved homeland, isn’t it Michael?  That’s why all you can see, when your eyes behold a couple, is the sex they’re probably having, isn’t it Michael?  Because that’s the only thing about how couples feel about each other that you Can understand, deep down inside that dark little heart of yours, isn’t it Michael?  And it isn’t just the feelings same sex couples have for each other that completely mystify you…is it Michael?

Pervert.

[Edited a tad…] 

Over at This Modern World, Jonathan Schwarz takes a look from James Holsinger over to another corner of the open sewer that is the Bush administration, from whence the Project For A New American Century came from.  Hold your nose, and hold on to your stomach…

As you may have already seen, Dr. James Holsinger, Bush’s nominee for Surgeon General, is very concerned about gay men and their “anal eroticism.”  Indeed, like most extremely manly men, he spends a lot of time thinking about this. I’m guessing that, at least when he was younger, he thought about it four or five times a day.

So everyone’s getting a good laugh about this. But Bush & co. work out their peculiar psycho-sexual obsessions in ways far more serious than this.

Take Eliot Cohen, for instance. Cohen wrote the Air Force’s study of the effects of air power during the Gulf War. Later he was a founding member of Project for a New American Century. And now he works for Condoleezza Rice in one of the State Department’s most prominent positions.

And this is what Eliot Cohen wrote about bombing other countries in 1994:

Air power is an unusually seductive form of military strength, in part because, like modern courtship, it appears to offer gratification without commitment.

Ha ha ha! Yes, killing thousands of people with high explosives is sort of like sex out of wedlock! What a witty, apt comparison!

These people are the world’s most genuine perverts.

If you’re feeling brave today, perhaps you’d like to take a walk up to the edge of the Pit and peer in. I promise you’ll see something worth knowing.

Hate. Ever wonder what it’s like, to look it right in the face and behold? Hate. Hate. Not to ask it why, or wherefore, but just to look and observe and then walk back away from it…always, always, walk away from it…and remember. Remember what you saw. Remember. I’m not talking Fred Phelps’ circus o’ hate. Fred’s been in it for the shock value longer then he can remember why he hates. He just wants to be the center of attention now. Same with all those poor weak little white power Nazi wannabes you see, gamely giving the stiff arm salute for the cameras, while surrounded by a ring of police protection. Himmler would have considered them little more then useful idiots. No…I’m talking the good stuff. Pure. Uncut. Hate. Hate. I have a hit of it right here for you.

Just be careful. Remember what Nietzsche said…repeat it like a prayer before you look… If you gaze long into the Abyss, the Abyss gazes also into you… When you are done looking, you are going to walk away. You must. It will be hard.

Here, via a Latvian group calling itself Defend The Family, is Scott Lively. He’s delivering a lecture to this group on the dangers of the homosexual menace. Lively may already be known to some of you, as the holocaust-revisionist author of The Pink Swastika. As Jim Burroway says…

Lively goes beyond the small cadre of anti-gay extremists who deny that gays were victims of the holocaust. He claims that ‘homosexualism’ itself was responsible for the rise of the Nazi party and led directly to the Holocaust. He writes that “homosexuality is primarily a predatory addiction striving to take the weak and unsuspecting down with it.”

Despite the crackpot theories manufactured largely from rumor, conjecture and the recycling of popular myths, Lively’s book has become something of a best seller. It’s now in its fourth edition. While it has been dismissed by historians, it has gained a significant following among anti-gay activists, particularly among European neo-Nazi groups who have been responsible for several anti-gay assaults in recent years.

Lively has been active in Latvia recently. On March 21st, he was invited to speak at a Kaunas Police Academy about “the effects of sexual ‘freedom’ that is promoted by the homosexual movement.”

Here is a video of Lively giving his talk during a workshop at the New Generations church in Riga, Latvia last March. This isn’t the Fred Phelps family chanting their obscene slogans, waving their signs at hundreds of angry protesters. This isn’t a group of faux Nazi milk babies strutting around in uniforms they think make them somebody. This is an intelligent man calmly, and methodically demonizing one group of people to another group of people who he knows are ready to accept anything he says to them, and have utterly no way of measuring the truth of anything he’s telling them.

