"Katherine, it's perfectly possible
to criticize ideas and policies without saying mean things about the recently dead. "
Yes. And you said "the papacy", not the man.
Look, I understand what you meant, but it's not what you said. But your follow up makes that pretty clear, so nevermind.
"My post referred to what Cheem calls the "ding dong, the witch is dead" reaction, which strikes me as being both in poor taste and politically counterproductive."
Maybe that's what you meant. It is certainly not what you said. You said: "If your criticisms are true and important -- I can easily think of some that are, and one reader has supplied me with others of which I'd been unaware --they'll still be true and important after the grass is green on his gravesite." This strongly implies that those with true and important criticsms should keep their mouths shut too.
If you don't want people to get the wrong idea, you should correct yourself.
One last thing: American TV coverage in particular, and too many Americans in general, seem to be showing real intellectual disrespect to Karol Wojytla. Love him or hate him, we tend not to take him seriously. Either we embrace the sweet, kind man and completely ignore his teachings, or we only evaluate the teachings in terms of the hot political issues of the day, or we use some of his teachings for our political purposes and ignore--not just disagree with or disobey, but ignore--those that are inconvenient to our side.
(I think it applies less to liberal Catholics than to most other Americans because the hierarchy has forced them to face up to the contradiction between their views and the church's teachings, without forcing conservative Catholics to do so. And there are plenty of atheists, Jews, Muslims, Protestants etc. it doesn't apply to either.)
The best example I've seen so far was Larry King interviewing the actor who played Jesus in the Passion of the Christ about the Pope's legacy. But turn on cable news for five seconds and you'll see another example.
Oh man, I was trying not to like him after this but you just made it impossible.
Here's Dodd.
This was the part of Reid's speech that stunned me:
"I will say a word about the interrogation techniques that were authorized. They included forced nakedness, forced shaving of beards, and the use of dogs, just to name a few. Many are specifically designed to attack the prisoner's cultural and religious taboos. In describing them, the similarities to what eventually happened at Abu Ghraib are obvious. Once you order an 18-year-old, a young man or woman, to strip prisoners naked, to force them into painful positions, to shave their beards in violation of their religious beliefs, to lock them alone in the dark and cold, how do you tell him to stop? You cannot.
We have seen the pictures of naked men stacked on top of each other in the so-called pyramid; rapes of men, rapes of women, leading in some cases to death."
First of all, that was incredibly brave of him to say. Second of all, did he just inadvartently leak information about the classified pictures from Abu Ghraib they saw?
I don't know if you guys have been watching. Though the outcome's been clear for a while, I haven't been able to stop. And despite Lieberman, Salazar, Nelson, Nelson, Pryor and Landrieu's best efforts, I'm glad I didn't. They did us proud out there, they really did. From Reid to Reed to Durbin to Kennedy to Obama to Leahy (twice) to Byrd to Feingold to Dodd, who made great speeches that they haven't posted, to Jeff Bingaman obscure senator from the state with the highest % of latino population in the country, who was not going to be cowed by Orrin Hatch's smarmy and patronizing attempts to play the race card.
The Republicans didn't have an answer. They really didn't. Not one of them--not Lindsey Graham, not Lugar, not Snowe, not Hagel, not Chafee, not John forchrissake McCain--voted no. Only one abstained, and it was only because he was busy shilling for Bush's social security plan in Montana. But the ones you might have thought better of for the most part wouldn't actually speak on Gonzales' behalf, either. Instead it was left to Cornyn, Bunning, Hatch about 4 times, Specter 3 times, McConnell, Allard, all mechanically reciting the same lame talking points. The vote ended up feeling like the 1953 Brooklyn Dodgers against the New York Yankees, but the debate was more like the Harlem Globetrotters against the Washington Generals.
I wanted them to filibuster, was very angry at them for not doing so. Not only Kennedy but also Durbin obviously really wanted to, and Reid didn't seem totally averse. But when the voting started it became clear why not: they just didn't have the votes. In Reid's place, I can't say that I would have chosen to take the wuss caucus to the wall on this one--not with the vote total uncertain no matter what you do, and the threat of the "nuclear option" on filibusters, and the social security debate coming up.
It's not a proud day to be an American, but it is a prouder day to be a Democrat than I remember in a while.
Re reading Angels in America, after finally getting around to seeing the HBO miniseries. Basically trying to memorize it.
