WHOSE SWINE IS IT, ANYWAY?

Everyone knows that real news is basically not reported on television anymore, except for the occassional (metaphorical, I hope) ejaculation from Anderson Cooper, and various and sundry other emissions (which may or may not include ejaculations) from other media sources.

Much has been said that "the fake news" (i.e. "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," "The Colbert Report") IS now our real news. So be it. "Real" news involves getting at the who, how, when, where and why - about questions of, as a certain character on Star Trek once said, passions and motivations, not about some anorexic Fox News anchor sitting at a news-like-looking desk looking like Bill O'Reilly just phone-sex fucked her chichlets out.

And so, I give you the following transcript of an interview that Steve Colbert had with Bill "The Bedwetter" Kristol last night. It's as real as the right's talking points are regurgitated, and as real as the left's uninsightful bluster is not a story:

COLBERT: Speaking of thinking alike, you were a member, or are a member of the Project for a New American Century, correct?
KRISTOL: I am
COLBERT: Were or am?
KRISTOL: Were and am.
COLBERT: How’s that Project coming?
KRISTOL: Well it’s…
COLBERT: How’s the New American Century? Looks good to me, right?
KRISTOL: I think it, I…I’m speechless.
COLBERT: Really?
KRISTOL: Yeah, we’ve sort of, the Project for a New American Century, we’re one of the few people…
COLBERT: Come on, it’s a terrific New American Century, right?
KRISTOL: Well, I think we’re doing ok.
COLBERT: You, Rummy, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Pearle, Feith, all you guys, right?
KRISTOL: Well, we fought back after 9/11 and I’m proud of what we’ve done in Afghanistan and in Iraq, yes.
COLBERT: Well, this is pre-9/11, you guys had the Project in the 90s?
KRISTOL: Absolutely, and we thought we should have been fighting back more in the 90s.
COLBERT: Right, we should have invaded Iraq, you know, then you said.
KRISTOL: We should have, actually.
COLBERT: Exactly.
KRISTOL: If we had finished the job in 1991 it would have been a lot easier.
COLBERT: A lot of people are bailing on this whole Iraq war idea. But you’re not, right?
KRISTOL: Correct.
COLBERT: You’re still onboard?
KRISTOL: I am onboard.
COLBERT: The grand experiment?
KRISTOL: No, it’s not a grand experiment.
COLBERT: It’s not? It’s a little experiment?
KRISTOL: No, it’s an unfortunate necessity that you cannot allow dictators to kill their own people and you cannot allow dictators to threaten their neighbors.
COLBERT: Which dictator do we take down next?
KRISTOL: Well, I wish we could take down more, actually. You know, it’d be nice to…
COLBERT: Wait a second, we cannot allow dictators to kill their own people. That’s a very simple statement sir, which I support wholeheartedly. Back it up!
KRISTOL: I’m with you.
COLBERT: Who do we go after next? Iran? Come on!
KRISTOL: I think we may have to take military action against…
COLBERT: Let’s get some boots on the ground, sir!
KRISTOL: I wish…we may have to do that. We have to do that in the Sudan.
COLBERT: Is the military option on the table in Iran?
KRISTOL: Absolutely, absolutely. And in Sudan.
COLBERT: Ok. How about the nuclear option in Iran?
KRISTOL: No, no.
COLBERT: Come on!
KRISTOL: No, I differ with you on this.
COLBERT: The President says…
KRISTOL: You’re a tougher guy than I am on this.
COLBERT: I’m a neo-neocon. You guys aren’t tough for me.
KRISTOL: I’m an anti-nuke neocon and you’re a pro-nuke neocon.

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Listening to Kristol's arguments makes one see how forced the whole "logic" behind them is. PNAC, which was formed in 1997 (he is a charter member - as are quite a few other Jews who think being what's good for the Rapture is what's good for the Jews - er - he's "Pro-Israel"), is a group of (what was at the time) a group of nut job conservative think-tank types who were either Reagan-era discards or Bush Sr. discards (that is, either discarded by these two men, or discarded from the federal government when Clinton became President).

So, when these men, including the estimable John Bolton, George Shultz, Caspar Weinberger (dead, thankfully), Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, John Podhoretz, and any other number of would-be distinguished conservative basket cases realized that they didn't have a real job (the ones that were actually kicked out of one, that is), they formed this group, Project for the New American Century. The group outlined its goal, explained in the group's 80-or-so page founding document, which I could link to, but won't, on the off-chance that you have just eaten, will be eating, or might be eating in the next month. The document, essentially, said this: after the Cold War, America faces new military challenges (read: we have no major enemy, so we must make one up). We must preserve our military dominance over other nations (read: premeptively invade other nations that cough at us just to show them that we are superior to them). To do this, we must buy oodles and oodles of sure-to-be obsolete military equipment - naval carriers, jets, missiles, you name it (after all, Clinton cut defense funding), to replace the ones that were now obsolete (you know, the ones under which we won the Gulf War, which the PNACers said was a mistake because we didn't end that war by toppling Saddam). In the document, the PNACers explicitly renounced intervening in "sissy multilateral conflicts" wherein we could not demonstrate our military prowess by air, land and sea (read: have as many troops killed as possible) - such as Bosnia. Nowhere in the document was terrorism mentioned - except for some vague mention of it in the context of money laundering, I think. The PNACers concluded, near the end of the document, though, since they were, of course, visionaries, that for their brilliant proposals to be implemented, it would take a "transformative event - something equivalent to Pearl Harbor."

Every time I think of this project, I think of Project: Genesis, the concept/storyline that was featured so prominently in the second through fourth Star Trek feature films. The people who created the latter, unlike those who came up with PNAC, had benevolent intentions: Project Genesis (PE) was a four-phase scientific experiment, with the ultimate phase/goal being the creation of life on a lifeless planet - terraforming, if you will. The way the project was supposed to work was this: the project was first supposed to be tested (and indeed was tested) on a dead life form - a moon-type body. Tunnels were dug deep underground into the interior of this body. The experiments - which involved "the rearrangement of matter at the subatomic level" were successful through phase 2. Phase 3 involved conducting these experiments on a greater portion of the dead planet's surface - i.e. replication. Finally, phase four was to be the actual creation, as it were - 'Life from lifenessless" - the transformation of a lifeless planet into one replete with flora, fauna, water, an atmosphere, and so on, by triggering a device known as the "genesis device," which would trigger the "rearrangement of matter at the subatomic level" on a planetary scale" - think of it as an ordered big bang.

The device was indeed detonated, but not when it was supposed to have been. The result: The Genesis Planet - a seeming success (the device, because it was not triggered in proximity to a selected planet, created a planet out of whole cloth - one nonetheless with flora, fauna, water, etc.). It is revealed, midway through movie 3, though, that one of the Genesis creators, as a way of speeding up the "rearrangement" process that was to happen once the triggering was to take place, inserted something into the device known as "protomatter" - an unstable compound that resulted in the Genesis planet's self-destruction. Bad. Shouldn't have messed with Mother Nature. God is supreme. Man is not.

The Genesis creators share much in common with the PNACers - wanting to remake the world in their image; an inability to think their ideas out. As Jeff Goldblum said in Jurassic Park, "Your scientists [insert here PNAC and the Genesis creators and other fools throughout history] were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they never stopped to think about whether they should."

FLYING UNITED, PART II

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, a critic whom I do not normally associate with trenchant criticisms, has said it even better than Robert Wilonsky has:

"Doesn't seem to matter that United 93, written and directed with bruising brilliance and healing compassion by Paul Greengrass, is a monumental achievement that stands above any film this year. According to the polls, audiences intend to shun it. It's too soon, we're told, for a movie to take on 9/11. It's too speculative to watch a re-enactment of what might have happened that morning on United Airlines Flight 93 -- departing Newark for San Francisco -- when thirty-three passengers and seven crew members rose up against the four knife-wielding hijackers who killed the pilots and took control of the plane. It's too hard to watch brave people lose their lives as they force the plane to miss its presumed target in D.C. and crash into a Pennsylvania field. To which I ask: Are American audiences always to be coddled by fantasy? Is harsh reality forever out of bounds at the multiplex?
If so, we're in a sorry state."

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Five years ago, we were told that the best sacrifice we could make for our country in the wake of September 11th was to go shopping. Now, we are being tols, that the best sacrifice that we can make to honor what happened on September 11th is to avoid coming to mental grips with it altogether..... and to go shopping. Provided, of course, we don't consume any product that actually makes us THINK about September 11th. How small we've become.

FLYING UNITED

The Dallas Observer's Robert Wilonsky has an answer to those who say that the film "United 93" is "too soon," as if art must obey a reverse statute of limitations to allow Republican demagoguery to continue unabated (with such demagoguery unwittingly aided by the - understandably - Bush-hating families of some of the victims of September 11th).

"Those who will forever view United 93 as a case of too much way too soon cannot and will not be placated by sincere gestures. They are right to say that none of us needs to be told once more what happened that day; we're reminded of it each time George W. Bush invokes the date to explain or excuse his actions since then. But that is precisely why United 93 needs to be seen: Even as a work of fiction, it wrests from politicians' sweaty hands the cynical battle cry that date has become and shrinks September 11 down to a human-sized tragedy. Those killed in the planes and in the towers and in the Pentagon are eulogized here--mourned over, cried for, at last CONSIDERED."

