Genghis's blog

Debt Ceiling II: Return of the Boehner

Genghis — Wed, 16 May 2012 16:59:26 +0000

Demonstrating the shrewd political acumen for which he has become known, House Speaker John Boehner has come up with a new strategy to galvanize American voters before the election. Seeking to top his electrifying "Pledge to America" campaign from 2010, Boehner promised yesterday a bold new plan that may be the popular Republican campaign in history: Debt Ceiling Standoff, Take Two.

The Speaker is aware that the debt ceiling is a complicated legislative mechanism well beyond the understanding of most real Americans, so he asked me to help make sense of it. I will now take several questions from an imaginary interlocutor in order to help the ignorant electorate understand this exciting campaign.

Q: Didn't Boehner already do this last year?

A: Yes, that's why it's Debt Ceiling Standoff, Take Two. Duh.

Q: But wasn't it wildly unpopular?

A: That's just what the arrogant liberal media wants you to think. But Speaker Boehner knows that Americans can't wait for another debt ceiling standoff. That's why he said, "We shouldn't dread the debt limit. We should welcome it. It's an action-forcing event in a town that has become infamous for inaction."

Q: But isn't a standoff kind of the definition of inaction?

A: See, you're not thinking this through. It will be a calculated act of inaction in order to produce a subsequent act of action.

Q: Just like the last time?

A: Well, last time was different because our obstinate elitist president didn't negotiate in good faith. That's why the Speaker wants to do it again.

Q: But didn't Boehner make a budget-cutting deal with Obama and then pull out?

A: What have you been reading? Talking Points Memo? If you'd listened to the Speaker's speech, you'd understand that it was all Obama's fault: "Last year, in our negotiations with the White House, the president and his team put a number of gimmicks on the table...Maybe in another time, with another Speaker, gimmicks like these would be acceptable."

Q: By another time, did he mean last year? Because I thought that Boehner actually accepted the compromise plan, but then the crazy wingers in the House wouldn't go for it.

A: You certainly are a naive one. The retreat was planned all along, just a little bit of political theater in order to create the conditions for action.

Q: What action?

A: Another debt standoff, of course, which as I already explained, is the key to more action!

Q: I'm so confused.

A: Don't worry, it's complicated. The point is that the Speaker's plan will restore confidence and fix the economy.

Q: But didn't the last debt ceiling standoff kill investor confidence and downgrade our credit?

A: [Sigh] The Speaker explained that bit in his speech too. Who was president when the downgrade happened?

Q: Obama?

A: Now you're getting it. If I may quote our great Speaker: "A president on whose watch the United States lost its gold-plated triple-A rating for the first time in our history."

Q: What about the financial community? Won't they be alarmed?

A: Speaker Boehner is aware that there will be some "wailing and gnashing of teeth" on Wall Street, but he won't abandon his principles just because a few bankers are upset as long as they keep donating to the Republican Party.

Q: Well, I still think it's irresponsible to default on America's debt.

A: It is irresponsible. The Speaker said so in his speech.

Q: Then why would he do it?

A: Because as he put it, "It would be more irresponsible to raise the debt ceiling without taking dramatic steps to reduce spending and reform the budget process."

Q: You mean action?

A: You got it.

Q: So...uh...what happens if Romney wins?

A: Don't worry, the Speaker is doing everything in his power to make sure that doesn't happen. President Obama is the best thing that ever happened to the Republican Party.

Q: So I guess that we can look forward to four more years of action?

A: Bingo! I can hardly wait.

Michael Wolraich is the author of Blowing Smoke: Why the Right Keeps Serving Up Whack-Job Fantasies about the Plot to Euthanize Grandma, Outlaw Christmas, and Turn Junior into a Raging Homosexual

Obama's Big, Bold To-Do List

Genghis — Tue, 08 May 2012 20:31:00 +0000

In a scene from Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act by South African dramatist Athol Fugard, a small boy builds an imaginary house in the sand. It has two rooms for his impoverished family of six. A man sees him playing and encourages the boy to expand.