I'd read it before, and really liked it, but now I'm obsessed--there is absolutely nothing like seeing a play performed.
One of the things I'd missed before was how Jewish the play is. Not just culturally (that's pretty obvious); also religiously. Since I first read the play, I'd married a Jewish man and begun starting to think seriously about converting, attending services, etc. Last time I remembered thinking "Aramaic? What's that?"--this time I knew the Kaddish slightly better than Louis, have seen it recited at two funerals, and recognized the Kiddush and the Sh'ma too. But beyond that superficial stuff--while the theology of the play is unconventional, its ethics* and its priorities are not:
Maybe God exists, maybe he has absconded, maybe it was a fever dream. Never mind all that--the mitzvot remain. You care for the sick (you visit your grandma, and you do not leave your dying partner, ever). You mourn the dead (you say the Kaddish over Roy Cohn, though the God you are glorifying may not exist, though Cohn he stands for everything you hate and this would horrify your parents in Schenecdaty, even though he got you electrocuted--but there is no need to forget he was a sonafabitch.) You don't blindly obey angels--you think about what they said, and if the more you think about it, the more they sound like confused or even malignant reactionaries, you reject it. And above all, more life.
I could hear this at either of the two synagogues I've been to, or at the Passover seder from my husband's grandfather. Heck, I have heard it at synagogue and at the seder.
*Obvious exception: Orthodox Judaism is not so cool with the gay thing, and Conservative Judaism is ambivalent--I, on the other hand, go to a synagogue where they perform gay marriages and occasionally use the word "heterosexist" in sermons.
the joke made my day, but then I thought:
He might not get heckled, but if he took questions he would certainly be asked about Maher Arar with the cameras on. That's never happened before.
Less funny.
"it was not unusual now to estimate the separate mass of Virginia and N. Carolina with a view to their separate existence. It is true that we are compleatly under the saddle of Massachusets & Connecticut, and that they ride us very hard, cruelly insulting our feelings as well as exhausting our strength and substance. Their natural friends, the three other eastern States, join them from a sort of family pride, and they have the art to divide certain other parts of the Union so as to make use of them to govern the whole. This is not new. It is the old practice of despots to use a part of the people to keep the rest in order, and those who have once got an ascendency and possessed themselves of all the resources of the nation, their revenues and offices, have immense means for retaining their advantages. But our present situation is not a natural one. The body of our countrymen is substantially republican through every part of the Union....
A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to it's true principles. It is true that in the mean time we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war & long oppressions of enormous public debt....If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, & then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are the stake. Better luck, therefore, to us all; and health, happiness, & friendly salutations to yourself."
Letter from Thomas Jefferson, shortly after the Alien and Sedition Acts. The metaphorical witches he had in mind were Washington, Adams and Hamilton, so we probably actually have it worse. But still, reading this helped.
You want moral values? Here's moral values:
"Looking for a way to pick up swing voters in the Red States, former President Bill Clinton, in a phone call with Kerry, urged the Senator to back local bans on gay marriage. Kerry respectfully listened, then told his aides, "I'm not going to ever do that."
Meanwhile, they run ads so vicious and dishonest that the candidate's ex-wife is furious and wants to go to bat for him:
"By August, the attack of the Swift Boat veterans was getting to Kerry. He called adviser Tad Devine, who was prepping to appear on "Meet The Press" the next day: "It's a pack of f---ing lies, what they're saying about me," he fairly shouted over the phone. Kerry blamed his advisers for his predicament. (Cahill and Shrum argued responding to the ads would only dignify them.) He had wanted to fight back; they had counseled caution. Even Kerry's ex-wife, Julia Thorne, was very upset about the ads, she told daughter Vanessa. She could remember how Kerry had suffered in Vietnam; she had seen the scars on his body, heard him cry out at night in his nightmares. She was so agitated about the unfairness of the Swift Boat assault that she told Vanessa she was ready to break her silence, to speak out and personally answer the Swift Boat charges. She changed her mind only when she was reassured that the campaign was about to start fighting back hard."
I've criticized Kerry, a lot. But in the end I'm back where I was in September of 2002, when I trusted him absolutely to do the right thing on Iraq: he is a fundamentallly decent man and would have made a very good president, probably the best of my lifetime.
He had some very bad advisors, and he listened to them more than he should have, instead of his instincts and the better angels of his nature.
