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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Yup. That would be about right. This is all of a piece. A sickening, stench filled piece. A movement so utterly willing to brutalize lovers is sick to it’s core. Gratification. Gratification. Do you understand now why so much of the torture inflicted on people who were essentially prisoners of war at Abu Ghraib was sexual in nature?
Lovers…and especially same sex lovers…when one of these jackasses calls you a pervert, laugh in their face. You are beautiful. They are the 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.
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 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.
You Might Sample “The Death Cookie” Too, While You’re At It…
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
As NRO’s designated chickenhawk, let me be the one to ask: Where was the spirit of self-defense here? Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn’t anyone rush the guy? It’s not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness’ sake—one of them reportedly a .22.
The other was a nine millimeter Glock. Yes, in fact you Can hose down a place with a semi automatic handgun. Ask me how I know. And according to news accounts, he had a lot of ammo with him.
At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him.
You’re a kid sitting peacefully in class and then someone bursts in and starts shooting. Never mind you have not clue one at that point what kind of gun it is, let alone how many rounds it can hold. Never mind the blast of even a small caliber handgun inside a closed space can be positively disorienting. Never mind that with practice you can drop the clip on that Glock and have another in it and a round chambered faster then someone could probably rush you unless you were practically standing right over them. Just fucking for once in your life try to put yourself in someone else’s place you drooling soulless right wing babbling moron. You’re a kid…you are in class peacefully going on about your school day and then suddenly you and your classmates are being shot at. By the time the first few shots are fired your thoughts are a frightened scrambled mess. Count? Count? Grow a fucking brain Derbyshire, you pathetic warrior male wannabe.
Handguns aren’t very accurate, even at close range. I shoot mine all the time at the range, and I still can’t hit squat.
Why is that not surprising. I shoot mine all the time too John, and I figure I’m not all that exceptional at hitting what I’m shooting at, because most of the other folks at the range there with me usually do too. But you probably think the gun adds several inches to your dick and that’s why you’re not really working it. You think just holding it in your hand makes you something. No. It doesn’t. It’s just a damn gun and you’re still the sorry brain dead soulless asshole you were before you picked it up.
Yes, yes, I know it’s easy to say these things: but didn’t the heroes of Flight 93 teach us anything?
Moron! Asswipe! The people on Flight 93 were grown Adults dealing with a situation that allowed them the means to find out what was happening to them (via their cell phones) and time to get themselves organized and together. And their attackers didn’t have guns, only crude knifes. The passengers of flight 93 had a chance the kids at VA Tech never did.
Point of fact, I read of at least one adult, a professor, who seems to have actually tried to save as many of his kids as he could, by staying behind and trying to block the doorway as his kids jumped out the classroom windows. Apparently the killer managed to get in anyway because that professor was one of the dead. But he stayed behind to try and save some of his kids. There’s a hero.
Garance Franke-Ruta, to her credit, has a somewhat novel take on What We Should Learn from the tragedy – namely, that we need to take domestic violence more seriously:
Because the first victim was a woman, and possible had a romantic connection to the killer, the police did not see her murder as a threat to the community. Now the police are pretty plainly telling the public that they failed to warn the campus there was a killer on the loose because they failed to understand that men who kill their partners are also threats to society.
Yes. Yes! But Sullivan doesn’t get it…
So while maybe there’s a case to be made for shutting down a campus or a neighborhood in any situation in which a killer is on the loose, it’s hard to see why intimate homicides in particular should be taken as warning signs that a killing spree is about to begin, and easy to see why police investigating a crime of passion would take the risk of random violence less seriously than when, say, there’s a murderous convict on the loose.
But it wasn’t random. There’s a sense you get, merely from the phraseology "crime of passion" that it was a spur of the moment unthinking, instant of madness kind of thing and mostly domestic violence isn’t that at all. It certainly wasn’t in this case. He chained the doors shut so the kids inside couldn’t get out. He brought along two guns and plenty of ammo. It was cold and brutal and calculating.
There are two dark and ugly shadows staring us back in the face after all this, and one of them is domestic violence and the other is the grotesque assumption that anyone who would violently attack their lover probably isn’t a threat to anyone else because…well…it was personal. But that willingness to attack the intimate other is Just the sort of thing you need to be watching out for in people. I keep harping on this quote from the author Mary Renault, but it keeps being a relevant insight into human behavior…
Politics like sex is only a by-product of what the essential person is. If you are mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in your sex life and it will come out in your politics when what really matters is that you are the sort of person who won’t behave like that.