"If you're going to dream," he says, "Give yourself five rooms, man."

President Obama has been playing in the sand ever since the Republican-dominated 112th Congress convened last year, a body so divided and deranged that it can barely pass routine measures, let alone critical legislation. As the election looms, Obama's chance of getting any bills passed is asymptotically approaching zero, and his proposals are like imaginary houses that will never be built.

That has not stopped him from producing them. His latest gambit is a five-point "to do list" for Congress. Its elements are all measures that he has previously proposed without success, including various tax incentives to encourage hiring, mortgage refinance efficiencies, and a jobs programs for veterans.

"These initiatives have bipartisan support and at this make-or-break moment for the middle class, we need to create an economy built to last," insists the White House.

But collecting these various proposals under the uninspiring idiom of a to-do list will not smooth their passage at this "make-or-break moment." The administration's experts surely realize that Republican legislators have no interest in passing anything Obama puts forward right now. We can only conclude the real purpose of this announcement is political--an effort to demonstrate that the President is trying to solve problems while Congress stalls.

What it actually demonstrates is the administration's failure of imagination--or perhaps lack of courage--in confronting a persistent crisis that has lasted the duration of Obama's term and shows little sign of abating. As our problems fester, the administrations' remedies seem to grow smaller every year. The ideas that Obama has incorporated into his to-do list are so tiny and lifeless that neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post nor the Wall Street Journal even bothered to catalog them.

If the proposals had any a chance of being enacted, there might be an argument for downsizing them. A minor bill that becomes law is better than no bill at all. But in the current political environment, even minor bills are hopeless.

Rather than hammer futilely at the small stuff, Obama might have taken the opportunity to think big--to present the American people with a bold stimulus plan that could finally wrench us free from this crevasse we've fallen into, even if it had no chance of passage.

If you're going to dream, give yourself a New Deal, man.

But instead of a New Deal, we've been offered an Old Hat, a cluster of small, tired ideas that will do little to inspire voters who once celebrated "the audacity of hope." If Obama wins, it will only be because his opponent's old hat is even smaller and shabbier. Either way, it bodes poorly.

Michael Wolraich is the author of Blowing Smoke: Why the Right Keeps Serving Up Whack-Job Fantasies about the Plot to Euthanize Grandma, Outlaw Christmas, and Turn Junior into a Raging Homosexual

A Cardinal's Regret

Genghis — Sat, 05 May 2012 14:41:15 +0000

In 1975, the Catholic Church of Ireland sent Father Sean Brady to interview two teenage boys who had been abused by their priest, Brendan Smyth. Brady recorded their harrowing testimony and submitted it to his superiors, who transferred Smyth to a different parish, again and again. Twenty years later, Smyth was finally imprisoned after being convicted on 153 counts of child abuse in Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Meanwhile, Father Sean Brady moved up the Church hierarchy. He is now Cardinal Sean Brady.

After the BBC recently reported his role in Smyth's investigation, Brady publicly expressed regret. He regrets that his superiors dealt inappropriately with Smyth. He regrets that the Church had no "guidelines" for handling pedophilia by priests. He regrets that he and others did not understand the "full impact of abuse" on the lives of children.

But for his own role in abetting child abuse, Cardinal Brady's regret is rather meager. He explained that he was nothing more than a note-taker without any authority to act. As to why he remained silent when his superiors transferred Smyth, he reluctantly conceded, "I also accept that I was part of an unhelpful culture of deference and silence in society, and the Church."

Despite the outrage rising in Ireland, he has refused to resign.

But what if Sean Brady were not a Cardinal?

Suppose that he had been an army lieutenant investigating a massacre by U.S. soldiers and that his superiors allowed the perpetrators to continue killing. Would he be permitted to continue as Army Chief of Staff when the news broke?

Suppose that he had been a corporate accountant who reported criminal fraud within his company and said nothing when his boss allowed the culprits to carry on defrauding customers? Would he be entitled to remain Chief Financial Officer when the fraud was revealed?