Which is getting to be a very familiar story.
don't tell David Brooks, but he can do angry too:
"I don't oppose all wars ... What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.
"What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Roves to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income ... to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone thru the worst month since the Great Depression.
"That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics .... "
I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.
So for those of us who seek a more just and secure world for our children, let us send a clear message to the president today.
You want a fight, President Bush? Let's finish the fight with Bin Laden and Al Qaida, thru effective, coordinated intelligence, and a shutting down of the financial networks that support terrorism, and a homeland security program that involves more than color-coded warnings.
You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to make sure that the UN inspectors can do their work, and that we vigorously enforce a non-proliferation treaty, and that former enemies and current allies like Russia safeguard and ultimately eliminate their stores of nuclear material, and that nations like Pakistan and India never use the terrible weapons in already in their possession, and that the arms merchants in our own country stop feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe.
You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells.
You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to wean ourselves off Middle East oil, through an energy policy that doesn't simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil.
Those are the battles that we need to fight. Those are the battles that we willingly join. The battles against ignorance and intolerance. Corruption and greed. Poverty and despair.
The consequences of war are dire, the sacrifices immeasurable. We may have occasion in our lifetime to once again rise up in defense of our freedom, and pay the wages of war. But we ought not - we will not - travel down that hellish path blindly. Nor should we allow those who would march off and pay the ultimate sacrifice, who would prove the full measure of devotion with their blood, to make such an awful sacrifice in vain."
A pretty good column on Dean, Nader, and Democratic Party Uni-whatsitcalled:
here
When my mom--socially liberal, but not incredibly so--start sending me and my sisters pictures from these weddings in what is clearly meant to be a subliminal "grandchildren! now now now!" message--
something has changed.
It's so good to see things change for the better--it's happened rarely enough, these few years.
I think Dean has gotten worse press coverage than Kerry--certainly more harmful press coverage--but it has to do more with luck and timing than anything else. Maybe Dean is worse at schmoozing, too.
There are some things about the press that hurt Dean particularly though:
1. They take critiques from within your party very, very seriously. Dean got a lot of criticism from within his own party--a lot of it because he was the frontrunner, but it actually started long before that. Some people concluded very early on that the civil unions signing, antiwar governor of Vermont would doom us in 2004, and it went from there.
2. "Would a good candidate allow us to take their words this far out of context", to paraphrase the Daily Show--they're obsessed with "gaffes" that amount to very little, because it is much easier to report that "Candidate X said Y, how embarrassing for him, will his campaign survive?" than it is do dig into candidates' records. Dean has an unfortunate tendency to shoot his mouth off for no good reason, as well as an endearing (to me) tendency to be honest about things in a way that opens him up to "shocked, shocked" press releases. I prefer this by 100x to the bland, scripted, empty platitudes that you hear from many politicians--but it's a real vulnerability given the way the press works.
3. It is more acceptable to give opinions about the horse race than about who would make a better president. Dean has convinced a lot of people that he would make the best president, but he has convinced a larger (sometimes overlapping) group that he cannot beat Bush. It's okay to talk about how many Democrats believe Dean is unelectable, and list the reasons, and imply they're right. It's much less okay to talk about how many Democrats believe Dean will be the best President, and list the reasons, and imply they're right.
Note, though, that the horse race also means the media obsesses over fundraising and exceeding expectations, and this helped Dean for a long time.
Basically, the media as a whole are not very good at their jobs, though some individual reporters are very good indeed. If the people who are supposed to be uncovering the truth are corrupt, or incompetent, or too hemmed in by their editors or worried about access to do their jobs, or what have you--it's going to hurt the Forces of Truth and Good, and reward the dishonest extremists (take a bow Bush, Cheney, DeLay, et al.)
I don't think we should accept a lousy press corps as inevitable--it gives the bad guys (and I am not talking about John Kerry here; our nominee will face what Dean faced and then some) such an unfair advantage. And if we blame everything on the candidate it feels like we're powerless until Mr. Perfect comes along on his white horse, and he never ever will.
But the trick is to see unfair press coverage as an obstacle that we need to either knock down or get around next time, not an excuse for ignoring our own candidate's or party's failings.
(one request: "Deanites" or "Deaniacs", fine--I prefer "Dean supporters" but it's not worth being hyper-sensitive about it. But I draw the line at "Deanyboppers", it just sounds way too patronizing and dismissive. Maybe you don't mean in that way, but humor me.)
