32 posts tagged “politics”

On this date in 1859, the book The Origin of the Species, written by Charles Darwin, was first published. 

It elicited a firestorm which has not yet completely died down.  Here is one take on the controversy, as show in the great 1960 film adaption of the play Inherit the Wind:

The play was based on the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, where a local schoolteacher in the town of Dayton Tennessee was charged with violating a state law by having taught the theory of evolution in his classroom.  The competing attorneys were the great populist politician William Jennings Bryan, two time Democratic presidential candidate, and Clarence Darrow, who had most recently defended the teen thrill-killers Leopold and Loeb, and was a leading supporter of the ACLU.

I majored, in college, in Physical Anthropology, which primarily is the study of Evolution.  I have never understood why evolution needs be incompatible with a faith in a higher power.  On that score, I am disagreed with on the right by the fundamentalists, and on the left by the adamant atheists.  I suspect that the Great Middle is with me.

My new neighbor Mariser has come across a new blog analyzer.  I thought It might be fun to run a few popular political blogs through and see the results:

Daily Kos: The Scientist.

Free Republic: The Mechanic.

Rude Pundit:  The Thinker.

Michell Malkin:  The Guardian.

Any others you might read?

For every one of me, there are thousands of young black kids with the same energies, enthusiasm and talent that I have who have not gotten the opportunity because of crime, drugs and poverty. I think my election does symbolize progress but I don't want people to forget that there is still a lot of work to be done.

From an interview that Obama gave to the Los Angeles Times, published on March 19, 1990, a month after his election as President of the Harvard Law Review. 

Interesting article in the Milwaukee Magazine, which may confirm your suspicions about conservative talk radio.  The following excerpt is restricted to "fair usage" length.  I will provide a link to the whole article after the excerpt.

Conservative talk show hosts would receive daily talking points e-mails from the Bush White House, the Republican National Committee and, during election years, GOP campaign operations. They’re not called talking points, but that’s what they are. I know, because I received them, too. During my time at WTMJ, Charlie would generally mine the e-mails, then couch the daily message in his own words. Midday talker Jeff Wagner would be more likely to rely on them verbatim. But neither used them in their entirety, or every single day.

Charlie and Jeff would also check what other conservative talk show hosts around the country were saying. Rush Limbaugh’s Web site was checked at least once daily. Atlanta-based nationally syndicated talker Neal Boortz was another popular choice. Select conservative blogs were also perused.

A smart talk show host will, from time to time, disagree publicly with a Republican president, the Republican Party, or some conservative doctrine. (President Bush’s disastrous choice of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court was one such example.) But these disagreements are strategically chosen to prove the host is an independent thinker, without appreciably harming the president or party. This is not to suggest that hosts don’t genuinely disagree with the conservative line at times. They do, more often than you might think. But they usually keep it to themselves

Here's a link to the whole article.

Food for thought:

From Keith Olbermann

Having been raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, by Republican libertarians, and as a Christian Scientist, I have always been confused by bigotry.  (This is not to say that my family or my church were pure.  My sainted grandmother said some odd things about folks of a different hue, even as she treated them as equal to her.  And Mary Baker Eddy was a pretty strong detractor of Catholicism.) 

Here are the words of one of my mother's political heroes:

The big thing is to make this country, along with every other country in the world with a few exceptions, quit discriminating against people just because they're gay.  You don't have to agree with it, but they have a constitutional right to be gay. And that's what brings me into it.

Those are the words of Barry Goldwater.  I know, as he got older, many in his party began to mutter that he was becoming more liberal in his old age.  Not really.  He was simply staying consistent to his beliefs.  Whatever his other views may have been, Goldwater had no patience for the idea that one's sexual orientation had any bearing on one's character.

In the context of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy in the military, which Goldwater vehemently opposed, he said the following

The conservative movement, to which I subscribe, has as one of its basic tenets the belief that government should stay out of people's private lives. Government governs best when it governs least - and stays out of the impossible task of legislating morality. But legislating someone's version of morality is exactly what we do by perpetuating discrimination against gays.