Suppose that he had been a teacher tasked with investigating child abuse in his school and that he kept quiet when the school board transferred the pedophile to a different school where he abused more children. Would he be able to stay on as Secretary of Education?

But Sean Brady is a Cardinal, a man of God chosen not only for his administrative skills but also for his moral authority. More than soldiers, executives, and educators, his office requires a deep understanding of the difference between good and evil and a profound commitment to moral law.

And so, in the logic of Catholic Church, he has been allowed to remain in his place to continue the work of God.

Michael Wolraich is the author of Blowing Smoke: Why the Right Keeps Serving Up Whack-Job Fantasies about the Plot to Euthanize Grandma, Outlaw Christmas, and Turn Junior into a Raging Homosexual

Thomas Friedman, Michael Bloomberg, and the Coming Implosion

Genghis — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 23:59:48 +0000

On Wednesday, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman repeated his call for Michael Bloomberg to run for president. Friedman has finally given up on the fantasy that America's "radical center" might coalesce around a moderate third-party candidate, but in his latest column, he argued that even if Bloomberg can't win, he could still make a difference:

I still believe that the national debate would benefit from the entrance of a substantial independent candidate -- like the straight-talking, socially moderate and fiscally conservative Bloomberg -- who could challenge, and maybe even improve, both major-party presidential candidates by speaking honestly about what is needed to restore the foundations of America's global leadership before we implode.

To avoid imminent implosion, Friedman recommended "fiscal, tax and entitlement reform," which proves that the radical center has some really groundbreaking policy ideas. Unfortunately, he didn't offer many details. His chief concern seemed to be that his cell phone kept dropping calls during his too-slow train ride to Washington. While many people would be happy for a President Bloomberg to speed up the NYC-DC connection and add a few cell towers, it doesn't seem like much of a campaign platform.

Friedman's plea for centrism follows on the heels of his colleague Bill Keller's clarion call for the two major party candidates to move to the center, to which our own Dan Kervick snorted, "They are already in the center. What does he want them to do, start fondling each other?" In that case, Bloomberg would be forced to snuggle between their passionate embrace.

Whether or not one agrees with Dan that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are ideological bedmates, you'd have to be a New York Times columnist not to see that these two would happily share a newlywed suite if they could get away with it.

Has Friedman forgotten the way Barack "Post-Partisan" Obama chased after John Boehner with a bouquet of roses wrapped in a budget plan? Does he really think that Mitt "Mr. Fix-It" Romney would flee his bipartisan accomplishments in Massachusetts if his pollsters told him that his constituents were enthusiastic about his love-fest with Ted Kennedy.

There is only one reason that the Obama and Romney are not joining hands and singing, "I've been working on the railroad," as they lay tracks for high-speed trains across the continent: The voters don't want 'em to. Americans may whine about partisanship and dutifully tell pollsters that they just want everyone to get along, but when election time arrives, they keep voting for the wingnuts, particularly on the right.

Can Friedman really have forgotten that Obama explicitly campaigned on rebuilding American infrastructure and that the crown jewel of this initiative was none other than a high-speed train network. Moreover, he actually managed to pass some minor legislation to kick it off. For these efforts, the voters rewarded him in the mid-term elections by electing a slate of Republican governors who promptly canceled all those rail projects in their respective states. We're not talking about crazy right-wing strongholds likes Mississippi or Oklahoma. This happened in the swing states of Florida and Wisconsin and the blue-state of New Jersey, which killed a much-needed rail tunnel to Bloomberg-land.

So forget about Bloomberg for president or post-partisan Obama or Romney the closet-moderate. America is deeply, bitterly, stubbornly divided. And unless someone fixes that problem, we're not going to see those high-speed trains anytime soon, and we're certainly not going to get any of that "fiscal, tax, and entitlement reform" Friedman says we need.

Sometimes I think the only thing that can put us on the right track is a nice big implosion.