Bravo. So, let me get this right. It's OK for George Bush to mutter the phrase "9/11" as a fear tactic and a terror tactic - that's neither too soon, too much, too tasteless, or too anything, but when a filmmaker actually dares to SHOW what that phrase actually MEANS, he is ripped apart by the Bush parroters for making, "too soon," a film about September 11th? What kind of horseshit is this? No one owns history. No one owns tragedy. I remember Charles Krauthammer writing an article in which he blasted the victims' families for claiming (so he thought) that "9/11" belonged to them. No, it didn't, said Krauthammer - it belonged to none of us, and to all of us (what he really meant was that it belonged to George Bush). The ACTUAL truth is that no human mind has a monopoly on pain or memory, and that no voice can claim exclusive dominance over victimhood so as to control the speech of others - ESPECIALLY the government. It is, after all, the government, ironically (to an idiot, anyway), by robotically bleating "9/11" over and over again, that is planting the message that "it is too soon"; when Bush talks about "9/11" in the manner that he does, he is sending the signal that it is only acceptable for that phrase to be used in our discourse in certain ways: hatefully; as a way of reminding others of the lie that "Iraq attacked us"; as a way of reminding us that the Constitution is just a piece of paper, and so on. As long as Bush blubbers on so, it is not soon ENOUGH for a film like United 93 - which reminds us that - as inconceicably tragic as September 11th was, the day is now in the past - to be remembered, to be learned from, but not to be, as Fitzgerald once said, like the hapless human, the agent that forces us to beat on, like the proverbial current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. The mere act of making United 93 - the mere fact that it ENDS - tells us something Bush and cohorts don't want to tell us - that life can, does, and MUST go on, and that, yes - our world is still here, and we need not destroy it to save it from our own, self-imposed demagoguery that we created to serve our own hysterical sense of self-importance in response to the events of September 11th.

I pray that we see more films, respectfully told, about September 11th. We need to get that date out of the hands of politicians and into the hands of history, where it belongs. For only then can we truly learn what we need to learn from that day (one of the lessons, of course, is that George Bush has poor taste in friends, that he doesn't give a shit about national security, and that the nation is even more vulnerable to a terror attack now than it was five years ago).

Too soon, you ask? Ask yourself this. According to whom? To what? By what standard? The too-sooners among us won't even entertain this line of questioning. If they did - even if they still came up with the conclusion that the film was too soon, then guess what? They'd actually have been forced to think for a few minutes. Which, of course, is the point about art, and about life in general. Don't be so quick to "too soon" your life, and other people's rights away. This mentality is how bad events repeat themselves. Maybe that is what some of the too-sooners want. Don't let them win. Their ignorance already resulted in one tragedy - September 11th. Their arrogance resulted in a second tragedy - Iraq. It is up to God (the real God, not the one who talks to Republicans) to decide when too soon is, folks: not you - get off the stage, and let reality in. Yes, you will lose your power, but is it really "too soon" for that too? I'd bet you'd argue it is, just as you argue - using the same logic- it's too soon for us to hear someone's point of view other than your own. Aah, there's nothing like the blast of fresh air that attends the exchange of new ideas, and the importatation of new points of view, and of learning, wisdom. It's never too soon for THAT kind of blast.

WHY DENY?

A friend told me recently that someone she knows - a Muslim and a Jew-hater - denied that the Holocaust happened. As is typical of Holocaust deniers, this particular denier did not offer evidence to support her claim. She did not refute any specific facts that have established the existence of concentration camps, of mass murders; she did not put into contention thousands of eyewitness accounts, photographs, historical documentation, witness testimony, and so forth, that proves that the event occurred. Bigots need to do no such thing. Hate does the leg work for you. The bigot in question, when confronted with the notion that she was a Jew-hater, claimed to my friend, "You are trying to draw a false and illogical implication. The mere fact that I claim that the Holocaust did not happen does not necessarily imply that I hate Jews. You have failed to draw out the necessary assumption on my part that makes your implication correct."

As a matter of wordplay, and without the bigot's knowing it, she may technically be correct. But as Justice Scalia once said, what is true is not necessarily relevant, and what is relevant is not necessarily true.

I have spent dozens of hours, merely by having typed the phrase "Holocaust denial," and iterations thereof, into various search engines, over the years, researching what I would call the phenomenon of "Holocaust denial." (Deniers are indeed quite defensive about this term - although if they are right as they claim they are, they should not be; they claim that the term is reductive and has sinister implications; i.e. it makes them look evil and hateful). Ever single high-profile Holocaust denier (i.e. denier who has lectured about the topic; who has "sang" about the topic - a la the Gaede hate twins; who has "debated" others about the topic; and who has spread propaganda about the topic - has, in doing these acts - made overtly anti-Semitic comments. But not just anti-Semitic comments. The majority of these hate purveyors have made racist and ethnic slurs regarding other religions; regarding African-Americans; gays; witches; Latinos, you name it. A veritable cornucopia of hate. Perhaps these groups do this to claim that they are not fixated on hatred of Jews. If so, the ploy has backfired: Hitler was not solely fixated on hatred of Jews, either, but hate is hate is hate, and it is hard to compartmentalize once it has reached a certain level).

While my friend's comment may not have been correct syllogistically, I would argue that it is accurate observationally and anecdotally. When someone claims that the Holocaust has not happened, to a mass audience whom he knows does not believe his claim, what is that person seeking to do? To first insult, injure and humiliate the audience's intelligence, whatever the ethnic mix of the intelligence, and to second, create an actual DEBATE on a subject about which there actually is none. Why would someone want to do the latter?

Because even though we are told to "never forget," one can "never forget" only if one remembers to tell a tale to his progeny, who in turn remembers to tell it to his. Holocaust survivors are dying quickly. The strategy of the deniers is, in legal terms, to create a question of fact, NOW, as to whether the event happened, MERELY BY CLAIMING THERE IS A DEBATE (much as Bush is claiming there is a "debate" about intelligent design simply because he has decreed that there is one), and to then, once survivors die, through their denier offspring, to WIN that debate.

Why would deniers wish to claim that an event never happened - to change world opinion - if not to change world opinion about the people involved in the event? Do we see massive efforts undertaken to convince people that, yes, a tomato is really a fruit? To convince people that inflammable and flammable really mean the same thing? If the deniers believe the world denied along with them, they would not expend their efforts. All speech is persuasive speech; the deniers intend to persuade us of something. Why? And for what purpose?

When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, as Sherlock Holmes once said. Holocaust deniers - who as I have stated above consist of anti-Semites (please, prove me wrong if you disagree) have had an easy go of sliming Jews throughout history, through opinion slurs, and even through slurs of fact (i.e. the blood libel, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion). It was not until Jews arrived in America (and until the creation of a Jewish state, in a sense) that the ability that comes with being able to focus properly(without being diverted by such matters as where am I going to live tomorrow) on combating lies takes shape. Once Jews came to America, America soon found itself engulfed in a global conflict, World War II, in which most nations took sides, and in which public war crimes hearings - the Nuremburg Trials - took place. The world saw - with its own eyes - that atrocities were committed against Jews. No longer could anti-Semites rely on the old slurs; no longer could they rely on their machinery of their own dictatorships to manufacture whatever myths they wanted to about Jewish suffering. Reality finally overpowered hate. And this drives the Holocaust deniers, who still live in the pre-reality hate state, absolutely nuts. They think that living in this state is still good enough - still sufficient enough - to let them hurl another blood libel - "The Holocaust never happened" - and to make it stick. They are wrong, and many don't even know it. Those who do have only become more
brazen in their hate.

Sickening, sad, and shameful. Truly, we must never forget, because hate doesn't go away by itself.

IRANIAN BEAUTY CONTEST

The other night, I was having the strangest dream. I was watching (from a safe distance, thankfully) an Iranian beauty contest. As I said, it was a dream (in reality, no such contest could exist. While women are treated as objects in Iran, and are degraded and humiliated, just as are women who participate in certain beauty pageants elsewhere, how can one judge a beauty contest where, as in Iran, one is forbidden to see the contestants' faces?!?!) - I could, indeed, see the actual contestants' faces!

Suddenly, the announcer (who spoke English, blissfully, for my convenience, introduced me to the scene, thus tipping me off to the fact that I was watching a pageant. He said, "And now, your Master of Ceremonies for the Miss Iran 2006 Beauty Pageant, the mook who really wants a nook, the half-stubble who's nothing but trouble, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad!" (Cheers, gunfire)

My memory of the subsequent details of the event, especially the swimsuit competition - were somewhat hasty. I remember several women swimming in a pool full of giant oil, with Mahmoud barking at them, "You fools! Swim harder! You're not soaking up the true value of that oil! The West sees this and is laughing at us! Allah is definitely NOT Akhbar, as far as you swine are concerned!"

Finally, the piece de resistance came. Only five contestants remained, the blood of the eliminated contestants having been neatly mopped off the floor by illegal Sikhs and other infidels. President Ahmadinejad conducted the proceedings from this point.

"So, contestant A, if there is one thing in the whole world you want, what would that be?"
Contestant A: "The destruction of Israel. To wipe Israel off the map."
President: "Actually, that's two things, but I'll forgive the cheating because I was doubly titillated. Great answer!"

"Contestant B, what is your long-term goal in life?"
"To see Israel driven into the sea. By the way, if it is driven into the sea, ir can't simultaneously be wiped off the map. Put another way, if we wipe if off the map, it's gone - it's no longer left to be driven into the sea."
"So what are you saying - that we should not drive Israel into the sea?"
"No."
"No, we shouldn't?"
"Yes. I mean, yes, we should."
"And should we wipe it off the map as well?????"
"Ummm, yes."
"That hesitation in your voice.... You are a filthy Jew lover. Get out of my sight!"

"Contestant C, if a genie from one of those despicable, caricatured stories that paints Persians as bloodthirsty savages came to you, and granted you one wish, what would you wish for?"
"To wipe Israel into the sea, to drive it off the map, to wipe it off the map, AND to drive it into the sea!"
"Wow, I had not even heard of some of those options. You have a creative mind, for a female. But, a female you are. You intimidate me. Leave us!"