Now, I don't really care what folk believe in their homes.  I honor the right of all Americans to embrace whatever religious or moral beliefs their religion, or even just their conscience, dictates.  Provided that the practice of those beliefs do not impinge on the civil liberties of other Americans.  That is the Rubicon for me. 

I graduated from college 25 years ago.  At the time, if an inter-racial couple walked through campus, you would see people staring and pointing fingers.  I have occasion to visit the campus still, from time to time.  The campus green is a great place for my son to run around.  I see inter-racial couples walking by.  I see that nobody else notices them.  And why should they?  The notion that they are somehow different would be considered ludicrous by most college students today.

And I see how gay couples are viewed on campus as well.  I wouldn't say that nobody else notices them yet.  But we are well past the staring and pointing fingers phase.

I'm left-handed.  When I was six years old, my parents sent us kids to a private school.  We were there for two years, before the vagaries of the economy led my parents to transfer us to public schools.  It was an old-school place, quite literally.  We learned using McGuffey's Readers.  It was a rigorous education, and I have been well-served by having had that head-start.  There was just one problem.  They didn't believe that a child should write left-handed. 

When the teacher began to teach us to write, I was told I needed to use my right hand.  This made absolutely no sense to me, so I refused.  She put me out in the hall.  The principal came over, and admonished me.  The next day, the teacher again insisted that I use my right hand to write.  Again I refused. and was put into the hallway.  The principal came by again, and told me that if I refused the next day, I would be suspended from school.  Remember, I was six years old.  I went home and told my parents what was going on.  The next day, my mother came into school with me.  I don't know what was said, but I was allowed to learn how to write with my left hand.  The teacher, given my stubbornness, no doubt, was not particularly enthusiastic about teaching me.  I still write like a doctor hurriedly dashing off a prescription scrip.

I know, that all sounds incredible, when viewed from today's perspective.  How on earth could it possibly make any difference which hand I wrote with?  But there was, and still is in some cultures, a deep belief that left-handedness was somehow bad.  The Christian church burned left-handed people as witches, and the Devil was depicted as left-handed.  In many  countries, the tradition has been that one "cleans" oneself after defecating with the left hand; it is literally unclean.  That is why the law to cut off the right hand of a thief is so humiliating.  A person thus maimed would have to eat with an unclean hand.

That's not the end of the story.  I had a very close friend in that school.  He was also left-handed.  They told him the same thing.  He learned to write right-handed.  My friend is intelligent, friendly, and loving.  He is also gay.  I knew that he was gay years before he was willing to admit it to himself.  It took him getting sober in AA, and five years of therapy to reach the point of doing so.  I remember the call I got from him when he decided to come out to his family and closest friends.  He was so afraid that I would reject him, that his family would reject him, and that he would be left alone.  This from a man raised in what may very well be the most gay-friendly region of the country.  I will never forget his sense of relief when he realized that I not only wasn't rejecting him, but was embracing him.

My friend was in his early 40s when he finally came out of the closet.  How many failed straight relationships, how much confusion, how much self-loathing did he experience before then?  What a waste of time and a fine man.  I wonder sometimes if he had had the stubbornness that I had, back at 3R School, whether he might have been able to accept his sexuality sooner.  I certainly know that I wouldn't have hesitated to come out, had it been me who had been gay.

My friend sent me an e-mail not too long ago.  He asked me to contribute to the No on 8 campaign.  I immediately sent money, as much as I could spare.  I pray for the day when he can feel the universal indifference of others to his sexuality.  I pray for the day when gay teen suicide rates are no longer 4 times the rate for straight teens, a rate oddly commensurate to the rates of incidents of harassment of gay teens.

There is always a way to justify bigotry.  Passages in the Bible were used to justify slavery, the massacre of innocents, apartheid.  Even killing left-handed people.  Those who live in fear of others will never stop looking for a justification to treat others as less than themselves.  But these are spiritually sick people.  I pray for them, that they may be released from their fear, and stand up into the light of freedom from spiritual bondage.

