Want Some Wood

Remember how, through all those years in Iraq, conservatives kept telling us to be patient, and that we had to "stay the course," and that if you wanted to end the war, you were a "cut-and-run Defeatocrat?"

Some of those same conservatives have decided (aided and abetted by the Post, of course) that Obama's stimulus package has obviously failed after less than six months.

The hole we're in took a lot longer than six months to dig, and it should be obvious that it will take more than six months for Obama and the rest of us to dig ourselves out.

Labels: Barack Obama, conservatives, economics, Iraq War, media, war, Washington DC

Geoff Colvin, an editor for Fortune magazine, takes his whack at the Democratic health plan here; he seems convinced that once people start thinking about the huge cost of the plan, they'll back away from it. (For now, I'll give Colvin the benefit of the doubt and assume that he's just predicting this, and not hoping it will happen, as many conservatives are.) He states that "(t)he bill would increase the federal deficit by $1 trillion over the next decade yet make only a dent in the number of uninsured, who would decline from 19 percent of the non-elderly population to 13 percent," which he describes as a "minor benefit."

Clearly, Colvin has a very different definition of "dent" from most people; I would think that reducing the number of uninsured by one-third constitutes a lot more than a "dent" and a "minor benefit." That one-third reduction, if we look at Health and Human Services statistics, constitutes roughly fifteen million people (and it would be interesting to ask these newly-insured people how "minor" the benefits are) In any case, if we're going on money and savings alone, I'd argue that having many, many uninsured people is quite costly in its own right--much more costly, in both monetary and human terms, than government-sponsored health care.

Labels: Barack Obama, health care, media

Let me get this straight: the Clintons and many of their associates endure nearly fifteen years of constant vicious, personal insults and slanderous rumors, not a few of them directed at their family. Plenty of the nastiness comes from late-night talk show hosts, and some of it even comes from the political left and center. They never ask anyone to apologize, and almost no one (Matt Drudge being one exception) is ever held to account for the lies they told during this time.

Then, one late-night talk show host says one thing--admittedly a tasteless thing--about Sarah Palin's daughter, and it's his duty to apologize to her.

And we're supposed to believe that conservatives don't get a fair shake from the media?

Labels: Bill Clinton, conservatives, Hillary Clinton, media, Sarah Palin

This Post article caught my eye for the same reason that it caught many other people's eyes, namely that it describes a rather unusual event (a man successfully stowing away in a plane cargo bay and traveling all the way to the U.S.). What strikes me about it on second reading is how little it conforms to the usual stereotypes of the illegal-immigration issue. That issue is almost always portrayed by the media, and by anti-immigration conservatives, as being about people from Mexico and Central America exclusively. Here, however, is proof that people from those places aren't the only people who try to enter the United States illegally; in this case, the would-be immigrant was actually from Ethiopia.

Labels: immigration, media, Mexico, Washington Post

(This is adapted from a diary I posted recently on Daily Kos. Surprisingly, it got a good reception there, even though I was being critical of the way some liberals talk about the gay marriage issue, and marriage in general.)

We all know that liberals are enemies of Christmas, thanks to the education we've received from political geniuses like Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson. Sometimes, reading certain liberal columnists makes one wonder if they don't want to give the likes of O'Reilly and Gibson a chance to declare liberals enemies of marriage. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, for instance, doesn't seem able to bring up the topic without becoming snide. In a November 20, 2003 column, he described marriage as "both wobbly and wheezing -- the butt of cynical jokes, a gold mine for divorce lawyers and, even for the non- initiated, the triumph of hope over experience." Meanwhile, in Salon.com, Sara Miles writes that "(s)traight people are just not that into marriage anymore," and adds that "(l)egal marriage gives heterosexuals the right to hire a cheesy '70s cover band, read embarrassing poetry to their friends, and fight with their parents over whom to invite to a party with bad food." (It certainly doesn’t sound like anything I have any interest in attending.) She also cites the usual half-of-all-marriages-end-in-divorce statistics. In the American Prospect, marriage historian E. J. Graff describes marriage as "an institution that many heterosexuals are fleeing." Most heady of all, perhaps, is Alisa Solomon's article in the Nation, in which she speaks approvingly of the 1971 Gay Activist Alliance takeover of the New York City Clerk's office (in which the GAA activists did not allow straight couples into the office to get marriage licenses) and the possibilities it raised for "abolishing marriage altogether."