"Contestant D, if Allah himself - blessed be his name, descended from heaven - somehow managing to avoid stepping in the scum-stained camel carcasses we have devoured in his name - and asked you what your one wish in life would be, what would you say?"
"To wipe Israel off the map, and to drive it into the sea."
"Perfect. You're sure you're Iranian, right?"
"Oh, you can pre-empt me any time if you're unsure!"
"How dare you mock the divinely anointed President! Out of my sight!"

"Contestant E: Your one wish?"
"Harsher sentences for parole violaters, Mahmoud." (Hat tip: Miss Cogeniality)
(Collective gasps and screams from audiences)
"WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT!!!!!"
"And to drive Israel into the sea!"


At this point, I woke up, and realized something: Iran will never hold beauty pageants. It's just too difficult. Some things were never meant to be. Actually, it was at this point that I THOUGHT I woke up. It wasn't until I saw the Iranian president's head, superimposed over Slim Pickens' body, riding a nuclear missile down into the beauty pageant auditorium singing "Until we meet again" that my exceedingly fascinating dream had come to an end.

THE END

FIRE AND DIMSTONE

How do you lock stupidity out.... When you've already invited it in?

Huffingtonpost.com:

The next challenge Harry Potter will face has nothing to do with horcruxes, Hogwart's or the half-blood prince.
Instead, it will be a group of concerned parents looking to take the series off the shelves of all Gwinnett County Public Schools.

Laura Mallory of Loganville filed an appeal last week to get the best-selling book series out of the schools' media centers. She is an evangelical Christian who has three children at J.C. Magill Elementary School.
"I think the anti-Christian bias -- it's just got to stop," Mallory said. "And if we don't say something, we'll just keep getting pushed out of the schools. And I pay taxes, too, and I think that gives me a voice to speak out about this." (In each HP book, by the way, the kids celebrate Christmas. At least a chapter in each book is devoted to this celebration. To date, we have yet to meet a character whose religion is not Christianity. This is not a criticism, of Mallory, or Rowling - just an observation).

Instead, in their place, she's itching to stack those quaint Left Behind books, with their bloody apocalyptic Christian fundamentalist revenge fantasies, on the public school shelves. And the best part of all, you ask? Well, it doesn't seem she reads much of anything at all!

Mallory said she has been contacted by other Christian parents who were concerned about the content of the books. On her complaint form, she suggested they be replaced by C.S. Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia" series or Tim LaHaye's "Left Behind: the Kids" series.

She admitted that she has not read the book series partially because "they're really very long and I have four kids." (which series hasn't she read? She probably hasn't read any of them)

"I've put a lot of work into what I've studied and read. I think it would be hypocritical for me to read all the books, honestly. I don't agree with what's in them. I don't have to read an entire pornographic magazine to know it's obscene," Mallory said. (How would you know if it was pornographic unless you read at least part of it? And in the case of Harry Potter, where large swatches of material cannot possibly deemed to be anti-Christian, page-for-page, even by Jerry Fatwell or Pat Slobertson, how would you know the books were offensive without reading enough so as to get to at least the first offense? Poor woman. Given that this woman has likely been at the Evangelical bit for a while, if she read the books, she would indeed be doing something hypocritical - thinking!)

Is this woman off her rocker? Narnia? Doesn't that have magic and socery in it as well? And how come Tolkien gets off so easy? Hmm. Seems she has a bit of support from a few other slack jawed yokels parents. The best course of action, if you're a member of the Gwinnett County Public Schools system is to ask: Why not just get rid of ALL the books in the library and turn it into a chapel? Or maybe just get rid of the school system all together and send all the kids to Mallory's house where they can sit around not reading anything much at all. Ah, isn't ignorance bliss when the rapture is near? (That way, when Jesus comes, you can have nothing to talk about to him!)

And now where would someone who doesn't in fact read the Harry Potter books get her opinions about the Harry Potter books? Why from Beverly LaHaye's Concerned Women for America, of course. Wife of best selling apocalyptic Christian author, Tim LaHaye.

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Ignorant yokels and suicide bombers - they blow up so fast. Freedom of religion does not include the right to stifle others' freedom of speech. The 1982 Supreme Court Pico case essentially held as much.

Indeed, freedom of speech is under siege from all institutions in America - from religious bigots, from the executive, and, most recently, from the judiciary. Even religious bigots themselves have had their freedom of speech stifled. As much as I find such bigoted speech offensive, to paraphrase Alan Dershowitz, "You may be a bigot, but the Constitution gives you the right to express bigoted views."

Two days ago, the 9th Circuit decided the case of Harper v. Poway. An evangelical Christian student named Harper, two years ago, wore a T-shirt with following phrases: "Our school has let in what God has forbidden," "homosexuality is a sin," and a quotation from Romans 1:27 (the quotation states homosexuality is an abomination). The phrases were either these words, or words close to them. The student wore the shirt in response to an event that LGBT students had held the day before (and that the public high school had seemed to tacitly approve) - a so-called "Day of Silence." On that day, gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgendered students would be silent - would refrain from speaking to each other - for the whole day - so as to call attention to the discriminatory treatment that they have suffered and are still suffering.

On the day when Harper wore the T-shirt, he "exchanged words" with a few students, but there were no physical altercations, nor, apparently, were any classroom studies disrupted. Once the school administrators discovered that Harper was wearing the T-shirt, though, they insisted that he go home, change his clothes, and come back (they didn't really want to suspend him). He refused. Although threats of discipline were made, he was, without ever having to chnage the shirt, not disciplined, and given full attendance credit for the day.

However, apparently (the opinion does not make this clear, but this must have been what happened), Harper stated his intention to wear the T-shirt or an article of clothing with a similar message again. He was then told that he could not do so. He then filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in the Southern Distrct of California seeking to enjoin the school's order. He lost, because the court found that he did not have a reasonable likelihood of success on the merits (i.e. his First Amendment claims were not likely to prevail).

In a truly idiotic decision, the 9th Circuit affirmed. This is just the kind of case that the fundies and wingies seize upon to fearmonger the country, and I hate when a decision like this gets delivered. The 9th Circuit held that the T-shirt interfered with the "rights of others," as that phrase was used in Tinker v. Des Moines - namely, the rights of homosexual students to learn in a productive environment free of discriminatory insult and harassment. It brushed aside Harper's freedom of speech claim, saying that the "interference with the rights of others" exception in Tinker had foreclosed it (that case involved a high school student wearing a black armband to protest the Vietnam War; the Court ruled that the 1st Amendment prohibited a school from banning this form of expression, but also ruled that student freedom of expression is not absolute; a school can "tinker," so to speak, with students' freedom of speech, when, among other things, it interferes with the rights of others).

The Court essentially treated the right to be free of "harassment" (a level of harassment nowhere near the actionable level - i.e. the Ellerth/Faragher level) as a fundamental right - it interpreted this "right" as the "rights of others" Tinker right. However, there is no such right. The only case that could possibly stand for that proposition is Hill v. Colorado, in which the Court upheld a state ordinance prohibiting abortion protestors from coming within less than 8 feet of people entering an abortion clinic without the enterers' consent. That case, however, is more properly viewed as a time, place and manner restriction of speech case (and it was wrongly decided as well). There is also no fundamental right to be free of getting insulted in school.

Given that the Court misconstrued Tinker, it does not matter that it ruled correctly on the freedom of religion claim brought by the student (it ruled that freedom of religion does not include the license to insult others on the basis of religious grounds in a public high school, where alternative fora for such insults are available).

In short, this was a bad decision. It is well nigh beside the point that any number of students' feelings were hurt by the message on the T-shirt, and that the student, however "sincere" his bigotry was, intended to hurt other students' feelings, even though they hadn't LITERALLY done anything to him. In a pluralistic society, if one point of view that is part of our political discourse is allowed to be expressed, the other, generally speaking, must be too - either both should be or neither should be. Viewpoint-based speech discrimination is repellant to the constitution - yes, even more repellant than intolerant bigots.

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HONEST ABE AND MCCLELLAN

The two names that encapsulate the title of this post are, of course, Abraham Lincoln and famed Union General GeorgeMcClellan. Lincoln's fabled reputation for honesty was probably built more upon a mountain of apocrypha than upon a mountain of truth, but he was, as far as politicians go, enough of a straight-talker (never mind that he, too, was a constitutional sodomite), that Americans - the North and border states, that is, found him of sufficient integrity, resolve, and intelligence so as to elect him as President in 1864, for his second term.

1864 was the year that the tide turned - for good - for the Union in the Civil War. Had it not done so, one of the generals earlier "retired" by Lincoln who ran against Lincoln on the Democratic ticket might possibly have defeated him. This "retired" general, McClellan, had quite a chore of convincing Americans that he was the horse to which they should change midstream, and that he could somehow improve upon Lincoln's conduct of the war, as sloppy, start and go, and meandering as it sometimes was. Poor McClellan. He first had to take orders from Lincoln, a man whom Lincoln, from what history tells us, did not hold in the highest of esteem, and then had the honor of being trounced by Lincoln as McClellan tried to make an issue of the supposed strong suit qualities that Lincoln used to form (so McClellan thought) erroneous judgdments over men like McClellan.

Flash forward, oh, 140 years or so. The party of Lincoln remains - in name, if not quite - not quite - in spirit. Until two days ago, that party was represented on a battlefield of sorts - a battlefield of communication of information - one of "spin" - of protecting the President under the alleged guise of presenting useful information to America (in a literal battlefield, the President and country are protected by sword, and those who do battle provide the President information regarding the strengths and weaknesses of opponents) - by yet another man named McClellan. This McClellan - no relation to George - was named Scott (he has a brother named Mark who also works in the current federal government; times may change, but patronage is forever).