They are people who have been taught since childhood to believe whatever the authorities tell them to believe. Once it was their Soviet masters. Now it’s their church leaders. Those leaders have told them that Lively is a great American author who traveled around the world just to speak to them, to warn them of a danger to everything they have ever known. Watch now, as Lively, calmly, deliberately, methodically, teaches them to hate and fear and loath their homosexual neighbors more then they ever, ever hated the Soviets.  Watch his face.

Last year’s Pride Day in Latvia…

As a compromise, Riga Pride organisers held a private indoor rally at the Berg hotel, following an Anglican church service. The church was surrounded by a group of religious extremists, old women and skinheads. "We tried to leave by the back door but they had put guards there. We tried to move through them but groups of people started to run at us shouting, ‘You deserve to die,’ and ‘Leave our land.’ They were carrying bags, which could have had anything in them," remembers Jolanta Chianovica, a half-French, half-Latvian activist.

The bags were full of human excrement, which was hurled at the mostly female congregation. Meanwhile, more counterdemonstrators had swarmed to the Berg hotel, where they were refusing to let Pride supporters in or out. "I saw two girls trying to leave and people spat in their faces directly in front of the police but they did nothing. When they saw the police weren’t interfering to stop the violence, they felt they could do whatever they liked. That was really frightening," says Chianovica.

This is the situation Lively walked into, this is the situation he knew he was walking into, as he told his audience that the gay rights movement has "destroyed the family structure in a large part of the United States", when he said of homosexuals that "they have no place in a society that protects marriage and family."

Now…walk away.  Go find a friend and make them smile.  Find a small uncared for corner of your world and make it beautiful.  Go.  Leave this place.  Later, you can remember what you saw…

I haven’t been watching the republican debates.  Apparently a lot of people got an eyeful of Milt the other day.  This from Atrios…

Commenter Bloix explains things to Massive Media Matt:

I thought he was clear. He does not believe in trial by jury, or the presumption of innocence, or the right to counsel, or an independent judiciary, or the right to liberty. He believes that the government should be disappear people from their homes and send them to prison camps where brutal guards will beat them up at their leisure. He thinks we need more Gitmos and bigger Gitmos. He wants to recreate the gulag. You saw how excited the audience was. They understood it. Why don’t you?

Apparently the only thing Milt isn’t willing to sell out on his quest for the presidency, is his religion.  He’s certainly willing to sell out his country. 

Andrew Sullivan discovers Jack Chick…

A 1984 evangelical Christian cartoon pamphlet, helpfully put online here. Don’t tell Hewitt. It could upset the Popular Front. (I think the racial stuff is out of date.)

Try some of his anti-Catholic pamphlets while you’re at it.  Oh…and the anti-Gay ones.  My favorite, the one that really lets you see that open sewer Chick calls a conscience, is the one where he tells the parents of kids who have commited suicide that their children are burning in hell…

They say, like a bunch of Johnny One Notes, that the "Gay Agenda" is an assault on families.  They say it with the utmost sincerity, while driving their knives into the hearts of families of gay children.

Peterson Toscano has posted one of the most moving blog entries that I have ever read, about what he learned John Smid’s Love In Action was doing to his parents, while it was busy doing it’s work on him…

On a recent road trip with my dad I asked him what it was like when he and my mom came to Memphis for the Family and Friends Weekend at LIA, a concentrated family encounter. Here is some of what he said.

We went to the meeting and had no idea of what we were going into. We met a lot of parents in the same category. Lots of kids had no parents there.

Everything seemed to be on the up and up at first. Yeah, but we found out these things aren’t so. I said to them, "You can’t change a zebra’s stripes." They didn’t go along with me, and they were very aggravated with me for saying so. Some people go through two colleges and they don’t have common sense. I hate when people keep things locked up.

They made me feel that I failed you. That’s how I felt after they got through with me. That’s how they made all the parents feel.

Years after I left LIA and I began to write my play, I interviewed my younger sister, Maria, about that time. What she told me broke my heart. She said that when our parents returned home from the Family and Friends Weekend, they were devastated. They didn’t eat right or look right. They acted sad and depressed. This went on for weeks. My sister felt so concerned that she actually called Love in Action and asked, "What did you do to my parents?!" She felt frustrated by the lack of concern or comprehension she encountered from the staff.

