Mock Radio

Through a combination of earnestness and contrarianism, certain enterprises (such as Christian rock, the Log-Cabin Republicans, and advice from Jim’s Dad) invite mockery.  Whether one’s goal is effective political advocacy or profitable entertainment, I can’t imagine that hiring a gaggle of liberals to harangue listeners and fact-check right-wingers in a polity manifestly unconcerned with facts won’t provide a more frequent target for parody than grins or food for thought.  Al Franken’s at his funniest when he’s detached and satirical, not trying to match Limbaugh and O’Reilly bark for bark, and if I want satrical detachment Harry Shearer’s Le Show’s got me covered.  Janeane Garafolo?  Her best (perhaps only) rhetorical tactic is her withering stare, which doesn’t exactly suit the medium.

But the main reason I won’t be tuning in Air America is that radio is my least favorite news source; it’s the pushiest of Push Media.  Perhaps if I spent more time in my car . . .

Ginned Rummy

In the days and weeks following the 9/11 attacks, Americans affected alarm when confronted by the ease with which the terrorists were able to inflict massive casualties and damage.  To anyone who spent any amount of time thinking about such things, our society’s vulnerabilities were fairly obvious and had been for many years.  There’s only so much you can do to protect the public from the suicidally insane.  Due to a variety of factors—not the least of which a fitful veneration of notions of liberty—Americans have come to tolerate certain levels of risk, such as fast cars, plentiful handguns, and securities trading.  Any attempt to eliminate such risks through legislation would offend our sense of personal autonomy and (almost as important) almost certainly fail.  After 9/11, many Americans (notoriously bad at quantifying risk) re-examined this tacit contract—the freedom of an open society along with the occasional abuse of freedom resulting in tragedy—and wondered if it wasn’t time to renegotiate.

A government that had decided to treat its citizens as adults would have, in due course, explained that while the clear and present threat of Al Qaeda would be met by appropriate responses including military, intelligence, and law-enforcement measures, terrorism itself is a permanent feature of modern civilization that can only be minimized at best.  A government that regarded its citizens as children would proclaim a state of war, both promising eventual victory and demanding exigent loyalty, while instituting restrictions on civil liberties that would last as long as a single terrorist remained at large.  Before the first tower fell, I had no doubt which course the Bush Administration would take.

As much as anyone, Donald Rumsfeld was the public face and voice of the U.S. government’s paternalism, assuring Americans that swift and just retribution was being dealt to evil-doers while reminding them that war isn’t an ice cream social.  If John Ashcroft has been our guilt-invoking mother, claiming that only terrorists and traffickers in drugs and pornography need fear increased surveillance, then Rumsfeld has been our hickory-switch-bearing father, intoning that that the War on Terror hurts him more than it hurts us.

Critics and supporters all agree that the single most important (if not only) argument for voting for George W. Bush this November is that national security is "Job One" and that Bush has demonstrated his superior proficiency at this task.  Today, Rumsfeld testified in his Plain-Spoken™ manner that, given the limitations of intelligence-gathering and the resourcefulness of terrorists, there wasn’t much that could have been done to prevent 9/11, and we will likely be attacked again.

But never mind that.  Just remember that, as Lileks said, if John Kerry is elected, then the terrorists will have won.

Spain Is The New France

11-M, as the Spanish have named the Madrid train bombings (and who else should name them?), was in many ways almost eagerly anticipated by opinion peddlers, maunderers, and litterers.  Benumbed by the prospect of eight more months of fact-checking Lee Atwater’s posthumous exhalations, charges of appeasement flew fast and furious as hawks both neo- and paleo- remembered what they loved about the war as a campaign issue: its clarity.  Krauthammer declared Spain "decadent," and the wags at The Corner vied with Charles Johnson to be the first to lead a post with the Spanish translation of "surrender monkeys."

As handy an analogy as Munich is, it doesn’t really apply (if indeed it ever did).  As Krauthammer points out, no one could seriously believe that ejecting Aznar’s party would reduce Spain’s risk of attack from Al Qaeda.  The corrolary of this principle is that no one should seriously believe that re-electing the Popular Party would increase Al Qaeda’s desire to attack Spain; everything we know about Al Qaeda suggests that we are simply props in their internal fantasy, and modifying our policies in the hope that we can deter or discomfit Al Qaeda is to engage in psychological shadow boxing with an invisible shadow.  Might it then be more plausible to assume that the Spanish voters were motivated by factors other than how their nation figures in the dramatic narratives of either Osama bin Laden or George W. Bush?  Particularly when you consider the reports the Socialists were gaining on the PP prior to 11-M, and that Spaniards themselves stated that a chief motive for their rejection of the PP was that they didn’t appreciate being deceived on the eve of an election.  This is what really alarms Bush’s supporters: the refusal by an elecorate to see everything through the lens of the "war on terror."

Kevin Drum asks: how does it serve Bush-supporters’ interests to breezily generalize this single electoral result into a trend threatening to alienate all of Bush’s European allies?  Perhaps the recent Wonkette-driven Punking of the Bush re-election site unintentionally (?) handed Rove the campaign’s new theme: "Bush-Cheney '04: Thrown Out of More European Countries Than the Visigoths."