Michael Wolraich is the author of Blowing Smoke: Why the Right Keeps Serving Up Whack-Job Fantasies about the Plot to Euthanize Grandma, Outlaw Christmas, and Turn Junior into a Raging Homosexual

The Not-So-Mighty Center

Genghis — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 21:49:02 +0000

Bill Keller, the former editor of the New York Times turned social commentator, has once again cast himself the great champion of good ol' boringness, an aging journalist-warrior who defends civilized institutions against barbarous onslaughts from Occupy Wall Street, digital pirates, and the Huffington Post, to name a few unsavory elements.

In Monday's column, he stood up for the long-suffering moderate center of American politics. "Centrism is easily mocked and not much fun to defend," he proudly conceded, "White bread, elevator music, No Labels, meh."

Lo how the mighty moderate has fallen. Once hailed as the elector of presidents, the honorable compromiser, the reasonable thinker, the Great American Moderate has been reduced to...sigh...white bread.

But hark! Before we seal them up in plastic and bury them in the freezer, Keller bravely assured us that the moderates live on and will play an important role in the upcoming presidential election. Keller seems to believe that his thesis is contrarian, radical even.

Legions of pundits might beg to differ. The old swing-voter argument, rehashed every election since the 1950s, is so disarmingly intuitive that one hardly needs political experts to make the case. It proceeds as follows: since most liberals inevitably vote for the more liberal candidate, and most conservatives inevitably vote for the more conservative candidate, the only question would seem to be the preferences of independent voters who are neither liberal nor conservative.

Pundits wishing to make the argument seem more scientific usually toss in some poll data to demonstrate that most undecided voters hold views somewhere between left and right, which is more or less a tautology. Keller didn't even go that far. He simply explained to readers what moderate Americans believed, citing no authority other than his own "gut check". Apparently, editing the New York Times makes ones gut an authority on such matters.

Dripping sarcasm, Keller also suggested that Santorum's loss against Romney bolsters his case, as if a bitter, drawn-out win by an establishment candidate with extensive qualifications and a chest full of cash against a no-name underdog with little charisma and wacky views proves that the moderate voter is still king.

On the basis of such incontrovertible evidence, Keller argued that Obama and Romney must move to the center, which is pretty much what every moderate analyst has been arguing for months and what every moderate analyst has argued in election after election for decades.

But more often than not, they've been wrong.

In 1980, Democratic strategists were initially delighted when Ronald Reagan emerged as the frontrunner in the Republican primary, believing that his views were too extreme to defeat Jimmy Carter. Former President Gerald Ford not-so-subtly hinted at his own view of Reagan's chances when he asserted, "A very conservative Republican can't win a national election." We know how that went.

After Bill Clinton's election in 1992, analysts argued that Republicans must moderate to regain the presidency. As one Democratic strategist put it, "They are silencing the more moderate elements in their party and seeking an ideological purity from the right. A marginalized, right-wing Republican Party will be less competitive with Bill Clinton in 1996 than a more inclusive and centrist Republican Party." Two years later, Newt Gingrich's conservative coalition blew the Democrats away, taking control of both houses of Congress for the first time in forty years.

In 1998, Newt Gingrich's resignation amid Republican losses and a swath of ethics scandals led many to conclude that the party had gone too far to the right. "The emerging cliche seems to be that the Republicans, having lost an unexpected five seats in the House and a couple of statehouses they thought were forever in their camp, will forge a new political message that is pragmatic and much less ideological, a shift in emphasis that will endear the party to moderate voters," wrote a Chicago Tribune political analyst. Gingrich's right-wing successor Tom DeLay easily debunked that prognosis.

By 2004, George W. Bush was using "wedge issues" like a proposed same-sex marriage amendment to run a campaign directed at conservative voters. He lost the moderate vote by nine percentage points, but he won 84 percent of self-described conservatives. A host of hard-line Republican legislators rode his coattails.