McClellan, S., like McClellan, G., played the part of the good soldier for several years. McClellan, G., could not have enjoyed this role. McClellan, S., certainly did not, if the pained looks of types of constipation he effected that one did not know even existed at press conferences are any indications. While Lincoln's honesty may have been in doubt, no one has yet to prove that Lincoln lied to McClellan, G. However, McClellan, S., was most certain lied to by his superiors regarding the facts of a certain affair known as "Plamegate." McClellan, unaware that he was being lied to, spouted the lies as truth to the American public. McClellan, G., was cashiered by Lincoln, partly because of Lincoln's penchant for playing for musical generals, and partly because of McClellan's own shortcomings. McClellan, S., two days ago, "resigned," a day after the new Chief of Staff announced that personnel changes would be immediately forthcoming and that any individual who wished to resign should do so as soon as possible (lest he or she be terminated).

McClellan, G., must have been motivated to run for President from a sense of anger derived from having been a dumped loyal foot solider. If ever there was a loyal foot soldier that has been automatically dumped, it is McClellan, S. Will he avenge himself upon this White House? I mean, it's not like there's a Civil War brewing, and McClellan, S. was actually and repeatedly lied to. These two facts make it awfully hard for McClellan's detractors to say that he would be an opportunist should McClellan, S., somehow find a way to avenge himself upon the current White House.

There is, however, a difference between Generals and spokesthugs, between then and now. Generals live in a world that is not shellacked by spin; spokesthugs are required to do the shellacking themselves, to the point where they lose the ability to tell the difference between the shellack and the real thing, even after their spokesthugitude -in its official capacity - has died. Something tells me that McClellan, S., will not be saying, or doing, anything of value, any time soon. That would after all, be keeping in character.

YESSURI

God help us, a baby girl, Suri (Hebrew for "Princess") was delivered to Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes a few days ago. For all of you out there who have seen fit to follow this story - to follow Katie Holmes' zombification and Tom Cruise's encouragement of same and general nutjobbitude (excuse me - following the path to Scientological enlightenment, which apparently consists of offering unsoliticted public beratings of individuals with whom he disagrees, raping furniture, and spouting inanities and hostilities presented as facts, while getting paid untold millions to do same) - and then to follow the literal flesh and blood of the unification of these two pieces of celestial crud, please read the following article. Its message: a boy is not a toy and a girl is not a pearl. Children are real people, even if their parents choose not to be, or choose not to treat them as such.

If unborn children really had rights, the infant daughter of the actress Katie Holmes and the temporarily-humanoid immortal starseed that styles itself 'Tom Cruise' would have been delivered by a lawyer. Breaking the absolute silence of the delivery room, the lawyer, on the infant's behalf, would have sued for spiritual guardianship and demanded that all profits earned from sale of the child's story and image-- including 'virtual' profits in the form of publicity for its parents -- be deposited in a trust account to fund its lifelong psychotherapy needs. It would also be stipulated that such therapy could not be interfered with or curtailed by 'Cruise' or his religious representatives.

Of all the world's great traditions of exploitation -- master over slave, husband over wife, rich man over poor man-- parenthood is the most absolute and the least subject to scrutiny or pressure. Not only do the stronger parties involved have the right to construct the weaker one's reality and then imprison their subject inside of it, they have the right to create the subject at a moment not of its choosing and not necessarily to its advantage. For Holmes and 'Cruise' to have marched a helpless new spirit into the global media shitstorm that they, their publicists and their clerical overseers have been whipping up for many months now should not only be an actionable infraction but a grave reminder to all of us not to toy around with unformed soul material.
Suri, lovely child, you are free. You just don't know it yet. You don't even have to, ultimately, keep that name they gave you. You can be an 'Amy' like your friends. None of what happened is your responsibility. Your mother, she chose to relinquish her personal liberty. Your father, he chose to forsake his humanness. But you, at eighteen, as an American citizen and-- in the words of the Desiderata-- 'a child of the universe' will have the right to hop any bus you want and take it as far as you want and never return.

I'm a stranger, child, but I'm a parent, too, and on behalf of many millions of parents who cherish the awesome power that we wield over those who come to earth with none , I make you this promise:

You shall be released.

--Walter

*********************************************************************************

In the words of Wordsworth, "the child is the father of the man." One can but hope that baby Suri, while she struggles to escape the darkness as she yearns for the light, can maybe teach her parents a few things.

MO'BILE

Another piece of the puzzle of selective manipulation of intelligence for political purposes. Apparently, putting these pieces together results in the conclusion that, yes, George Bush IS a liar (not that it matters to his supporters; even if he lied about sex, it would not matter to them, wartime or not. For these folks, the ends do justify the means. Question: what "end" comes to mind when one thinks of Iraq, other than the word "endgame?"):

April 12, 2006

What Did The President Know and When Did He Know It?(tip: Howard Baker)

Remember those trailers, the Bushies went on and on about post-invasion? The ones that gave Stephen Hayes and The Weekly Standard kids such throbbing hard-ons? The mobile death labs filled with killer biological cocktails whipped up by villainous Iraqi scientists? Yeah?
They were for helium balloons. As for what the president knew and when he knew it; he knew he was lying and he knew it two days before he lied to the American people.

From WaPo:

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction." (If it didn't matter whether Iraq actually had them, why did he feel the need to pont this out?) The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed (by the officials, not non-bubblers) at the time as an (ex-post-facto)vindication of the decision to go to war.


But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true. A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq -- not made public until now -- had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement. The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped "secret" and shelved (in other words, they were CLASS-ified).

Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories (I can just hear it now: "Q: What evidence do you have that the trailers were weapons factories?" "A: That's classified." "Q: Is Bush lying about this?" "A: That's classified, too).

Unlike the portions of the National Intelligence Estimate which HAD to be declassified lest the American people be misled by devious opponents of the war, this report has not been declassified, distributed to ensure the public who is financing and fighting this war (and the public who had to vote for President in 2004 as the President scolded us, "Congress had the same information I did!") is able to conduct their deliberative democracy with the best available information.

The administration declassifies (remember: the portions of the NIE that were declassified were lies, and the administration knew it; since it's accountable to no one, this makes sense - why reveal trutful statements or information to support your case? On the other hand, when you release information that is a lie, you get Goebellian satisfaction PLUS the satisfaction that comes with knowing you feel the American people are idiots. Perhaps I answered my own question, raised above) to embarrass political opponents, not to better inform the citizenry they're supposed to serve.

Instead, Americans heard Colin Powell, months after the report's completion, assert that the government's "confidence level" about the labs was increasing. That was probably correct, as more and more bureaucrats forgot about the shelved document, they became more amenable to their own spin. And so it's no surprise that, come September, America saw Dick Cheney declare the trailers "mobile biological facilities" that could have been used for anthrax or smallpox. What they didn't hear was this:

News of the team's early impressions leaped across the Atlantic well ahead of the technical report. Over the next two days, a stream of anxious e-mails and phone calls from Washington pressed for details and clarifications. The reason for the nervousness was soon obvious: In Washington, a CIA analyst had written a draft white paper on the trailers, an official assessment that would also reflect the views of the DIA. The white paper described the trailers as "the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program." It also explicitly rejected an explanation by Iraqi officials, described in a New York Times article a few days earlier, that the trailers might be mobile units for producing hydrogen. But the technical team's preliminary report, written in a tent in Baghdad and approved by each team member, reached a conclusion opposite from that of the white paper.

Some politicized desk jockey in DC was heeded over nine experts each with a decade plus of experience in a relevant area. He was listened to because his judgments squared with that of "Curveball," the Iraqi defector who claimed to be a chemical weapons engineer, turned out to be a liar, and appears to have singlehandedly concocted around 50% of our case for war.

Impressive work, considering his code name, basically, means betrayal. How cunningly Shakespearian of him.

As for George Tenet's' later assertion that the labs could have been "easily modified" to create biological weapons, that too was a vicious lie. "It would have been easier to start all over with a bucket," said Rod Barton, an Australian biological weapons expert and member of the Iraq survey group. Of course, this administration prefers not to lie (?), they're fond of the plausible mislead. So they asked the experts to lend a brotha a hand:

After team members returned to Washington, they began work on a final report. At several points, members were questioned about revising their conclusions, according to sources knowledgeable about the conversations. The questioners generally wanted to know the same thing: Could the report's conclusions be softened, to leave open a possibility that the trailers might have been intended for weapons? In the end, the final report -- 19 pages plus a 103-page appendix -- remained unequivocal in declaring the trailers unsuitable for weapons production.[...] "I went home and fully expected that our findings would be publicly stated," one member recalled. "It never happened. And I just had to live with it."

Not anymore. This is big, and coming at precisely the wrong time for the administration. They've declassified incorrect reports to kneecap the case against war, ignored classified documents that discredit their own rhetoric, and now Americans are trapped in an imploding war that they accepted on false premises. The danger for the Bushies is that at exactly the moment voters are searching for a reason to turn against a conflict they nominally supported, they're being given both a reason and villains who purposefully tricked them into ignoring their better judgment. Revelations about the administration's actions are lifting culpability from the American people, and once they lose their investment in this conflict, the crew sullying the White House is finished.

OH GOD, YOU (BLUE) DEVIL!

Surely by now you've heard of the "scandal" that has "rocked" Duke University.

The Duke University lacrosse team, composed of 40 or some members (all but one of whom are lily white males, who mostly went to exclusive prep schools - I am not being redundant by the use of "exclusive" here - some prep schools claim they're exclusive, but believe me, the only thing exclusive about them is that you'd want to exclude them - from the universe; the other - forgive the pun or don't - is black) had I guess what it calls a party one night not too long ago - whether this party was before a game, after a game, to celebrate a victory, to wash away a defeat, I cannot say - partying is, after all, its own reason and reward.

As part of the preparations for this party, one or more of the members solicited the services of a black stripper (who is above the age of consent, as are all of the players). The stripper claims that several (if not more) of the players, while being boys, of course, systematically took turns raping and assaulting her.