When it comes to gay marriage, I am perfectly comfortable with the libertarian position.  It's none of my business, and should be none of government's business.  (Frankly, I don't believe government should be in the marriage business at all).  If religious bodies have a problem with it, I don't have to join those religious bodies.  This is America.  I am free to worship, or not worship, as I choose.  But I look forward to the day that my dear friend can feel the full privilege of citizenship.  As the Supreme Court told us decades ago, "Separate but Equal" is a sham, and is un-American. 

When I walked out of the voting booth last Tuesday, a phrase from Martin Luther King's speech in Washington in 1963 resonated in my head:  Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last.  Then I saw the news on Proposition 8.  Now the phrase from the speech in Memphis resonates in my head:  We as a people will get to the promised land.  The fight for equality is not over.  But neither am I yet tired.

To those who struggle with this issue, I leave you with this.  I love you.  I pray for you.  I wish nothing but good things for you.  In the words of the humanly imperfect Mary Baker Eddy, founder of my childhood faith:

And Love is reflected in love.

Yep, I think this election is pretty well sewn up.

Courtesy of Andrew Sullivan:

If you're a conservative on the fence, worth considering.

Edit:  if the above link isn't working, try the following: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/10/the-top-ten-rea.html

I am neither a conservative (any longer) nor on the fence, so I won't presume to judge for any conservative whether the points made should resonate with them.  Neither will I make any assertions as to which, if any, of these points I agree with.

But I will say this:  I have often joked that as a young man, I was a Republican moderate, and that now I am a Democratic liberal, while my political views have remained essentially unchanged.  So I do understand the dilemna that a thinking conservative faces in this election.  I watched as, in my judgement, my party and the party of my ancestors moved away from its intellectual underpinnings, and spun off into some distortion related to the inherent baby-boomer sense of personal entitlement.  I make no claim that the party of Jackson has aquitted itself, over the years, in a sterling fashion, particularly in Washington.  But the fundamental integrity of America has been tarnished by the extent to which the party of Lincoln has become willing to throw aside principles for temporary tactical advantage, whether in terms of politics or in terms of governance. 

Is there a place for conservatism in the dialogue of American politics?  Of course there is.  The pendulum swings both ways.  And true conservatives will be needed to lead the country away from the inevitable excesses of liberal governance, just as true liberals are now needed to lead the country away from the obvious over-reaching of current so-called conservative governance. 

I ask you, if you are a conservative:

Does being a conservative mean embracing the dimunition of personal liberty?

Does being a conservative mean casting aside the rule of law to allow torture?

Does being a conservative mean tearing down the wall between church and state?

Does being a conservative mean engaging in pre-emptive war against a country which is not demonstrably impeding, in an aggressive way, the national security interests of the United States?

Does being a conservative mean embracing an aggressively regressive income tax policy?

Does being a conservative mean placing multinational business interests above American economic interests?

Does being a conservative mean applauding judicial activism, merely because the political outcome of that activism supports your political goals?

Does being a conservative mean being more concerned about a person's religion, sexual identity, race, or ethnic origin than that person's work ethic and abilities? 

As a progressive, I expect to be disappointed by Obama, and I expect conservatives to be pleasantly surprised.  I know his background, his temperment, and his philosophy.  But that does not bother me.  Because Obama, on some levels, represents a return to American conservative values.  Were I still a Republican, I'd be worried.  Because, in toto, Obama truly is a centrist.  All this nonsense about socialism and extremism is noise designed to distract the public from that fact.  Better to vote for him, and get down to reforming the conservative movement in this country, which has lost its way.  So that when the inevitable liberal over-reach occurs, the conservative movement has both the personal and intellectual integrity to appeal to the center again.  McCain represents nothing other than his own ambition, and his victory would, if anything, simply delay that process.

Honestly, watching the far right over the last few weeks is like watching Lee J. Cobb come apart like a cheap suit at the end of "Twelve Angry Men."

Keith Olbermann

I am grateful to Irish Lucky Lass for this post.  I don't agree with her choice on how to vote this time, but was struck by her determination to stay in her party, the better to change it.  This is a difficult choice, one I had to make many years ago.