When Democrats swept back into Congress in 2008, political analysts declared that the Republicans had lost the center, and strategists encouraged them to follow the "California way" of moderate Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. Republican leaders duly lined up behind the "maverick" John McCain. He lost the election, and Republicans lost even more congressional seats to Democrats.

In the aftermath, moderate Republicans like former New Jersey government Christie Whitman argued, "We're going to have to be more inclusive if we want to be a majority party. It's not as if the Christian conservative base didn't vote." A few months later, the Tea Parties exploded into American politics. In 2010, those Christian conservatives helped right-wing Republicans drive Democrats out of Congress and state capitols across the country.

But what of the Democratic Party? Unlike the GOP, there has been little recent history of successful left-wing political campaigns. Ever since Walter Mondale's disastrous loss to Ronald Reagan, Democrats have been fearful of nominating liberal candidates.

That was not always the case, however. The first half of the 20th century offers numerous examples of successful presidents, senators, and congresspeople whose politics were far left of center. There is no inherent reason why it cannot happen again.

But people like Bill Keller have trouble envisioning such a possibility. Their "gut check" perception of the electorate is fixed and lifeless, as hidebound as their imaginations. They rate candidates' chances based on a checklist of political positions, measuring them against a mythical political center that they interpolate from the extremes.

History demonstrates, however, that the American electorate is far more dynamic than the pundits give them credit for, swaying left to right and back again like currents in a cascade. It is not just a matter of candidates' personality, which the pundits grudgingly acknowledge in their prognoses. Political momentum extends well beyond any one candidate, reaching from the White House all the way down to city councils and school boards, transforming the political environment every few decades.

Americans, it turns out, are open to persuasion. They listen to powerful voices making impassioned arguments. Those passions do not flow from the dull, desiccated, "white bread" middle that Bill Keller has staked out. They come tumbling down from the bluffs at either edge--if only politicians are brave enough to ascend the heights.

Michael Wolraich is the author of Blowing Smoke: Why the Right Keeps Serving Up Whack-Job Fantasies about the Plot to Euthanize Grandma, Outlaw Christmas, and Turn Junior into a Raging Homosexual

No More Bible Stories

Genghis — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 21:04:50 +0000

I sat quietly several rows back, playing the respectful atheist. My young cousin blushed and simpered on the bema--the wide, raised platform at the front synagogue. This was her day.

The rabbi called out my mother's name in Hebrew. She rose from her seat beside mine and ascended to the bema. Two more honored relatives took their places at either side of a curtained cabinet embedded in the wall--the Holy Ark of the Torah. As they drew back the curtains, the congregation rose and began to chant reverently in Hebrew. Few of us understood the words. Translated to English, they plead, "Arise, Lord! May your enemies be scattered, may your foes be put to flight.'"

The rabbi then reached into the Ark and withdrew the sacred Torah, two massive scrolls of parchment trussed in velvet and silver. He held it up lovingly like a trophy or the urned remains of some revered ancestor.

"One is our God, great is our Lord, holy is his name," sang the congregation in Hebrew. Then the rabbi placed the Torah gently into my mother's arms. As she paraded it slowly around the room, the congregants reached out to touch it with prayer books or pieces of cloth--never bare hands--and then reverently kissed the item that had come in contact with the holy Torah.

After the procession, the rabbi undressed the Torah and lay it face up on the podium. A series of honored guests approached the bema to read portions from the naked parchment, kissing it gently with the corner of a prayer shawl before each reading. Last came my cousin, the bat mitzvah girl. She read the ancient Hebrew words haltingly, having been trained just well enough to complete the ceremony.

During the reading, most congregants sat quietly with their thoughts, ignorant of the content. I read the English translation. This is what it said:

If there is found among you, in one of the settlements that the Lord your God is giving you, a man or woman who has affronted the Lord your God and transgressed His covenant turning to the worship of other gods and bowing down to them...you shall take the man or the woman who did that wicked thing out to the public place, and you shall stone them, man or woman, to death. (Deuteronomy 17:2)

I worship no god, so perhaps I am innocent of this offense, but that's small consolation to an atheist like me, whose heresy would surely have earned me expulsion or worse in the old days. My father and brother are atheists too, and I thought of my mother parading those sacred scrolls that would piously condemn her entire family.