The University, when these allegations were brought, didn't seem to care very much. After all, the University is white, elite, rich, and the town upon which the Duke campus is built - working-class Durham 9(which includes a large black population), is not white, elite and rich. Hence the two only feed off each other's hate, not largesse. The community felt outraged at the school's failing to take any action at all upon the stripper's allegation (finally, the president of Duke cancelled the rest of the lacrosse season, grimly pronouncing that to do so "was in everyone's best interest" - whatever that means). The Duke University police (remember, private campus police have all the powers of regular police, but never use them, and not public officers - meaning the public does not have the right to see the records generated by these men and women, who are deputized to carry firearms, make arrests, and perform other traditional police functions - lovely!) were slow to act on the allegations as well. That fact should make prospective students feel secure. The rich ones, anyway.

Once Durham county police got involved, a twist, as it were, developed: each member of the team (except the black member; the stripper claims the black member did not rape her; perhaps he was vomiting, perhaps because he consumed too much alcohol, perhaps not) volntarily submitted a DNA sample to the police. Guess what? The woman's body did not contain ANY of the players' DNA resiglue. Moreover, the players' lawyer, in dramatic fashion, has asserted that the stripper was already injured by the time she had arrived at the party (no one disputes she was at the party; what happened there is disputed. Think of it as Rashomon with broomsticks and assholes instead of swords and samurai).

Of course, the players could have been wearing condoms while raping the woman. Or, they could have penetrated her without ejaculating (you know what they say about too much working out... What? What do they say?) At any rate, the police, undeterred, are going forward with the prosecution.

One of the "shocking relevations" in this scandal was brought forth in the form of an email sent by one of the white players to his teammates. In the email, the player - whose name is a matter of public record, and who could rape someone with his nose - informs his teammantes of the intention to invite a stripper over (at a time when the actual stripper roughly arrived to whatever place of amusement the students had congregated at), to "kill and then scalp her." The statement seems to me to reflect a basic misunderstanding of Native American customs. A good scalping WILL kill someone - or, at least, will serve as an exquisite torture device. What good is it to kill someone and then scalp her only once she's dead? This is like threatening to poison someone, and instead of poisoning him, shooting him and THEN poisining him. Since the emailer did not propose the strange sequence of acts for any detectable reason (such as, say, so as to frustrate the police's ability to determine the actual cause of death), the education he supposedly received at Duke (while on an athletic scholarship, of course) must have been a real waste of money. Or would have been. If it were someone else. Someone who studied and who wasn't on the lacrosse team, maybe.

Once the existence of the email came to light, the school THEN sprung quickly into action, removing the student from campus, not for violating any school rule, regulation or code, but "for his own protection." Kind of like a witness protection program for non-witneses, I guess. The school also suspended his email account - meaning that it viewed his threat as a harmless joke, but really, really doesn't want ANYONE threatening to kill HIM over email. No, that would not be good.

I can make one prediction: it doesn't matter what happens at the trial, which, given the evidence to date, will obviously turn on credibility. The defense will try to attack the stripper's character by saying she's a stripper - the defense LAWYERS, that is, and will try to plant the seeds of doubt by showing alleged "time and date-stamped" evidence that she was injured earlier in the day (what the probative value of this evidence is, I cannot say, because I do not know where she claims she was injured). Meanwhile, the prosecution will, as much as it can, try to show that half the team has a history of multiple arrests and convictions (if it's OK for the lacrosse team to have this, then its's... NOT OK for you), will invoke North Carolina's rape shield law as best it can, and eventually, presumably, a verdict will be returned.

Regardkess if whether the verdict is "guilty," of whether there is an acquittal, or whether there is a mistrial, the practical result will be the same in each case: further inflammation of racial tensions, and those tensions that Republicans say don't exist - repeat after me - CLASS tensions. The University, regardless of the verdict, will continue to give the lacrosse team at Duke the right to play, even if the members have GPAs that would cause any other student to be expelled. The "Durham" community may not get over what happened, but the "Duke" community will, because as far as it is concerned, there is nothing to "get over": while over half of the student body, if not more, may find the lacrosse team, its members, and/or the existence of this team, to be insufferable, the Duke community, as a whole, will never do anything to intentionally inflict damage upon itself. Thus, the incident - and the guilt that may be found, or the perception of miscarried justice attendant to an acquittal - will simply become the MacArthurian equivalent of "scandals" - it will just "disappear." Those who arre genuinely outraged will be branded as not supporting the team - either the lacrosse team or the Duke team. Those who, regardless of what they think of the merits of the decision, find the fallout indicative of a serious social problem that is not being addressed, will be cut down from backstage, or by the mere passage of time. Why, every college I know of has "black only" fraternities/living centers, "white only" fraternities and living centers, and the degree of self-segregation is so high that one would almost be tempted to think that - gasp! - affirmative action really IS a failure (further sarcasm is not necessary here). Such self-selected isolation leads not just to racial animosity, but leads to self-selection within self-selection, resulting in a phenomenon that I would call "click (clique) or exit." Forgive the dreadful pun, but what I mean by this is that, if you haven't self-selected yourself twice, three, four times over, very early on in the college experience, the end result may not be that you are raped - but you definitely have been fucked. To the tune of over $100,000. And you didn't even get the services of a stripper in return. Bummer.

FAIR AND BALLAST

My view on the immigration debate that has now engulfed our nation, from the diapers to the dynamos, is simple in terms of what I think should happen to the 11 or 12 million or so illegal immigrants: I don't favor expulsion of these people, whatever their race, religion, or ethnicity, for the simple reason that our government lacks the funds to forcibly remove them, and that I, as a taxpayer, should not have to pay interest due to the government's failure (if one is to call it a failure) to expel them earlier. Both political parties have used Latino immigrants as a prop in political campaigns - Democrats have turned a blind eye to illegal border crossings to curry favor with the Latino vote; George Bush has done the same thing, and his corporate paymasters, in direct violation of federal law, have failed to report illegal aliens. Thus, the corporations have not incurred the requisite sanctions (sanctions, which, ironically, could fund the cost of a nationwide expulsion). The corporations, multinational, multistate, and otherwise, who need immigrants as a cheap source of labor, and these folks' apologists, have squawked that it's not their job to act as "border control" officers. However, laws imposing sanctions upon employers are not targeting/commandeering (see Printz v. U.S.) corporations to act as vessels for a federal government scheme (even if such laws did, corporations are not "sovereign entities," as states are, and can be commandeered in this fashion); such laws merely require employers, along with everyone else, to play their part in ensuring that laws of general applicability are not violated. There is no legal prohibition against making corporations, which are created under state and federal laws in the first place, do this, especially given that the rest of us (i.e. citizens) have our own legal obligations (the failure by which to abide can result in legal consequences) to report illegal aliens; to not defraud the IRS by paying illegals off the books, and so on.

The attitude of corporate apologists is astonishing. We have laws in this country that are specifically designed to control workplace interactions. These include, among other laws, federal anti-discrimination statutes. Employers grumblingly recognize that these statutes are constitutional, and further realize that ultimately, their failure to abide by these laws will result in a government entity (a court) imposing damages upon them. In this sense, employers DO have a responsibility to act as "civil rights enforcers" - but because - and precisely because - they are the entities that are deemed by the law to be capable of committing civil rights violations in the workplace. Since emplyoers recognize the legitimacy of federal anti-discrimination laws, to those who have a problem with how those laws are effected, I ask, what would you have as the alternative? Government monitoring of your worksite? Such monitoring is obviously offensive, and the fact that it isn't done indicates that to some extent, the anti-discrimination laws can only be enforced by corporations' self-policing: the government is not literally in the workplace, but it is telling you that if you don't police your shop, you'll pay. This is how laws - criminal laws - and the law of intentional torts work, in general. Why should corporations be exempt from these precise ordinary workings of the law by a requirement that they should not have to check the citizenship status of their employees? Again, since these entities recognize that the employment relationship that they have with illegal aliens is illegal, and since they do not WANT the government monitoring their shop to check the citizenship status of each hiree, how do the corporations expect or want immigration laws to be enforced without their self-policing, the failure to accomplish will result in a fine (an incentive for self-policing?) It's amazing how corporations so desperately want to be treated like people, just so they can evade liability, and yet when it comes time for the corporations to do things people actually do, they declare that the laws that people must follow don't apply to them. These arguments are legal absurdities.

Yet, the corporations have won out. The last effort at immigration reform came in 1986. The product of this effort was the granting of - love that Republican catchphrase - "amnesty" to some aliens, laws purporting to enforce border control, and laws requiring employer sanctions. The employer sanction laws have not been enforced. Why? From pretty much continuously from 1986 to the present, we've had either a Republican president or a Republican Congress. This group would lose much of its base if it dared to enforce these laws. While Democrats, I believe, are (or at least should be) innately less squeamish about enforcing such laws, many of them do not want to foul the trough at which they feed by insisting upon sanctions, and some may even view sanctions as (God forbid) tantamount to punishing the aliens themselves!

So, to the extent there is a problem - a surfeit of illegal immigrants in this country - it is our fault. Our government's fault, your fault and mine. We have failed to elect/seek out individuals who will insist upon the imposition of sanctions, and we've failed to elect/seek out individuals who will merely even PROPOSE to what extent, if any, we should beef up border security. In the words of Pogo, "we have met the enemy, and it is us."

Because the American people have failed to solve this problem through republican democracy, the people who represent us under that system think, not inappropriately, that no solution is "really" needed, so long as the reprsentatives keep demagoguing the issue one way or another, keeping it in the public spotlight.

The Republican party itself has been wedge-issued by immigration. The corporate wing of the party is not in favor of expulsion en masse of 12 million immigrants and a virtual fence to prevent "new immigrants" from arriving - were it to favor such things, American workers would, god forbid, have a shot at getting a better wage and benefits, the labor market for American workers would become more competitive, less union-busting would occur, and Mexico and the multinationals would be sent the message that NAFTA is not a one-way benefit pipeline to it. The corporate wing cannot abide this.