Unreal Madrid

The Madrid bombings were by an order of magnitude larger than anything ETA has ever attempted.  ETA has primarily targeted government officials and military sites, and typically issues warnings before attacks.  ETA has officially denied responsibility, while a group "affiliated" with Al Qaeda has claimed it.  After Tony Blair, current Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar was the most prominent European camp-follower in Bush’s démarche to Baghdad, despite the overwhelming anti-war sentiment of the Spanish people.  Spain is also featured in Al Qaeda’s animating psychodrama.  Aznar’s party is facing elections on Sunday.  So who is the current Spanish government’s usual prime suspect?  And does the current American administration—who has ignored no shred of evidence, however flimsy, in its quest to link all acts of malice to the (New) Axis of Evil—dispute the Spanish government’s suspicions?

(Attributions of responsibility to Oliver Kahn are probably premature at this point.)

Absent At The Creation

Where’s Seattle’s notorious rubophobia-driven me-tooism when you need it?  Oh, yeah; protecting its ass.

On The Gastronomy Of Morals

Once again, America's Finest News Source has, well, overcome (sorry) its quotidian torpor and hit one out of the park.  This is my favorite piece, of course.

Consummatum Ecch

Writing a good hit piece is harder than it might seem.  You have to stay focused on the target while constantly coming up with fresh angles of attack, lest the audience conclude you are a crank.  You don’t want to sound like you’re preaching to the choir, but you should also avoid temporizing qualifications and caveats; trust in your cause, and express yourself clearly.  Stop short of hyperbole, but just.

Christopher Hitchens is spectacularly gifted in this field, which is why I continue to read him even after he succumbed to "the Orwell temptation."  As delightful as Hitchens’s most recent rhetorical sledgehammer is to read, I can’t help noticing that Hitchens requires the urgency of combatting anti-Semitism abroad to excuse this digression from his day job of rewriting Bush Administration press releases.

I have very little interest in commenting on Mel Gibson’s re-make of Battlefield Earth, and less interest in viewing it.  All I have to say is that any film whose dialogue is entirely in Aramaic and Latin wouldn’t earn a dime without a raging controversy to give it free publicity.

The End Of The Beginning

For better or worse, I’m not acquainted with any passionate opponents of gay marriage, so I have few resources for judging how such opponents view their beliefs and themselves in the larger contexts of progressive politics, constitutional precedent, or human liberty.  But every single member of the political and journalistic establishment that supports the Federal Marriage Amendment has explicitly admitted that they see this as their last chance to stop the spread of this "peculiar institution;" that without the FMA, some "activist" judiciary might decide that Equal Protection actually means Equal Protection and thus require a state to acknowledge the human dignity present in an incident of gay marriage.  In asserting such urgency, proponents of the FMA are both wrong and right.

They are wrong in the legal sense, and here is where I would hope the Democratic nominee will seek the safety that Bill Clinton provided for him.  As much as I was dismayed by the Federal Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, the Act clearly permits the states to refuse to recognize marriages, civil unions, or other "proceeding . . . respecting a relationship between persons of the same sex" from other states.  So the claim that, say, Texas will have to honor same-sex unions solemnized in Vermont or Hawaii is entirely false.  At present, 38 states have already legislatively defined marriage as an exclusively heterosexual province, but even if (out of some anti-democratic, social-engineering, moral-relativistic "activism") more state supreme courts follow the path of the Massachusetts Supreme Court and find such legislation to be in violation of their state constitutions, the states are still free to amend their own constitutions as they see fit without requiring other states to recognize their policies.  The Democrats (and sane Republicans, if they like) can and should safely state, "Marriage has never been an issue for the federal government, and we don’t see why it should be one now.  Amending the U.S. Constitution is never to be taken lightly, and this issue simply doesn’t rise to the required level of urgency."  This position is legally sound, factually true, and will compare favorably with the more hysterical advocates that we can expect to hear far too much from in the coming months.

Proponents of the FMA are right, however, when they say that they cannot allow even a single enclave of gay marriage to endure within the Republic; the example of a community that officially endorses the rights of gays and lesbians to enjoy all the benefits of society will be ultimately corrosive to the institutionalized bigotry that imagines marriage needs "defending" and produces such shameful legislation.  The manifest absurdity will bring it all crashing down.  It is helpful to remember that the Secession Crisis of 1860 was provoked not by an attempt by the Federal government to abolish slavery in the South, but by the election of a presidential candidate who advocated merely the prohibition of slavery in newly-admitted states.  The South feared the diminution of their electoral power (60% of their slaves counted towards representation, remember), but more than that they feared the successful examples set by non-slave states; they wanted to restrict the liberty of others because the exercise of that liberty humiliated them.  Had the South simply accepted Lincoln’s program, it is likely that they could have maintained slavery in their own states for many more years.  Instead, they listened to the counsel of their pride and their fears.

Note that I don’t imagine George W. Bush to be a homophobic bigot, any more than I think he believes that there were nuclear weapons in Iraq, or that abstinence-only sex education is the best way to prevent teen pregnancy, or that 60 is the precisely ethical number of stem cell lines with which to conduct experiments.  I do think that Karl Rove approved today’s announcement while mindful that a) this controversy has legs that will be helpfully distracting over the summer and fall, and b) the Bush Administration needn’t actually do anything about it until well after the election.  Putting the FMA formally on the table also chills legal challenges to state-level legislation; if it looks like the U.S. Constitution will override any amendments to state constitution (either for or against gay marriage), few people will get behind such projects.

We are in for a struggle that will be costly in terms of industry, treasure, and spirit.  Thanks to Bush’s shot at Fort Sumter, however, we have the comfort of knowing that our opponents have declared themselves to be the enemies of dignity.

Quelle Surprise

How are those petroleum futures for October lookin’?