Lance Carroll could say a few things I reckon, about that stunning lack of concern or comprehension…

My parents were very disappointed and didn’t know what to do next, feeling that they had tried everything. My mom took it upon herself to somehow change me. This began with daily bouts of verbal abuse, her telling me how ashamed she was of me. After a few months of this, the verbal abuse escalated into small episodes of physical abuse, with her cornering me and slapping me, while telling me what an abomination I was.This type of behavior continued until I could no longer stand to live at home. One day I packed up all of my belongings into my car, and told my parents that I was moving out right that minute. My mother got so angry when I told her this that she exploded and beat me into a corner, ripping my shirt and giving me scratches and bruises in the process. My dad had to pull her off of me so that I could get to my car to leave.

Of course John Smid was nowhere to be seen while all this was going on in Lance’s family.  It isn’t just the kids John is heart-wounding. He puts his little mark on the hearts of vulnerable parents too, and other family members, and leaves a wreckage strewn landscape behind he doesn’t even bother looking back on as he walks away from it.  Perhaps he’s afraid of turning into a pillar of salt.

A look back from Editor and Publisher at how the Great Satan of the Liberal News Media covered the event…

As presidential spectacles go, it would be hard to surpass George Bush’s triumphant ”Top Gun” visit to the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln yesterday off the California coast. President Bush flew out to the giant aircraft carrier dressed in full fighter-pilot regalia as the ”co-pilot” of a Navy warplane. After a dramatic landing on the compact deck — a new standard for high-risk presidential travel — Mr. Bush mingled with the ship’s crew, then later welcomed home thousands of cheering sailors and aviators on the flight deck in a nationally televised address.

The scene will undoubtedly make for a potent campaign commercial next year. For now, though, the point was to declare an end to the combat phase of the war in Iraq and to commit the nation to the reconstruction of that shattered country….

-Editorial, May 2, 2003, The New York Times.

The tail hook caught the last cable, jerking the fighter jet from 150 m.p.h. to zero in two seconds. Out bounded the cocky, rule-breaking, daredevil flyboy, a man navigating the Highway to the Danger Zone, out along the edges where he was born to be, the further on the edge, the hotter the intensity.

He flashed that famous all-American grin as he swaggered around the deck of the aircraft carrier in his olive flight suit, ejection harness between his legs, helmet tucked under his arm, awestruck crew crowding around. Maverick was back, cooler and hotter than ever, throttling to the max with joystick politics.

Compared to Karl Rove’s ”revvin’ up your engine” myth-making cinematic style, Jerry Bruckheimer’s movies look like ”Lizzie McGuire.”

This time Maverick didn’t just nail a few bogeys and do a 4G inverted dive with a MIG-28 at a range of two meters. This time the Top Gun wasted a couple of nasty regimes, and promised this was just the beginning.

–Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, May 4, 2003

And many others, either equally fawning or equally passive in their complete willingness to simply jot down all of President Junior’s talking points and pass them along as news, without so much as letting a peep be heard from the dissenters.  Oh no.  To read the New York Times back then you’d have thought there was no dissent anywhere regarding the threat Iraq posed to the world, or that it had weapons of mass destruction, much beyond a few dirty radical hippy leftists who nobody needed to pay any attention to.  It was "You provide the pictures, I’ll provide the war…" all over again. except this time it wasn’t the William Randolph Hearst of our era doing it, but the Gray Lady herself.

Ah well…  The Times has yet to admit its culpability as a willing participant in the Whitewater smear campaign either…

It’s like fussing with a wound that hasn’t even begun to heal, but humans are like that.  One of the hardest things to teach a kid is to leave it alone when it starts hurting again…

So the killer sent a package to at least one of the big TV networks.  I’m actually surprised he didn’t post it all on YouTube or MySpace, but he may have thought that would have given him up too soon.  I’ve only seen a few very brief clips so far, but one thing that that leapt out at me was how completely deranged he seemed.  I’ve seen anger, I’ve seen fanatical hate, I’ve seen bitterness.  I’ve had a gun pointed right at my head, saw killing rage in the face behind the iron sights, heard it in his voice (it was a road rage incident…obviously he didn’t actually shoot me…).  I can half close my eyes and still see and hear it.  It seems bizarre to think of it as sane, and yet I realize now it was sane, completely sane, compared to what I saw as Cho Seung-Hui vented for a few minutes about rich people and trust funds and debauchery. 