The other wing - let's call it the "social conservative" wing, is comprised, in large part, of good old Republican bigots who simply do not like the fact that brown people (as opposed to WASPS) have come here illegally (mind you, this wing has done nothing to correct this problem - if the problem disappeared, it would not be able to demagogue it, and therefore, the problem must be kept alive) These people claim that Mexicans have a plan of "reconquista" (reconquer) - a plan under which once they "invade us" in sufficient numbers, they will then launch a war against the United States to "take back" land in California, New Mexico, and Texas that previously belonged to Mexico (so that this land can be part of the country they want to get away from?) A leading proponent of the reconquista theory is that fine scholar Michelle Malkin, who in a recent book, exhaustively documented the extent to which Japanese Americans really WERE a threat to America in WWII, and thus deserved to be interned. Facts are not this woman's best friend. They aren't even a casual acquaintance.

The bigotry is now showing its full colors. Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, described the protests with marchers carrying foreign flags as "ominous" in "their hint of a large, unassimilated population existing outside America's laws and exhibiting absolutely no sheepishness about it." (gee, Rich, I guess the protesters are kind of like the Bush administration, with the only difference being that the Bush cabal is somewhat smaller in number).

Brit Hume, the news anchor on Fox News (we all know that news anchors cannot hold personal opinions, and the anchors, especially those at Fox, are - and if they aren't, they should be - fair and balanced), described the marchers, particularly those carrying Mexican flags, as "a repellent spectacle." No doubt Brit made this comment in the "no spin" portion of his newscast.

The remarks of the Lowrys and Humes of the world serve but one purpose: to keep the bigot base energized. Were these men to back up their words with some kind of action, there is a chance, however remote, that the issue which they keep demagoguing will be rendered moot. The fear of this mootness is the bigots' greatest fear. It's hard to imagine that when FDR first said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," he specifically envisioned modern-day Republican fearmongering. Then again, he didn't have to. For while the song of despair wailing out of the wilderness of the Great Depression has ended, the melody - "action must triumph over demagoguery" - lingers on, as any President- past, present, or future - would recognize.

THERE'S JUST ONE HITCH....

I just was perusing the contents of Slate.com's homepage, and ran into the following headline:

"Wowie Zahawie: Sorry everyone, but Iraq did go uranium shopping in Niger.
Christopher Hitchens, fighting words, April 10, 2006, 4:43 PM ET."

Hitchens, whether he can hold his liquor or not, is a man of some intelligence, and he knows it. The problem with many intelligent people is that they put this intelligence in the service of singularly unintelligent enterprises.

Hitchens has engaged in such an enterprise for three years running. The enterprise: insist that we need more, more, more troops in Iraq, more international support for our adventure, more recognition of the fact that Saddam was REAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLY bad, and more recognition of the "fact" that the media is responsible for our (well, I guess he would call it a non-failure, which raises a credibility question) "failure" in Iraq. The man's evident bloodlust can be summed up best by a recent article in which he described how the "international community" (to whom Saddam was not a threat, just like he wasn't one to us) should have responded to Colin Powell's now infamous U.N. speech. The title of the article? "My Perfect War." How charming.

Hitchens is also understandably very touchy about having the "chickenhawk" label thrown at him. Indeed, he is so riled up by the fact that some people with military experience who are (relatively) well versed in mid-East politics have dared to suggest that people who have neither the experience nor the verse are engaged in "illegitimate, reductive" argumentation. He would know, given his propensity to mock, vilify and ridicule, undistinctively, EVERYONE who is against the war in Iraq, regardless of the reasons these people have for the opposition. Behold the perils of projection.

Hitchens got his gut in such an uproar one day that he wrote an article called "Don't you "Son" Me!" One point of the article: just because you've never experienced combat, or have not seen a loved one off to combat, does not mean you are not capable of making intelligent pronoucements on or about a war. Reasonable enough. But Hitchens can't leave it at that, of course. He says that pretty much all people who have seen combat/have sent people off to war have the mentality that leads them to think their opinions on war and peace are necessarily superior to Hitchens'; Hitchens believes these people believe the opinions of people like him (who have never served in any war, and who would not serve in any war) are WORTHLESS.

The argument has a seductive appeal to it, until you realize it's a straw man. Those retired (and active) generals you see on TV who are fighting on the front lines (or who have done so previously) are not as a whole (maybe a few of them are) saying that "civilians" cannot speak intelligently on Iraq; rather, these people are responding to the neoconservatives' sucessful three-ear succesful campaign of hectoring that has somehow managed to convince people that the generals' opinions are irrelevant - precisely because the generals are generals! The generals are merely trying to say, I think, "Look, we have the right to speak about this war too, and for all of you people who've never served and never would serve to just tear into us isn't fair. For you to question our patriotism because we have served, or are serving, our country, in a manner with which you are dissatisfied, is improper." The generals haven't even, in large, made the perfectly legitimate argument that goes along the lines of "Hey - I have the experience - you think maybe I can speak at least as intelligently on this subject as you can?" and they certainly haven't suggested that "civilians" are not capable of offering intelligent critique. I think they are simply fed up with the Hitchens types projecting their own feelings of machismo inadequacy when the Hitchens types say, "Anything you can do, I can do better."

An example of Hitchens' logic: he notes that thousands of people have asked why Bush's daughters have not signed up to serve in Iraq (Hitchens' answer: "It's a volunteer army"). He then says Bush's "making his daughters serve" (which according to him is not possible, so I guess he means "encouraging them to volunteer, with the result being that they do) would constitute a ridiculous PR stunt; after all, Napoleon, stung by the criticisms that he was a warmonger who would not ask his own family to make the same sacrifice he asked his military to make, ended up sending a son ill-fit for the task, who died rather clumsily and ingloriously on the battlefield. Hitchens' conclusion (which presumes that the Bush daughters are any more inept than the average soldier; we don't know this): Presidents asking their children to serve in a war -the mere act of asking - is dumb (so, to Hitchens, is a Presidential act of going directly on television to ask for new recruits. If Bush did this, he'd get new recruits because for him, the asking would constitute an act of humility in a sea of blustery rhetoric).

Here's what I think: what if the daughters did go, after being given the same military training as any other recruit? You know what would happen? Either they would die very soon, or, eventually when Dumbya asks them, "How are things going?", they'd reply - possibly honestly. In either case, the message that war has consequences - a message this President does not grasp - would be driven home - indeed, it would be driven home in the most blunt manner possible. This is why leaders of countries don't encourage their children to volunteer - so that the leaders' ignorance of the awfulness, and in this case, futility, of war, remains intact, pure. If the twins did go, contrary to what Hitchens thinks, the country would not interpret it as a PR stunt. At least one person would say, "Hey, Bush believes in this war so much he's willing to persuade his own daughter to go. I used to think that he was a hypocrite in that he'd never adhere to the rule that says never ask someone to do something that you or someone very close to you wouldn't - but now my opinion has changed. If Bush believes in the war so much that his own daughters can now be potentially sacrificed, maybe I'll sign up too, because I finally have a sign from him that genuinely suggests this war is important."

Back to "Wowie Zahawie" - in this article, Hitchens contends that, despite the yellowcake forgery, independent evidence or circumstantial evidence exists - or may exist - that shows that Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake. Well, stop the presses! Even though he has no proof that a sale was even close to being consummated, no proof that Iraq had the wherewithall to DO something with this uranium so as to create a WMD, no proof that it intended to use the possible sale of the yellowcake against the U.S., for him, the "proof" that Iraq intended to buy the yellowcake justifies the war. But in his mind, the war was justified despite the absence of WMDs, an Al-Qaeda Saddam link, etc. In other words, as far as he's concerned, even if Iraq didn't intend to buy the yellowcake, so what? (If it did, nothing would have happened). The war was still justified. How many more instances of irrelevant (to him, and to us) information need he give us, when his entire contention is that it is irrelevant why we went to war?

The answer is that there are some people like Hitchens who have the mentality of the Roman legion armies of old (Hitchens probably knows much about such armies, perhaps or precisely because he never would have served in one while his countrymen did). These armies were of the following belief: "We have lost battles, but we never lost wars, because we never allowed a war to end until we had won it." Hitchens' logic is actually even more sick: he will not even admit battle defeat. However, just like the Romans, he is waging a war - the war in his case consisting of proving to himself that his bloodlust is proper - and he will not allow this war to end until he has won it - not with weapons, of course, but hollow, irrelevant, meaningless words.

He can conduct this war all he wants, but I humbly suggest that it might be time for him to start doing so privately.

LEAKTARD

As I just finished telling a friend as I argued to him that intelligent design (which is not science) should not be taught in science clasrooms, a law/policy/act need not be unconstitutional (i.e. a law forcing the teaching of intelligent design as science) to be a bad law/policy/act. In the I.D. case, teaching non-science as science will result in taxpayer funds being thrown to the winds, and will stunt students' educational development. Not unconstitutional. Just bad.

As far as the latest relevations in the Valerie Plame case; namely, that President Bush himself allegedly declassified portions of a National Intelligence Estimate, and told Scooter Libby, either through subordinates or directly, that Libby could reveal this information to the New York Times (whom, of course, Bush hates), the declassification itself may not have been illegal (I say "may not have been" because certain procedures must be followed to declassify something, even by the President, and we do not know if or when the President followed these procedures).