Some of these authors, especially Graff, make good points, and Miles's essay, especially, is personal, heartfelt, and very worth reading. That said, what's most fascinating is that all of these writers were making an argument not against marriage in general, but for legalizing gay marriage.

I think that a more effective argument for gay marriage would be one that was also for marriage. This would appeal to facts, since the death of marriage, to paraphrase Mark Twain, has been exaggerated. The half-of-all-marriages-end-in-divorce figure that Miles and many other people cite is a statistical myth, and the divorce rate has actually been dropping for the last several years (it is surprising how rarely liberals cite this statistic, given that it punches a hole in a common social-conservative argument that the "American family is dying"). Graff is right that people are marrying later, but they are also more likely to stay married--which is not surprising, since statistics have long shown that marriages are more likely to last if they begin later in life.

It also appeals to common sense. After all, if marriage is as bad as Cohen and Miles make it sound, why is it something worth fighting for?

Gay marriage activists should take a page from the civil rights movement here. In 1965, as the voting-rights movement gathered steam, Martin Luther King did not argue that black people needed an unfettered right to vote, even though voting is a waste of time because all politicians lie, and voting doesn't make a difference anyway (a commonly-expressed sentiment about voting then and now). Instead, he celebrated the right to vote as “(the) greatest privilege as an American,” and said that if more people had a secure right to vote, a “new era would open for all Americans.”

He said those things because he understood what was at stake, and he also understood that something had to be really worth fighting for, if people were going to march and lobby and protest and get beaten up for it (as civil rights activists were, of course, that very year and throughout the history of the movement). If something is worth fighting for, it should be described with inspiring language as King did, not putdowns like the ones described at the beginning of this article.

It should be added that a few liberals (notably Solomon, in the article cited above) speak of the often-sexist past of marriage, or what they consider to be its inherent sexism. It is true that in the past, marriage often was sexist (although that's mostly just because everything in almost every society in history has been sexist), but that doesn't mean that marriage is fundamentally a bad thing, or that marriage's past history has to determine, or does determine, the way marriage is now.

The best analogy I can come up with is this. Through most of human history, government's main function was to protect the interests of kings and wealthy people, yet liberals quite rightly realize that there is no immutable law that says that government always has to be that way, and that is why we champion the good things government can do (and often does do), namely regulate industry so we have no child labor, less pollution, safer and fairer workplaces, and so on. Similarly, there is no reason why we have to oppose marriage because of its less-than-perfect history; in fact, the assumption that that bad history makes marriage flawed could very well get in the way of efforts to grant marriage rights to gays and lesbians.

(I should add that what I’m advocating meshes very well with what progressive writer Ann Friedman argues in this excellent piece, namely framing gays’ right to marriage as a civil rights issue and not merely a cultural issue or a question of fairness.)

No one doubts now that much was at stake during the 1960's battles for voting rights; liberals can all agree that the stakes are high for gay marriage rights as well, especially after the passage of Proposition 8 in California and its subsequent upholding in court, both of which stunned those of us who support gay marriage rights. Even though attitudes have begun to change in the last few years, this election shows that marriage is still the one right that too many straights are not ready to grant to gays. Hearts and minds have to be changed if this situation is ever to improve. Would a better, more inspiring argument help that change happen?

Labels: 2008 election, Christianity, gay/lesbian issues, marriage, Religious Left

To the editor:

Where did Richard Cohen get the idea that the Obama administration is abandoning Afghanistan and its people to the Taliban? Didn't Obama just announce that he is sending 17,000 new troops there?

Thank you for reading my letter.

Labels: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, media, terrorism, Washington Post

I don't know about anyone else, but I, for one, am very glad to finally have a president who waits a day or two before making a statement, so that he knows what he's talking about. I know it's been several weeks since he said it in that press conference, but it's still worth pointing out. (I have to give a hat tip to Mark Schmitt, one of my favorite writers for the Prospect, for reminding his readers about it in this excellent article.)