There’s almost nothing that shows us what the inner person is like, then how they treat their lover. Yes, just about no one else on earth can hurt you quite as painfully, or as deeply, as the one you love (unless it’s your own parents). Yes the emotional wounds a lover can inflect, particularly during a breakup, can be devastating. Ask me how I know. But that’s because no one else’s feelings matter to you as much. If someone you love isn’t safe around you then who the fuck else can be? Nobody, that’s who.
DUNDALK, Maryland — A dramatic hostage escape from a home near Baltimore, Maryland late Tuesday gave police information they needed to storm the house and safely rescue a remaining hostage. The alleged hostage taker, Joseph Palczynski, was shot dead in the raid, police said.
The standoff had dragged on for four days, and it was the time factor that police credited with ending the siege.
"Patience," said Baltimore County Police Chief Terrence Sheridan. "It was waiting for the opportunity to save three lives" that led to the end of the standoff.
That opportunity came when hostage Lynn Whitehead escaped through a window in the home where she, her boyfriend Andrew McCord and his 12-year-old son Bradley had been held since Friday. McCord then followed Whitehead out the window and both ran to safety.
"We were having a briefing when we were informed she had come out of the window," Sheridan said. He said that Whitehead and McCord told police that Palczynski was sleeping on a living room couch and that the boy was asleep on the kitchen floor.
"At this point, SWAT team officers made what’s known as a tactical entry," Baltimore County Police spokesman Bill Toohey said. "They broke through a window, encountered Mr. Palczynski in the family room and shot him. They then rescued the boy."
"Joseph Palczynski is dead," Toohey said. "He was shot by Baltimore County tactical officers shortly after 11 tonight and died at 11:05 on the scene." None of the police was wounded.
Police rescued the boy, who was found asleep on the kitchen floor. None of the hostages was hurt, Sheridan said.
Palczynski was accused by police of killing four people in the Baltimore area two weeks ago while he allegedly tried to kidnap his former girlfriend, Tracy Whitehead, who later escaped.
Whitehead, who is the daughter of Lynn Whitehead, had broken up with Palczynski, recently, police said. The ex-girlfriend escaped from Palczynski at a motel, police said. Family members said she had been beaten with the butt of a rifle and sustained a broken nose, black eye and multiple bruises.
You can read more about Palczynski’s violent history here. He killed the couple his ex was living with, Gloria Jean Shenk and her husband, George Shenk. He killed David M. Meyers who tried to intervene while Palczynski was dragging his ex to his car. He killed Jennifer McDonel and wounded her child during an attempted carjacking because he needed vehicle to run from the cops in. For two weeks he terrorized the Baltimore area. He took some relatives of his ex, including a 12 year old boy, hostage and for four days randomly shoot up the neighborhood they lived in, demanding that police let him talk to his ex (they didn’t, knowing full well that as soon as he got her on the phone he’d start shooting his hostages). A swat team finally brought him down after one of his hostages managed to sneak a tranquilizer into his drink and he fell asleep and the adults were able to get away. Nobody later questioned the hail of bullets he was awakened to, because for certain he would have killed the boy the instant he knew the game was up, had he the slightest shred of a chance.
To assume that nobody else but the ‘Ex’ is in danger from a violent lover is stunningly stupid on its face. If they’re dangerous to their lover, then nobody else around them is safe either.
[Update…] Now we’re hearing that girl he killed first in the dorms wasn’t romantically involved with him at all. So this apparently wasn’t all brought on by a violent lover after all. Cho seems to have simply just been mad. As in…crazy.
Horrific news from VA Tech. I suppose I don’t have to repeat the headlines you’ve already seen. Just keep in mind that the first things you hear about ugly, shocking events like this are almost always the noise coming out of the fright and confusion. If you have friends or loved ones down there, don’t take the initial reports you hear to heart. Hang on, find some family and friends to be with, and wait for the solid facts to start coming in.