My answer: so what? Snott McClellan tells us that the leaked material (which, interestingly, was given to Miller, and then "formally declassified" roughly ten days later - this suggests that the procedures may indeed not have been followed) was leaked for the public benefit. Libby's main line of defense (or one of them) to the charges of perjury and obstruction is that certain disclosures were authorized. If the information Bush "declassified" did not include Valerie Plame's identity, then how does this defense aid Libby? If it does, then how is a declassification that outs a CIA agent in the public interest? Someone, please tell me. The portions of the NIE that were leaked were exclusively the cherry-picked "evidence" (which the Administration knew or should have known was false) that Saddam had WMDs. So, given that there were copious amounts of information in the NIE that pretty much disproved that claim that were not declassified, one must conclude that it is in the public interest to mislead the American people, either into war, or either into supporting a war once it has started.

Much has been made of Bush's saying "There are too many leaks in Washington. If someone who works for me has leaked information, that person will be dealt with." McClellan said, when told that, in effect, the enemy was us, "Well, there's a distinction between leaking information that's in the public interest, and leaking information that's damaging to national security - i.e. information about the existence of the NSA wiretapping program."

The distinction constitutes mere wordplay. Our national security is damaged when our leaders force-feed us misleading information without giving us the whole picture. Even if one agrees with McClellan's assertion that the leak of the existence of the NSA wiretapping program damaged national security (this assertion is basically a way of stating that Bush couldn't act like a dictator for a day; no evidence of a breach of national security has been proven), the selective leaking did too. Also, as the old saying goes, he who lives by the sword dies by it. Let's say that Bush is correct and that the President has the authority to declassify information at will, without following any procedures, and that he can declassify it selectively so as to produce substantively misleading informaton, and so as to result in violation of other laws which he claims (and for the sake of argument, I'll accept his claims) he cannot be held accountable for breaking. Again, at the end of the day, so what? Bush's high-minded rhetoric about leaking, and his insistence that "you can't criticize my decision for going to war or rewrite history", thanks to his deliberate choice to use the power (illegally or not) of declassification for pure political gain, have effectively destroyed whatever credibility he has left on the subject of Iraq. He can perhaps console himself with the knowledge that he is King, or that he broke no laws. But that's kind of like a Titanic casualty saying (once he's dead) that he should be happy because he found the time to put his lifejacket on.

SUNDAY BIGOT WATCH

http://jameswolcott.com/archives/2006/04/flag_wavers_and.php

CALLING DR. SANITY

Just when one has just about had it with the insufferablerati -types in this world whose blubbering is said to constitute "punditry," one of the types quits pontificating and just says something that brings a smile:

Andrew Sullivan, who is not tolerated nearly as well by the average person who reads him as he believes he doesn't tolerate those whom he considers fools (there's a reason certain people cannot be on TV on a daily basis, Rush Limbaugh. Even Bill O'Reilly has off on weekends), scourge of the "ignorati," the "nonpomp-arati," and the "trying to keep finding public ways to justify killing people even as you know there aren't any-rati" said just something a few days ago on his blogsite (which, alas, is now not a stand-alone site, but officially part of time.com. Sauce for the goose, as a great screenwriter said), titling one of his posts "calling Dr. Jonhson."

Could he have been referring to THE Dr Johnson, Samuel Johnson of England? Well, the article had to do with a dog that could apparently walk on its back legs.

Dr. Johnson made one of the most elegant retorts in history, one of which I never tire quoting, when,upon being called to pay a housecall to a family dog, he was asked by the owner to look at something the dog was doing - namely, standing on its hind-legs for seconds at a time. "What do you think of THAT, Doctor?" the proud owner of the dog asked.

"Well," Johnson said, smiling, "I must say, that it is not done well, but one is surprised to find it done at all."

The comment is often reported as the doctor's saying, "I must say, that it IS done well, but one is surprised to find it done at all."

Does it really matter which one he said?

YOU STUPID, INBRED YOKEL

Here's a funny article:

Opinion
Democrats stronger, wiser on security
By Larry Atkins, Philadelphia Inquirer, 4/7/06
Strength and Wisdom.

It's the campaign slogan that Democrats should adopt for the forthcoming midterm elections and the 2008 presidential campaign.

In a 2004 speech, former President Clinton emphasized the theme: "Their opponents will tell you we should be afraid of John Kerry and John Edwards because they won't stand up to terrorists. Don't you believe it. ... Strength and wisdom are not opposing values. They move hand in hand."

Republicans did a masterful job of convincing Americans that Kerry and Democrats didn't care about national security. Americans were dumb enough to believe yokel former Sen. Zell Miller when he blubbered that Kerry would defend America with spitballs. ("What's he going to arm them with? Spitballs?" Miller barked, as the foam on his mouth dripped to the podium, making contact with the stench of the hate of his hands. Chris Matthews, before Miller threatened to take him out, Aaron-Burr, style, asked Miller if he was serious about the spitball comment. Miller's answer was "Ruff Ruff Ruff." Matthews then said, "Senator, let me tell you something. If the spitball came from someone as deranged as you, that would be as powerful a weapon as a bunker buster." I think that's when Miller masticated, "Getthehelloutofmyface!," recognizing that Matthews had just rained a shitstorm down upon his hate parade).

Yet it's the Bush administration that has failed miserably in the war on terror and homeland security. As the Dubai debacle indicated, the President has turned a blind eye to ports security and, despite train bombings in London and Madrid, little has been done to bolster Amtrak security. Our borders remain porous. Just last year, investigators from the Government Accountability Office easily entered the United States through Mexico and Canada with enough radioactive material in their vehicles to make two dirty bombs. The investigators got past the Border Patrol with fake paperwork. (The Administration, in response, called the investigators terrorists, "folks" who hated America, who blame America first, libruls who wanted to cut and run, and members of the "media elite" who do nothing but report bad news). I might have gotten the order of the name-calling wrong.

Democrats are far wiser and on the ball when it comes to homeland security.
As Kerry stated in December, "It's time to finally get serious, with money and attention, to the most urgent homeland security threats, including the extreme vulnerability of our ports, the most likely point of entry for terrorists with weapons of mass destruction." (As opposed to the entry point Bush thinks is the most likely one - from an invisible corridor connecting Earth to outer space, and/or one connecting the center of the Earth "to one of our major cities," as Dick Cheney would say. These people are so fucking stupid. We don't need bunker busters - we need weapons that wipe the mentalities of these morons of the face of the Earth - how about we call these weapons ARCHIE Bunker busters).

President Bush diverted funds and manpower from Afghanistan to fund the Iraq debacle. We let Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora and we're making little effort to capture him even though we have a pretty good idea of where he is (actually, I'm not so sure about the latter part). The new mantra being spouted from Republican talk radio to their Hannitized and Dittohead lemmings is that people shouldn't vote for the Democrats because they have no new ideas (as opposed to the old mantra, where the new ideas where bad ideas; why, when you have a perfectly sensible "old" idea already, do you need to specifically come up with a "new" one solely so that it can constitute a response to a Neanderthal one? Speaking of Neanderthals, to paraphrase Woody Allen, I'll bet that even the collective piece of flotsam of the U.N., when it looks at John Bolton, thinks of his wife, and says, "Imagine...having your very own private Neanderthal!") and that all they can do is criticize Bush (this criticism Bush has leveled- "You can criticize my conduct of the war, but not my reason for entering it" - is like saying to a rape victim, "You can criticize your rapist for the bad breath he spewed at you while he violated you, but not for the fact he broke the law.")

However, this week, Democratic congressional leaders set forth a national security policy statement, which included a call for doubling the number of Special Forces to capture bin Laden (twice zero is still zero, though, no?) Contrary to Republican assertions, Democrats do support spying and wiretap surveillance of potential terrorists. The major difference is that Democrats correctly believe that it can be done in a legal manner.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) effectively balances the government's power to conduct surveillance with the need to protect Americans' civil liberties. It allows warrantless searches if circumstances require prompt action, but then requires the government to seek a warrant within 72 hours from a secret FISA court, which almost always grants the requests (I have never heard of an instance where the court denied a request, and tens of thousands have been made).

While most conservatives don't mind that the Bush administration abused its authority to spy on Quaker, antiwar and protest groups, will they be happy with such broad government surveillance powers under a Democratic president? If President Hillary Clinton authorizes surveillance of NRA members and militia groups? (Their answer is that Hillary will never become president. Brilliant retort as always. Bush is already using this power to spy on Republican political opponents, defined as those people who have thought in his presence).

We need strength and wisdom in order to protect our country from terrorism. The Bush administration has acted with much bluster, but has been consistent with its misjudgments and incompetence. The Democrats are both strong and wise. They can do better.

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Well-put. The Republican party, since the 1950's, owes a lot of success due to its ability to bleat one-word phrases (including the l word) into our airwaves and (lack of?) brainwaves.

In the '50's and '60's, the phrase increasingly became "nigra nigra nigra" (no offense to black people meant by me. This was the phrase).

In the '70's and '80s and into the early '90's, the phrase was "commie commie commie"

Through much of the '90's, it was "vayues vayues vayues."

From 2001 on, its been "terra terra terra."

Have I left any period of time out? If so, without even knowing what that time period is, here are the words: "murca murca murca."

GET AWAY FROM HER, YOU CRAZY...

One of the New Republic's writers recounted a dialogue exchange in Ridley Scott's memorably moody 1979 science fiction/horror/suspense epic in space (where no one can hear you scream), Alien:

ASH: You still don't know what you're dealing with do you? Perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.

LAMBERT: You admire it.

ASH: I admire its purity, its sense of survival; unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.

The writer concluded that Ash's appalling admiration of the alien was, if nothing else, heartfelt - as far as genuine reptilianness went, the alien was the real deal, and ended by stating that TomDeLay could easily have substituted for the alien in the picture, thereby allowing 1)Ash to have made the same comments; 2) something gross to still have popped out of William Hurt's chest; and 3) the producers to save a lot of money by not having to pay for H.R. Giger's services. Something for all of you horror movie makers to think about in the future.