Labels: Barack Obama, George W. Bush, liberals, media

To the editor:

Shame on Dan Balz for that ridiculous editorial pretending to be
analysis on the front page today. We have a former vice president who
is shamelessly pro-torture, we have editorials calling for torture (oh,
excuse me, "enhanced interrogation tactics") on the Post op-ed page, we
have other Post editorialists telling us to move on and forget criminal
acts in the past--and then, suddenly, it' all about Nancy Pelosi. Even
a completely discredited and out-of-power right wing can still get what
they want in today's media.

Thank you for reading my letter.

(I tried hard to find Balz's editorial on the Post web site, but I haven't been able to find it, so here is another Post article that strengthens the right-wing talking points by repeating them and making a serious issue out of them. Here is a fantastic article by the fantastic Gene Lyons that perfectly sums up the issue, and corrects the talking points instead of repeating them.)

Labels: liberals, media, Nancy Pelosi, Washington Post

(This was a comment that I left on the American Prospect web site after reading this article. One other thing that's worth adding is that while Courtney Martin, the author to whom I was responding, says that Americans wanted an "ethical" president, not a "religious" one, Barack Obama is, in fact, a religious president, for better or for worse, and talked about that frequently during the campaign. In any event, I'm not sure why someone can't be both religious and ethical at the same time.)

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Courtney Martin's interesting article on religion makes some good points, but like so many things liberals write about religion and Christianity, it ultimately disappoints, mostly because of the generalizations it makes.

Martin argues that Americans have "a complex relationship with God," and cites the fluidity of religious beliefs and the larger number of people unaffiliated with religion, especially Christianity, in the recent Pew report. (I have a feeling that anyone who reads liberal blogs and magazines is going to be hearing a LOT about that Pew report.) The trouble is that even if 16% of the American public is unaffiliated with any religion, that still means that 84% are, and it's common sense that 84% fits the definition of the word "most." Also, while Americans are more religiously diverse than they were in the past (and I would agree with Martin that that's a good thing), the vast majority of that 84% are still Christian. Like any good liberal, I hate calling this country a "Christian nation" because the religious right has co-opted the phrase, but it's hard to get away from the fact that more people in this county still follow Christianity than any other religion, or no religion. The Pew report acknowledges this, and it also acknowledges that not everyone in the unaffiliated category considers himself or herself an atheist or agnostic (something Martin does mention in the article).

The other issues with Martin's article are more standard. She describes "the global gag rule, abstinence-only sex education, and marriage-promotion programs" as "consistent with religious perspective," when they are in fact consistent with a religious-right perspective, not with the perspective of all or even most religious people. As with Paul Waldman and other secular liberals, Martin's statements have an ironic resonance with those of James Dobson and other religious-right leaders, who would be all too happy to agree with them that right-wing views and religious views are one and the same. Moreover, while I agree with her that "kindness" and "reason" aren't solely religious values, and you don't need to be religious to share them, I would argue that it's not at all impossible or unprecedented for Christians to have those values. In any event, saying that those values are foreign to religion is arguably not that different from a fundamentalist claiming that his religion is the basis of all morality.

Furthermore, Martin argues that an American revival will be built not on "religious fervor" or patriotism, but on more lasting things like the above-mentioned values. While I grant that not everything built on "religious fervor" is good, are things with that foundation really never "enduring?" What about the Sistine Chapel, or Angkor Wat, or the Hagia Sophia Mosque in Istanbul?

Like Martin, I was ecstatic when Barack Obama was elected president, and in that ecstasy, I found new hope for my country. If Martin talked to some Christians, she might find that many more of them than she expects had the same experience that she and I did.

Labels: 2008 election, Barack Obama, Christianity, conservatives, liberals, Religious Left, Religious Right

I wanted to highlight this article, since almost everything we hear about every institution in Mexico is negative, and this is one exception. I agree with the authors that the Mexicans did an excellent job of slowing the spread of the recent swine flu virus outbreak.

Labels: health care, media, Mexico, terrorism, Washington Post