I don't post much about politics here, but those few things I have posted leave little doubt that I am supporting the Democratic Party in this election.  But that is not where my political story started.

I was raised in a Republican household.  Both my mom and dad were Republicans, but it went deeper than that.  We weren't just members of the party.  On both sides of the family, we were Republican going back to the earliest days.  My great-great-grandfather served in the Union navy; his brother Edward was killed in the Battle of Pleasant Hill, during the Red River campaign in April of 1864.  I grew up with a large framed daguerretype of him in his Iowa Volunteer uniform, with the shaded eyes which, in those days, indicated death in battle.  The rest of mom's side of the family was Latter Day Saint, even back to the early days in New York in the 1820s.  Joseph Smith, the first LDS prophet ran for president, and included abolition in his platform.  We know less about my dad's side, but the family name was common in New England, and, given where the family ended up, it is likely that they were part of the Concord movement, some of whom went West to set up Indian schools, and all of whom were abolitionists.  Many of Teddy's Rough Riders came from the towns near where my mom grew up.  We referred to ourselves "Lincoln Republicans".

My mother's family was heavily involved in party politics.  Her aunt Hazel was the secretary of the Arizona Republican Party, Mom was an alternate delegate for Ike at the 1952 convention, and worked for Goldwater's campaign in Northern California. 

So it was natural, when it came time to choose a party, that I would choose the GOP.  I cut my teeth, before even being registered, working phones for the Ford campaign in the primary, and went to Kansas City as a youth delegate.  But I was already drifting away from the party.

It started with Nixon.  I was fully on board until Watergate.  But if there was anything I cared more about than the party, it was the Constitution.  And Nixon lost me one night, when he came on TV with the transcripts.  (Up to that point, I had been fighting daily with my friends, defending him).  Then there was the foreign policy.  I had been a huge Kissinger fan, but started to become disillusioned.  Reagan was the final straw.

Part of it was personal.  I had watched in Kansas City, as the Reagan supporters had deliberately sabotaged Ford, leaving him damaged just enough to lose.  He had been my governor as well, and I thought he acted in an angry way in a dangerous time.  And on economics:  The Laffer Curve, also known as supply side economics, was ridiculous.  Then there was his currying of favor from the Dixiecrats.  My ancestors hadn't died for states rights.

So I left the party, just as it was gaining ascendancy again.  And I have watched for years, sadly, as it has been taken over by religous nuts, whom Goldwater warned us about, kleptocrats, whom Teddy R. warned us about, and warmongers, whom Ike warned us about.  Not to mention those with contempt for Liberty, whom Jefferson and the rest of the founding fathers warned us about.

And now the butcher's bill is due.  The answer is not, in my opinion, for loyal Republicans to stand true to the party.  Let the party crash.  Let those who wrecked it suffer the consequences.  And build a new party, or, rather, the old party back up.  As Irish Lucky Lass says, vote knowledgably at the local level.  But throw the rest of the rascals out.

I had to leave the party, and look to build inside the Democratic party.  I am now comfortable there.  But I hope those of you who remain in the GOP will build it back to what it used to be.  So we can have a fair debate, not distorted by angry fanatics of either side.  Then the American people win.

And if you think I'm just saying this as a Democratic ploy, I understand.  But my father, who has always voted, in the 56 years he has been registered, for the Republican candidate, is not voting this year.  And my mother, who ran the Goldwater campaign in my home county, just re-registered as a Democrat.  Pigs are flying, hell has frozen over.  Take the opportunity to vote for change, not just as a slogan, but as a promise to yourself to reform your party, if you belong to one, or the system, if you don't. 

I don't know how many of you read Doonesbury this Sunday.  The strip refers to a way of communicating political views effectively to raise yourself and demean your opponent.  The memo which it references, written by Newt Gingrich is here. 

Feel free to refer to the list as the cacophony of political advocacy and advertising reaches its peak over the next few weeks.  And don't let anyone con you into thinking that words don't matter.