Although DeLay denies the concept of evolution (for obvious reasons), he (just substitute the words "arm-twisting" and "bribing" for "swimming and eating," and "expands his operation" for "makes little sharks") no doubt would identify with the shark in Jaws as Richard Dreyfuss' character described it: "What we are dealing with is a perfect engine, an eating machine. It's really a miracle of evolution. All this machine does is swim and eat and makes little sharks, and that's all."

Or perhaps Mr. DeLay still thinks that because his party is the party of superior firepower, political organization, political operatives, technicians and money, it is the one with better intentions toward the American people. Maybe he got this idea from Pierce Brosnan's character in Mars Attacks! (here, just substitute "Democrats" for "aggressive species"): "Logic dictates that given their high level of technical development.....they're an advanced culture. Therefore, peaceful and enlightened. The human race, on the other hand......is an aggressively dangerous species. Now I suspect they have more to fear from us......than we from them."

GET YOUR (HABEAS CORPUS) ACT TOGETHER

Op-eds on legal news by law professors and JURIST special guests...

Padilla's Real Message: The Grace Period is Over 12:06 P.M., 4/4/06

JURIST
Special Guest Columnist Jonathan Freiman, one of the attorneys representing Jose Padilla on his habeas petition, says that the concurrence in the US Supreme Court's rejection of Padilla's certiorari petition stands as a warning to the government that when it comes to imprisoning US citizens without charge or trial, its time may be running out...

"When the Supreme Court declined to hear the Padilla case Monday, 6-3, the decision was widely reported as a win for the Bush Administration. The reporting was only half right. To be sure, the government sidestepped immediate Supreme Court scrutiny of one of the most extreme legal tactics in the war on terror: the indefinite imprisonment, without charge or trial, of American citizens suspected of associating with enemies of the state. But in a carefully worded paragraph near the end of a brief concurrence, Justice Kennedy, joined by the Chief Justice and Justice Stevens, warned the government that its grace period is over.

Jose Padilla is an American citizen who (in 2001) was arrested as a material witness in Chicago and flown to New York, supposedly to testify before a grand jury (regarding his alleged affiliation with al-Qaeda and his alleged attempt to set off a radioactive "dirty bomb" within the U.S.). On the eve of a hearing to determine if Padilla could continue to be detained, the government transported him to a military prison in South Carolina, where for more than three years he was held as an “enemy combatant.”

Two days after being seized by the military, Padilla’s court-appointed attorney filed a writ of habeas corpus with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City, asking that he be freed. The Second Circuit found that Padilla had to be charged with a crime or released, rejecting the government’s claim that the President could jail Americans without charge or trial. The Supreme Court reversed, in Padilla v. Rumsfeld (2004), on other grounds, 5-4 (the usual lineup) finding that the habeas petition should have been filed in South Carolina (the logic the majority used in this case was almost as impressive as the logic used in Bush v. Gore - and remember, this was the same majority that ripped apart the Elk Grove v. Newdow majority for finding Michael Newdow had no standing).

Justice Scalia’s same-day dissent in the Hamdi v. Rumsfeld case (in which he held that only a suspension of the writ of habeas corpus could justify the indefinite suspension of American citizens), coupled with the four dissenting votes in Padilla (the four dissenters argued that Padilla's petition was properly filed, and that the case therefore should have been decided on the merits - i.e. the Court should have held that Padilla should not have been held for three years), led most court-watchers to conclude that at least five justices viewed the military detention without charge of citizens as illegal.

Padilla re-filed his case in South Carolina and the district court granted him summary judgment, agreeing with the Second Circuit that the President lacked the power to seize citizens on American soil and imprison them without charge indefinitely. The Fourth Circuit (encompassing South Carolina, and probably the most conservative cicruit in the nation; no Supreme Court justice has ever come from this circuit), led by conservative icon Judge Luttig (who, by the way, wrote the dissenting opinion in Hamdi when it was at the Circuit Court level, arguing that Hamdi had the right to challenge his enemy combatant status), reversed (essentially holding, in 2005, that the President could detain Padilla for as "long as we were fighting al-Qaeda"), and Padilla petitioned the Supreme Court for certiorari.

Then things got strange. Having already changed its story about Padilla several times, and with the real possibility of Supreme Court review and reversal, the government shifted course again, asking that Padilla be transferred from military custody to a civilian prison to stand trial for new charges unrelated to the earlier accusations against him (and doing so with very little fanfare. Remember when Ashcroft came on TV and first blustered Padilla's name over the airwaves?)

The Fourth Circuit balked, with Judge Luttig (who, by this point in time, had lost out a Supreme Court nomination to John Roberts, Harriet Miers and Samuel Alito) penning some of the most memorable words in this long case. “[A]s the government surely must understand,” he wrote, the government’s actions left two deeply unsettling impressions: “that Padilla may have been held for these years, even if justifiably, by mistake,” and "the impression that the government may even have come to the belief that the principle in reliance upon which it has detained Padilla for this time, that the President possesses the authority to detain enemy combatants who enter into this country for the purpose of attacking America and its citizens from within, can, in the end, yield to expediency (i.e. can yield to the government's desire to put Padilla before the civilian courts so as to avoid military review, thereby putting the lie to the notion that Padilla is so dangerous he must be locked up indefinitely in a military prison) with little or no cost to its conduct of the war against terror--an impression we would have thought the government likewise could ill afford to leave extant."

Luttig continued: "And these impressions have been left, we fear, at what may ultimately prove to be substantial cost to the government's credibility before the courts, to whom it will one day need to argue again in support of a principle of assertedly like importance and necessity to the one that it seems to abandon today. While there could be an objective that could command such a price as all of this, it is difficult to imagine what that objective would be."

And again: "On an issue of such surpassing importance, we believe that the rule of law is best served by maintaining on appeal the status quo in all respects and allowing Supreme Court consideration of the case in the ordinary course, rather than by an eleventh-hour transfer and vacatur on grounds and under circumstances that would further a perception (i.e. Luttig's perception) that dismissal may have been sought for the purpose of avoiding consideration by the Supreme Court."

Undeterred, the government argued that Padilla’s transfer would moot the case or make it less worthy of review, then sought and received permission from the Supreme Court - all of it -to transfer Padilla (the court cowardly noted that it would "take up the petition for certiorari in due course," which is an illusory promise).

The Court listed the certiorari petition for consideration at an extraordinary eight conferences. Some commentators speculated that the wait augured a long dissent from a denial of certiorari, but yesterday’s denial (one vote shy of the four required to grant cert.) came accompanied only by thin escorts: a 2-page dissent by Justice Ginsburg (Breyer and Souter also dissented from the denial of cert., but did not provide a written explanation for their dissent), and Justice Kennedy’s 4-page concurrence for himself, the Chief Justice (who distinguished himself from Alito, who, along with Scalia and Thomas, just refused to grant cert., period - this may be the most compelling evidence yet that Roberts is not as big a whack job as Scalia and Thomas but that Alito is) and Justice Stevens.

The concurring opinion begins ordinarily enough, taking no position on the mootness arguments but concluding that “there are strong prudential considerations” for denying certiorari, both because Padilla is not now in military prison and because his “claims raise fundamental issues respecting the separation of powers, including the role and function of the courts.” In other words, today, when no American languishes without charge in a military prison, is the wrong day to decide such a monumental issue. But echoing Judge Luttig’s concerns about the government’s waning credibility, Justice Kennedy noted that in “light of the previous changes in his custody status and the fact that nearly four years have passed since he first was detained, Padilla, it must be acknowledged, has a continuing concern that his status might be altered again.” The concurrence did not think that “continuing concern” worth resolving now because it “can be addressed if the necessity arises” – i.e., if he is again thrown into a military prison.

The opinion could have ended there. Instead, it goes out of its way to make clear that if the government again tries to imprison an American citizen without charge or trial, the issue will be resolved quickly. In the space of three sentences, Justice Kennedy three times emphasizes the need for swift resolution: Padilla is entitled to all normal constitutional protections, “including the right to a speedy trial”; if the government “seek[s] to change the status or conditions of Padilla’s custody,” the district court should “rule quickly” on the legality of such changes; and not only the district court but all “courts of competent jurisdiction” “should act promptly” on the legality of any such governmental moves. Indeed, the concurrence emphasizes that Padilla “retains the option of seeking a writ of habeas corpus in this Court,” a reminder of the little-used and oft-disfavored direct path to the Court. Such speedy review is essential, Justice Kennedy explained, “to ensure that the office and purposes of the writ of habeas corpus are not compromised.”

To my mind, the office and purposes of the writ were already compromised in Padilla’s case, where the government locked up a citizen in a military prison for years without charging him or giving him a chance to defend himself. There is nothing prompt about that. But if the concurring justices do not think the writ has yet been compromised, they signaled yesterday that the hour is nigh, and the opinion takes steps to warn that the government’s grace period is over. It may have taken four years the first time, Justice Kennedy suggests, but it won’t the next time.

For Padilla, who faces the unthinkable prospect of being re-interned in a military prison even if found innocent in Florida, that’s a silver lining. For the rest of us, it’s at least a comforting indication that the Court recognizes that “at stake in this case is nothing less than the essence of a free society,” as Justice Stevens warned two years ago. He was not alone. As the late Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote then for the Court, the central but as-yet unanswered question raised by Padilla’s case is “indisputably of profound importance.” Monday's order and opinions reveal a Court ready to answer those essential questions if the government ever again starts to lock up citizens without charge or trial.
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It seems that the Court was saying, "Fool us once, we won't notice." "Fool us again, we won't give a shit." "But fool us a third time, and a narrow majority may end up writing an opinion tailored only to the facts of this case that ends up throwing a bone to Padilla - er, an opinion that holds that a President cannot hold a citizen indefinitely in a time of "war" without explanation or trial." I shudder.