This is a good point: what happens after election day? We need a contingency strategy for if we lose, and probably a strategy for getting anything done with the (comic book guy voice) Worst House of Representatatives Ever (/comic book guy voice) if we win. This will mainly be decided by the presidential nominee and Congressional leadership, of course, but is there any way to influence it for the better?
I don't think Dean saying why he's electable has any chance of working now. You know what they say to writers about "show me, don't tell me"? I think that's the main issue, and the campaign has decided that in the short run they simply cannot win the votes of people who are voting based on perceived electability. But I think "show me, don't tell me" is also the rule you ought to follow when you want to prove your political courage.
I want him to use reasonable, reassuring tones and plain language--he can be so good at using clear language without talking down to voters--to make brave, substantive critiques about Bush rather than rattling off the popular one liners. And run on his record without seeming to brag about it.
argh. I just lost a long post. Brief summary:
1) canvassing, when I did it, focused on finding 1s (Dean supporters) and 2s (Dean leaners) and talking to 3s (undecideds.) 4s (lean towards another candidate) got less priority, and 5s (firm supporters of another candidate) got a "well, he'd certainly be better than Bush, thanks for your time." (That's an exaggeration, but we didn't start focus grouping them on exactly why they supported the other candidate.) The number one concern among undecideds, by far, was always "I just don't know if he can get elected" and the campaign had to know that was a problem. There were some notes about each contact but they were brief and I doubt they filtered all the way back to the ad agency. I don't know the extent to which the field directors consulted with the ad people.
2) Don't assume the New Hampshire organization was the same as the Iowa organization, and definitely don't assume either was the same as the weblog. The NH grassroots operation was the best I've ever seen, easily. I don't have such extensive experience, of course, but I have a bit. It focused very heavily on state residents talking to their own neighbors in meetings at their houses, though it was supplemented by out of staters' canvassing and phone calls and the more traditional stranger-to-stranger activity. Karen Hicks knew what she was doing. If we'd had two weeks, we might have pulled it out. If he'd made his NH concession speech after the Iowa caucuses, we might have pulled it out. (If both, we would have pulled it out.)
3) One of the main problems with the weblog is that a lot of people had the impression that it WAS the campaign, and you could understand the mind of the Dean supporter by trolling through the comments. Not true, and a bizarre conclusion for anyone the least bit familiar with online discussions--but the campaign allowed and even encouraged the perception, so it's partly our own damn fault. Still, it's extremely frustrating and unfair to a lot of serious, sane Dean supporters.
4) I disagree completely on Kerry, I was planning to volunteer for him last November--after the war vote, note--and now he's my fourth choice and not close to the others. I don't know if there's any point in going into why. You can make a lot of arguments why Dean deserved to lose, but by those criteria it's Edwards who deserves to win. (Or maybe Clark.) Kerry ran a negative, ineffectual campaign--the worst I'd ever seen, in terms of reducing my respect for a politician I'd once admired--until mid December/early January, and it doesn't seem to matter at all. That contributes a lot to my defeated, "why did I even bother" feeling--the clock just suddenly rewound to February 2003, as if intervening year did nothing. To some extent I just need to get over myself, of course, but this is a very widespread feeling among Dean supporters.
Oops. Brief summary indeed. Sorry, normally I'm not so long-winded (and I definitely was not when speaking to NH voters!).
You're absolutely right, of course. But how on earth does one do that? I can think of things not to do, but...what's upsetting about this January is that I don't think volunteering has made much real difference at all, or at any rate it's totally swamped by TV ads and media coverage in the last week.
I can understand why someone doesn't want to listen to a complete stranger's spiel, but where does it leave someone who believes in a candidate? If you live in a state where elections aren't close, only giving money seems to work.
I did canvassing in NH, but I get tongue tied around strangers--and anyway, about 4 people were home on a given day. I did get out the vote, but no one needed a ride to the polls. Maybe the last minute literature drops for people who weren't home helped, but at most I think we're talking 1 or 2 votes for a whole day of volunteering. I wrote some letters to Iowa, carefully composed, but I got no reply and by all accounts those might have been counterproductive. I guess I've been mildly successful about nagging my friends and family to register to vote and show up, but that's all. And by the time they vote Dean will be out of the race--so again, it's just been money. Which is not nothing, but it's not much.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 6 |
| 2004 | 12 |
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