Much of the Torah portion that day addressed the rules of warfare. After a military victory, it commanded, women and children must be spared, and trees must be left standing. Unfortunately, such laudable proscriptions did not apply to subjugated tribes within Israel's God-given borders: the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. In those cases, the Torah commanded,

You shall not let a soul remain alive...lest they lead you into doing all the abhorrent things that they have done for their gods. (Deuteronomy 20:16)

After the Torah readers finished their portions, after the scrolls were re-dressed, re-blessed, re-processed, and fondly returned to the Ark, my cousin stood before the congregation to deliver her bat mitzvah speech. In accordance with custom, she spoke to us about lessons she had gleaned from her Torah portion. It was important, she explained, to protect the trees. She made no mention of stoning infidels or slaughtering children.

Such is modern Judaism. Even the rabbis avoid discussing the many offenses for which the Torah prescribes stoning: blasphemy, idolatry, wizardry, fraudulent virginity, working on the sabbath, or having sex with someone else's fiancee. Nor do they advertise brutal passages like the one from Judges in which eleven tribes of Israel make holy war on the twelfth, torching its cities and slaughtering the inhabitants, including women, children, and animals.

But some ugly passages are hard to avoid. For instance, the festival of Passover famously celebrates the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt. According to the story, God slaughters every first-born Egyptian son--a large percentage of the population--in order to persuade the Pharaoh to release the Israelites. Worse, God is said to have "hardened Pharaoh's heart," forcing him to refuse the Israelites' passage so that God would have an opportunity to dazzle the world with his miraculous killing.

The destruction of Sodom and Gomorra offers another famous example of holy brutality. In the story, God obliterates two "wicked" cities, killing all the inhabitants. Were such killing performed by mortals, we would call it genocide. We would demand sanctions, air-strikes, and U.N. condemnations. But we do not condemn God or his Torah; we praise them.

Even the founding myth of Judaism is shocking from a modern vantage point. God commands Abraham, legendary forefather of the Jewish people, to prove his devotion by sacrificing his beloved son Isaac. The obedient Abraham binds his son over a woodpile and prepares to slit his throat. At the last second, God stays Abraham's hand and retracts the command, satisfied that his disciple is faithful to the core.

Some interpret God's salvation of Isaac as proof of his glorious mercy. Some mercy. What kind of monster insists that devotees be willing to sacrifice their own children? And what kind of deranged zealot obeys him?

I once attended a Torah study session in which the rabbi strained to answer these questions. The story, he argued, is about faith and trusting God, not killing or being willing to kill innocent children.

That is how we modern Jews rinse the blood from Torah. If we do not ignore the ugly bits outright, then we de-emphasize them or turn them into metaphors. We refashion the brutal stories that resonated in older, crueler eras and remake the Torah into something new, something that we are proud to parade around the synagogue and teach to our children.

But in that case, why do we need Torah at all? Rather than carefully emphasize the good commandments and neglect the bad ones, why not just teach morality to our children without using scripture as a crutch? We don't need explicit instructions from God to know that it's wrong to lie, steal, and kill. We don't need an obscure biblical passage about sparing trees after a siege to teach our children to value life or to protect the environment.

Some defend the Torah on the ground that it was enlightened for its day. In an era when people really did sacrifice children to the gods, a religion that forbade human sacrifice was progressive, even revolutionary.

Perhaps it was. But we can recognize and celebrate the Torah's advances without treating it as a contemporary authority, just as we can celebrate Aristotle's scientific brilliance without subscribing to his theory of physics. We can and should continue to study the Torah for its contributions to history and culture, just as we study the Iliad, the Tempest, and the Magna Carta.

But when it comes to morality, let us treat the Torah as we would a long-dead visionary, someone whose ideas were once groundbreaking but which were meant for a different world to which we cannot and should not return.