The Daily Dish: Enemy of the People: Meet Professor Walter F. Murphy, emeritus of Princeton University. He’s a former Marine, with five years of active service and 19 years in the reserve, and a legal critic of Roe vs Wade and supporter of the Alito confirmation. He’s also on the Terrorist No-Fly List:
I presented my credentials from the Marine Corps to a very polite clerk for American Airlines. One of the two people to whom I talked asked a question and offered a frightening comment: "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that." I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. "That’ll do it," the man said."
Just a heads up about what these people are up to.
I am posting the below with the permission of Professor Walter F. Murphy, emeritus of Princeton University. For those who do not know, Professor Murphy is easily the most distinguished scholar of public law in political science. His works on both constitutional theory and judicial behavior are classics in the field. Bluntly, legal scholarship that does not engage many themes in his book, briefly noted below, Constitutional Democracy, may be legal, but cannot be said to be scholarship. As interesting, for present purposes, readers of the book will discover that Murphy is hardly a conventional political or legal liberal. While he holds some opinions, most notably on welfare, similar to opinions held on the political left, he is a sharp critic of ROE V. WADE, and supported the Alito nomination. Apparently these credentials and others noted below are no longer sufficient to prevent one from becoming an enemy of the people.
"On 1 March 07, I was scheduled to fly on American Airlines to Newark, NJ, to attend an academic conference at Princeton University, designed to focus on my latest scholarly book, Constitutional Democracy, published by Johns Hopkins University Press this past Thanksgiving."
"When I tried to use the curb-side check in at the Sunport, I was denied a boarding pass because I was on the Terrorist Watch list. I was instructed to go inside and talk to a clerk. At this point, I should note that I am not only the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence (emeritus) but also a retired Marine colonel. I fought in the Korean War as a young lieutenant, was wounded, and decorated for heroism. I remained a professional soldier for more than five years and then accepted a commission as a reserve office, serving for an additional 19 years."
"I presented my credentials from the Marine Corps to a very polite clerk for American Airlines. One of the two people to whom I talked asked a question and offered a frightening comment: "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that." I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. "That’ll do it," the man said. "
"After carefully examining my credentials, the clerk asked if he could take them to TSA officials. I agreed. He returned about ten minutes later and said I could have a boarding pass, but added: "I must warn you, they=re going to ransack your luggage." On my return flight, I had no problem with obtaining a boarding pass, but my luggage was "lost." Airlines do lose a lot of luggage and this "loss" could have been a mere coincidence. In light of previous events, however, I’m a tad skeptical."
Nice. Welcome to George Bush’s America. If you’re thinking they "lost" his luggage so they could take it somewhere they could inspect it more thoroughly for evidence of a crime, you’re still not paying attention. This was harassment. State sanctioned harassment of someone who was critical of Bush. And they would have Wanted him to complain publicly about it. So harassment not only punishes its target, but also sends a message to anyone else thinking about speaking out against the Bush administration. One of DeLong’s commenter’s avers the following:
Possibly, just possibly, Walter Murphy might now question his support for the nomination of Samuel Alito.
Yah Think? Another commenter brings up the firing of all those federal prosecutors via this New York Times story:
April 9, 2007
Another Layer of Scandal
As Congress investigates the politicization of the United States attorney offices by the Bush administration, it should review the extraordinary events the other day in a federal courtroom in Wisconsin. The case involved Georgia Thompson, a state employee sent to prison on the flimsiest of corruption charges just as her boss, a Democrat, was fighting off a Republican challenger. It just might shed some light on a question that lurks behind the firing of eight top federal prosecutors: what did the surviving attorneys do to escape the axe?
Ms. Thompson, a purchasing official in the state’s Department of Administration, was accused by the United States attorney in Milwaukee, Steven Biskupic, of awarding a travel contract to a company whose chief executive contributed to the campaign of Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat. Ms. Thompson said the decision was made on the merits, but she was convicted and sent to prison before she could appeal.
The prosecution was a boon to Mr. Doyle’s opponent. Republicans ran a barrage of attack ads that purported to tie Ms. Thompson’s "corruption" to Mr. Doyle. Ms. Thompson was sentenced shortly before the election, which Governor Doyle won.
The Chicago-based United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit seemed shocked by the injustice of her conviction. It took the extraordinary step of releasing Ms. Thompson from prison immediately after hearing arguments, without waiting to issue a ruling. One of the judges hinted that Ms. Thompson may have been railroaded. "It strikes me that your evidence is beyond thin," Judge Diane Wood told the lawyer from Mr. Biskupic’s office.