I keep hearing the word "disturbed" here.  Let me say it: he was crazy.  It’s not just our rational mind, but all the evolutionary baggage our brains have accumulated over the eons that make us human.  I’ve seen human rage.  I’ve seen human hate.  What I saw in that brief excerpt NBC showed us was chillingly grotesque…like a face blasted apart and sewn back together by something that had never seen a human face before and didn’t know quite where to put things.  There were pieces missing from him inside…deeper more ancient things then those higher emotions of compassion and empathy.  Things from the bedrock of our mammal souls.  Maybe older still.  And what was there wasn’t enough to make any sense when it came to making a person out of it.  I’ve no idea if his personality had decayed that much before he sat down to make that video.  But if it was anything near I can see why he was scaring the hell out of people long before he did what he did.  The face chills you, not because of it’s anger and rage, but because it is missing something, some subtle thing you can’t quite put your finger on, but which leaps out at you for its not being there.

I don’t think they’re going to find the why of this in anything in his history or his environment.  A trigger, perhaps.  Perhaps not.  This is a clinical case.  He was crazy.  I strongly doubt now that it has anything to do with anything that might have been said or done to him.  In addition to the video he left a paper manifesto, with photos and writing.  One glimpse of a page of densely packed text, no paragraph breaks, just one long string of words for line after line filling the entire page, was enough.  I’m no professional but I’ve seen that before in case study after case study, and in the graphic art of the mad, which I have studied with interest.  And…something I saw first hand…

I once worked for a private psychiatric hospital.  I was a stock clerk.  My job was to keep the office supplies and custom printed forms flowing to the various units, most of which only dealt with mildly disturbed folks.  But one, the Intensive Care Unit, had double doors you had to be buzzed through.  I made my deliveries there only just to the inside door, where one of the staff would take my things and hand me a list for the following week.  One day while I was doing that, I saw a young girl who had just been brought to them.  She was laying on her back on a sofa in a room just next to the door and I could see her clearly.  She couldn’t have been more then 20.  Young, strikingly beautiful.  Her face was set in a serene, peaceful, fixed stare at the ceiling.  Her elbows were at her sides, forearms up, her hands and fingers extended, the palms facing the ceiling almost as if she was pushing it away.  She was talking in a low, utterly calm monotonal drone.  Something like this…

remembering sank shadows echoed in water reflected gained in light realized remembered effort grounded in reputation in secure secure remember programmed joy of momentum needs energy remember the well placed expansive classrooms bringing forth eyes to ponder glass light thrown up into sky remember remember remember reframe embrace renew fever strives to purge soul light and sky remember imbalance pursuing sickness and wonder together in wonder wonder wonder wonder aware awareness gave transcendent sight casts forth water fire cast cast cast cast cast

Like that.  I’ll never forget it.  I wanted to quit my job then and there because I wasn’t sure I could deal with seeing and having to know because I was seeing it, how tenuous the grip the human identity really has inside of us.  What is a soul?

You hear it called the ravings of lunatics, but until you’ve actually witnessed it you might assume that’s something like a politican or a fundamentalist preacher babbling on and on about something that nobody but them actually cares about.  But no…it’s more like a brain just dumping its contents onto the table like it’s barfing.  That’s what I saw in that video, and even more, in the page of his manafesto.  It was a brain dump.

Cho Seung-Hui, I believe now, was crazy.  Not crazy angry.  Not crazy with hate or crazy with rage against…whoever.  Just crazy.  In the literal sense.  We throw that word around so much that it’s practically become meaningless I suppose.  But there it is.  The Abyss.  The unraveling of the human identity inside of a person.  That’s not excusing or trivializing what he did to 32 school kids who still had their lives ahead of them, and I’m not trying to dehumanize him.  Cho was certainly human.  He had that rational mind, was able to think and plan, was able to consider death and what would happen after he was dead.  He was calculating and methodical as only a human being can be.  But a very sick one.  He was mad.