Let us dress the Torah in its finery, bury it in its Ark, sing a prayer for the dead, and let it rest in peace. The children of Israel already left our old teacher behind long ago. We just won't admit it.

Michael Wolraich is the author of Blowing Smoke: Why the Right Keeps Serving Up Whack-Job Fantasies about the Plot to Euthanize Grandma, Outlaw Christmas, and Turn Junior into a Raging Homosexual

Santorum Invokes the "Real Republican" Defense

Genghis — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 20:27:50 +0000

Like a fairy tale hero, Rick Santorum hopes to win the Republican nomination by spinning poop into gold.

On Sunday, he laid into a New York Times reporter, saying, "Quit distorting my words. ... It's bullshit."

The public use of an expletive by a "serious" presidential candidate provoked condemnation from his opponents, while respectable news outlets gleefully smeared the word "bull----" across their august pages.

But Santorum is trying to make the most of the shitstorm. On Fox News, he proudly declared, "If you haven't cursed out a New York Times reporter during the course of a campaign, you're not really a real Republican." He followed up with a fundraising letter titled, "I Am Ready to Take On The New York Times."

Republican analysts are closely evaluating the effectiveness of Santorum's "Real Republican" response, which could become a staple of right-wing damage control strategy. Focus groups have responded positively to hypothetical retorts by other conservatives who have taken wrong turns up shit creek. Here are few examples:

Rush Limbaugh: If you haven't publicly called a liberal college student a slut, you're not really a real Republican.

Mitt Romney: If you're not a millionaire with multiple houses and a couple of Cadillac who is hopelessly out-of-touch with working Americans, you're not really a real Republican.

Sarah Palin: If you haven't mangled American history and international affairs, you're not really a real Republican.

Newt Gingrich: If you haven't shut down the federal government, been reprimanded for ethics violations, and divorced two wives while championing the sanctity of marriage and attacking a Democratic president for infidelity, you're not really a real Republican.

George W. Bush: If you haven't launched two disastrous wars for trumped up reasons and failed to finish either, you're not really a real Republican.

John Yoo: If you haven't invented a Constitutional warrant for torture, you're not really a real Republican.

(Once and future) Judge Roy Moore: If you haven't been removed from office for violating the Alabama Canons of Judicial Ethics, you're not really a real Republican.

James O'Keefe: If you haven't selectively edited videos and been arrested while masquerading as a journalist masquerading as a telephone repairman, you're not really a real Republican.

Pastor Terry Jones: If you haven't publicly burned a Koran to provoke international outrage, you're not really a real Republican.

Andrew Joseph Stack III: If you haven't crashed your airplane into a federal building, you're not really a real Republican.

When Etch A Sketches Go Bad

Genghis — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 12:42:23 +0000

Mitt Romney is in a bind. He must present himself as a staunch conservative in order to appeal to skeptical right-wing voters in the Republican presidential primary, but if he plays it too conservative, he'll alienate moderate voters in the general election.

Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom is not overly concerned, though. On Wednesday, he expressed confidence the campaign would hit the "reset button" after the nomination and redraw Romney as a moderate candidate.

"Everything changes," he explained on CNN, "It's almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and we start all over again."

Fehrnstrom's comparison of his boss' campaign to a toy tablet ignited a political firestorm. Internet wags imagined Mitt Romney as an Etch A Sketch drawing, while his primary opponents, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, gleefully brandished Etch A Sketches at campaign events. Romney rushed to contain the damage by promising to be a true conservative forever.

It won't work.

Fehrnstrom has accidentally stumbled on something profound. He may not have much experience with Etch A Sketch technology. With all due respect to that iconic American toy, its legendary reset abilities have never been quite up to scratch. Dark smudges tend to mar the perimeter of its silvery slate, and no matter how vigorously you shake the thing, you can never quite obliterate the residue. Even so, the real-life Etch A Sketch in all its splotchy glory actually offers a better metaphor for American politics than the fantasy of a clean post-primary slate.