For years now critics of those of us who have been warning of the creeping facisim of the Bush administration have been called hysterical, and suffering from something they call "Bush Derangement Syndrome". The only thing surprising about Ms. Thompson’s case is that she was allowed to challenge her imprisonment in the courts at all. Bush, Gonzalas and the republicans have made it quite clear that they think Habius Corpus is a luxury America can no longer afford…
At the end of the post I wrote last week about ABC News and Brian Ross’ new report that Iran could have nuclear weapons by 2009, I noted that ABC and Ross — back in October and November 2001 — were the driving force, really the exclusive force, behind news reports strongly suggesting that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were responsible for the anthrax attacks on the U.S. There are several very important issues arising from those events which I strongly believe merit real attention. This post is somewhat lengthy because it is vital to set forth the facts clearly.
Last week, I excerpted several of the Saddam-anthrax reports from ABC and Ross — here and here — but there are others. ABC aggressively promoted as its top story for days on end during that highly provocative period of time that — and these are all quotes:
(a) "the anthrax in the tainted letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was laced with bentonite";
(b) bentonite is "a troubling chemical additive that authorities consider their first significant clue yet";
(c) "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons";
(d) bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program"; and,
(e) "the anthrax found in a letter to Senator Daschle is nearly identical to samples they recovered in Iraq in 1994" and "the anthrax spores found in the letter to Senator Daschle are almost identical in appearance to those they recovered in Iraq in 1994 when viewed under an electron microscope."
At different times, Ross attributed these claims to "three well-placed but separate sources" and, alternatively, to "at least four well-placed sources." All of those factual claims — each and every one of them, separately — were completely false, demonstrably and unquestionably so. There is now no question about that. Yet neither ABC nor Ross have ever retracted, corrected, clarified, or explained these fraudulent reports — reports which, as documented below, had an extremely serious impact on the views formed by Americans in those early, critical days about the relationship between the 9/11 attacks, the anthrax attacks and Iraq…
The fact is, nobody can trust a damn thing ABC News says. That’s a problem not only because Iran may indeed be a real threat to the world, but because any grave threat to worldwide peace and stability now has to be judged through the understanding gleaned now from the past six years of George Bush and his crony’s, that they govern by way of lies. Who do we trust? Well…not ABC News. We all saw it in the course of their bogus anthrax reporting. Your gay and lesbian neighbors saw it also, on November 26, 2004, when ABC News cynically gave a dead gay kid’s killers a public forum to spit on his grave a few times, so that the republicans could later argue that hate crime laws are unnecessary.
The claim that the anthrax was laced with bentonite, and that government tests detected the presence of bentonite, was simply false — a complete invention from Ross’s sources, eager to link Saddam and anthrax attacks. And separately, it was a complete fiction that "the anthrax spores found in the letter to Senator Daschle are almost identical in appearance to those they recovered in Iraq in 1994 when viewed under an electron microscope." That just never happened.
Equally false, really completely frivolous, was the conclusion Ross’s sources fed to him from this false premise — namely, that even if bentonite — which ABC referred to as a "troubling chemical additive" — had been found in the anthrax, that would be some sort of compelling proof linking Iraq to the anthrax attacks.
The very idea that bentonite is "a troubling chemical additive," let alone that it is some sort of unique Iraqi hallmark, is inane. Bentonite is merely a common clay that is produced all over the world, including from volcanic eruptions. Over the weekend, I spoke via e-mail with M.A. Holmes, a Geologist in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who wrote:
Bentonite is mined and used for drilling mud (getting the rock chips out of a drill hole when drilling for oil or deep water) and now is mined for the clumping-type kitty litter ("swells when wet"). It’s also used to draw cactus spines put of the skin (sold as a product called "Denver Mud"). It has lots of other uses, like lining pits for waste disposal (because it "swells when wet" it forms a pretty good seal).
Bentonite is mined extensively in Wyoming and oh, yes, SOUTH DAKOTA. It is not "a chemical additive" and it is not unique to Iraq. It is widespread and common, and readily available wherever you can get "drilling mud."
Go read the whole thing. The drumbeat to war is happening again. Just remember whenever you hear something from ABC News about Iran, that this is the news organization that stooped to smearing a dead gay kid’s memory for the sake of republican party talking points. Nothing is beneath them. Nothing.
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