Read the full article at CNN.com

Quietly Celebrating Death

Genghis — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 19:31:18 +0000

Several weeks ago, I met a man with a Jewish wife. Though he was not religious himself, they were raising their young daughter to be Jewish. A year ago, he went with his family to a children's service for the festival of Purim at an Orthodox synagogue in Mexico. The rabbi there spoke briefly to the children about the events that Purim celebrates. "Many years ago in Persia," he gruffly explained, "They tried to kill the Jews. But we killed all of them instead. Ha ha!"

This is not exactly the Purim story that most Jewish children learn in the U.S. Most Sunday school teachers focus on the brave, beautiful Queen Esther and her clever cousin Mordechai as they outwit an evil official named Haman and foil his plot to slaughter the Jews of Persia.

At the end of the story, the children do learn that Haman hangs for his crimes. Some teachers might mention that Haman's ten sons hang as well. Few relate the last part of the story--how the Jews take up arms and slaughter some 75,000 of their Persian enemies.

Scripture is full of such horrific tales. Every year on Passover, we celebrate the liberation of the Israelites from ancient Egypt. In order to persuade the Pharaoh to release the Jews from slavery, God kills the first-born son of every Egyptian family and every first-born animal to boot. Talk about collateral damage. In another lesser known story, eleven tribes of Israel avenge the murder of one man's concubine by waging holy war on the twelfth tribe and slaughtering everyone they can find--men, women, children and animals.

In modern society, we Jews have developed techniques for downplaying these stories. We omit the cruel bits, especially when we tell them to children. We recite the texts in Hebrew words that we do not understand and don't trouble ourselves with the translations. We remove a few drops of Passover wine from our glasses in sympathy for the Egyptian victims of Gods wrath, imagining that this symbolic action whitewashes the celebration of death. We dismiss the offending verses as metaphors, not to be taken literally.

Yet many Jews still take the Torah as a whole to reveal profound ethical truths. In weekly homilies, rabbis exhort their congregations to submit themselves to its wisdom and guidance, ignoring the easy nonchalance with which the same Torah so often glorifies the execution of innocents.

But perhaps the old savage stories of the ancient Israelites do have something to reveal to us modern men and women. Much as we sugarcoat and repress the naked brutality of scripture, perhaps we also live in denial of our own suppressed bloodlust.

When social violence occasionally emerges among modern societies in moments of fear or chaos, we express shock and outrage, wondering aloud how human beings can do such things...as if to persuade ourselves that we could never do such things.

When we people of developed nations argue for war, few of us invoke divine justice or celebrate violence against foreigners. We speak instead of "national security" and "surgical strikes" designed to protect ourselves from danger and nothing more.

Sometimes our fears may be warranted, and war may at last become necessary. But when we call for violence against our enemies, be they Persian or any other tribe, we should pay close attention to whether our enthusiasm represents nothing more than reluctant necessity...or whether that ancient howling for blood, now camouflaged by words of caution and restraint, still murmurs in our ears.

Happy Purim.

Michael Wolraich is the author of Blowing Smoke: Why the Right Keeps Serving Up Whack-Job Fantasies about the Plot to Euthanize Grandma, Outlaw Christmas, and Turn Junior into a Raging Homosexual.

Why Evangelicals Love Santorum, Hated JFK

Genghis — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 14:27:36 +0000

Sen. Rick Santorum, who is campaigning to become America's second Catholic president, disagrees from the bottom of his gut with the first Catholic to hold the office.

In October, he told a Catholic university audience that when he read the 1960 speech in which John F. Kennedy said: "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute," he "almost threw up." More recently, he elaborated on his dyspeptic condition in an ABC television interview, calling JFK's credo "an absolutist doctrine that was abhorrent at the time of 1960."

But the Baptist ministers who witnessed Kennedy's speech surely felt differently. In the 1960s, evangelical leaders were not concerned that Kennedy was too secular; they were concerned that he was too Catholic.

Read the full article at CNN.com